had been offered for sale with a "scrap value of £5,882". Cook presented the house to the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, which promptly passed it to the National Trust. It was one of the Trust's first great houses, and over the next 70 years was to be followed by over three hundred further nationally important houses which the Trust would administer and open to the public. Following World War II, many owners of vast houses faced a dilemma; often they had already disposed of minor country residences to preserve the principal seat, and now that seat too was in jeopardy. Many considered passing their houses to the National Trust and subsequently received a visit from the Trust's representative, the diarist James Lees-Milne. He often had to choose between accepting a house and saving it, or declining it and sentencing it to dereliction and demolition. In his published memoirs he writes of the confusion many owners felt in what had become a world they no longer understood. Some were grateful to the Trust, some resented it, and others were openly hostile. To some owners, the principal house was more than just a dwelling; built when the family was at the height of its power, wealth and glory, it represented the family's history and status. The family seat was an integral part of the family's being and needed to be preserved and retained by the family, even if this meant "entering trade", a prospect which would have been unthinkable just a few years earlier. This turn of events had not been anticipated; Evelyn Waugh in his introduction to the 1959 second edition of Brideshead Revisited explained he had not anticipated that Brideshead would in fact have been absorbed by the heritage industry; like the owners of many demolished 'stately homes' Waugh had assumed that such houses were doomed: It was impossible to foresee, in the spring of 1944, the present cult of the English country house. It seemed then that the ancestral seats which were our chief national artistic achievement were doomed to decay and spoilation like the monasteries in the sixteenth century. So I piled it on rather, with passionate sincerity. Brideshead today would be open to trippers, its treasures rearranged by expert hands and the fabric better maintained than it was by Lord Marchmain. This can be exemplified by the business ventures executed by the Marquess of