The row over the sale of Edward Heath's house has highlighted our ludicrous obsession with preserving the nation's past
For the second time in two years, Sir Edward Heath's old house, the grade II listed Arundells, has been closed to the public, with the aim of selling it off. This is in complete defiance of his wishes. Although he lived in the place for no more than 20 of his 89 years, two decades out of the roughly four he dedicated to sulking, Heath's will was dedicated to keeping the place open, along with its outstanding collection of nautical doodads, as a personal shrine. A charitable trust was set up to do this. If some question the philanthropic benefits of a Heath memorial, the precedent may encourage all those who hope, for instance, to see John Prescott's famous downstairs lavatory, defiantly redecorated by Pauline during the couple's time of trouble, or to touch the actual elephant lamps that landed the Goves in so much grief. In Heath's case, there is neither the cash nor the visitors to keep going. The National Trust has said it would not take it on for less than £8m.
Rather touchingly, given Heath's incredible unpopularity even within his own party, and his friendly associations with mass murderers and tyrants, the trust's decision to sell up and spend the remaining money on charitable activities has elicited some passionate defences of the Arundells legacy. On the Daily Telegraph letters page, one writer has called the closure a "tragedy".
Wisely, Heath's supporters have accepted that the posthumous discomfiture of a widely detested man may not be the most persuasive argument in their armoury. Rather, they invoke national heritage and the tragedy of losing any of it, even the fraction that Ted Heath refurbed. "How harshly History would have judged the Churchill family if they had succeeded in selling Chartwell which is now an iconic piece of our heritage," caution the Friends of Arundells, a group dedicated to saving the house. Like Chartwell, the Friends say, Arundells provides "a means of assuaging our curiosity as to how powerful and influential people lived". Even with the house closed, the illustrated Arundells website remains a great curiosity assuager, at the same time that it prompts questions that must remain forever unanswered. Was this upmarket version of dictator style copied by Heath from his important friends or was Heath, on the contrary, the original model for all the chandeliers and illuminated display cabinets, the gilt, marble and column -mounted busts favoured by tyrants the world over? Do the knickerish festoon blinds and entrail pinks of the dining room tell us anything significant about a man famous for his staggering rudeness to women? How often did Heath play his grand piano, when the top was littered with silver-framed photographs of his smirking self adjacent to one famous scoundrel or another? And how can the preservation of this vainglorious tat, in a house that could easily find a buyer, conceivably be passed off as a worthwhile charitable project?
It will certainly have enhanced Heath's claims on posterity, that, after cunningly wresting its ownership from the Cathedral, he invested in the kind of listed, historic property that, unlike Mrs Thatcher's executive home in Dulwich, immediately entitles the owner to proclaim oneself a custodian of the nation's heritage. Even when these houses are permanently closed to the public, their owners, if the Historic House Association is any guide, are likely to consider their costly maintenance or "stewardship" enough reason for tax breaks and subsidies not available to the struggling owners of uglier, newer or nonexistent properties. Have pity, for instance, on historic house owners who now dread a mansion tax on properties they can barely afford to run as it is. "In the past 10 years or so one in eight such houses has had to sell works of art – often abroad – to help finance major repairs," the HHA president wrote to the Telegraph, as if daring readers not to laugh. How many stewards of non-historic houses have sacrificed as much?
Thanks, above all, to the National Trust, since it made sheltered housing for feckless aristocrats its publicly funded mission, the British have become remarkably tolerant about appeals for help from unimaginably wealthy homeowners, as well as fantastically sentimental about celebrity homes. While Heath's supporters fight for the right of Arundells and its hideous paint-jobs to rank alongside Salisbury Cathedral, friends of the great travel writer, Patrick Leigh-Fermor, are agitating to save his villa in Greece and, closer to home, friends of Ringo Starr are celebrating a reprieve from demolition – in the face of an indifferent National Trust – of the notable drummer's birthplace.
If Ringo fans were unmoved by the argument that he only lived at 9 Madryn Street for three months, and some time before his immortal Octopus's Garden, there could be no better testament to the trust's amazing success in persuading the public of the power of furnished property, no matter how vulgar, artificial or otherwise unprepossessing, to connect visitors with the past. Even when a house does not, in the words of James Lees-Milne, the saviour of strapped aristocrats, breathe "that ineffable spirit essential to the legendary purpose of the country house", the National Trust experience is intended to take you back. "Imagine walking into the kitchen where John's Aunt Mimi would have cooked him his tea," it urges visitors to John Lennon's house. At 18th-century Shugborough, where the latest Lord Lichfield is presumably breathing his ineffable spirit out of sight of the paying public, it suggests that the animistically inclined "try out the beds in the new servants' bedroom" (check first, house closed October-March).
On this basis, maybe the Friends of Arundells have a point. In comparison with the trust's circumscribed invitations to bounce on the reconstructed beds of imaginary skivvies, the chance to imagine oneself as a solitary Sir Edward, engaged, say, in his favourite hobby of scrawling abusive marginalia on an unflattering biography, is positively enticing. Now that the trust has democratised, as it had to, the credentials for a building's preservation, almost no house, and certainly no famous person's house, can be disrespected as built heritage. With the Lennon and McCartney homes now official, publicly funded historic destinations, it is understandable that Heath and Leigh-Fermor should have thought that their respective houses, stuffed with authentic kit and only recently vacated, were legacies equally deserving of support.
Had they not coincided with national bankruptcy, civil unrest, grievous public suffering and pleas from Greek archeologists for help in saving their country's classical heritage from ruin, current efforts to transform Leigh-Fermor's Peloponnese home into a permanent writers' retreat might have looked quite normal, proportionate and not even a curious way to celebrate a celebrated nomad. Instead, thrown into Greek relief, the British determination to preserve certain, arbitrarily selected homes from estate agents is exposed for what it often is: excruciatingly poor taste.
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