Richard Ryder

What most imperilled country houses in the 20th century was taxes and death duties, not requisition

A review of Requisitioned: The British Country House in the Second World War by John Martin Robinson

The Long Library at Blenheim Palace, converted into a dormitory for the boys of Malvern school in 1940 [Getty Images/Shutterstock/iStock/Alamy] 
issue 26 April 2014

Servicemen used paintings as dartboards.   Schoolchildren dismantled banisters and paneling for firewood. Architects from the Ministry of Works acted like pocket Stalins. Sarcophagi were dumped in gardens beside beheaded statues. And overhead, Luftwaffe Dorniers droned with menace. Such hazards ravaged requisitioned country houses during the last war. Yet nothing imperilled them more, in the 20th century, than super-taxes and the rattle of death duties.

When the country houses were handed back, the majority were defiled as well as decaying from leaking roofs and dry rot. Cash-poor owners, already penalised by towering taxation, could not afford to carry out major repairs to their caves of ice — to borrow from Coleridge and James Lees-Milne.

The 1945 Labour government injected extra venom by setting the top rate of tax at 98 per cent and ratcheting up death duties twice in four years. Simultaneously, the West German finance minister, Ludwig Erhard, advanced in the opposite direction, by slicing taxes.

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