ON Wednesday, November 26, 1947, the aesthete, conservationist and writer James, or ‘Jim’, Lees-Milne arrived in Yorkshire by train for a visit to Harewood House. As he noted in his diary, he was met at Leeds station by a ‘nice, old-fashioned chauffeur, not in livery’, driving ‘a brand new small Daimler limousine with a large silver owl on the bonnet’. Lees-Milne was visiting on behalf of the National Trust, following the death of the house’s former owner, Henry Lascelles, 6th Earl of Harewood, six months earlier.
Jim had joined the Trust in 1936 at a crucial moment in its history. The charity had been founded by Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley, Octavia Hill and Robert Hunter in 1895 and, in the mid 1930s, enjoyed a membership of a few thousand and a staff of about five. All that was about to change, however, in the combined context of growing financial pressures on great country houses—caused by high taxation and falling land revenue—and an increasing awareness of their historic and aesthetic value.
The 1930s had witnessed a revival of interest in Georgian architecture spearheaded, among others, by COUNTRY LIFE. Bombing and destruction began to democratise that taste
