THE OFFICIAL
JAMES LEES-MILNE WEBSITE

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1968-75: By the late 1960s, JLM and Alvilde had achieved a modus vivendi, living as a devoted couple at Alderley, yet leading separate lives. In his sixties, he finally began to achieve recognition as a man of letters outside the field of architecture. His autobiographical novel Another Self appeared in 1970, and was an instant success; two further novels followed, giving fascinating insights into his imagination. Ancestral Voices, the first volume of his wartime diaries, was published in 1975 and proved a succès de scandale. Meanwhile, in 1971, he had resumed a regular diary for the first time since the 1940s. This portrays him as the contented literary squire he essentially now was.

During the early 1970s, JLM and his wife began to take a gloomy view of the state of the country and their personal finances, and decided that the effort of running Alderley was too great for them. She sold the property at the end of 1974, and they moved to a maisonette in Lansdown Cresent, Bath. Its great feature was the library of William Beckford, which JLM lovingly restored. Soon after the move, he was invited to write a short book on Beckford - his first biography. Despite the boon of the library, the Bath property proved too cramped for them, and the garden too small for the exercise of her horticultural talents. When a late 17th century house on the Badminton estate, with an attached acre, became vacant, they were able to secure the tenancy thanks to their friendship with the Duke of Beaufort's heir David Somerset and his wife Caroline. They moved there at the end of 1975, Jim retaining the Bath library for his work.

1976-91: Despite the eccentric behaviour of their landlord, the hunting-obsessed 10th Duke of Beaufort ('Master'), which provided priceless material for JLM's journal, the Lees-Milnes led a contented life at their Badminton residence, Essex House (dubbed 'Bisex House' by a waspish observer). During this period, JLM wrote his three major biographies - of Harold Nicolson (1886-1968), Reginald, Viscount Esher (1852-1930), and the Bachelor Duke of Devonshire (1790-1858). The last of these was undertaken at the request of his lifelong friend 'Debo', Duchess of Devonshire, youngest of the Mitford sisters, whom he often visited at Chatsworth. In 1979, aged seventy, he embarked on a platonic friendship with a young man of twenty-five; this briefly disturbed his marriage, but he and Alvilde drew close to each other as she nursed him through serious illnesses in 1984 and 1988.

1991-97: JLM struggled bravely through his eighties, despite declining faculties and the spectre of cancer. His National Trust memoirs People & Places, written at eighty-three, is one of his most eloquent works. His diary became increasingly elegiac, as in old age he reflected upon the modern world and its ways. Alvilde's health broke down in 1992, and he devoted the next two years to looking after her. Her death in March 1994 at first left him disconsolate; yet he soon began to enjoy life again, experiencing a freedom he had not known since his marriage, and revelling in his status as a grand old man of letters and conservation. He remained lucid and active almost to the end, dying in his ninetieth year on 28 December 1997.



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