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- [00:05]
A
In 1895, when the National Trust was founded, same sex acts of what was called gross indecency were still illegal in Britain. And yet the Trust had connections to queer individuals from its very outset. In this episode of the History Extra podcast, Charlotte Vosper chats to Michael hall about his new book, A Queer Alternative Histories of the National Trust to to find out more.
- [00:29]
B
In Queer Inheritance, you explore histories of sexual difference in connection to the National Trust. What drew you to that history and.
- [00:36]
C
Those stories that goes back quite a long way. For quite a few years, I worked for Country Life magazine, which, as you probably know, every week it publishes an article about a country house. And I was much younger then and I was employed to write some of those articles. And I began with, actually one of the houses I mention in the book, which is Packwood in Warwickshire, which was acquired by an industrialist from Birmingham for his son, really to do up as a sort of hobby and collect old furniture for. And it did strike me that he had this house, but he never got married. He lived there for many years and all he seemed to care about was his collection and entertaining. So the idea that somebody might be a bachelor, do up a house and then give it to the National Trust to look after forever seemed quite intriguing. But I didn't really realize there was a sort of pattern to it until I did a similar article on Anglesey Abbey. And that made me realize that there was a story about the National Trust which hadn't really quite been told. I've been a member of the national trust since 1979, I think, so quite a long way back. But I've never worked for the National Trust, and I should make it clear that this isn't an official National Trust book in any way, and I don't speak on its behalf. And indeed, they may very well disagree with a lot of what I say.
- [01:47]
B
That's really interesting that you noticed that pattern. But before we launch into talking about that pattern, I want to go back to the beginning of the story and the founding of the National Trust. So the National Trust was founded in 1895 at a time where home homosexuality was illegal in Britain. So in what way do you think, or do you think, the National Trust had queer origins?
- [02:09]
C
That's a simple question that demands a rather complicated answer. It is, I think, very intriguing that its origins and its first meetings and so on coincided almost exactly with the Oscar Wilde trials, when homosexuality was sort of headline news. But as I investigated the origins of the National Trust, it made me realise that it was, first of all, much More of an urban organization than people realise. Very rooted in the city and in anxiety about London's poor, about the urban poor, and how they could be given access to beauty, which would be either architecture or nature. And this was thought to be morally improving. So, in a sense, part of the sort of motivation for the National Trust was to do away with what seemed to its founders the sort of decadence and worrying vice of London in the 1890s, which homosexuality was an element and rather a prominent one. The founders of the National Trust created this enormous sort of committee who would sort of oversee it, and they were very good at getting important people titled people and so on. And one of them was Lord Roseberry, and he was going through a very bad time at that moment because he thought he might be named in the Wilde trials, because the Marquis of Queensberry, who was Wilde's deadly enemy, also loathed Rosebery and thought he was queer as well.
- [03:29]
B
Just before we go any further, do you want to just describe a little bit by what we mean by the term queer? How do we know that the people who were part of the National Trust's origins and who were connected to National Trust properties and estates that we'll go on to discuss, how do we know that they were queer? Would they have understood themselves in that way?
- [03:47]
C
Not perhaps particularly as queer, I don't think, for an historian, I think you just have to look at the story, really, and say, you know, how do you interpret this story? And really, the advantage of queer is that it avoids putting very precise labels on people, because that is tricky. The word itself has gone through many meanings. I mean, it sort of goes back, I think, to the 16th century, just meaning odd, unusual. And for most of the last century, of course, it was a term of abuse. But queer was very much taken back as a word by gay activists in the 1980s, particularly during the AIDS crisis, as a way of reclaiming their identity. You know, we're queer and we don't care. And queer is now a preferred term for queer studies and for historians, and after all, it's history that we're really talking about. I think it's quite useful because one of the issues a historian has to face is how do you talk about people of unorthodox identities in terms of their sexual orientation or gender identity in the past, when they did not have access to the terms we would use today, like gay, bisexual or so on? And queer is quite useful because you can use it and a modern audience knows what that means, but it's not imposing something on the past. I myself think the fact that the term is clearly anachronistic is actually rather helpful because it emphasises the difference between the past and the present. But in the end, you can argue about these things forever. But if you're a historian, you just have to get on and do the history. There was a lot of anxiety about finding evidence that people were gay, and the one obvious point is it almost always involves male homosexuals. That is the bit that people get really anxious about. There's much less anxiety about women, much less anxiety about bisexuality, and I think it's simply because male homosexuality was so stigmatised and was, you know, illegal for so long. People have always said, well, what's your evidence? For which the answer must often be, well, what's your evidence that they were heterosexual?
- [05:44]
B
That's an interesting approach. Now, if we move beyond the National Trust's, as you've said, queer origins, who were the queer landowners that were connected to the National Trust? I know there are many that feature in your book, but could you pick out a few kind of key stories for us?
- [05:59]
C
It was quite difficult to choose because the book has two aspects. One is the history of the National Trust itself, which in a way tops and tails the book, because I begin with its origins and the last chapters are on its modernisation, you know, beginning in the sort of 1950s. Although most of the story is the 20th century, it was important to have at least two places where you could talk about the situation up to the point where the National Trust was created. And one of those was absolutely obvious, which was Kingston Lacey, which you may very well know the story. William Banks, who inherited this great estate in Dorset, had to go into exile when he was caught having sex with a guardsman in Green Park. And the house which he then redecorated, remodelled, he had to do that at sort of remote control, in exile, getting his brother and sister to do it for him. So it's a very sort of interesting story. And then I talk about Clumber, which is a lost house, one of the dukes in Nottinghamshire, where there were four generations of the Dukes of Newcastle who go from. The 4th Duke of Newcastle actually shopped his valet, who he discovered was what he would refer to as a sodomite. And the poor man was hanged through stories of particularly gender difference in the mid 19th century because of the friendship of one of the members of the family with a famous pair of Victorian cross dresses called Fanny and Stella, and then ending up with the seventh duke, who was a friend of Oscar Wilde. And I should emphasize the book is not primarily about country house. I mean, country houses come into it, of course, but it does bring home, I think, that the National Trust has a very wide range of different sorts of buildings and different sort of. Different sort of houses. And one is Clouds Hill, that little cottage in the Dorset heathland which Lawrence of Arabia. T.E. lawrence acquired. So I talk about him, but his sexuality has been hugely debated. I mean, there are endless biographies of Lawrence Arabia and they all come to rather different conclusions. That's one that's controversial. One that's much less controversial is Smallhithe in Kent, which was of Ellen Terry, the great Victorian actress. Well, my interest was that it was inherited by her daughter, Edith Craig. Very interesting woman, feminist, fought for women's rights in terms of voting, was a theater director of considerable eminence. And she had a sort of lesbian menage. She had two close lesbian friends she lived with at Smallhithe, and they drew in there lots of their lesbian friends, people like Radcliffe hall, the writer. So you can trace a lot of lesbian history in the 20th century just by visiting Smallhithe.
- [08:28]
B
That's really interesting. And what particularly stands out is this idea that actually certain properties or places have several kind of queer storylines linked to them. I think it would be interesting to explore why it is that there is this connection between queer lives and experiences and the National Trust. Why do you think that there were so many properties and estates and gardens that were owned by queer men that were bequeathed to the National Trust? Why do you think there is that institutional connection with these stories?
- [08:57]
C
Well, I think when the National Trust made it clear in the 1930s that it was interested in acquiring relatively large historic houses and their estates initially, there was a very poor response from what you might think of as the traditional landowners, because the only way that the National Trust could finance this was if the landowners themselves gave them a lot of money, which would allow them to maintain the house in the future. So it proved much more appealing to the people. I began by talking about who were these men? And they were all men who had usually industrial money or they were banking money, bought manor houses, usually Jacobean or Tudor, had done them up, laid out a garden, very often that was a big interest, would install their own collections there, and here is the National Trust, which could take them on. So, in a sense, the National Trust wasn't expecting these sorts of gifts and didn't necessarily do a lot to encourage it. But there was an immediate flow of men offering their houses, many of which were accepted when the country Houses scheme got going in the 19 and what we think of as country houses, big houses with landed estates were offered. Very often the last owners were bachelors or unmarried women. And one can ask whether, you know, they were gay or lesbian and so on. But I wanted to write about places that queer people had shaped in some way, either by building them, decorating them, furnishing them, or by making them part of their life history. The obvious example being feature Satville west at Knole. I mean, if you go to Knowl there's almost nothing that you can see that she actually did. You can go and see the manuscript of the great novel Orlando, which Virginia Woolf wrote about her love of Vita Zapfelwest and Noel. But there's nothing. I don't think there are even any portraits of Vita Zapfelwest there. But, you know, Noel has its lesbian visitors who go there. Because our perception of the house is so completely shaped by Vita and her relationship with Virginia Woolf.
- [10:51]
B
I want to kind of draw on that a little bit more about this relationship that you've just implied between space and people and how these spaces are the result of influence by the queer people who lived in them or who were connected to them. Could you talk a little bit more about that relationship between the space and the people and how we can access those people through those spaces today?
- [11:11]
C
Going back perhaps to Lawrence Arabia, because he's a famous example, his little hut, not much more than a hut, really, but if you go there, you go upstairs, just two rooms downstairs, two rooms upstairs. If you go upstairs, there is a room which he basically uses a guest bedroom, but he also used it as a store where he kept food, because there was no kitchen. In the 1930s, when he was realising it was going to be the place he'd live after he retired from the raf, he very curiously lined it with silver paper. And this has always been explained as being a sort of practical thing to do because it kept the room cooler. And then I became rather intrigued by the fact that Siegfried Sassoon, who was a gay writer himself, who was a friend of Lawrence, visited with his lover, Stephen Tennant, who was one of the bright young things. Well, if you look at one of the best known photographs of Stephen Tennant taken by Cecil Beaton, it shows him in his own bedroom, which he had lined with silver paper. So I thought it was a very interesting queer link, which, as far as I'm aware, hasn't been made before. So this room, which people present of as Lawrence's practicality, I think might also say something about his own sense of identity in terms of his sexual orientation.
- [12:19]
B
How interesting that you can kind of see the networks that people were part of through the buildings they lived in.
- [12:24]
C
And the word networks is absolutely crucial because I soon began to realise that all these houses began to link up. I mentioned Radcliffe Hall. Well, nobody's particularly connected her with the National Trust before, but as well as being very, very friendly with the women at Smallhithe, she was very friendly with E.F. benson. And E.F. benson had for a long time had a tendency of Lamb House in Rye, which had belonged to Henry James. Queer writer. E.F. benson himself was gay and he was visited there by Radcliffe hall and by Ethel Smyth, the great lesbian composer. Exactly as you were saying, it's all about networks.
- [12:58]
B
Yeah, absolutely. That's something that really came across to me when I was reading the book is actually how many connections there are between these properties, between the people who were associated with them. And that was something I wanted to ask you about. Quite a lot of the people in the book who were landowners or who had some connection to these spaces did come from a background of social privilege. Do you think there's anything to be said about that class and queerness angle? Is there a connection between being upper class and being able to express sexual or gender non conformity?
- [13:31]
C
Yes, there definitely is. I'm not only writing about elite people. I mean, some people like Edith Craig were, you know, elite within her profession, but she wasn't elite in terms of, you know, high society, sort of aristocratic or landowning society. But one person, now rather famous person that I'm talking about, although his fame is relatively recent, is the 5th Marquess of Anglesey. The famous dancing marquis who lived at Place Neuf. He was Edwardian, he died young, he inherited a huge fortune because the Marquis of Anglesey had big revenues from coal and other mineral rights and he spent it all on the theatre, both a theat at Place Neuith and also touring. And he dressed up a lot. He went to fancy dress parties in a way, sort of gender bending way, and he got into the newspapers and he went bankrupt. So in a sense, obviously he was able to do what he did because he was very, very rich and he wouldn't have been able to dress up, put on theatrical productions and so on if he'd been a regular member of society. But the sort of downside was enormous public curiosity about him, endless stories about him in the press. Then when he went bankrupt, I mean, he laughed at and ridiculed in a very sort of relentless way that Wouldn't have happened if he'd been sort of an obscure member of society. And the same is true of William Banks at Kingston Lacey. He was an mp. He seemed perfectly respectable, but, you know, he was twice caught with his trousers down with a guardsman. And this was a matter of huge public scandal. The first time it happened, he had to go to trial. There were page after page after page in all the newspapers in the 1820s and it was total humiliation. And he had to retire from public life even though he was acquitted. And that wouldn't have happened if he had been a man living alone in a little small middle class house or something like that. He might have got away with it.
- [15:24]
B
Yes, I suppose that element of class and being upper class, it facilitates as much as it potentially brings a lot of negativity and attention.
- [15:32]
C
Yes. Well, look at Vita zapflewest. I mean, she certainly was a very privileged person, very wealthy background, and she had a very strong sense of her identity as an aristocracy as well as a lesbian. And she pushed it as hard as she could. You know, cross dressing, semi public lesbian affairs, kickback from her family and also the family of her main partner. Violet Trefusis was very, very strong. She had to really fight for it in a way that I think a woman who was less embedded in her class might have found it easier, possibly.
- [16:06]
A
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D
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- [18:26]
C
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- [18:57]
B
You just spoke about Vita Sackville west, the cross dressing. How and when did this sexual difference that we see throughout the book intertwine with gender nonconformity and gender expression? I know we've spoken about Vita Sackville west and Fanny and Stella, but could you maybe pull out those stories a little bit more?
- [19:13]
C
Unlike Fanny and Stella, who were cross dressers, undoubtedly they went out in society dressed and cause great scandal as a result. But you know, they were young middle class men. Also, I mentioned Marcus Van Gosset, who never did that, but as I said, his contemporaries thought him extraordinarily effeminate. And if you look at pictures and people now find them very compelling because it is very clearly blurring genders. In fact, there's going to be a whole film about him, mad fabulous coming out, I think, which is going to be looking at what seems to people today rather than modern ideas. I mean, is he a person who now might identify as trans for instance, that's a question that's been asked about Fanny and Stella too. But it brings up the question of modern identities, how much you can read those back into the past. I'm not entirely sure about that. I mean, people did play with gender identity. I don't think they did it in such a political way that it would be interpreted now, I think.
- [20:08]
B
So in terms of reading back identities and ideas that we have shaved into the past, do you think that's a case by case basis or is that something that you would avoid doing?
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C
No, I wouldn't avoid doing it because I think the question in interpreting how they saw themselves, the story of Fanny and Stella, just to explain, Lord Arthur Pelham Clinton, who was the son of the 5th Duke of Newcastle, had an affair with somebody who cross dressed as Stella as a woman. And this was a huge scandal about that. But. But really most of our information about Fanny and Stella comes from the legal case. So the difficulty one has in interpreting how they saw themselves is you have to read it through transcripts of trials and things like that. And for the prosecution, they were wicked sodomites who dressed up as women to entrap men into committing sodomy to the defence. They were just young men about town having a laugh who liked dressing up and. But whichever side you take, it was very important for both to say they were really men. So that's the interpretation that the sources thrust upon you. I think it's really interesting to speculate that may not be accurate.
- [21:18]
B
Do you think that female queer landowners or historical figures who were connected to these properties and gardens and estates, do you think they had a different experience to men? The pressures of marriage and heteronormativity and the idea that only men can inherit, did that make their experience different in some sense?
- [21:36]
C
It's a difficult question for me to answer with complete authority because everyone comes from it, from their own point of view. I mean, this book goes back to 2017, just when Bloomsbury said they'd like to do it. And it seemed rather obvious then that they would ask a gay man to write it. It's a very, very rich subject and I rather hope that it will be taken up particularly by female historians, and particularly queer female historians, because there's a lot of material which I'm sure I missed or misunderstood. But I would point to one fascinating figure who very much came into focus for me while writing the book, who is Lady Caroline Pad at Place Noyeth, because there is one of the examples. You talk about a house that has two queer stories. One is the Dancing Marquess. When he died quite young, I think he wasn't even 30. It was inherited by the sex marquis, who himself was quite young, but he had these rather glamorous daughters, including Lady Caroline Paget, who was a sort of debutante, very strikingly beautiful. All men fell in love with her. She was bisexual, I think it's reasonable to say, but her closest relationships were with women. And I think you can see her own endeavours to create a life for her own as a queer woman. And for her, the theatre was the way out for that. And she met her partners through the theatre. But Lady Caroline Patrick had to escape the expectations of her family and her class, which were that she was a debutante, she would get married, and so she had to fight off Ben and find reasons for. And she did come very close to marrying one man, but she turned him down. And then he was killed in a flying accident. And that then gave her the excuse, you know, she was mourning, so she couldn't think about men anymore for a time.
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B
It sounds like there's lots of layers to that. Is that a kind of phenomenon that we see several times over in the book, where we have people who you've identified as being queer marrying to inherit or because of the expectation that was put upon them? Is that something that you see a lot?
- [23:29]
C
Yes, I think that's absolutely the case. Of course, the classic example is Harold Nicholson and Fetus At Full Worth. And I think to a lot of, particularly my lesbian friends, they're rather disappointed that Vita got married. But before the First World War, Harold Nicholson was a professional diplomat. He was more or less compelled to get married. And they did fall in love. I mean, it wasn't a lavender marriage, they weren't pretending. And they had two sons, Benedict Nicholson and Nigel Nicholson, who were very important to them. So they were a real family as well, but their own partners of choice after that, with her own sex. But they didn't do it to inherit, because it was clear that Vita couldn't inherit nil because she was a woman. And the interesting thing, I think, is that they created Sissinghurst, and Vita hoped that it might be inherited by one of her granddaughters. I mean, she hoped it might go down the female line, but that didn't happen.
- [24:18]
B
There's a particularly interesting point that you touched on there, that even though both of those individuals have been identified as being queer, they did have a happy and loving marriage. I suppose that is a difficult element with this kind of historical topic, because we are dealing with people's emotions and people's inner feelings. Is that something that you potentially struggled to access when you were writing this history? What sort of sources did you use to kind of infer that and get inside people's minds and feelings?
- [24:43]
C
Well, that's a massive question for any historian. And queer topics has always been rather hedged around with problems. Up to 1967, most homosexual acts between men in England and Wales were illegal. And so there are obvious issues and the sources for that. Women had it slightly easier, in a way, although in the 1920s, which I hadn't really realised before writing the book, there was a lot of public antipathy expressed towards lesbianism and it was debated about whether this legislation against homosexuality should be extended to women, and it was decided not. And the House of Lords said, we don't want to draw attention to the fact that anything so disgusting exists, so it was easier, but. But what did strike me was, if you go back to the original sources, and I'm thinking more of secondary sources rather than unknown letters or diaries, is what people always think you're going to find, or hope you're going to find. But read the official biographies or the official lives and letters of somebody like Octavia Hill, who was one of the founders of the National Trust. An extremely remarkable woman. She made a professional career for herself in Victorian England, but never got married and lived in with another woman. Going back and looking at the original biographies of her, you know, the Victorian state, women weren't fools, they weren't idiots. They knew on the whole probably what was going on. You just have to tune in, I think, and, you know, you'll learn a lot. Lots of people think that all these things were just completely obscured in the past, and sometimes they think it's more difficult than it actually is.
- [26:14]
B
That's a really interesting idea that actually, if you kind of tune in, it's there if you want to find it, this kind of information. Now, if we kind of zoom out from the individual stories that we're telling in your book, these are histories that have, like you say, been known about before. They're in the sources. And the National Trust has told these stories sometimes before. But the National Trust has faced some backlash for trying to reclaim minority history more widely in more recent years. What has the National Trust's attitude towards queer people been, would you say?
- [26:44]
C
I think traditionally, they weren't very open about it, for relatively obvious reasons. I mean, nobody was terribly open about it for many decades. I became very interested in the role homophobia had played in the modernisation of the National Trust, which took place in the 1960s and 70s, when there were big internal upheavals within the National Trust, partly in response to outside criticism. And there was an accusation, frequently repeated, that it was being run by this sort of coterie of aristocratic men. They were all men and the undertone was that they were gay. And this was, to be fair to the critics, largely true. The National Trust was trying to run its houses on a more professional basis in the 1950s, so it began to appoint curators and there was a standoff between the land agents, who were the sort of traditional men in tweeds and brogues, who dealt with forestry and so on, and the group that I've called the east, the bachelors, who were hanging the pictures and rearranging the furniture. And this sort of became a sort of division within the National Trust, which quickly acquired the name of the hobnail boot versus the lily of the field. This division, in a way, reflects an essential sort of binary within the National Trust itself, that it's a natural trust for places of historic interest or natural beauty. By the 1950s, they were beginning to be interpreted as opposed to each other, nature versus the houses. And one of the ways that the people who thought the National Trust wasn't paying enough attention to the natural world were very happy to leverage criticism through homophobia and making life rather tricky for gay men within the National Trust. I think the National Trust would be upset that I said, well, you know, that division which opened up in the National Trust between Are we nature, Are we art? And architecture, was actually driven by homophobia to some degree. It's not a homophobic organisation now, you know, they made a big effort to, you know, catch up with lost time. The obvious example would be Sissinghurst, where Nigel Nicholson, Vita and Harold's son, published this memoir by Vita about her great affair with Violet Chaffusitz, called Portrait of a Marriage, which came out something like 1975, I think, like that. And then 10 years later, Victoria Glendinning published her great biography of of Vitus at 4 West, you know, laying it all pretty well in the open. But it wasn't until 2008 that any official publication by the National Trust mentioned his parents same sex affairs. So it's pretty recent that they've been open about it and I think generally it was a feeling that this was the right direction to be going in. Very much so.
- [29:22]
B
Well, yeah, it's quite surprising when you lay out that timeline, that it's so recent that some of this history was actually being officially mentioned.
- [29:29]
C
Yes, and it brought up, I think, a very important question which. Which I think one just has to be a bit tough about, because where there were objections by relatives or friends of the people who were being mentioned as being queer saying the National Trust shouldn't say that because he. And it always was a he, a gay man they were talking about would have been very unhappy about it. You're outing him. Well, they were talking about people who died 50 or 60 years ago. How do we know what they would think now? That is the crucial question. I don't really think the idea of outing someone makes any sense about somebody in the past. It's a political term that came to really to the forefront during the 1980s, during the AIDS crisis, as a way of oppressing queer people. It doesn't make any sense to talk about historic figures in terms of outing, I don't think. And really the issue is if you object to somebody in the past who's been long dead being described as queer, or the question being raised about whether or not they were what we would now call gay, well, that implies that you find homosexuality shameful.
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B
It's interesting that the kind of controversy of outing these historical figures didn't apply so much to queer women in the past.
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C
I don't think people find women's sexuality as threatening as they find men's sexuality. And it's men who are upset about other men being described as gay overwhelmingly. I mean, look at Lawrence of Arabia. There are thousands of biographies. I think only one's been written by a woman as far as I can remember.
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B
So considering, you know, the kind of controversy that's existed, what do you hope will come of the book? What do you hope the impact will be of queer inheritance?
- [31:03]
C
Well, I hope that people will realize that queer history is a very, very rich subject. Even for the National Trust. There's huge amounts more that can be said. I mean, I found that everyone who picks up the book or looks at it says, oh, but you haven't spoken about X or, oh, I'm really disappointed you haven't mentioned Y. So there's lots to do, you know. And a woman would have written a completely different book, I think. And also a young person would have written, you know, I'm not very. Have written a very different book. And they would have come at it in really interesting, different ways. I think they would have been much more alert to issues, particularly of gender identity than I am. I think it's an incredibly rich field which is only just opening up. Queer studies has tended to be rather literary. In its basis. So there's a huge amount of writing on queer approaches to literature, but there are very rich things being done at the moment about queer ecology, for instance, queer approaches to the natural world. I just recently heard absolutely fascinating lecture about queer earth science, but the links with heritage. When I began working on the book, I thought lots of people were writing about queer heritage, but funnily enough, they're not. There are some really good books, and I would mention particularly books by Nino Strachey and Alison Oram as well. So it has been done. But this is only just the beginning.
- [32:15]
A
That was Michael hall speaking to Charlotte Vosper about his new book, A Queer Inheritance. Michael has written several other books on country houses and architecture, and is also a former architectural editor of Country Life.