The National Trust has opened a can of worms
Leaving open the question of repatriating its artefacts will plague the charity for many years to come
Zewditu Gebreyohanes | Daily Telegraph | 31 May 2023 (in print 1 June 2023)
A panel event at the Hay Festival called “The British Country House: Revealing the Bigger Picture”, run in partnership with the National Trust and featuring the historian David Olusoga and Sathnam Sanghera as panellists, was never going to be uncontroversial.
But few would have predicted that the most eyebrow-raising statement would be made by the softly spoken, reasonable-seeming chairman of the National Trust, René Olivieri. After all, since his appointment last year, he has made attempts to prove that he is not a wholesale subscriber to the various contentious agendas espoused by those currently at the top of the trust’s management.
Asked by an audience member whether visiting Powis Castle would be “a lesser experience if the National Trust conducted a repatriation exercise and returned the South Asian artefacts there to South Asia”, Olivieri announced: “We are in the process of creating our own policy in the National Trust. We will be following the advice that’s been given to all organisations like us by the Museums Association and the Arts Council.”
Listening to this, alarm bells rang instantly. It has been clear for some time that the National Trust has been straying further and further from its original spirit, statutory objects and charitable ethos. What I had not realised, however, was that the trust might be prepared to cast aside its founding Act of Parliament and its membership to take instead as gospel the divisive pronouncements of the Arts Council and Museums Association on the issue of repatriating artefacts in its collection. Is that right? If so, who made this decision?
Members deserve to know why the National Trust seems less and less accountable to the institutions that actually govern it, as well as why and how two outsider bodies were elevated, at least rhetorically, to the role of apparent dictators over the trust’s decision-making process.
Let us not forget that we have Arts Council funding to thank for the enlightened captions underneath the portraits in the Long Gallery at Sudbury Hall in Derbyshire. “They said this pose would highlight my importance and dignity but do you think I just look like I have indigestion?”, read a particularly crass one under a painting of Henry Vernon, an ancestor of the Lord Vernon who bequeathed the Grade I-listed house to the trust.
As for the Museums Association (which says that “the repatriation or restitution of museum items can be a powerful cultural, spiritual and symbolic act which recognises past wrongs”), it beggars belief that those currently running the National Trust, a charity which is by no definition a museum, would deem it remotely appropriate to be following its advice.
Further dissection of Olivieri’s words provides additional cause for concern. He speaks of “organisations like us”. Yet the National Trust, the biggest conservation charity in Europe, is surely an institution like no other. One would hope that its chairman has as strong – perhaps even stronger – a belief in its uniqueness as its millions of members, of which I am one, and its tireless volunteers.
There was also in Olivieri’s seemingly prepared response the absence of any indication as to what bright ideas the National Trust management has come up with in relation to the artefacts at Powis Castle, or what its new repatriation policy might look like, apart from that this is an “open question”.
And this is the problem. If kept open, the question of restitution could plague the trust for years to come, when it has plenty of other issues to be dealing with, especially in its core responsibility as the custodian of many country houses.
Olivieri – on whom, after the welcome departure of Tim Parker, many disillusioned trust members had pinned their hope – should reassure members that their worst fears are unfounded, and do his best to make sure the charity is being run in complete accordance with its obligations.
Ultimately, the National Trust is a custodian of this nation’s heritage, not a private owner at liberty to do what it likes with the objects in its care. The clue is in the name.