The National Trust's untold story: How generations of bachelors poured their souls into their houses, and then gave them to the nation

Given the scale and fame of the National Trust, it is surprising that it hasn’t attracted more attention from historians. The last authoritative overview of its story, From Acorn to Oak Tree, by Dame Jennifer Jenkins, was published more than 30 years ago, in the run-up to the organisation’s centenary in 1995. The absence of an up-to-date history may help to explain a number of misconceptions about the Trust’s origins and purposes. For example, according to its present director-general, Hilary McGrady, in an interview with The Times last year, ‘we are more generally known for our houses, but the Trust was founded to give access to Nature’. This overlooks the fact that the organisation’s original name, which it has never abandoned, is ‘The National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty’ and that as early as 1907 it owned no fewer than 26 historic houses.

A second misconception concerns the acceleration of the Trust’s acquisition of historic buildings after it decided in the 1930s to focus on country houses. There is a belief that it immediately became the grateful recipient of estates that had been inherited by aristocrats unable to pay their tax bills. In fact, for the first 15 years of what it referred to as the Country Houses Scheme, the pace was set by a very different sort of owner: a bachelor man who had bought a historic house, restored it, furnished it with his collections, laid out a garden and wanted to secure its future. Unlike most owners of ancestral houses, such men could afford to give the Trust the substantial financial endowments that it required in return for accepting these buildings in perpetuity.

The role of bachelors in the Trust’s acquisitions of historic houses is documented in the diaries kept between 1942 and 1949 by James Lees-Milne when he was working for the Trust’s Country Houses Committee (renamed the Historic Buildings Committee in 1945). Dogged in his pursuit of houses for his employer, he was also quizzical about the men who were offering them to him. Bisexual, with a bias towards his own sex, he was especially alert to any signs of sexual heterodoxy.

A vivid example is his record of the visit he paid in September 1945 to Lindisfarne Castle, Northumberland (Fig 3). The building had been bought as a ruin by Country Life’s proprietor, Edward Hudson, who commissioned Edwin Lutyens to restore it. The result is such a compelling example of the Arts-and-Crafts taste that the magazine promoted that it is often forgotten how the castle came into the hands of the Trust. In 1921, Hudson sold it to a London stockbroker, Oswald Falk, from whom it was bought eight years later by a merchant banker, Edward de Stein (1887–1965). It was he who invited Lees-Milne to Lindisfarne to discuss his offer of the castle to the Trust.

As this suggests, De Stein was public spirited, yet, although he was a poet, a collector of porcelain and a skilled embroiderer, he did not appeal to Lees-Milne, who wrote that he was ‘a peppery, fussy, schoolmasterish little man, with whom I should hate to have a row’. Lees-Milne was curious about his host’s domestic arrangements. De Stein was a bachelor, who resided with an older unmarried sister, Gladys, but she was not there when Lees-Milne visited; instead, De Stein was accompanied by a much younger male friend. Lees-Milne thought him ‘rather nice’, unlike De Stein, who ‘is prudish and disapproving, yet he puts his arm round one’s waist and makes rapid, sly remarks which I think it best to leave unheeded’. Nonetheless, the gift was accepted, subject to a right for De Stein and his sister to remain as tenants.

In one case, the bachelor owner of a house was so taken with Lees-Milne that he thought of bequeathing it to him rather than the Trust. Edgar — ‘Ted’ — Lister (1873–1956) was the owner of Westwood Manor, near Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire, a manor house of great beauty with 15th-century origins, which he had bought in 1911. The son of a prosperous Liverpool businessman, he had worked in the diplomatic service, from which he retired in 1918 to devote himself to the restoration of the house and the creation of its garden. He lived there alone, pursuing his hobbies of music — he played the harp — and embroidery. Lees-Milne’s marriage in 1951 put an end to the idea that Lister might might bequeath the house to him, but his enthusiasm for Westwood — ‘every time I come here I am overwhelmed by the perfection of this house’ — undoubtedly swayed Lister’s decision to give it to the Trust.

Men such as Lister were part of a cultural phenomenon in early-20th-century England that has been called ‘the cult of the manor house’, an enthusiasm for buying and restoring small houses, ideally Tudor or Jacobean, that were believed to embody national identity in the form of a settled rural social order centred on the squirearchy. This was an ideal that Lees-Milne embraced wholeheartedly, yet it is one to which these donors stand at an angle in terms of class, since the money they brought to the task had usually been new-minted in industry and commerce. Their unmarried, childless family circumstances may be one other reason why Lees-Milne was so ready to apply the term ‘fake’ to their much-restored houses, implying that they were sexual, as well as architectural impostors.

The pioneer of this tradition was Frank Green (1861–1954), who in 1930, well before Lees-Milne joined the Trust, made a gift of Treasurer’s House in York and its contents — it was the first time the Trust had been given a fully furnished house (Fig 6). Green’s money came from the family business, the manufacture of heat exchangers. In youth, he was an elegant dandy: according to one young friend, Daphne Vivian, later Marchioness of Bath, ‘women’s clothes interested him and he made a habit of going to dress shows in London and Paris. He wore all sorts of elegant and eccentric clothes himself’, but by the time Lees-Milne knew him he was famous largely for his ferocious temper and threats of physical violence to anyone who moved any of the house’s furnishings.

The quality of fastidious perfection at Treasurer’s House, where the rooms seem to radiate a sense of ‘do not touch’, is shared by Packwood House, set in the Warwickshire countryside between Birmingham and Stratford-upon-Avon. Sixteenth-century in origin, it was heavily restored, decorated and furnished to create a romantic vision of Old England by Graham Baron Ash (Fig 7) — ‘Baron’ was a Christian name, not a title — who discovered the house when he was in his teens.

In 1905, his father, Alfred, who ran the family’s Birmingham zinc-manufacturing business, purchased Packwood on his son’s behalf, helped him to furnish it and left it to him 20 years later. Ash (1889–1980) then liquidated his stake in the family firm and devoted himself to completing the restoration of the house, to which he added a great hall (Fig 8).

In 1940, Ash offered Packwood to the Trust with such a generous endowment — £30,000 — that the organisation accepted a building that Lees-Milne thought ‘more a fake than not’. Ash was more emollient than Green, but he, too, insisted that the Trust must not change anything in the house. Nothing, it seemed, must be allowed to dislodge the carefully contrived image that Green and Ash projected to the world as guardians of these examples of England’s heritage of old buildings and decorative arts. Since neither left any records that throw light on their private lives, it is only possible to guess at the psychological dynamics that were concealed behind these immaculately maintained architectural masks.

In 1943, Urban Huttleston Broughton, 1st Lord Fairhaven (Fig 5), invited Lees-Milne to Anglesey Abbey (Fig 4), a few miles outside of Cambridge, to discuss his proposed gift of the estate to the Trust. Fairhaven (1896–1966) was the richest of all these bachelor donors thanks to the immense fortune made by his maternal grandfather, the American oil baron Henry Huttleston Rogers. However, Lees-Milne was not impressed by the way that he had remodelled the Tudor house, writing in 1943 that it was ‘like Packwood, more a fake than not’. Fairhaven’s reputation has never recovered from Lees-Milnes’s mockery, as in the account of dinner at Anglesey Abbey, where he ‘is served first, before his guests, in the feudal manner which only the son of an oil magnate would adopt’.

One reason why this snobbish dismissal has proved so enduring is the absence of documents that might provide alternative insights into Lord Fairhaven’s private life. His diaries vanished shortly after his death and are believed to have been destroyed by his family, with the result that visitors have been left to draw their own conclusions from the prominence of sculptures and paintings of nude young men in the house’s collections.

By the time the National Trust inherited Anglesey Abbey, it was well provided with country houses and estates of the traditional type. Nonetheless, the stream of gifts and bequests by bachelors continued, and indeed had been enlarged to encompass gardens, with the gift in 1948 of Hidcote, Gloucestershire, by its creator, Lawrence Johnston. There was also a shift in taste away from the Tudor and Jacobean houses that had appealed so much to the interwar generations: at Hinton Ampner, Hampshire, for example, the Victorian house was remodelled in an elegant Georgian idiom by Ralph Dutton, who left the estate to the Trust in 1985. The bequest in 2003 of The Homewood (Fig 1), near Esher, Surrey, brought to the charity a distinguished Modern Movement house designed by its owner, the architect Patrick Gwynne (Fig 2), who shared it with the pianist and composer Geoffrey Rand for more than a decade from 1950.

The tradition of gifts and bequests outlined here is important not only for its own sake, but because it corrects another common misconception about the Trust. The idea that it is in thrall to the landowning aristocracy is a criticism that has been frequently expressed, especially from the 1990s onwards, in reaction to the prominence of country houses in public perceptions of the organisation.

The legacy of the houses and gardens given to it by so many aesthetically minded bachelors over the past century is evidence that the truth is much more complex. It is a tribute to the range and depth of the Trust’s holdings that it owns an unequalled range of houses and gardens restored or created in the 20th century by men who stood well outside the norms of marriage, family and inheritance that the organisation is so often held to embody.

Michael Hall’s new book, ‘A Queer Inheritance: Alternative Histories in the National Trust’ (Books, February 4), is published by Bloomsbury (£25)

Photography: Mark Fiennes/Paul Barker/Country Life Picture Library; Future Publishing Ltd; National Trust Images.

This feature originally appeared in the February 25, 2026 issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.