STATE SANCTUARY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 12 May 1938, Page 9

STATE SANCTUARY

COUNTRY HOME OF BRITISH PRIME MINISTERS. CHEQUERS COMES OF AGE. Chequers, the official home of Britain’s Prime Ministers, “comes of age” this year, states the “Christian Science Monitor.” Earl Baldwin, when Prime Minister, once said: “There are three classes which need sanctuary more than others —birds, flowers, and Prime Ministers. Prime Ministers want some place where they will not be snapshotted, where they can be in private, and where they can perch for a moment on a fence and look at the landscape without being ‘shooed’ off. Thanks to Lord Lee, I have my sanctuary at Chequers.” Twenty-one years ago Lord Lee of Fareham, Director General of Food Supplies during the World War, presented his Buckinghamshire home to the British nation for this very purpose.

But Lord Lee had a higher aim also —Chequers was to be a kind of bulwark of the British Constitution.

“To the revolutionary statesmen,” he wrote in his deed of settlement, “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 on too hasty upheavals; whilsteven the most reactionary could scarcely be insensible to the spirit of human freedom which permeates the countryside of Hampden, Burke and Milton.”

Standing on the, site of a fort probably built by Caractacus, the early British warrior king who resisted the Roman invasion, Chequers is a perfect example of the English Tudor manor’ house. It was inhabited for a time by descendants of Cromwell, and contains a unique collection of Cromwellian relics, including three portraits of that patriot and statesman. These were the special pride of Mr Ramsay MacDonald during his occupancy of Chequers.

(The name “Chequers,” by the way, is supposed to be derived from the office of an early owner of the estate who was Clerk to the Exchequer.)

To preserve the privacy of this rural sanctuary, the strictest secrecy surrounds the Prime Minister while he is there. No pressmen are allowed in the grounds, whether the Prime Minister is in residence or not. His privilege of working or relaxing away from all prying eyes has been consistently respected ever since Mr Lloyd George held his Chequers housewarming in 1921. What does he do? Walk? Fish? Watch birds? Have breakfast in bed? The few who know the Prime Minister’s activities at Chequers are forbidden to divulge them.

Should the Prime Minister not wish to make use of his country retreat, the Chequers Estate Act provides that it should be offered, in turn, to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Foreign Secretary, the Colonial Secretary and the American Ambassador in London.