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up, hand over the estate to the National Trust or – scandalously – demolish the buildings, an act of vandalism that was perfectly legal then. In 1955, country houses were being destroyed at a rate of one every five days.¹

      It seemed that the war, and the subsequent years of austerity and the Welfare State, had driven the final nail into the coffin of the British aristocracy and their landholdings, from which flowed not just their wealth, but their prestige and power. For centuries those that physically owned Britain – its farmland, rivers, forests and cities – had run Britain. It was as simple as that; and it looked as if they would no longer have any basis for their assertion of superiority. As Sir Ian Anstruther, the 13th Baronet, lamented: ‘The upper classes are not wanted.’ My own grandfather, the 9th Earl of Portsmouth, was one of many to despair about the new era of the Welfare State, high taxes and his lack of purpose. The family home – an 11-bedroom house which he described as a ‘modest mansion for 20th-century living’ and which had been in Wallop hands since Elizabethan times – was leased to a prep school as he decided to start a new life in Africa. ‘All was drab, alas too drab, in England. The motto of the new democracy seemed to be … “the greatest misery to the greatest number”,’ he said.

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