On Sunday 17th July Restore Trust held its second talk, this time at Shilstone House in Modbury, Devon and featuring Harry Mount, editor of The Oldie. Harry first delivered a talk focussing mainly on the topic of what he called the Trust’s “intellectual decline”, before a conversation between him and Restore Trust director Zewditu Gebreyohanes on various topics, followed by a Q&A session with lively participation from the audience.

In answer to the question of when the Trust’s intellectual decline began, Harry said that according to distinguished architectural historian John Martin Robinson, it all began “about twenty-five years ago when the Trust started bringing in management consultants to run the houses as the property managers, so you started a cut-off between the curators and these property managers who didn’t have any expertise in houses” and whose sole expertise was in making money. Harry went on to say that “that approach worsened under Fiona Reynolds, Director General from 2001–12, and Helen Ghosh from 2012–18 (she’s the one who famously declared there was too much “stuff” in National Trust properties) and that all chimed with when I started noticing things were going wrong”.

Harry pointed out that the National Trust’s management is misguided in its apparent view that ‘dumbing down’ is a step towards inclusivity, and that in fact the less privileged in society suffer most from this approach: he pointed out that until recently, the National Trust was “one of the great informal arms of eduction in this country; a university that anyone could get into“ and that it is a tragedy that “a rigorous, fact-based education is increasingly being cut off from everyone but the lucky few“. He lamented the replacement of “captions in houses once brief and historical, with dates, artists, architects and the explanation of style” with displays that are much bigger, have banal messages and “say much less” of worth—sometimes even containing inaccurate information.

He posited that ignorance has been in part at least to blame for this, because those in charge do not seem to have a full understanding of the history of the places. “The guides want to know more; the visitors want to know more… it’s only the senior management that is cutting off this supply”. He related an anecdote illustrating this: a friend of his—the head of a conservation charity—visiting Tredegar House in South Wales wanted to find out whether a particular ceiling was a copy or an original, to which he received the reply that, “well, we really want to know that too, but the people in charge haven’t given us that information“.

By contrast, he said that at English Heritage “they are so good at spotting any dumbing down that it’s immediately stopped by senior management; and that just doesn’t happen at the National Trust”. Harry said that we also do not see the trends seen in the National Trust at private houses such as that of Francis Fulford (of TV fame), sitting in the front row of the audience, or the palaces of “Arundel, Birley, Blenheim: they don’t do any of this silly dumbing down”. He pointed out how this no-nonsense approach attracts more people: “I went to Chatsworth the other day… the car park was completely crammed“. Harry also noted that there are some exceptions to the rule even at the National Trust: “Trust properties where the family still own the objects in the house and employ the curators do not suffer from these problems of dumbing down, citing Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire, in which the collections are still owned by the Rothschild family, as an example“.

Harry said that after writing a number of articles critical of the National Trust, he was introduced to Director-General Hilary McGrady, who told him, “you must tell me whenever you see any of these appalling signs: the spelling mistakes, the poems”. Not long after, he “went to Dunster Castle in Somerset and in the kitchen there, and on the cupboards there—one of the things that annoys me is the anthropomorphising of objects—the National Trust had said, ‘I am a sensitive 1970s larder door. Do not open me’”. He took a picture of it and sent it to Ms McGrady as discussed, whereupon she told him, “Actually, there’s nothing I can do about it”. He concluded that “it was a slightly pointless exercise” and noted that Ms McGrady does in fact “have the authority but at some level it’s broken down: property managers have become all-powerful, and so actually even the person at the top can’t actually change this at the moment”.

Harry identified a “glimmer of hope” for the National Trust in the recent interview in Country Life with Rene Olivieri, the National Trust’s new chairman. He said that it is “not too late”, and that “if the senior management is replaced, or have a change of heart, conservation and curators could come first again“ and the Trust could return to its founding ethos and aims.

Discussion of Clandon Park featured prominently in the Q&A session, with a clear consensus that the National Trust’s recent decision not to restore the Grade 1-listed house, devastated by fire in 2015, was a dereliction of duty. Reference was made to the National Trust’s oft-invoked motto “For everyone, for ever”. Francis Fulford suggested that “the sadness about not restoring a house like Clandon Park is that the restoration of other disasters like Uppark and Hampton Court and Windsor Castle had a silver lining: they provided training and allowed a whole new generation of craftsmen to learn the craft of woodwork, plasterwork etcetera. And it’s a tragedy that this opportunity is being rejected by the National Trust”.

Restore Trust would like to thank Sebastian and Lucy Fenwick for very kindly allowing us the use of their venue and for the wonderful tour of Shilstone House afterwards.