Viscount Lee of Fareham, of Bridport in the County of Dorset, on 9 December that year. Productive from House of Lords Conservative Prime Ministers Bonar Law and Stanley Baldwin, along with Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, all benefited substantially from Viscount Lee's dedicated work during the decade of the 1920s, as Lee was not content to rest upon his laurels in the House of Lords. He went on to chair Royal Commissions on the civil service in India (1923–1924), London cross-river traffic (1926), and Police Powers and Procedure (1928). He was also Chair of the Radium Commission and of the Committee on Police Pay and Pensions (1925). He was appointed Knight Grand Commander of the Order of the Star of India on 1 January 1925, and he was promoted Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath in the 1929 King's Birthday Honours. He was also appointed Knight of Grace in the Venerable Order of Saint John on 20 June 1930. Chequers Lee and his wife took on a long lease of Chequers, a country house and estate in Buckinghamshire, in 1909. The Lees bought the property in 1912 after the owner died, and began restoration. In 1917, they gave the estate, and the entire contents of the house which included a library, historical papers and manuscripts and a collection of Cromwellian portraits and artefacts, in trust to the nation to be used as the official residence and retreat of successive British Prime Ministers in perpetuity, enabled by the Chequers Estate Act 1917. The Lees left the property in January 1921, and Lloyd George was the first Prime Minister to use the property. Patron of the arts, and later life After furnishing Chequers, Lee began a second collection. He gained the financial backing of Samuel Courtauld and Joseph Duveen, and established the Courtauld Institute of Art with the University of London. The institute, the first to offer degrees in the history of art in Britain, opened in 1932 with William George Constable as its director at Lee's request. Also with Courtauld, he persuaded the University of London to accept the transfer of the Warburg Institute from Hamburg; it was loaned to him prior to its re-establishment in 1944. He also donated a silver collection and other objects to Hart House, at the University of Toronto in Canada in 1940. In 1935 he donated a Madonna of Venetian painter Bartolomeo