paintbrush in avant-garde paintings to protect the modesty of his lover, Elizabeth 'Lee' Miller (married to Aziz E. Bey). Wilfred Vernon taught the art of mixing home-made explosives, and his explosives store can still be seen at the rear of the house, while Canadian Bert "Yank" Levy, who had served under Wintringham in the Spanish Civil War, taught knife fighting and hand-to-hand combat. Despite winning world fame in newsreels and newspaper articles around the world (particularly in the US), the school was disapproved of by the War Office and Winston Churchill, and was taken over in September 1940. Closed in 1941, its staff and courses were reallocated to other newly opened War Office-approved Home Guard schools. National Trust After the Second World War, Lord Jersey approached Middlesex County Council, who had shown interest in buying the estate, but eventually decided to give the house and its park to the National Trust. The furniture was sold to the Victoria & Albert Museum. In 1947, Jersey moved to the island of Jersey, taking with him many pictures from the collection at Osterley. Some were destroyed in a warehouse fire on the island soon after. He assisted the Ministry of Works and the V&A in their restoration of the house to its present late-18th-century state. The National Trust took charge of Osterley in 1991. The house enjoys loans and gifts from Lord Jersey, including items of silver, porcelain, furniture and miniatures. The trust commissioned portraits of Lord Jersey and his wife by Howard J. Morgan – which hang upstairs. In 2014, William Villiers, 10th Earl of Jersey, the present Earl, arranged a ten-year loan to Osterley of portraits of the Child family. Portraits included in the loan include Allan Ramsay's portrait of Francis Child (1758), and George Romney's portrait of Francis's brother, Robert. The house and small formal gardens are open to the public. They account for 30,000 paying visitors per year. Many hundreds of thousands of visitors per year walk the footpaths and enjoy the woodland of the surrounding park at no cost. The park is the site of a weekly 5k Parkrun. The house saw its latest restoration from 2018 to 2021. This repaired structural deterioration and discolouring of the external brickwork. Gallery References and footnotes Citations Footnotes External links Osterley Park information at the National Trust Flickr images tagged Osterley Park A Brief History of Osterly Park by the Dowager