The Men from the Ministry Heritage! The Battle for Britain's Past

The First World War had seen conflict and destruction

on a scale never before imagined.

Mainland Europe lay horrifically scarred,

both in terms of its dead and its landscape.

But as the last months of war dragged on,

there was a significant symbol of hope and renewal in Britain.

In September 1918, Britain's most famous monument, Stonehenge,

was given to the nation by a Mr Cecil Chubb,

a lunatic asylum proprietor

who'd bought the stones at auction a few years before.

After centuries of vandalism and neglect,

Stonehenge would at last be protected and restored.

Fallen stones righted

and lintels repositioned.

In a land fit for heroes,

it heralded a new age of government responsibility

for the nation's heritage,

when the men from the Ministry would command a massive rescue operation.

But, at the same time,

and not so very far away from the nation's ancient sites,

the cities of Britain were modernising

and expanding haphazardly into the countryside.

The motor car, newly affordable, was on the rise.

And a crisis faced the country houses of Britain.

Most frightening of all,

Hitler would target our finest old buildings

in the infamous Baedeker raids of World War Two.

New heroes rallied to the cause

as the fight to save Britain's great buildings

reached a new intensity.

There is one symbol of our national history

that is so familiar we have come to view it as timeless.

The ruin.

Many are the remains of the nation's greatest mediaeval buildings,

set on a path of ruin

in two of the most dramatic periods of upheaval in Britain's history.

Religious buildings caught up in the violence of the Reformation

in the 1530s

and castles that fell victim to the English Civil War

in the 1640s.

These ruins have a familiar look.

The bare stripped stone,

the glassless Gothic windows,

the bowling-green lawns

and the metal plaques telling us what we need to know.

But it's a look very different from how it used to be.

For centuries, the ruins of Britain

had to take their chances against relentless nature.

And nature often won.

In the 18th and 19th centuries,

ivy-clad and tree-infested,

they inspired Romantic poets and artists

to ponder the fleeting nature of human endeavour and existence.

But by the 1920s, the world had changed.

For a Britain emerging from the horrors of the First World War,

the ruin had truly lost its romance.

The First World War was a time of mass destruction,

destruction of human beings, of British youth

and a time of mud, carnage, filth, despair and futility.

And I think, very importantly,

guiding some of the spirit

of the new official, public attitude towards conservation and heritage,

was the belief that we needed to cleanse away, clean

and set up this bright new world.

The bright new world dawned in Whitehall,

in a government minister called the Office Of Works.

Thanks to the new Ancient Monuments Act of 1913,

government officials now had the power to declare

there were ancient buildings of such importance

their owners could no longer neglect them and allow them to fall down.

And in return for handing them over,

the government would foot the bill for repairs and maintenance

and open them to the public.

The law extended only to historic buildings that were uninhabited

and, in practice, that meant ruins.

But it was a huge advance from the neglect of the previous century.

And, in 1918, many great ruins were on the verge of collapse.

The Office Of Works had to move fast,

the inspectors set out on their mission right across the country.

What this whole Zeitgeist, if you like,

enabled to take place was a massive collecting spree,

which the Office Of Works went on

and they went round the county taking into their care

all the major ruined buildings,

the mediaeval abbeys, castles, they could possibly get their hands on.

One or two they didn't take, one or two they wanted, they couldn't get.

But hundreds and hundreds of buildings came into their care.

Success would come down to the vision and willpower of one man,

Charles Reed Peers, the new Inspector Of Ancient Monuments.

Peers was a very different man from the 19th-century heritage pioneers

whose sensitivity towards a building had outlawed drastic intervention.

They had preached a gospel against scrape and clean

preserving what they called "the golden stain of time".

But Peers had a crisis on his hands.

And out of the ruinous confusion,

he wanted clarity and order to emerge.

His house, at Chiselhampton, in Oxfordshire,

still boasts a calm symmetry of classical order and nature tamed.

Peers was a great gardener.

He, like everyone in the Office Of Works,

had been to either Oxford or Cambridge

and had been used to seeing historic buildings

set against beautifully-mown green grass in the college quads.

And I think this aesthetic of ruin

against the calm of the grass

was seeing as something that was extremely attractive.

How those ruins could be set,

not in the sort of the fields of mud of the trenches,

but in something that anchored them

in this sort of conception of England.

Peers was an architect and an archaeologist.

He was charming and energetic.

He inspired loyalty in his team,

but he did not suffer fools gladly.

His family called him "the squire".

Peers had a clear vision

of what the nation must do with its great ruins

and it was not just a matter of rescuing them from collapse.

Above all, he wanted them to speak to the nation,

to tell a clear and accessible story.

You needed to be able to read the nation's history in the stones.

And that meant getting rid of later accretions,

that meant taking down the ivy,

that meant taking down later buildings

that were built up against the mediaeval walls,

meant simplifying them, printing plans of them,

clear guidebooks with clear phases,

putting labels on each individual part of the building.

So this was a great exercise

in explaining to the nation its own history.

His mission was high-minded and it was commercial.

If the ruins spoke to everyone,

more visitors would come.

He would make ruins into popular textbooks,

the flat pages would be the green lawn

and the stones would be the text.

But first, he needed a vital bit of newfangled technology.

Before the motor mower, achieving the perfect lawn

had been an expensive, labour-intensive process.

You needed a small army

with scythes and rollers.

Then, came the horse-drawn mower,

followed by the steam-operated contraptions

that never quite caught on.

But the mass-produced motor mower

would change the look of heritage for ever.

It's a 1920s Atco standard.

This is a 14-inch model.

This machine gives a perfect bright finish,

which was ideal for formal lawn.

This machine at its time would have been

the height of technology at an affordable price.

And it was sort of like an industrial revolution,

instead of having to push the machine up and down, it went on its own.

It was so easy to use and extremely reliable.

And to make the castles and stately homes more pleasing to the eye,

they would have used a machine like this.

Beautiful, formal British dried lawn that this machine was designed to do.

And it would do sterling work for miles and miles of cutting grass.

And you'd finish with a finish as good as a carpet.

So Peers issued a bible to his busy workforce.

And his commandments were to be followed to the letter.

Ivy, that most active and insidious enemy of old buildings,

had to be uprooted.

Buildings not part of the original medieval structure must be removed.

The accumulation of soil and rubble must be cleared

to reveal the building's foundations.

And up went the signs telling you precisely what was what.

Today, the successor to the Office Of Works is English Heritage.

Keith Emerick is an Ancient Monuments Inspector in Yorkshire.

We're still the government adviser

on all matters of cultural heritage and historic environment.

He's on his way to Rievaulx Abbey, in North Yorkshire,

the first major site to get the Office Of Works' treatment.

Rievaulx was founded in 1132

and became one of the richest religious institutions in England.

So when Henry VIII broke with the Catholic Church in the 1530s,

it was high on his hate list.

Henry took its treasures

and stripped the building of anything valuable.

The king ordered Rievaulx to be rendered uninhabitable.

Which it has been ever since.

Rievaulx was handed over to the Office Of Works

by the Feversham family after the death of the Earl

at the Battle of the Somme in 1916.

-Hiya!

-Hi!

-I just came to have a quick look around the site, if that's OK.

-Indeed.

-If there's anything...

Have you noticed anything at all, any bits falling off?

-We did have a tree fall, a branch fell the other day, yeah.

-Right, OK.

-It didn't hit anything?

-No, thankfully not.

OK, thanks. Thanks a lot.

When the Office Of Works took over Rievaulx,

it was on the brink of collapse,

and after the recent bad weather,

Keith is here to check all is well.

What I'm looking for is just evidence of what's called spalling,

where kind of frost action and the water getting behind the stone

or the detail of the stone has then expanded as it's frozen

and forced pieces of the decorative details off.

Or whether there's something actually more catastrophic that might be going on,

but I doubt the latter is the case,

but there's usually...once you get into the start of the winter season

we might expect to see some spalling,

and it's always good to keep an idea of, keep a sense

of how much there is or how little there is.

In accordance with the Peers bible,

Rievaulx was shorn of its ivy,

post-mediaeval accretions, even picturesque cottages,

were pulled down

and the ground made even

to reveal foundations.

But there was an immense structural challenge here -

the monument was top heavy,

with the upper stories leading out alarmingly.

Peers and his architect, Frank Baines, authorised major surgery

on the very innards of the abbey walls.

When the Ministry Of Works came to the site,

the whole of the east end was moving quite considerably.

The upper part of the building was actually hanging out

about two feet or more beyond its base.

So they scooped out all of the core work

and they drove railway rails through the fabric

to actually knit the three walls together.

And then, they filled the interior with concrete

and then, they put the stonework back on the face

in exactly the same position

so all the repairs are completely hidden,

so you think that you're looking at an authentic building,

whereas, really, it's what perhaps might be called

a staged authenticity.

The scale of the work was quite amazing.

The clearance of the site was kind of, if you like,

on an industrial scale.

They employed a lot of returning and disabled World War One veterans

to do the work.

There were small railway systems that were built to take the material,

as they were excavating it, off the site.

It was just a huge, huge undertaking.

Peers intervention was fantastically bold.

This is mediaeval fabric with a modern steel and concrete core,

but it worked.

It's not how we do it now.

But I don't think we can criticise them,

because what is absolutely clear

is that if the Office Of Works had not taken on all those ruins

in the interwar period, they wouldn't be here today.

They'd all reached a sort of stage of final collapse

and for every one ruin that was taken in by the Office Of Works,

there were two or three that fell down and have now disappeared.

The heritage laws had worked brilliantly well

for roofless and uninhabited ruins.

The great abbeys and castles of the nation were saved.

And in just a few years,

they had established themselves

on even the most casual day trip as a itinerary.

'One of the most pleasant of places to go to,

'a spot that's almost bursting with memories of the glorious past,

'it's ancient Tintagel, in Cornwall.

'There, if you're bent towards an old castle,

'overlooking sea and ready for immediate occupation,

'little remains, but for you to see the remains.

'So this way, please, ladies.'

But if the only means of protecting a building

was for the government to acquire it,

and it had to be roofless and uninhabited to qualify,

it was still a painfully small answer to the crisis.

In the 1920s, the cities of Britain were modernising

and nowhere more so than London.

The mood was for progress and modern urban living.

The demolition gang reigned supreme

and in a world that had little time for Georgian splendours

and hated Victorian architecture,

the casualty list was high.

When you look at the buildings that disappeared,

we now think so wonderful,

all the great, almost all the great private palaces,

the aristocratic townhouses,

Norfolk House, Dorchester House, Devonshire House, Lansdowne House,

they all went.

The Foundling Hospital, Waterloo Bridge, Regent Street,

all these things disappeared.

There are always people who think that you mustn't stand

in the way of what they imagine to be progress.

You know, the world, in some ways,

after the catastrophe of the wars, was getting better

with cars and the wireless and aeroplanes, all this sort of thing.

Why care about old buildings?

It's probably the most destructive period in London's history.

CAR HORN BLARES

But the cities of Britain were also expanding fast.

The new suburbs seemed to promise a life of convenience and comfort,

leaving behind the dirty city.

Between the two world wars,

English cities sprawled intensely and immensely.

And there are various reasons for it,

there was a desire to create lots of new clean, green housing for people,

new suburbia, that would be healthy for people,

a great concern about public health.

The new suburbs will be clean, there'll be tennis playing,

they will have gardens and people would be...they'd brush their teeth

and wash their faces and they would be a lot healthier with clean air.

Inevitably, it was the open countryside

that bore the brunt of the spreading suburbs.

Thousands of new homes spread out

from the edges of towns and cities.

New roads ripped through the countryside in an unplanned free-for-all.

A new disease was even diagnosed -

Bungaloiditis.

The countryside was definitely under seize,

it was undergoing a fundamental transformation

and the amount of land that changed hands after the First World War

was as much as the amount of land that changed hands after the dissolution of the monasteries.

There's a whole change in the nature of the way the countryside was run,

who owned it, who lived in it, who enjoyed it, who went to it.

This was profoundly unsettling

for those people who liked the countryside as it was.

Villages that had felt safely distant from urban sprawl

were suddenly too close for comfort.

New pressure groups formed to stop the invasion,

led, in 1926, by the Campaign For The Protection Of Rural England.

The battle was on.

'Here, less than 30 miles from London,

'you're in the heart of rural England.

'The old thatched cottage, which might be somewhere in Devonshire

'instead of less than 30 miles from London,

'would have disappeared

'and in its place, there may perhaps be petrol stations

'and roadside cafes,

'garages and camping sites.

'Just the other side of the hedge is the old road.

'Little traffic passes along it during the day.

'At night, there is practically none.

'Yet, the old your road is to be made five times its present width,

'and soon, there'll be no room for butterflies.'

The moment called for a champion.

And it got one in the unexpected form

of a Welsh architect and aesthete -

Clough Williams-Ellis.

Clough Williams-Ellis was an extraordinary creature,

if you had met him.

He was this tall, Anglo-Welsh aristocrat,

who wore very flamboyant outfits,

big wide brim hats, yellow cravates

knickerbockers, white socks,

wonderful broke shoes.

But beyond the flamboyance, he was a very serious-minded man,

who was very important in the idea of trying to stop the sprawl.

Cities and towns should be compact.

The countryside should be beautiful and green.

In 1928, Clough wrote a book - England And The Octopus.

A polemic against the sprawl of suburbia.

It was Britain's first environmental bestseller.

And it was a call to action.

He wrote, "In the late war,

"we were invited to fight to preserve England.

"We believed, we fought.

"It may be well to preserve England,

"but better to have an England worth preserving.

"We saved our country that we might ourselves destroy it."

The image of the octopus would become a defining symbol

of the interwar years.

Its tentacles a rallying call against the urban sprawl

known as "ribbon development".

But Clough did not confined himself to words alone.

He set about proving his case

and so, he built a new town,

Portmeirion, in North West Wales, on the edge of Snowdonia.

People treat it as a joke

because it looks like a pastiche Italian hill town.

But it is an important statement in architecture planning,

cos it tries to show how you can get lots of people into a small area,

enhance a landscape with architecture

and cause no damage to the natural environment.

What Clough wanted to say was - you can take that example, Portmeirion,

and you can make it much bigger, of course,

you could create a whole new town like that.

Began in the 1920s,

Portmeirion would take 50 years to complete.

And Clough was there to see it finished.

The town is full of wit,

and tricks of the eye.

A grand frontage often hides a more humble dwelling.

And humble dwellings embrace the picturesque.

Clough also reused architectural salvage on a grand scale,

rescued from demolition sites around the country.

He called it "a home for fallen buildings."

I suppose I wanted to paint a propagandist picture, one might say.

I wanted to show that you could develop a place,

even a very rural place, without defiling it.

In fact, if you did this

with sufficient love and care and expertise,

you might even add to what God had given you as your background.

And beyond the flamboyance,

it's still a serious exercise in high-density building.

Cramming a lot in without compromising the landscape,

a retort in bricks and mortar

to the ribbon development of the 1920s and '30s.

The growing curse of the octopus.

But even as the landscape was changing,

more people than ever were setting out to explore it.

It was the golden age of the charabanc,

bringing urban dwellers out to the countryside.

and the newly affordable mass-produced motor car.

It was truly the romantic age of motoring.

The pioneer driver was king of the road.

The motor car allowed people to explore the nation's heritage

in a new and liberated way.

Visitor numbers boomed.

It was the birth of an extraordinary relationship

between the nation's ancient monuments and the motor car.

CAR HORN BLARES

Today, motoring magazines are almost entirely about cars,

they're full of alluring pictures of fast cars.

In the 1920s and '30s, things were a bit different.

Almost every issue had quite a lengthy article on touring by car.

They'd have lots of photographs of villages and churches and so on,

usually with the car sitting somewhere

in the corner of the photograph.

And car manufactures would actually use historic buildings

as part of their advertisements.

For example, Austin, for their Austin Seven model,

had pictures of the Austin actually standing outside a ruined abbey.

And you have an extraordinary boom in books, for example,

that catered for people who wanted to go out into the country.

Batsford started to bring out a series of books called

the English Heritage series

and The Face Of Britain.

And these sold in numbers that were completely unprecedented

for books on the English landscape.

Similarly, we have the Shell Guides coming out,

so there was a whole range of books designed to encourage you

to go and see your England.

But it was a two-edged sword, really, because, on the one hand,

the car magazines were encouraging people to go out into the country,

but, at the same time, in doing that, the owners of the cars

were actually often damaging the very thing

that they were going out to look at.

There were already some worrying signs,

even the landscape around Stonehenge

was suffering from the clutter of the motor car.

And soon, petrol advertising would be out of control.

But the campaign for the beautification of roads

fought successfully for unsightly petrol advertising to be removed.

And by the 1930s,

filling stations were even trying to get the heritage look themselves.

Tudor-bethan cottage style.

And the inflammable thatch look.

Now, of course,

the filling stations from the golden age of motoring are heritage too.

In Dane End, in Hertfordshire, the old village forge

was converted to a filling station in the 1930s.

And John Minnis has his modern listing hat on.

In almost every respect, this is really typical of its period.

And it's still got some of the old enamel signs on it

that you can see there.

One for spark plugs and there's another sign for India Tyres.

What we're looking at here are a couple of probably late-1930s pumps.

And if we just take a closer look at them,

we can see they're Avery Hardoll,

who were one of the leading manufacturers of petrol pumps.

These were electric pumps of the type that came in in the mid 1930s.

They've lost the globes that they would have once had,

they would have once had illuminated globes on the top.

But otherwise, they're still pretty intact

and there are very few petrol pumps today

that really date from this era still in situ.

Collectors have got quite a few

that have been taken from their original locations,

but here we are with these still in front of the garage

that they once served.

So it's a real period piece.

TRAIN WHISTLES

In the 1930s, the campaign to make the countryside

accessible to everyone was growing.

It was the great age of rambling.

Mass trespass was almost a weekend pastime.

More and more people publicly declared themselves

the enemy of the octopus,

the enemy of urban sprawl wrecking the countryside.

One such group was a mysterious band of bright young things

called Ferguson's Gang.

In 1932, reports began to appear in the newspapers

when a masked member of the gang, styling herself Red Biddy,

turned up at the National Trust office in London

and handed over a swag bag of cash.

The gang members bought their masks from Harrods

and liked to feast on figs with cream and champagne.

Other members of the gang left similar deposits calling themselves

Bill Stickers,

Erb The Smasher

and Kate The Nark.

At the time, no-one knew who they were

or how the money had been come by.

Their greatest coup came

when the BBC allowed a masked member of the gang to address the nation.

'I appeal to you tonight for the National Trust.

'That means for the beauty of England that belongs to you and me

'and it's vanishing from under our eyes.

'No government grant supports the work of the Trust

'and it urgently needs more subscribing members

'to help in its battle against the octopus.

'The octopus whose tentacles in the shape

'of jerry-built states and ribbon development

'are stretching like a pestilence over the face of England.'

The appeal led to a flood of donations

and new members for the Trust.

A stretch of the Cornish coastline was donated

and a town hall on the Isle of Wight.

Priory Cottages in Oxfordshire

and 18th-century Shalford Mill, in Surrey, were saved.

The mill would become the Gang's headquarters,

where they swore oaths on the grindstone

to preserve England and frustrate the octopus.

Everyone in the Gang is long since dead

and only recently have their true identities being revealed.

The leader of the gang, Bill Stickers,

was in fact Peggy Pollard,

a Sanskrit scholar, naturist

and six-foot great-niece

of Victorian Prime Minister William Gladstone

It was her brother, Erb The Smasher,

in reality old Etonian Bobby Gladstone,

who had made the masked broadcast at the BBC.

Joanna Bagnall and Penelope Adamson had come back to the mill.

They are the daughters

of gang members the Artichoke and Black Mary.

They remember life at the mill in the early 30s could be surprising.

-I remember picking up Red Biddy with a donkey and cart.

-Oh, yes!

That was at the station when she had baby and I was shocked,

cos she fed the baby on the platform.

Breastfeeding the baby on the platform?

Struck by horror, obviously. Very embarrassed, but anyway.

I was brought up in awe of them.

Well, they were actually very well educated, better than we were.

Well, we were very young, anyway, darling.

-They were very thoughtful people.

-Yes, right.

And very intellectual.

That's why they used to sit around the millstones,

just...you could have eight members cos they could get their legs in.

-That's right.

-And they struck the grain shafts saying,

"I commit myself to the preservation of old England

"by defying the octopus."

-The were like the Bloomsbury set in a way.

-Oh, they were!

I found that they came from very wealthy families.

Not all of them, by any means.

They...

She was! She was a colonel's daughter or something.

-A general's daughter.

-Yes, a general's daughter.

-Socialists too.

-Yeah.

They were Socialists,

but their families necessarily weren't Socialists.

-Well, they must have been to a certain...

-They were country gentlemen.

To a certain extent, darling, don't want to tread on them completely.

There were probably masked then and they were...

Yes, they were great fun, cos they liked to dress up.

They loved dressing up.

And I do remember it was just peppered with gaiety,

of other people's gaieties and our gaieties.

And all the, the crowds of people coming,

I don't remember them having vast parties.

But...a lot of children, always children rushing around.

80 years on, the National Trust is celebrating the Gang.

And octopus is on the menu.

This is the octopus that anyone can come and tame the tentacles of,

if they want.

I might just try that.

Delicious.

-And you remember meeting the Gang, don't you?

-Uh-huh.

Billy Stickers, yeah. Billy Stickers, then, and that's your...

-That's my aunt.

-Your aunt.

COWBELL

I feel very honoured

to be amongst you all.

I only wish the Gang were here,

so hold on to the memory,

cherish it and carry it on.

My God!

CHEERING

Shalford Mill is typical of the type of building

the National Trust liked in the 1920s and '30s.

From its earlier days, saving open landscape and woodland

had been its priority.

And when the Trust saved buildings,

they tended to be modest and vernacular, wedded to the landscape.

But a crisis was looming that would make both the Trust

and the Office Of Works, with its great portfolio of ruins,

re-examine their priorities.

It was the magazine Country Life that spotted the problem

in its Property-For-Sale pages.

The crisis made a hot story for the newsreel cameras from America.

'And as one fine old mansion after another is sold

'for taxes and delivered to the wreckers,

'bankrupt peers face necessities even more precedent-breaking.

'The Marquis of Huntly,

'listed in Burke's Peerage as the premier peer of Scotland,

'goes out to earn his own bread and butter.'

And I want a job, as a matter of fact.

I have an appointment to see the manager.

I wonder if you could show me about where he is, can you?

-Certainly, what's the name?

-Lord Huntly.

For the toffs up against it,

the easy option was to seek their fortune elsewhere.

Many of the biggest country houses were Georgian or Victorian,

not even old enough to be considered interesting in the 1930s.

They faced demolition,

the parklands sold and their collections broken up.

'Unless something is done

'to preserve these beautiful old country houses and gardens,

'in a generation, half of them will be in ruins

'through taxation and death duties.'

It's very easy, sitting here in the 21st century,

to imagine that it was always going to be the National Trust

that was going to save the nation's country houses.

But that was far from clear in the 1930s.

And before the Second World War,

there was a pretty mixed attitude towards country houses.

They weren't really regarded as proper heritage,

they weren't regarded as proper history.

I mean, Georgian architecture was only really just beginning to be

properly appreciated like that.

Barrington Court, a great Tudor house in Somerset,

was much more the people's taste at the time.

Barrington was the National Trust's

only big country house purchase in 40 years.

But it had annoyed the Trust's formidable founder, Octavia Hill.

The story of the Trust's stately homes

starts actually with Barrington Court,

an empty house,

which they felt they had to save

and it nearly bankrupted the Trust.

And there were lots of sort of maybe apocryphal stories

of every time the National Trust wanted to take on another building,

people going darkly, "Remember Barrington," you know.

Because it was a complete disaster financially.

And I think actually that turned the Trust rather against country houses.

In fact, for a long time

and certainly, Octavia Hill was very critical

of all this money being, you know, in her view, wasted on country houses

instead of open spaces, which she wanted.

I think that in the early days

of the discussions within the National Trust

about how it might get involved in country houses,

there was huge reluctance to get involved in it.

I mean, they couldn't see why they should.

Many of the sort of senior people at the National Trust had been

and were Socialists or Communists even.

And, you know, suddenly getting involved with all these toffs

who were in dire straits

was, you know, an extraordinary step forward.

But the National Trust was changing.

From the early years of middle-class philanthropists

campaigning for the countryside,

it would become more literary artistic.

Soon, the aesthetes would arrive.

And it was beginning to attract a viscount or two,

even the occasional marquis.

The Trust in the interwar period became really very aristocratic.

I mean, the inheritance of Octavia Hill, Rawnsley and Hunter

had changed quite radically.

And by the 1930s,

with the development of the country house concept,

it was...the language with which it was expressed was quite remarkable.

And there, she said, "We must save country houses

"in which the people can have weekends."

And it was taking the concept of the country house weekend

and trying to nationalise it.

The tussle was on.

On the one hand, the Office Of Works.

On the other, the National Trust.

The future of the country house hung in the balance.

What we have to remember is that in the 1930s,

the Office Of Works had been incredibly successful

in gathering together a collection of hundreds and hundreds

and hundreds of historic buildings.

To get hold of them,

they had negotiated with aristocratic owners

and the aristocratic owners had handed over these wonderful ruins,

abbeys and their old castles and things,

quite happily to the government that was going to look after them.

And so, it was seen absolutely naturally within the Office Of Works

that when the issue of the country house was faced,

it was going to be the Office Of Works who dealt with them.

Then, the Trust had a brainwave.

It proposed taking on country houses in lieu of death duties.

The houses would open to the public

while the former owners could continue to live in the houses as tenants.

The government agreed.

It would be called "the country house scheme".

And it looked like a breakthrough.

But the title home owners were having none of it.

Many of them were very conservative, they hated the state,

they didn't want, you know, the state to take over their house.

The National Trust, with its various tax advantages,

appeared to be an agency of the state.

By the outbreak of the Second World War, in 1939,

the scheme had gone nowhere.

And there were more important things to think about

as both the British people and its precious old buildings

faced a new type of conflict.

For the first time, the cities and towns of Britain

prepared for a massive onslaught from the skies.

Air raids had been few and far between in World War One.

Now, the home front, the heritage front,

would be directly in the firing line.

SIRENS WAILING

The London Blitz and the bombing of Coventry

showed what aerial bombardment could do.

Britain would retaliate with a raid on the coastal town of Luebeck.

British bomber command had chosen Luebeck

because it was an achievable target.

But it had resulted in the destruction

of hundreds of fine German medieval buildings.

Hitler's Minister Of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, wrote in his diary,

"We will respond by razing English cultural shrines to the ground.

"That is now to be done on the biggest scale possible."

And on 27th April 1942,

Baron Gustav Braun von Stumm, of the German Foreign Office, revealed,

"We shall go out and bomb every building in Britain

"marked with three stars in the Baedeker Guide."

Astonishingly, the Luftwaffe was going to picket British targets

from a heritage guidebook.

"Of course, Exeter was a sitting target.

"Just a quiet cathedral city.

"And the Hun was able to do its worse."

'By the time it'd finished, the place was well ablaze.

'Exeter's always been known for the beauty of its squares

'and crescents and circuses.

'Many of them today were just groups of bare, blackened masonry.'

With aerial bombardments,

you're seeing the deliberate selection

of historic cities as targets.

The Baedeker raids -

Exeter, York, Norwich, Canterbury and Bath.

So that picking on heritage as a deliberate target

shows the potency of heritage as a national identifier

and people's determination to slight it as an act of vengeance,

an act of blatant aggression.

'The King and Queen have come to see

'how Bath now takes its place in Hitler's plan of war.

'The Germans turned the pages of a travellers' reference book

'and picked out our beauty spots and historic landmarks for destruction.

'Bath is famous for both.

'While they may concentrate their bombers

'on targets suggested by Mr Baedeker,

'the RAF will continue to open up the second front

'in the skies over Germany.'

The emotional impact of the Baedeker raids

was to have a profound and long-term effect.

The bombing of Britain in the Second World War did make people conscious

of how precious buildings could be.

Before the war when buildings were destroyed, it was progress.

But when they were bombed, of course, it was a product of Nazi barbarism.

Often buildings after a bombing raid would be vulnerable,

if their neighbouring buildings had fallen down, for instance.

How could you make sure that that building remains standing?

How could you carry out emergency repairs?

So the Ministry of Works has a really important part to play

in upholding, literally, the special interest of those buildings.

300 architects were appointed by the Government to go round

the country very quickly and to look at the bombed cities

and to work out which buildings ought to be kept and repaired

and which buildings were not so important and could be demolished.

It was a massive task, covering bombed buildings

and intact buildings in the firing line.

In effect, an inventory of the nation's greatest

architectural assets.

In peacetime, it would have been resisted

because these were privately-owned buildings.

In wartime, it happened

and it would change the future of heritage protection.

These salvage surveys became the foundation

of what we now know as listing

because the lists that were compiled by the architects

right in the middle of the war as the bombs were falling

became the basis of the listing system that we have today.

Listing wasn't going to save your building from being attacked

from the air by German bombs.

What listing could do, however,

was make sure that proper care was taken of it after the bombing raid,

that every effort was taken to make sure it remained standing

and thoughtless clearance of a site didn't take place.

At last, the Office of Works had a system of safeguarding buildings,

inhabited and with roofs on, not just ruins,

that did not depend on acquiring them.

Before long, the listing process would become enshrined in the Town and Country Planning Act.

To list or not to list would define the post-war heritage world.

But the Government wasn't the only body making lists.

Before the war, a youthful James Lees-Milne had been working for the National Trust.

Now, newly-demobbed due to ill-health and back at the trust,

he set out on a fresh mission to convince the owners

of the finest country houses to hand them over to the trust.

Maybe in wartime they would be more open to persuasion.

Many of the owners had abandoned their big houses as they were

requisitioned by the Government for the war effort.

Some of Britain's finest houses were now schools for evacuated children,

hospitals for injured servicemen

and, worst of all, training camps for the services.

Many were damaged.

Several had caught fire.

Most needed urgent repair.

The waspish Lees-Milne in his diary paints an extraordinary picture

of a titled class losing its marbles.

Suicidal earls,

ladies of the manor living in treehouses

and baronets down to their last butler.

He passed judgement on both houses and owners as he travelled

and was not always complimentary.

"The house is a hideous, pretentious, genteel,

"over-restored fake.

"Just like its inhabitants. A horrible property.

"I hope it gets bombed."

But to their faces, he was as nice as pie.

And the lords and ladies down on their luck seemed to like him.

Lees-Milne went to Eton.

He knew many of these families, he spoke to them in their language.

Being quite ruthless about this, he could do it.

He pulled off, effectively, a giant confidence trick

on the aristocracy of Britain. He took away their wealth.

But he said to them, "People like me will look after you.

"You can stay in the house. You can continue to pretend it's yours.

"You can continue to enjoy it.

"You will have the same sense, and your children, most importantly,

"will have the same sense that it's still your house."

Lees-Milne needed a prize.

And at the very top of his shopping list was one of the greatest houses

in the country, Knole in Kent.

If he could get Knole for the trust,

if he could convince its owner the 4th Baron Sackville,

formerly known as Major-General Sir Charles Sackville-West,

he would bag for the trust

a house of unsurpassed architectural splendours

with furniture and paintings to match.

Most importantly, he knew other owners of great houses

would sign their houses over to the trust

if someone like Lord Sackville led the way.

Built by an Archbishop of Canterbury and dating back to the 15th century,

Knole is so grand no-one's ever been quite sure

how many rooms there are.

These days, it's home to Robert, 7th Baron Sackville.

This room here.

It's A terrific portrait there by Sir Joshua Reynolds

of an Italian dancer

who was the mistress of John Sackville,

3rd Duke of Dorset.

We have her there. We've got the third duke there.

We've got the wife of the third duke,

with whom he eventually settled down, over the fireplace.

So they're all meeting in some ghastly family reunion.

Sackville ancestors include a Lord Treasurer to Elizabeth I,

an ambassador to the court of Louis XIV

and a flamenco dancer nicknamed Pepita.

The family survived the Civil War,

endless disputes over inheritance,

bouts of transgenerational depression

and even riots against them by the angry people of nearby Sevenoaks.

But by the 1940s, for the then incumbent Charles 4th Baron Sackville,

it looked as though the game was up.

In the dark days of war, Knole had reached its lowest ebb.

Pretty much ever since a Sackville family member lived here

in the early 17th century

the house has been simply too big

for the means of the Sackville family.

So they have struggled or tended to struggle over centuries with debt.

Certainly my great uncle Charlie often thought that he

or at least his son would be the last Sackvilles to live at Knole.

It was seen to be a massive burden rather than a pleasure

and he, I think, realised that something had to be done.

And Charlie and James Lees-Milne started to talk

about what might happen to Knole.

I mean, James Lees-Milne describes some of these conversations

and what he says about Charlie is that Charlie was very charming,

but entered into these discussions with a great,

if not suspicion, with a certain wariness.

There were no precedents for what happened to houses such as this

when taken over by the National Trust

and more specifically what happened to their owners.

But James Lees-Milne wanted a deal. He wanted Knole.

Negotiations took the best part of two years

and were frequently exasperating.

But in October, 1943,

the London Times announced that a deal had been struck.

The terms were generous to the Sackville family.

But Lees-Milne had his prize.

In 1946, the Sackville family handed over the house.

So began the first modern marriage of a titled family

and the National Trust.

From a family perspective,

we, I guess, are very grateful to James Lees-Milne

for acquiring Knole

and acquiring it on terms that are relatively beneficial to the family.

Knole was a very good deal for the Sackville family.

But, no, each of the deals were fit for purpose at the time

and there was a serious risk of Knole, in effect,

disappearing from the public realm

and the negotiators at the time did the best deal they could

and that happened in almost all the cases.

The outcome is quite remarkable.

Knole's open to the public.

Knole is safe. The estate is safe.

The objects in the house are safe.

Knole is a success story.

If you'd asked me, would we do such a deal now? No, we wouldn't.

The circumstances are very different now.

Today the trust is carrying out a £17 million restoration

to make Knole weatherproof,

replace rotten timbers and window frames and repair stonework.

It's a massive operation over five years.

After the acquisition of Knole by the trust,

many house owners followed Lord Sackville into the trust stable.

No other deal would be quite as generous again.

But it had convinced the British aristocracy that the trust

was the only way forward.

But it wasn't quite the end of the story.

In 1946, the Office of Works,

still determined to get into the country house game,

went after the finest Jacobean house in the country,

Audley End in Essex.

It would be a final skirmish.

They scrapped about it. James Lees-Milne was incredibly rude

about the Office of Works, calling them tasteless.

And I suspect, probably behind closed doors, the Office of Works was

very rude about the National Trust,

thinking they were a load of aesthetes who didn't know anything about buildings.

The National Trust was very, very keen to have the house.

The Office of Works was very, very keen to have the house.

It would have been their first country house

and they very much saw that as potentially the founding house

of a big collection of what they thought were probably going to be

the top dozen houses. That's what they would like to have.

They had the top dozen castles. They had the top dozen abbeys.

They had the top dozen prehistoric monuments.

So, quite naturally, they wanted the top dozen houses.

In the end, the Office of Works got its prize

in the form of Audley End.

But it was a short-lived victory.

As post-war austerity loomed,

the Treasury stamped firmly on the Office of Works' ambitions.

As a matter of fact, our report's on its way to you today...

A Government report decided the National Trust was the place

for houses and the rest, as they say, is history.

Back at Knole, it's business as usual for the National Trust

and history has moved on from an obsession with the gilded past

of dukes and earls.

We've got a group of people who are slightly lower down

and we've got a group of people who are a bit higher up.

Some of you are clearly rich people.

Some of you are very clearly not rich people.

And what we're going to do now is we're going to look...

The interwar years had seen the men from the Ministry

open hundreds of the nation's ruins to the public,

the National Trust had evolved to take on the mantle

of the country house

and amidst the ruins of the second world war,

the listing system was born.

Now the nation's framework to safeguard its most precious

old buildings was in place.

But how would it cope with the modern world?

In next week's programme,

fighting for the most famous monument to the railway age...

..Betjeman and Pevsner go head to head,

sexing up the stately home for mass consumption...

..and just how modern can heritage get?

For more information about English Heritage's

complementary exhibition to the series visit...

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd