Chequers: grace-and-favour retreat or bunker?
The house in Buckinghamshire has been the Prime Minister's country retreat for just over a century, sometimes the scene of high drama or low farce
The “cabinet playdate”
On Friday, the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, brought his cabinet ministers and closest political advisers to Chequers, his official country residence, for discussions of long-term policy and strategy. As a matter of interest, it occurred to me that some readers might want to know a little bit more about the house and how it came to be the escape from urban life for the head of government that it is today.
A Chequered history
Chequers is a Grade 1 Listed Building, a mid-Tudor manor house built for William Hawtrey, Member of Parliament for Buckinghamshire in the second Parliament of Elizabeth I (1563-67), having been Sheriff of Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire (the two counties shared a sheriff until 1575) and later serving as High Sheriff of Oxfordshire. It is near the village of Ellesborough, halfway between Princes Risborough and Wendover, and passed through various families until in 1715 it came by marriage into the ownership of John Russell, a senior member of the East India Company and a grandson of Oliver Cromwell.
In 1813, the owner, the Rev John Russell Greenhill, grandson of John Russell, who had inherited the estate from his cousin Mary Russell, died, leaving Chequers to his son Robert, who then changed his name to Robert Greenhill-Russell to reflect the importance of the Russell inheritance. He was a Whig MP for Thirsk from 1806 to 1832, created a baronet in 1831, but died without heirs five years later, and Chequers passed to a relative, Robert Frankland, who had been fellow Member for Thirsk 1815-32. Frankland succeeded to his father’s baronetcy in 1831 and changed his name to Frankland-Russell on inheriting the Chequers estate. He also engaged the architect Henry Rhodes to remodel the house in the Gothic style then popular.
Through Frankland-Russell’s youngest daughter Rosalind-Alicia, Chequers passed to the Astley family: her son Bertram Frankland-Russell-Astley (he changed his name from plain Astley by Royal Licence in 1901) restored the house’s Elizabethan appearance between 1892 and 1901 and passed it on to his eldest son Henry on his death in 1904. However, four years later, Henry Frankland-Russell-Astley, only 16 years old when he came into his inheritance, granted the estate on a long lease to Arthur Lee, Conservative MP for Fareham, and his wife Ruth, daughter of a wealthy New York banker. When Astley died in a flying accident 1912, Lee bought the property outright.
Lee turned 32 just after his election to the House of Commons, but had the misfortune to be reaching political maturing when the Conservatives suffered a catastrophic defeat at the general election of 1906. However, the party fought back with extraordinary speed and success in the two elections of 1910, finishing only two seats behind the governing Liberal Party in January/February and a single seat adrift in December. The following year, the languid, highly intelligent but detached Arthur Balfour was replaced as Leader of the Opposition by the hard-charging, abrasive Canadian-born Scotsman, Andrew Bonar Law, and politics entered a rough-and-tumble period over the power of the House of Lords and Home Rule for Ireland.
All bets were off when the United Kingdom entered the First World War in August 1914. Lee was commissioned as a temporary colonel to serve as the personal commissioner of the Secretary of State for War, Field Marshal Earl Kitchener, reporting on the Army Medical Services in France. He then became Military Secretary to David Lloyd George, first as Minister of Munitions (1915-16) then as War Secretary (1916), and was awarded a KCB in July 1916. The Conservatives had joined a wartime coalition government with the Liberals in May 1915 but Lee seemed now more to have been absorbed into the administrative machine (though he remained an MP): in June 1917, he became Director-General for Food Production under his Conservative colleague, Rowland Prothero, who was President of the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries. A year later, he was ennobled as Lord Lee of Fareham.
Gift to the nation
In 1917, Sir Arthur Lee decided to donate Chequers to the nation. His intention was to provide for the Prime Minister, at that point his ally and patron Lloyd George, and his successors to have a country retreat where they could recover from the stresses of government and spend time thinking and relaxing. This was formalised in statute by the Chequers Estate Act 1917, granted Royal Assent on 10 December, which placed the house, collections and estate in trust for the use of future Prime Ministers with an endowment of £100,000. Sir Arthur, soon to become Lord Lee of Fareham, and Lady Lee were to continue to reside their until their deaths.
(The act is also the first statutory reference to the office of “Prime Minister”, previously only mentioned in its usual formal alter ego of First Lord of the Treasury.)
Lee’s motivation was, perhaps characteristically of the period, simultaneously paternalistic and cautiously democratic, and was explained fully in the Schedule of the Chequers Estate Act:
It is not possible to foresee or foretell from what classes or conditions of life the future wielders of power in this country will be drawn. Some may be as in the past men of wealth and famous descent; some may belong to the world of trade and business; others may spring from the ranks of the manual toilers. To none of these in the midst of their strenuous and responsible labours could the spirit and anodyne of Chequers do anything but good. In the city-bred man especially, the periodic contact with the most typical rural life would create and preserve a just sense of proportion between the claims of town and country. To the revolutionary statesman the antiquity and calm tenacity of Chequers and its annals might suggest some saving virtues in the continuity of English history and exercise a check upon too hasty upheavals, whilst even the most reactionary could scarcely be insensible to the spirit of human freedom which permeates the countryside of Hampden Burke and Milton.
Apart from these more subtle influences, the better the health of our rulers the more sanely will they rule and the inducement to spend two days a week in the high and pure air of the Chiltern hills and woods will, it is hoped, benefit the nation as well as its chosen leaders. The main features of this scheme are therefore designed not merely to make Chequers available as the official country residence of the Prime Minister of the day, but to tempt him to visit it regularly and to make it possible for him to live there, even though his income should be limited to his salary.
In short, Britain had changed so much and the future was so uncertain that it was not necessarily the case that future Prime Ministers would have their own country houses, and therefore such a benefit should be provided for them as a perquisite of the office, given the obvious benefits for mental and physical health.
In fact, the Lees vacated Chequers in January 1921, allowing Lloyd George to take up residence. Viscount Lee of Fareham, as he became, would not die until 1947. The gift had been astoundingly popular across the nation, catching some spirit of solidarity in wartime and a recognition that the supposed stranglehold of the land-owning classes on the leadership of government had been broken.
Just what the Prime Minister ordered
It was certainly timely. Lloyd George was a provincial solicitor from north Wales whose father died when he was only a year old, and although he was the head of a flourishing legal practice when he was elected to the House of Commons for Caernarfon Boroughs at a by-election in April 1890, and his wife Margaret came from a well-to-do farming family, he was not wealthy in the sense of being able to own a country estate. Nor was his predecessor, H.H. Asquith: again, a successful lawyer, he was an able barrister and had been appointed a Queen’s Counsel in his late 30s. He earned significant fees from his work at the Civil Bar, the equivalent today of somewhere between £500,000 and £1 million a year, but that income, of course, disappeared when he was in government office.
Asquith’s predecessor, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, worked in his family business, wholesale and retail drapery firm J. & W. Campbell & Co. of Glasgow, but in 1871, when he was in his mid-30s, he inherited Hunton Lodge (now Hunton Court), near Maidstone in Kent, from an uncle. A.J. Balfour, Prime Minister from 1902 to 1905, came from an old Scottish landowning family the wealth of which had been buttressed by railway investments in the 19th century, and inherited Whittinghame House in East Lothian at the age of seven when his father, Conservative MP for Haddington James Maitland Balfour, died.
Reaching back into the 19th century, Prime Ministers owned some of the country’s grandest and most famous stately homes. The Marquess of Salisbury (1885-86, 1886-92, 1895-1902) lived at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire; William Gladstone (1868-74, 1880-85, 1886, 1892-94) lived at Hawarden Castle in Flintshire, his wife’s brother’s property, from 1853 and inherited it in 1874; the Earl of Rosebery (1894-95) owned 12 houses, including Mentmore Towers in Buckinghamshire and Dalmeny House on the Firth of Forth; the Earl of Derby (1852, 1858-59, 1866-68) had Knowsley Hall near Liverpool; Viscount Palmerston (1855-58, 1859-65) owned Broadlands in Hampshire; the Earl of Aberdeen (1852-55) lived at Haddo House in Aberdeenshire.
An exception was Benjamin Disraeli, Prime Minister in 1868 and from 1874 to 1880. He dabbled with the law, both as a potential solicitor and a would-be barrister, lost money in mining investments and earned some money as a novelist and writer before becoming a Member of Parliament in June 1837 (MPs did not receive a salary until 1911) and still had significant debts. Political allies including Lord Henry Bentinck, third son of the Duke of Portland and MP for North Nottinghamshire, and his elder brother John Marquess of Titchfield, former MP for King’s Lynn and future 5th Duke of Portland, helped Disraeli’s father, Isaac D’Israeli, buy Hughenden Manor in Buckinghamshire in 1847, and Disraeli inherited the property when his father died the following year.
There was an interesting kind of forerunner to Arthur Lee’s gift of Chequers. Lord John Russell, later 1st Earl Russell, the only man to serve as Prime Minister in the House of Commons (1846-52) and in the House of Lords (1865-66), was the third son of the Duke of Bedford and therefore stood to inherit no major fortune and certainly not the grand ducal seat at Woburn Abbey. In his younger days he was often dependent on the financial support of his father, and earned a little money from writing, but was never a man of great means. A year into his first premiership, Queen Victoria granted him and his family the use of Pembroke Lodge in Richmond Park, owned by the Crown Estate and previously occupied by the Earl of Erroll.
Russell came to love the house, calling it “an asset that could hardly be equalled, certainly not surpassed in England”, and used it a great deal for official business: he received not only the Queen and the cabinet but Giuseppe Garibaldi, the Italian revolutionary, and a host of famous contemporary authors including Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Alfred Lord Tennyson. He died at Pembroke Lodge in 1878 and his family continued to live there until 1903.
This was clearly, however, not intended by the Queen as an institutional but a personal arrangement. In any event, all of her Prime Ministers after Russell’s death—Disraeli, Gladstone, Salisbury and Rosebery—had no need of such a favour. But it was perhaps a tiny glimmer of the acknowledgement of the burden of office which would motive Lee so many years later.
Since David Lloyd George took occupancy of Chequers in January 1921, the estate has certainly been a useful benefit for Prime Ministers. Of the 23 occupants of the office in those 104 intervening years, only four have had possessed anything like a traditional country estate: Stanley Baldwin (1923-24, 1924-29, 1935-37) at Astley Hall; Winston Churchill (1940-45, 1951-55) at Chartwell; Harold Macmillan (1957-63) at Birch Grove; and Sir Alec Douglas-Home (1963-64) at The Hirsel. The others have made varying use of Chequers but many have found it an invaluable resource.
One resident was not Prime Minister at all, nor ever seemed likely to become so. Harold Macmillan had his own house at Birch Grove in West Sussex and remarked, in reference to his wife, that “Lady Dorothy didn’t like weeding other people’s gardens”, so after he became Prime Minister in 1957, he allowed the Foreign Secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, to take over the tenancy of Chequers. Lloyd had divorced his younger wife Elizabeth on grounds of adultery that year and was a rather lonely figure save for the companionship of his black Labrador, Sambo. Macmillan did not rate Lloyd among the first rank, and would slightingly refer to his origins in Merseyside local government and his rather pedestrian manner by dubbing him “Mr Hoylake Urban District Council”. But he knew that Lloyd was impeccably loyal and posed no threat to him, and perhaps also felt some sympathy with his personal circumstances, as Lady Dorothy Macmillan had been having an affair with former Conservative MP Bob Boothby for nearly 30 years, and the Macmillans lived largely separate lives.
Lloyd was told that his residency at Chequers was assured and he enjoyed the relaxation and solace of the house. He retained its use when he became Chancellor of the Exchequer in July 1960, but two years later, quite unexpectedly, he was dismissed from the cabinet as part of the wide-ranging reshuffle known as “the Night of the Long Knives”. It was a shock and an affront in professional terms, as he was sacked more for presentational reasons so that Macmillan could seem dynamic than for any failings in office, but it also meant that he lost his weekend home, and could not keep his dog in his London flat; he left Sambo with the curator of Chequers, Kathleen Hill. There was a poignant coda, as D.R. Thorpe described in The Spectator in 2012:
Shortly afterwards Macmillan held a meeting of his new ministerial team at Chequers to discuss pre-election strategy. As Macmillan sat on the terrace in the cool of a July evening, expansively dilating upon the middle way ahead, other members of the entourage gradually became aware of the inquisitive presence of this black labrador dog, walking along the line of the assembled company vainly looking for his master. The tension rose as Sambo settled in front of Macmillan, looking up mournfully at the prime minister, who with studied disregard ignored the animal, knowing better than most what memories its presence evoked.
It seems somehow a very English metaphor for what many felt was betrayal.
A country retreat
Ramsay MacDonald, Labour’s first Prime Minister, had enormous affection for Chequers. He had been born into very poor circumstances in the north of Scotland, his father absent and his mother a housemaid, and he much preferred Chequers to the cramped and jumbled confines of 10 Downing Street, calling it:
an abode mellow with age and sanctified by the ghosts of vanished generations, given to the nation so that Prime Ministers might know that birds sing, flowers bloom and body and mind may rest.
Despite having a country estate at Chartwell, Winston Churchill made great use of Chequers during his wartime premiership. He was in residence when he heard of Germany’s invasion of Russia in June 1941, and when the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that December brought the United States into the Second World War. However, between November 1940 and September 1942, he also spent some time at Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire because of security fears that Chequers was too easy for German bombers to locate, due to the long access road which was clearly visible from the sky.
Margaret Thatcher came to regard Chequers very much as a second home, hardly surprising given that she was Prime Minister for more than 11 years. She said that “Downing Street and Chequers were the twin centres of my personal and professional life”, also remarking “I do not think that anyone has stayed long at Chequers without falling in love with it”. She received Mikhail Gorbachev there in December 1984, shortly before he succeeded Konstantin Chernenko as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Thatcher had heard that the young (by Soviet standards) leader was a reformer and wanted to meet him, concluding after his visit “I like Mr Gorbachev. We can do business together.”
Tony Blair found the house beneficial for very much the reasons Lord Lee had foreseen in the terms of his gift: “Chequers was a blessed relief from the Downing Street swirl. Without it, the Prime Minister’s life would have been very different and worse”.
Theresa May brought her cabinet to Chequers in July 2018 to thrash out a deal for the UK to leave the European Union. The so-called Chequers Plan was only a temporary reprieve, as Brexit Secretary David Davis resigned in protest, Boris Johnson, then Foreign Secretary, following suit the next day. The EU rejected the plan in September.
Johnson, when he became Prime Minister in 2019, revelled in the grandeur of Chequers, spending a great deal of time there. A former colleague acidly remarked that “it’s part of the grandeur that he thinks is his due”, and he only relinquished his tenure in July 2022 after being persuaded that, having indicated he was resigning his office, he could not hold a wedding party at the estate.
A national asset?
Most Prime Ministers have made full use of Arthur Lee’s gift to the nation, both as a country retreat and as a venue away from Downing Street, out of London altogether, where ministers can take their time to think strategically and discuss ideas in very comfortable surroundings. Will Sir Keir Starmer prove to have found solutions to his government’s woes at this week’s awayday? Perhaps the English country air will be conducive to creative thinking. But he will have to realise, too, that whatever the venue, the dramatis personae remains the same. Let us wait to see what emerges.