(George) James Henry Lees-Milne (6 August 1908 – 28 December 1997) was an English writer and expert on country houses, who worked for the National Trust from 1936 to 1973. He was an architectural historian, novelist and biographer. His extensive diaries remain in print. Early life Lees-Milne was born on 6 August 1908 at Wickhamford Manor, Worcestershire as George James Henry Lees-Milne. His biographer Michael Bloch observed that in Another Self, Lees-Milne "conveys the impression that he hailed from an old county family and that Wickhamford was their native seat. This was not quite the case.... His father... had bought Wickhamford, and moved from Lancashire to Worcestershire, only two years before Jim's birth." He was the second of three children and the elder son of a prosperous cotton manufacturer and farmer, George Crompton Lees-Milne (1880–1949), and his wife, Helen Christina (1884–1962), a daughter of Henry Bailey, JP and Deputy Lieutenant of Coates, Gloucestershire. Lees-Milne's maternal grandfather was Sir Joseph Bailey, 1st Baronet. His uncle, Joseph Bailey, second baronet, was later created Baron Glanusk. George Lees-Milne, once a lieutenant in the Cheshire Yeomanry, chaired the family business, A. and A. Crompton & Co. Ltd, deriving a fortune mainly from a Lancashire cotton mill. Lees-Milne's parents were a "curiously contrasting couple" – his father "shy but steady" and "conventional in outlook" with a "predilection for gambling and philandering", "obsessively punctual and constantly making plans". His mother was "uninhibited with a streak of mental instability... which ran in the Bailey family and which [Lees-Milne] always feared might lurk in himself." She was "unconventional", "whimsical and impulsive", and where "she had a sense of humour, he [her husband] had none." An exaggerated portrait of his parents as "a pair of ludicrous eccentrics" appears in Another Life. Lees-Milne's sister, Audrey, born in 1905, married Matthew Arthur, 3rd Baron Glenarthur. His brother Richard was born in 1910. The Lees-Milne family belonged to a junior branch of the Lees family that later came to own Thurland Castle, Lancashire, having been tenant farmers on an estate called Clarksfield near Oldham which they later purchased from the Booth family of Dunham Massey in the reign of James I. Succeeding generations became successful as "master cotton spinners and manufacturers". Its members were "a rough lot" (Lees-Milne suggested their motto should have been "Sport and Booze"). Though the discovery of coal on their land increased their wealth, it "did not civilise