“I hope that identifying the existence of LGBTQ+ people in the history of the National Trust will encourage us to think more deeply”
What first inspired you to investigate and document the queer histories embedded within National Trust properties?
The idea for the book goes back quite a long way, to 2017, when the National Trust staged a programme of events, ‘Prejudice & Pride’, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act 1967, which partially decriminalised male homosexuality in England and Wales. I remarked to the Trust’s then Head Curator, David Adshead, that I hoped this would be an opportunity to correct the common misconception that the Trust’s early acquisitions of country houses were gifts from aristocrats who wanted to get out of paying tax bills, whereas the lead was in fact taken by bachelors who had bought historic houses, restored and furnished them, and wanted them to have a secure future. David said ‘that sounds like an idea for a book’. At first I thought of confining it to the group of donors I’ve called the ‘aesthete bachelors’ but that would have meant an almost exclusive focus on gay men, and I quickly realised that there was a much larger story to be told.
Did you discover any stories that particularly surprised you or defied your initial expectations about queer heritage within the National Trust?
Perhaps because I’ve never worked for the National Trust, I began by assuming that the book would concentrate on its best-known properties, the country houses, but as the book developed it ranged much more widely, to include for example, Ellen Terry’s house at Smallhythe, Kent, and Lamb House in Rye, home of Henry James and later E.F Benson, so I hope that people will take from the book some sense of the great variety of the Trust’s possessions.
At first it seemed unlikely that I’d have much to say about its holdings of countryside and coastline, but when I read Peter Parker’s brilliant 2016 book Housman Country: Into the Heart of England I realised that it might be possible to use a literary lens to explore the idea of queer landscape. The key was E.M. Forster, who bequeathed some woodland in the Surrey Hills to the National Trust. This led to a chapter that used his novels to unlock the queer identity of not just Forster’s wood, Piney Copse, with its echoes of the ‘greenwood’ into which Maurice and Alec escape at the end of his gay novel Maurice, but also other National Trust landscapes: Figsbury Ring in Wiltshire, the Purbeck Hills and Wenlock Edge, all of which he wrote about.
Your book explores well‑known individuals such as Lawrence of Arabia and Vita Sackville‑West – how did revisiting these more familiar figures through a queer historical lens reshape your understanding of them?
It was a matter of seeing these people not just through a queer lens but also closely in relation to the National Trust places with which they are associated. For example, there’s been endless argument about T.E. Lawrence’s sexuality, but I found that focusing on Clouds Hill, his little cottage in Dorset, helped me identify a pattern in his life of the small houses in which he lived at various times, in each of which an intimate relationship with a man was key, including at Clouds Hill his only certain sexual relationship with someone who can be identified.
I was keen to write about a garden, and Sissinghurst may seem too obvious a choice, as it is one of the most famous queer places in the world, yet almost everyone who has discussed its queer identity has confined themselves to Vita Sackville-West’s tower and writing room. I wondered if there was more that could be said about the garden itself, which is what most visitors come to see? This turned out to be a very rich subject, as I discovered when I explored not only the garden’s design, imagery and choice of flowers but also the horticultural networks that supplied Vita and Harold Nicolson with plants and advice.
On Sissinghurst
Almost everyone who has discussed its queer identity has confined themselves to Vita Sackville-West’s tower and writing room. I wondered if there was more that could be said about the garden itself, which is what most visitors come to see?
How did you approach writing about lesser‑known figures, such as confirmed bachelors who quietly influenced the National Trust’s legacy?
When researching the lives of people in the past whom we might now identify as queer there are very often issues around written sources, which are frequently absent, sometimes because they have been destroyed or censored, but more usually because of the necessary discretion imposed by stigma or, in the case of gay men, the threat of prosecution. Such bachelor donors to the National Trust as Frank Green at Treasurer’s House, York, and Graham Baron Ash at Packwood House, Warwickshire, left no papers that might throw light on their private lives, and although we know that Lord Fairhaven at Anglesey Abbey, Cambridgeshire, kept a diary, it was lost after his death and is presumed to have been destroyed. My chapter on the confirmed bachelors relies heavily therefore on the diaries kept by James Lees-Milne between 1942 and 1949, while he was working for the National Trust. As a queer man, he was alert to any hint of sexual heterodoxy in the lives of these bachelors – although even he was often perplexed by them.
What role do you hope this book will play in shaping the public understanding of LGBTQ+ presence in British cultural heritage?
I hope it makes it clear that it’s always been there! For example, the book’s opening chapters examine the founding of the National Trust in 1895, which coincided with the trials of Oscar Wilde. These may seem unrelated events, but the Prime Minister, Lord Rosebery, a member of the National Trust’s founding council, was terrified that he was going to be named in the trials. Wilde’s nemesis, Lord Queensberry, was obsessed by a belief that English society was controlled by a network of aristocratic gay men, and modern historians have concluded that Rosebery indeed had gay tendencies. An early appointment to the Trust’s executive committee was the Arts and Crafts architect and designer C.R. Ashbee, who hoped that National Trust houses might be used by communities of men and boys engaged in handicraft – a gay man himself, this was a vision of society he had learned from such queer writers as Walt Whitman and Edward Carpenter, but the National Trust was not sympathetic. Ashbee lamented that the alternative was that the houses would exist instead simply ‘to be looked at by tourists’, which has indeed largely been their fate.
I hope that identifying the existence of LGBTQ+ people in the history of the National Trust will encourage us to think more deeply about not only what British cultural heritage has become but also what it might have been.
