Is the National Trust doing itself any favours? Full disclosure: I am a fan of the National Trust, and everything that they have done for the British nation. Many of my happiest childhood memories come from scampering round the halls of the grand houses and racing around their grounds.
The quickest way to my heart is to suggest a day out in one of their properties, preferably with lashings of Blytonian lemonade and scones in the tearoom, and if there happens to be a second-hand bookshop lurking in an outhouse, all the better. There is something inimitably, wonderfully British about the National Trust, and I want them to succeed for all perpetuity.
That said, it is sometimes hard not to feel that this great institution has been overcome by a decidedly un-British sense of small-mindedness and pettiness. This has been demonstrated most recently by the depressing story of one of their volunteers, Andy Jones, who was dismissed from his (unpaid) service after sending in a dossier of observations about misspellings and factual inaccuracies on the Trust’s website.
While Jones, who worked for the institution for 14 years, might rightly be castigated for his decidedly intemperate language after no response had been given to his dossier – he referred to Hilary McGrady, the organisation’s Northern Irish-born director-general, as the “Oirish Dame”, and talked of the Trust’s “crappy not fit for purpose webs***e” – there is a certain loftiness in the company remarking that: “We can say that no-one would be told they were no longer welcome as a volunteer simply for pointing out grammatical errors on a website and this would not lead to relationship breakdown. Relationship breakdown tends to occur after a series of incidents.”
“Relationship breakdown” is an unorthodox way of describing the dismissal of a volunteer, but then it reflects a growing sense that the National Trust has enthusiastically signed up to an agenda that might superficially be progressive and forward-looking in its tenets – embracing diversity, seeking to explore issues of slavery and colonialism at their properties and asking staff to wear rainbow lanyards – but is likely to frustrate and alienate many of their core supporters.
The question that many will ask is what the Trust stands for in 2026. When it was founded in 1895 by Octavia Hill, its mission statement was to “promote the permanent preservation for the benefit of the Nation of lands and tenements (including buildings) of beauty or historic interest.” Few would seriously argue that this has not been maintained over the past 130 years, and countless impoverished aristocrats have been only too grateful to surrender their money-pit stately homes to the nation in exchange for an exemption from inheritance tax, and seeing their once-benighted mansions carefully restored and maintained by an army of committed, cheery volunteers.
For every disaffected Jones, there are a hundred more National Trust stalwarts who love the institution, seeing it as a vital piece of English historical preservation that would cause irreparable harm to the nation if it was ever to collapse.
Yet like some other British organisations that have the word “National” in their name, it is hard to escape the suspicion that many of those at the higher echelons of the Trust – perhaps those who are not working cheek by jowl with the unpaid – believe that it has to be politically and socially conscious in a way that, say, the privately owned Blenheim Palace in Woodstock does not.
Many who visit will be oblivious to well-meaning, if slightly clumsy, attempts to drag their properties into the 21st century, and others will even applaud the Trust’s attempts at “relevance”.
Yet it is also frustrating to see cases such as that of Jones, which may be anomalous but contribute to a sense of a now-dominant ideology that cannot tolerate the very British sense of eccentricity and individualism that has sustained the National Trust since its foundation.
Let individuals have their say without being punished for it, and the wider organisation will only benefit from their quirky, even dissident presence.
