The National Trust blacklisted a volunteer after he pointed out spelling mistakes on its website.
Andy Jones, 71, a volunteer at the trust for more than a decade, sent a dossier of thousands of misspellings and factual errors to the charity’s director-general in the hope that they would be corrected.
After sending a strongly worded complaint to his local branch, in which he criticised the trust’s director-general for not responding, he was told that his comments were “not in line with our organisational values” and was banned from volunteering at any of its sites.
His case is the latest example of the trust dismissing or suspending volunteers over claims that they do not meet its “culture” or “values”.
Earlier this year, more than a dozen volunteer gardeners on the Isle of Wight were suspended after managers claimed that some of their behaviour did not align with the trust’s “inclusive culture”.
The separate cases appear to be examples of the organisation’s pursuit of a progressive culture, which has included exploring properties’ links with slavery and colonialism and asking some staff to wear rainbow lanyards.
Responding to the cases highlighted by The Telegraph, Restore Trust, a pressure group comprised of members and supporters of the organisation, accused the charity of “disciplining or sacking volunteers for their opinions”.
Gardening and membership queries
Mr Jones volunteered for the National Trust for 14 years, first at the Woolbeding estate, in West Sussex, and later at Hindhead Commons and the Devil’s Punch Bowl in the Surrey Hills. His roles included everything from gardening and burning waste to dealing with membership queries and offering guidance to visitors on walks.
Last year, on his own initiative, he reviewed the trust’s web presence and created a dossier of the mistakes.
These ranged from typos such as “toliets” and “permanant” and grammatical errors such as “take a peak” to misspelling the name of the pre-Raphaelite artist Lucy Madox Brown as Maddox Brown.
