A diarist of discrimination

DIARIES: ROBERT O'BYRNEreviews James Lees-Milne: The LifeBy Michael Bloch, John Murray, 400pp. £25

STAYING AT Birr Castle, in May 1948, James Lees-Milne wrote in his diary, “I do not like Ireland . . . The Irish are all eyes and nothing else. No compassion and I doubt whether there is any love, except for the dead. Much hate for the living”. These sentiments, and others he would later express during the years the IRA was engaged in a bombing campaign in Britain (when on one occasion he proposed the repatriation of every Irish citizen), are unlikely to have endeared Lees-Milne to this country, even though he acknowledged that his dislike was “almost intuitive, certainly temperamental and racial”.

The pity is that offensive but entirely human prejudices of a kind from which we all suffer to some degree might deter readers from discovering the manifold delights of Lees-Milne’s diaries. These run to a dozen volumes and have gained fresh admirers with the appearance of each fresh instalment to the extent that they are now the object of cult-like adulation. As a diarist, Lees-Milne was almost unparalleled in the last century; for the ability to make the personal universal he was often compared with Pepys and, his personal favourite, Francis Kilvert. For though the world in which he moved was relatively small and privileged, Lees-Milne managed to make it all-inclusive.

Through the diaries one comes to know his friends and acquaintances as well as he does and, thanks to an elegant, descriptive prose style, to feel one is present at the events depicted. There is also the essential dash of malice and sufficient self-deprecation to make each successive volume utterly entrancing.

When Ancestral Voices, the earliest of the diaries, appeared in 1975, this newspaper's principle critic, Terence de Vere White, commented that "of the many diaries that have appeared in recent years, none seem to be more likely to appeal to future generations than this journal . . .".

“All writers are advised to keep diaries for practice, like playing scales,” noted Lees-Milne. “No doubt diary-writing is also a kind of vanity. One has the sauce to believe that every thought that comes into one’s head merits recording.” Of course this is to ignore the process of judicious selection, editing and rewriting that took place before his thoughts were offered to the public.

How much of Lees-Milne's published diaries, especially those from the 1940s, are as originally recorded is open to question. In 1970 Another Selfappeared. Supposedly an autobiographical record of Lees-Milne's early life, as Michael Bloch shows, the book actually contained "many touches of fantasy" with dates and incidents rearranged – and sometimes poached from other sources – in order to suit the narrative. The semi-factual equivalent of a comic novel by the likes of Evelyn Waugh or Nancy Mitford, Another Selfpresents the author's upbringing and youth as a sequence of ever-more bizarre incidents and eccentric characters, not least his own parents. As portrayed by their son, they were an idiosyncratic and ill-suited pair, his mother dizzy and self-centred, his father philistine and permanently at war with his offspring. Thereafter everyone else he encounters in the course of the tale seems to match or exceed them in unconventionality.

Whether fact or fiction, the delights of Another Selfwere immediately recognised and it has remained consistently in print. Lees-Milne was almost 62 at the time of the book's original publication and outside architectural circles hitherto little known as an author; he was, as he often conceded, a slow developer. But the work's success acted as the spur he needed and over the remaining 27 years of his life he produced 22 further books for publication as well as countless pieces of journalism.

So, although he longed to win acclaim as a novelist, it is for his diaries that he will and should be remembered. Yet in Britain, Lees-Milne also deserves recognition as a key figure in the National Trust, where he worked for 30 years, from 1936 onwards, instrumental in saving many significant country houses for the nation. The trust has always had an ambivalent attitude towards Lees-Milne (Bloch notes that even today his diaries are not stocked in the organisation’s shops) but his involvement indisputably helped to define its post-war personality and purpose. Though his academic training was weak, Lees-Milne possessed intuitively sound judgment and learnt fast on the job.

A natural aesthete, he had a passion for beauty and detested to see buildings and countryside destroyed supposedly in the name of public progress but, as here, more often than not for the sake of personal gain. He was also sympathetic to the plight of historic properties in a rapidly changing environment and concerned to ensure those that deserved to survive did so for the sake of future generations. The National Trust, a well-intentioned but somewhat amateur operation when he joined its staff, is now a much-cherished British institution. For this, Lees-Milne warrants much of the credit.

Regrettably, Ireland has never had someone like him involved in the struggle to save our architectural heritage, his nearest equivalent perhaps being the Hon Desmond Guinness (and how one would relish the chance to read those diaries, should they exist). Maybe this biography will spur interest not just in its subject but in the issues that so much engaged him throughout his life. Michael Bloch (who, incidentally, though born and raised in Northern Ireland was much loved by Lees-Milne – so much for an anti-Irish bias) has served his old friend well, delivering a book every bit as well-written and entertaining as the diaries.

Robert O'Byrne is a writer and journalist. His most recent book, Style City: How London Became a Fashion Capitalis published by Frances Lincoln