"Lyme Hall, Cheshire, The Seat of Lord Newton," from Country Life, Dec. 17th, 1904

The diarist James Lees-Milne describes a visit he makes to Lyme on behalf of the National Trust in 1943, arriving in Stockport by train where he is met and driven to Lyme Park which "forms a bulwark against Manchester and its satellite horrors.  The greater part of the 3,000-acre property stretches in the opposite direction..."  An immense and imposing bulwark, as you can see.

A butler meets J L-M and conducts the way through the courtyard, up some stone steps and into the main hall of the piano nobile:  

            "Lord Newton lives and eats in the great library with a huge fire burning, and two equally huge dogs lying
              at his feet.  Lyme is one of England's greatest houses... The contents of the staterooms are magnificent,
              notably the Chippendale chairs, the Charles II beds and the Mortlake tapestries... My bedroom on the
              west side of the first floor had two Sargent portraits, one of Lord Newton's mother and the other of 
              his mother-in-law."
             
              (James Lees-Milne, Ancestral Voices, London, Chatto & Windus, 1975, p. 273)

In spite of all this magnificence, however, or rather because of it, J L-M observes that "Lord Newton is hopeless.  The world is too much for him, and no wonder... He just throws up his hands in despair.  The only thing he is sure about is that his descendants will never want to live at Lyme after an unbroken residence of 600 years."

There is a "Brideshead" feel to this visit, as there is throughout much of the war-time diary entries.  "There were forty evacuated children in the house," J L-M writes of Lyme Hall, "but they have now gone.  The park is cut to pieces by thousands and thousands of R.A.F. lorries, for it is at present a lorry depot."  Knowing in advance how cold it will be, Milne brings a heating pad with him for the bed and manages to short out the electrical system to much of the rest of the house, although he is unaware he's plunged his host into darkness until the morning. 

When you are living at the end of an era -- any era coming to a close, really --  I suspect you either become the observant diarist or the hopeless participant, throwing your hands up in despair.  I confess I've done both, in my fashion, and my family never lived in the same place for six hundred years, I assure you.  However, I have only to look at the books I have ready at hand, telling you this, and at all the things I've collected around me to wonder, "who will want any of this, once I'm gone?"  Sometimes of course I see it all quite clearly with amused detachment, but occasionally when I'm feeling down, with just the tiniest touch of self-pity  regret.  But, like you, I try not to dwell too much on what can't be helped; in any case I'm taking none of it with me, if you know what I mean.

Towards the end of 1943, J L-M has lunch with Lord and Lady Newton in London and notes that Lady Newton must once have been handsome.  "She is tall; and she is thin like everyone else these days.  But she is languid and as hopeless as her husband.  Both said they would never be able to reconcile themselves to the new order after the war.  They admitted that their day was done, and life as they had known it was gone for ever.  How right they are, poor people."  (Ancestral Voices, p. 284) 

How right they were.