The Gentry

by Adam Nicolson

  for this is a time when speculation in land is apt to be dangerously active and may be particularly mischievous in its results. Sir Richard Acland, who has been most unfairly attacked for his public-spirited action in transferring his estates to the Trust, could, for instance, have sold them for £150,000.92

  That was no more than 10 per cent wide of the figure he actually received. In private with the National Trust Acland was forthright:

  I am not giving you all my property. I am keeping some of it to live on, some of it to buy a house, and some of it I am giving to Common Wealth. With what is left I pay off as much of the debts as possible, and then hand over the rest to you, leaving you, I regret to say, to look after what is left of the debts.93

  One of the greatest ironies of this story is the source of money which allowed the Trust to buy Acland out. In September 1942, Mrs Ronnie Greville had died in her suite in the Dorchester Hotel in London.94 She left Marie Antoinette’s necklace to the Queen of England, £25,000 to the Queen of Spain, £20,000 to Princess Margaret and £10,000 to Osbert Sitwell. Much of the rest (a total estate worth £1.6 million, equivalent to £170 million today) went to the National Trust. She was the stepdaughter and heir of the Edinburgh beer king William McEwan, inheriting two-thirds of the brewery, and had lived a luxuriant and opulent life at the heart of the Edwardian establishment, afloat on oceans of bitter, fawning on the court and feeding the ancient aristocracy. ‘One uses up so many red carpets in a season,’ she said famously.95 She found Hitler charming and Americans acceptable only if they were plutocrats recognizably equal to herself. Cecil Beaton saw her as ‘a galumphing, greedy, snobbish old toad who watered at her chops at the sight of royalty … and did nothing for anybody except the rich’.96

  The Aclands would not have liked Mrs Ronnie Greville but it was her money that the Trust drew on for Holnicote and Killerton and which allowed Richard to make the greatest philanthropic gesture of his life. This is not to suggest it was an act of hypocrisy on his part. The Aclands held on to some beautiful things, eighteenth-century family silver plates and dishes, portraits and landscapes, a group of family miniatures, an early nineteenth-century piano, which they kept at Sprydon; they were able to buy a nice house in Hampstead at 66 Frognal Street; there was to be an education fund for the boys; and Common Wealth received about £65,000, allowing it to win two more by-elections. Apart from that, the Aclands were left essentially propertyless. They kept the right to a flat in Killerton rent free (later transferred to the tenancy of Sprydon) and one of the pretty thatched cottages at Selworthy, but otherwise the inheritance had gone and they entered a strangely weightless, post-gentry world in which murmurings of their past hung on like ghosts in the landscape.

  The ‘Memorandum of Wishes’ which Richard presented to the National Trust enshrined that gentry world.97 On both estates, ‘the tenants, many of whom have been in occupation for a great number of years, are to be sympathetically treated … In case of any doubt [over the employment, dismissal and pensions of the staff] the National Trust will consult me or Lady Acland.’ The foremen at Killerton and at Holnicote, the forester, gardeners and gamekeeper, Mr Cornell, were all to be carefully looked after. ‘Mr Cornell had an extremely bad time in the last war, and generous treatment is called for.’ The Trust was to continue with annual payments to local charities and the traditional fortnightly dole to the old and widowed. Richard asked that the family should retain some rights over Selworthy, including the gift of the living at the parish church.

  The leader of Common Wealth was also to remain a country gent. ‘I desire to have permission to shoot game limited to 30 pheasants off each estate in any year, such shooting to be arranged as to suit the convenience of the shooting tenants.’ He was to be allowed to fish with one rod on the reservoir at Nutscale.

  The public vision was there: ‘I hope all the mansions will be made available for public or semi-public purposes including agriculture, horticulture or forestry or as holiday centres,’ but the Aclands were to be consulted on any tenancy agreement or any new building. In many ways, the world would notice no change:

  I have already arranged that Stag Hunting and Fox Hunting is to be permitted on the Holnicote Estate so long as the sport is carried on over a substantial part of the adjoining lands and I hope that every effort will be made for the opening meet of the Stag Hounds to be held at Cloutsham as heretofore.98

  It was to be change with no change, a perpetuation of the great A.T. under a new form of common ownership whose nature and style the Aclands would oversee. ‘My goodness I do feel jolly about the National Trust,’99 Richard wrote to Anne from his campaign hotel in Midlothian in January 1943, and you can see why.

  Their sons were not consulted; they were too young. The political impetuosities of Acland’s life meant he could not wait until they were old enough. The family’s own employees and advisers restricted themselves to saying that what Sir Richard had done was ‘a high-minded gesture’.100 Anne’s conservative family was appalled. She wanted an education fund set up, as she wrote to Richard, explicitly because of

  people like my brother Dick who will be a perfect nuisance in any case I dare say & who will certainly suspect you of plunging us all heedlessly into destitution. But if we can say oh no it’s all settled & we shall have so much a year, about, & the education business is so & so, they will be stymied. People will think us pretty improvident & sudden in any case you see so we’d better not appear madder than we need.101

  The West Country gentry disapproved, but with more of a sense of pity than contempt. Richard’s and Anne’s second son, Robert, asked a cousin ‘how my father was perceived in the neighbourhood and she said “They thought he was fool, a sincere fool.”’102

  In September 1943, Anne had to give up running Killerton. The Trust installed its own manager, ‘a fully qualified man of about 55 called Senior’,103 and at the end of January 1944, the public handover was made at two ceremonies, one in Broadclyst near Killerton and another in Allerford near Holnicote, at which Richard explained that the ownership of such an extensive property had been ‘an increasingly heavy burden on my conscience’. Unless he had made ‘gifts of this kind’ death duties would have picked away at the estates. ‘This would mean that farms were sold over the heads of tenants, desirable building sites would be sold to builders.’ At the end of the ceremony, ‘Sir Richard and Lady Acland were presented by the tenantry with a painting by Mr. A.J. Munnings, R.A.’104

  The Aclands no longer owned Aclandshire but the nature of the ‘gift’, as it was always called, remained deeply ambivalent. The gentry were ‘giving away’ their property so that in future it could continue to be as it had been before, under long gentry guidance. Giving it away was a means of keeping it. As the tenantry had been, so it would be. But this act was also portrayed as a moment of heroic selflessness. ‘Transferring this property to the people’, Richard said at the ceremony, was ‘the only right and proper course’ he could think of.105 It was a grand political gesture on a national stage and it put him in a powerful position within Common Wealth. Through 1943 and 1944, he built a large following in the country, as a man of integrity, a politician who had done what he urged others to do. He might have been laughed at in the House of Commons for describing ICI and Standard Oil as ‘creatures [that] bear all the hallmarks of a dead-end’, for urging that ‘private ownership of all substantial resources must now be supplanted by common ownership’ and because ‘he often intoned his speech’ with ‘a seer-like earnestness’,106 but beyond Westminster those failings were an advantage. His millenarian habit of mind and phrase found a response in a country which wanted no return to the compromises and social and economic failures of the 1920s and ’30s. Acland the politician was the man who had denied himself everything his inheritance had given him. The fact that he had also denied that inheritance to his children, and that he would spend its proceeds on supporting the marginal and eventually futile political party he had founded, was never raised in public.

>   A deep, hidden swing to the left had gathered pace during the war but in the electoral truce between the big parties, only Common Wealth could capitalize on it. The party’s 10,000 members were middle class and excited by the transformative visions Acland spun for them. ‘It is essential to us to resolve that all the banks, all the land, all the railways, all the harbours and all the factories, except small one-man concerns, are going to be owned in common and worked by all,’ he repeatedly told them.107 In April 1944 he said that the Duke of Westminster should have his lands nationalized and His Grace should be compensated with ‘£1,000 a year for life and after that to his son nothing’.108

  On these egalitarian promises, Common Wealth won in West Derbyshire in February 1944, and again in Chelmsford in April the following year, but as soon as the Labour party put up candidates in the general election of 1945, Common Wealth’s support collapsed and the party folded. Despite Acland’s enormous donations, it had run out of money. He lost his deposit fighting Putney for the party, where he came a devastating third to Labour and Conservative. He then joined the Labour party and was elected Labour MP for Gravesend in 1947, finally resigning in 1955 over the development of the H-bomb. But his political career had effectively ended in 1945. The war had seen the crisis and the climax of his life. The family recognized it. Soon after the election in 1945, they sold the Hampstead house which was to have been his base as party leader in London.

  In Devon, the vision of happiness had not materialized either. In the spring of 1945, William, a fourth son, to join John, Robert and Henry, had died shortly after he was born. The relationship with the National Trust and its manager, Mr Senior, soured. The Aclands and the Trust fought over the minor ingredients of the place: should a favourite tree be felled if it had dropped a single limb; should Anne’s ideas for rebuilding the village hall be followed; how should the garden be divided outside their flat in Killerton?

  The lack of complete control was painful and Anne wrote to Richard in March 1951:

  The Tomkins [farm tenants] near reduced me to tears with more tales about Senior and the Trust. I do feel so terribly our continuing responsibility to the estate & that when I go away things will be even worse. I wonder if we could make out that they are not carrying out the memorandum of wishes? They’re not, in the spirit.109

  All this came with the territory. Right up until the end of his life, Richard was niggling at the Trust over the direction of the estate, even in 1984 wanting to clear up ‘one of the main points which has caused difficulty and misunderstanding between us in the last year or so’ and suggesting to the Trust’s Regional Director that he insert a new clause into their agreement:

  It is agreed that, unless there be some strong reason against it, the traditional practice of the Killerton estate (in so far as it can be ascertained) and not the judgment of the Trust’s officers shall normally be the decisive factor.110

  Needless to say, the keepers of the flame and the arbiters of what was or was not the Killerton tradition – the new morph of the ancient A.T. – were always going to be Richard and Anne. The Regional Director, P.W. Broomhead, saw this as something that gave ‘the Aclands the final veto on what does and does not happen at Killerton rather than the Trust’.111

  The Trust’s solicitor recognized the realities, replying to Broomhead: ‘I believe you should accept that Sir Richard and Lady Acland have the last word for as long as they live as they have always had in the past.’112

  The ambivalence of the twentieth-century Aclands penetrated far into their lives. Henry Acland, their youngest son, who taught sociology and social policy at the University of Southern California, remembers the atmosphere in the 1950s:

  It was confusing because we were still the emblematic, the symbolic and yet the quite real family on the estate but our power had now gone, our real basis for authority and position had departed. We were special but not.

  You know that the estate workers were expected to attend church in the old days. We kept up a version of that, sitting in our special pew, in Killerton chapel, quite near the main house, with a sense of looking round and seeing who was there and who wasn’t. That went on well into the 50s and 60s.

  It was all about the residue of this culture. My mother even re-instigated the tenants’ dinner, an annual event when the tenants would gather, full of bonhomie and camaraderie. She expected my eldest brother John to go along. But the Acland business at Killerton was over. I know John hated it.113

  In Henry Acland’s memory, his mother was the source of this form of social antiquarianism, as a kind of theatre of nostalgia. She was quite at ease with it, as she was with the visits ‘to have cups of tea in tenants’ houses’, always agonizing for the boys. His father was the opposite,

  a person wrapped up in his books. He had a saying: ‘I love humanity but I don’t like people’, and he was very awkward socially, he didn’t have an easy touch with people. I remember him describing the experience of arriving at a dinner party and the person to each side of him turning to the person on the other side …

  He loved to entertain and be jolly, but the more I have thought about it, they were always set pieces. He didn’t improvise. So he would carry around a piece of bright blue string, and he would do some string figures, his party piece. That is how he related to children. He wasn’t genial. At some profound level he was not at ease.

  In the Fifties, Anne seems to have become an increasingly severe and controlling presence in their lives, the holder-together of a family which had disappointment at its heart.

  She wasn’t a natural mother. She was so gobbled up with her own emotional landscape she didn’t have a lot of room for other people’s. And her view about upbringing was Spartan.

  I wondered how the sons had taken the story of ‘the Gift’, when they realized what had happened?

  John was furious. It was never a focused fury but he did go up against our parents. He did say, ‘You have made a mess of my life. If only I had inherited, particularly the Holnicote estate, or what was left of it, everything would have been fine. That was my birthright, you took it away.’ Just bedrock resentment that this opportunity had been denied him.

  After a career as a teacher, first in East Africa and the Karoo, and then in Cambridge and Bristol, John came with his family to live on the Killerton estate at Sprydon, inheriting the baronetcy on his father’s death in 1990. His younger brothers, Robert, who lives in Kentucky where he is professor in micro-surgery at the University of Louisville, and Henry, who between 1970 and 2010 was at Harvard and then in California, made their lives away from this troubled and knotted piece of landscape. ‘My solution to the situation would have been for us to have left completely,’ Henry says.

  This strangely complicated, mixed experience of being there and not being a real part of it … If I could rewrite history I would say ‘OK we are giving it to the National Trust, good bye, we are leaving, we don’t have a role to play here any more.’

  Only recently does Henry Acland feel that he has got his relationship straight to the place and to his family structure. Richard and Anne had decided that his elder brother, John, should inherit all the ancient possessions of the family which they had held on to. The other sons found it difficult when Richard and Anne and then John himself sold off most of that silver and the pictures. ‘I did raise objections,’ Henry says. ‘“This ain’t fair. If you are going to liquidate stuff, it should be shared.” And they did for a year or so but not for long.’

  More than the questions of money and material objects, the longest-lasting residue of the decision made in the winter of 1942–3 is the painful combination of attachment and rejection which Anne and Richard’s children have felt for the rest of their lives. I spoke to Henry Acland in January 2011. He was then sixty-seven, a tall, bony, handsome, clever, unmistakably Aclandish man, now back in England after spending his working life in Los Angeles.

  HENRY: So long as I played along and was agreeable and signed up to the family story about the Gift an
d Richard’s role and the subsequent history and primogeniture being used as a way of handling this problem, I felt that perhaps by remaining a player in this situation there might be a redemption somewhere, there might be a resolution, something might happen. I finally realized not long ago that it’s not going to happen. It is time to let it go, to walk away.

  AN: Sixty years later. Wasn’t that an appalling burden for your father to have imposed on his children?

  HENRY: Yuh, he didn’t have much of an idea of that …

  AN: A wise dog might have waited until you were twenty, say. And then sat down with you and explained that this was his ideal, this was his beautiful idea, what do you think, are you signing up to that, or how else might we arrange things? That would have been the generous and humane thing to have done, wouldn’t it? And mightn’t the hostile view be that it was an act of vanity not to have done that, an act of ego promotion?

  HENRY: That’s right.

  AN: Could that be true of him?

  HENRY: I do think so.114

  In the Devon Record Office, John Acland (who died suddenly as the result of a car crash in September 2009) left a note written in March 1994 for anyone who might come to read the papers. In it he described how he had made many requests that his mother ‘should explain to me why the Killerton and Holnicote estates had been given to the National Trust in the 1940s’.115 In response, she arranged for him to look at the letters between her and Richard but John found on reading them that she had destroyed all the documents from the critical period at the end of 1942. Her explanation to him was that ‘she had never kept any contentious letters’. His note continued: ‘Anne only talked to me once, in 1989, about the gift of the estates. The talk lasted for several afternoons. Her principal contention was that she and Richard had been in complete agreement at every stage.’ Perhaps all this secrecy, the denial of the story, was an attempt by Anne and Richard to protect themselves from the rage of their children.