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When it emerged that the National Trust had put vegan scones on the menu, it was seized on by some newspapers as a marmalade dropper – or strawberry jam dropper, perhaps – proof that the institution was woke. Wait until they hear about all the queer men and women who helped to make the Trust what it is today. The charity’s 5.4 million members and others visit its grand piles for a nice day out and a tea towel, unaware that they are surrounded by the ghosts of these figures. They are brought to life by Michael Hall, a former architecture editorof Country Life and author of books on Waddesdon Manor and the gothic revival in Britain.
Some of them, such as the buttoned-up Henry James, who lived at Lamb House, Rye, merely lent their lustre to properties that were later taken over by the trust. Others introduced features to the estates that continue to delight trippers to this day. They include Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, partners in a lavender marriage, who created the gardens at Sissinghurst, appropriately enough.
The National Trust was established in 1895, the year Oscar Wilde stood trial for gross indecency. Hall recreates the suffocating, hypocritical atmosphere of late 19th-century England; of London, in particular. But did hard-pressed queer Victorians create the National Trust? Not exactly. It’s true that one of its founders, Octavia Hill, lived with a woman. However, Wilde himself “had no direct link to the organisation” and one of Hill’s co-founders was a puritan who spent his declining years trying to stamp out saucy seaside postcards.
All the same, A Queer Inheritance tells a deeply researched and revealing story of our national life centred on a range of deceptively cosy settings. Hall suggests that Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray may have been inspired by outrageous goings-on at Clumber, the seat of the Duke of Newcastle, which is now in National Trust hands. EM Forster lived at Piney Copse in Surrey, also in the trust portfolio. He indulged in reveries about “the greenwood”, the semi-mythical woodlands of old Albion with revivifying powers, but also the habitat of Pan, master of pagan revels.
After the war, many country houses were passed to the trust because of dwindling returns from their estates and steepling inheritance tax. In their vast unheated rookeries, aristocrat’s fingers were turning the same colour as their noble blood. Architectural historian James Lees-Milne, whose diaries are a waspish insider account of the trust, had the job of tapping up the toffs to hand over their title deeds in return for staying on, rent free. He also dealt with what he called an almost “extinct generation of bien, high-to-middlebrow bachelors, endowed with money, privilege and nice houses and possessions; queers with an Edwardian sense of the proprieties, snobbish yet full of confidence”. Hall tells us the comic, sad stories of some of these squires, with their galleries of unabashed etchings and what Lees-Milne calls their “too immaculate blue suits”.
At times, the author is like one of the peelers of old London town, finding queer behaviour everywhere. The Arts and Crafts movement was characterised by “gruff male diffidence … [which] often concealed deeper longings; one of their most distinctive forms of furniture was the closet”. Two young men who passed as society beauties were clearly cross-dressers, but Hall speculates that they may have been trans. For a writer who appears to feel the sexual injustices of the past keenly, he makes little of the interest of some well-connected gentlemen in the company of boys. And while he strikes a retrospective blow on behalf of queer people, the elegant establishment pillars of the trust don’t so much as wobble. We only hear about the better class of gay and lesbian. This version of Downton Abbey doesn’t concern itself with life below stairs.
I make no apology for returning to the delicious scone served by the trust. Like the institution itself, it’s familiar and comforting but not free of complexity. Is it jam first, or cream? “S’gone” or “scoone”? Perhaps this is another case – like histories gay or straight – where there is more to the story than a simple binary suggests.
