Lord Montagu of Beaulieu: You're Never Alone with a Stately Home...

This weekend, between 8,000 and 10,000 people each day will visit Lord Montagu's-home at Beaulieu in Hampshire. Is this taking commercialisation too far? Would it not be more dignified for a stately home owner who cannot afford to maintain his house to hand it over to the nation? In this film Lord Montagu puts the case for private ownership. 'Our historic houses must above all remain as family homes, not museums.' He looks at the situation in France, where the chateaux so often stand 'as dead mausoleums of a bygone age,' and visits other stately homes in Britain. He also gets forthright comments from some Oxford students and a group of car workers at Cowley.