Conserving Deference by Christopher Draper

“The rich man in his castle, The poor man at his gate, God made them, high or lowly, And ordered their estate.”

(C F Alexander 1848)

OR so the NATIONAL TRUST would have us believe for 'Europe’s largest conservation charity' above all conserves Britain’s class system. Whilst the National Trust's Country Houses celebrate wealth, power and aristocratic privilege, Chairman, Tim Parker, 'a private-equity asset stripper' with 'a record of brutality and heartlessness towards workers' is sacking 1,200 people, 13% of the Trust’s workforce.

A Strange Kind of Conservation

The gullible swallow the excuse of 'Covid-related income loss' but the National Trust has over a billion pounds of investments to tide it over, not to mention the two hundred million pound personal fortune Chairman Tim Parker made by closing Clark’s shoe factories, sacking workers and outsourcing to Vietnam and then asset-stripping the AA (4,000 sacked) and KwikFit (3,500 sacked).

Charity for the Over-Privileged

National Trust is indispensable to the aristocracy as a mechanism for maintaining social status whilst avoiding taxation. The State is complicit in this game, granting the National Trust a unique legal status (1937 National Trust Act) that facilitates aristocratic tax avoidance (1953 Finance Act). Off-loading liabilities onto National Trust the toffs who remain in residence, retaining title to valuable contents which they permit the Trust to display, maintain and insure then claim back and sell when financially opportune – all for merely allowing limited public access. Income-producing assets such as shops, farms, pubs, holiday cottages etc are also retained. It is a cynically perpetuated myth that there’s been any fundamental redistribution of landed wealth and power in Britain since the Victorian era.

Welcome to Dudmaston Hall

'I am Elfrida and I live here with Mark and our two children, Oscar and Rachel, plus a few family pets! We have followed in the footsteps of Mark’s parents, James and Alison Hamilton-Russell…The photographs we have spread around the Entrance Hall and family rooms belong to the Hamilton-Russell family – most of which have been taken somewhere here at Dudmaston – see if you can spot where! As a visitor to the house, not many people realise that your front door is our front door…' This drivel continues and comprises the introductory leaflet I was handed on arrival at Dudmaston, as volunteer room guides, with hushed deference, revealed that lady bountiful herself was arranging flowers in the hallway. The Trust fosters this reverential aura of enduring aristocracy, inviting visitors to share their jaundiced view of reality.

Thoughts of Chairman Tim

Tim approves of this nonsense and is so pleased with the “history” projected by the Trust’s country houses that he told the Daily Express, 'Immigrants should visit stately homes to feel more British…we all of us need to have a sense of how we arrive at where we are today' - although not all of us arrived in a Porsche, with £200m in the bank and owning expensive homes in Hampshire and Chelsea.

The British?

Managing mansions is NT’s core business and each embodies, promotes and celebrates an air-brushed version of aristocracy from which all reference to slavery, exploitation, racism, criminality and colonial oppression has been excised; a picture of the past in which the great mass of ordinary, working class people are invisible. When immigrants, on Tim’s recommendation, visit the grand houses over which he presides the only “British” they see represented, from Francis Drake to Robert Clive, were in large part rapacious racists and ruthless exploiters sufficiently deferential to monarchy to be 'ennobled'. 'Their story' never was 'Our story'.

Who Lives in a House Like This?

The Trust’s selection of whose story is told starts with its acquisition of properties – a portfolio stuffed with grand country houses but no mining villages, holiday camps, allotments or council flats. As Times correspondent Brian Hughes observed in 2007 'The National Trust has always been keener on conserving the houses of the rich and powerful than those of the riff-raff…' In recent years Trust made a token effort to acquire a few less than grand houses, usually because they’re associated with 'celebrity' but of all the hundreds of National Trust properties only one represents radical challenge to class privilege and that’s Rosedene an 1840’s Chartist cottage. Even then the Trust restricts visits and uses the cottage as a holiday let. 'English Heritage' criticises the National Trust’s misrepresentation of the property as 'visitors are presented with a slightly rosy interpretation of rural life rather than the revolutionary force that Chartism represented in the mid-nineteenth century.'

Kedleston Hall

In contrast, the National Trust is keen that you 'Experience the ambitious grandeur of this lavishly decorated 1760’s show palace, lived in over the centuries by the Curzon family. Discover the treasures of the Eastern Museum, a collection amassed by Lord Curzon while he travelled through Asia and during his service as the Viceroy of India...” There’s no hint from NT that Curzon imposed divide and rule, setting Hindu against Muslim, - an arrogant Imperialist, even Balliol, his old college has hidden away his portrait out of post-colonial embarrassment. Nor does the Trust care to mention that Kedleston’s current incumbent, the Hon. Richard Francis Nathaniel Curzon was in 2016 jailed for serial convictions of driving whilst banned. His older brother, the Rt Hon. Peter Ghislaine Nathaniel Curzon, the 4th Viscount Scarsdale is the rightful occupant of Kedleston’s 23-roomed Georgian Wing and two servants’ flats granted rent free in perpetuity by the Trust but he was imprisoned for refusing to pay his divorce settlement and never returned. Perhaps fear rather than prejudice prevents the National Trust/i> from including such unsavoury aristocratic history for Peter Curzon warned a Daily Mail reporter who tracked him down, 'Be careful what you write because people like us are very powerful – how do think Earls can do away with their nannies and disappear?'

Conserving Privilege

It’s difficult to unearth the range of privileges NT concedes to 'donors' as it refuses to publish these 'gentleman’s agreements'. They’re often arrived at informally, 'between friends', only for this imprecision to cause rifts when subsequent generations claim title to valuable contents. This occurred, for example, at Chirk Castle where descendants reclaimed and sold several valuable items before NT formalised contracts.

At Penrhyn Castle, Richard Charles Harper Douglas-Pennant retains title to a mansion in the grounds as well as 75% of the castle’s contents. NT’s Castle guidebook originally featured Jan Steen’s painting of the 'Burgomeister of Delft', until in 2004 it was withdrawn from exhibition on Douglas-Pennant’s instruction and sold for £8.1m. The current edition of the guidebook features Rembrandt’s portrait of 'Catrina Hoogsaet – the masterpiece of the collection', unfortunately Douglas-Pennant reclaimed and sold that in 2015 for £35m. In lieu of paying inheritance tax on that sale the government accepted title of 34 minor paintings already on show in the castle, including six eighteenth century watercolours of Jamaica where the family owned sugar plantations until 1943.

Skeletons

Bodnant Gardens is unusual amongst NT properties, as it wasn’t financed from profits of the slave trade but here, as elsewhere, NT assists in hiding aristocratic skeletons. There’s a deafening silence over the curious disinheritance of John Pochin, the only son of the garden’s founder (hence the estate passed from the “Pochins” down the female line to the “McLarens”). Then there’s Charles Melville McLaren’s guilty secret - until three years before he died, Lord Aberconway, father of the present incumbent, concealed the fact that he was amongst a group of seven British businessmen who secretly met Goering and other leading Nazis on an island off the German coast, just three weeks before war was declared in a last ditch appeasement attempt to offer Hitler a 'second Munich agreement'. The tragic effect of this meeting was to encourage the Nazis to invade Poland in the belief that Britain would not fight.

At Bodnant the Trust maintains the accessible 82 acre gardens but the family retain ownership of the 5,000 acre estate which includes farms, forestry, holiday cottages and retail outlets that the National Trust obligingly channels 260,000 visitors through each year. Michael Duncan McLaren forbids access to Bodnant Hall even though he works in London as a highly successful commercial barrister owning multi-million pound houses in Kensington and Tuscany.

Venite Adoremus

Plas Newydd was given to the Trust by the Marquis of Anglesey in 1976 but the family retain ownership of Parys Mountain which supplied invaluable copper to the African slave trade. You wouldn’t learn this from the National Trust’s presentation of the property nor would you discover much about the extraordinary life of the flamboyantly camp fifth Marquis of Anglesey as the family don’t want this publicised. The Marchioness does wish that her late husband’s study remains on view, unchanged and maintained as a shrine to his memory and NT duly complies. The Trust’s site manager, Jane Richardson, did clash with the Marchioness over her insistence on limiting public access to the gardens but was forced to concede after she was 'given a very, very clear steer' by the Trust’s Director General 'That I have a responsibility to work with the donor family and to keep them happy'!

Conserving Control

The National Trust’s Constitution provides for the restraint rather than representation of members’ views. It is a centralised and hierarchical organisation with a Chairman heading a ruling Council while the executive wing is controlled by a 'Director-General' and 'Executive Team'. Although NT comprises 14,000 staff, 65,000 volunteers and 5.6 million members they have little opportunity to influence policy.

In 2013 the National Trust bosses commissioned Leicester Business School to investigate disaffection amongst volunteers. In 2015 it concluded, 'Volunteers often felt a sense of marginalisation with respect to decision making, property developments, skills utilisation and creative input.' A staff member reported, 'I agree with the volunteers. The volunteers’ complaints are being dismissed as 'bad behaviour' by management. 'As paid staff we cannot express our opinions or feelings, we just have to toe the line.' 'Kim' articulated management’s response, 'We need them to buy into what we are ultimately trying to achieve!'

Sheep and Goats

Trust bosses claim “Our pay policy recognises that our staff are not motivated or attracted solely by pay…” and reflecting the organisation’s charitable status most of the workforce are indeed modestly remunerated although the bosses employ a different yardstick in calculating their own pay and, conveniently, “The pay arrangements for senior managers are not covered by the Partnership Agreement”. The National Trust’s top 15 bosses pocket two million pounds a year between them while Director-General Hilary McGrady “earns” £190,000 plus perks. Perks for top managers include accommodation in properties donated to the Trust but not open to the public. Thomas Hardy’s home, “Max Gate”, for instance was quietly acquired by the Trust in 1940 but kept under wraps and only opened to visitors 54 years later. Scotney Castle was donated to the Trust in 1970 but wasn’t opened to the public until 2007. For most of the 1970’s and 1980’s Margaret Thatcher occupied a three-bedroomed apartment at Scotney but despite the determined efforts of M.P.Dennis Skinner, National Trust bosses refused to disclose details of this cosy arrangement.

Manipulating the Membership

National Trust members can stand for a position on the ruling Council or submit a motion for debate at the AGM, where nominations and resolutions are decided by members’ votes, but there’s an important proviso. Members not attending routinely authorise the Chairman to vote on their behalf. Most people assume this provides a casting vote in the event of a stalemate but this isn’t the practice at the Trust. The National Trust chairmen, past and present, employ thousands of these 'proxy votes' to systematically vote down motions otherwise endorsed by the majority of members. The anti-democratic effect of this procedure has been denounced at AGM’s for more than fifty years, prompting one unsuccessful nominee, Nicholas Fry a trustee of Chester Cathedral, to describe the Council as a 'a self-perpetuating oligarchy'

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In 2000 two Q.C.’s, who were also Trust members, successfully proposed a resolution banning the use of the Chair’s 'block vote' only for it to be overturned by the Chairman’s 'block vote'! Facing a membership increasingly angry at the Trust continuing to allow fox hunting on its land, in 2002 the Chairman made free use of the 100,000 'proxies' in his pocket to pack the Council with blood-sports enthusiasts including Clarissa Dickson Wright and Nicholas Soames MP. With a curious irony the National Trust’s 'democratic deficit' was denounced by the House of Lords! Forced to reform, the Trust’s Chair was compelled to reveal to members, for the first time, exactly how many proxy votes he cast at AGM’s and proxy voting for Council membership was abolished. Members were then directed which candidates to vote for and these names were printed in bold-type on ballot papers! In a rare victory, at the 2015 AGM, members finally voted out this disgraceful practice despite the chairman casting 4,065 proxy votes against. Of the total of 18 members’ resolutions submitted to the last 7 AGM’s the Chair opposed every single one including motions on ending trail hunting, on banning barbed wire and even on serving Fairtrade tea in the Trust's cafes.

At the 2017 AGM members would have finally banned trail hunts (which are a ruse to continue fox hunting with terrier men convicted for releasing foxes to be ripped to pieces by trail hounds) but the Chair cast 3,460 proxy votes to 'keep on killing'. Seventy or so trail hunts operate on National Trust land but with the 3-year exclusion rule (for resubmitting resolutions) expiring in 2020 the ban was due to be voted on again at this year’s AGM and members were confident of victory. Curiously the National Trust bosses decided to cancel the meeting. Meanwhile the Scottish National Trust responded to Covid by moving its 2020 AGM online. the National Trust adamantly rejects its members’ calls to follow suit.

Beyond Reform

As I’ve illustrated in this series of articles, the National Trust is fundamentally class-biased, racist, uninterested in ending animal cruelty or supporting environmentally friendly transport and the bosses are antipathetic to the views of volunteers, workers and members. It is an undemocratic corporation that’s proved itself incapable of internal reform and must be broken up to create numerous smaller, localised, perhaps county-sized, independent Trusts more willing and better able to reflect the many and varied histories of the people of England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Christopher Draper (Part 4 of 4-part NT series)

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Acorn to SUV - Consume & Be Damned

by Chris Draper

THE NATIONAL TRUST proclaims itself “Europe’s Largest Conservation Charity” but its eco-credentials are as exaggerated and dishonest as its interpretation and presentation of Britain’s history.

Founded by Christian socialists in 1895 to protect threatened countryside and promote public access, NT has been re-engineered into a powerful corporation preserving Britain’s aristocratic legacy and promoting the vicarious enjoyment of an uncritical middle class. Whilst maintaining the myth that it’s a democratic organisation committed to ecological aims, in reality NT regards members as little more than cash cows buying into a “country house experience”, targets for as much ancillary marketing as it can muster. Some excellent environmental work remains but as NT has grown it’s become less radical, more Establishment, more Corporate and more Consumerist, and consumption is killing the planet.

LOGO?

The National Trust’s logo is no longer appropriate; my abiding memory of NT visits isn’t the ubiquity of “leafy oak branches dotted with acorns” but the depressing sight of seemingly endless acres of car parks that once were fields and meadows. 'Enter via the car park, exit via the gift shop.' Replace NT’s oak leaf logo with the more appropriate silhouette of an SUV, or possible a cash till. Although, to be fair, I learn from the website that, 'The National Trust has produced a car “badge” of some sort for 70 years and we know that many members love displaying their car sticker.'

Fair enough but don’t then claim to be, 'Europe’s largest conservation charity' whilst acting as, 'Europe’s largest Jeremy Clarkson appreciation society.' Even Clarkson’s rampant eco-vandalism is eclipsed by the Trust’s ability to annually generate fifty million environmentally destructive car journeys through visits to NT properties.

Carriage Trade not Charabancs

The National Trust has given no consideration to whether any of the grand country houses it eagerly acquired were accessible by public transport. Even where visitors were initially able to arrive on foot, by bicycle or via public transport NT closed off that option by sealing off minor entry points and channelling visitors down carriageways monopolised by motor vehicles. “Enter via the car park, exit via the gift shop.” I’ve often alighted from a bus and been forced to walk along a main road bordering NT land before turning into the sole permissible entry point and then walking another mile or so down NT’s drive as motorised visitors sped by. Adding insult to narrowly avoided injury, NT ticket offices, inevitably sited adjacent to the car park, frequently offer buggy transport to convey motorists those last few yards to the front door of the country house.

'Europe’s largest conservation charity' marginalises everyone who arrives on foot and does nothing to facilitate connections to bus stops or railway stations. Where buses do pass near National Trust properties the Trust doesn’t erect shelters or cooperate with local authorities to ensure that they do so. The Trust ensures signage directs motorists from far and wide but the un-motorised are ignored although 25% of households don’t own a motor vehicle.

Click on any National Trust website and see for yourself how little information, help or concern is shown for pedestrian. Now compare the Harewood House website – what a contrast! Harewood positively encourages public transport users who are offered live transport timetable links, half price entry and are even met by golf buggies at the entry gate and conveyed free of charge down to the house but then Harewood is run by an independent trust not the National Trust.

In Bed with BMW

As if the National Trust’s general promotion of private transport isn’t bad enough it’s now climbed into bed with car manufacturer BMW. The National Trust won’t disclose the terms of the deal and in response to my email requesting specific details the Trust sent me an uninformative press release. Curiously this didn’t mention that in February 2019 BMW was fined 8.5 million Euro for selling vehicles that breach EU permitted emission levels nor that two months later, after raids on the company’s headquarters, BMW was further charged with 'having colluded with other motor manufacturers to limit the introduction of clean emissions technology'.

The National Trust claims that its partnership is eco-friendly as BMW also makes electric cars but using tons of precious resources to move private motorists around in a vehicle that’s stationary for approximately 95% of its lifetime is inherently wasteful. Some studies suggest that over the complete cycle of such vehicles, from construction to disposal, electric cars cause even more environmental harm than petrol engine equivalents. The batteries are especially damaging as lithium is found in only a few arid countries and its extraction consumes vast amounts of water. Cobalt, another essential ingredient, generally comes from parts of central Africa where widespread “artisanal mining” operates with notoriously low standards of safety and pollution control. The disposal of batteries is also hazardous and potentially explosive but on the plus side, the Trust’s backing for BMW brings in the cash, helps 'greenwash' a powerful polluter and reassures self-deluding National Trust members that they can enjoy guilt-free motoring.

Three in a Bed

The National Trust’s bedsheets were already soiled by its long-running affair with junk-food giant Cadbury. Every year for more than a decade the Trust pocketed approximately £7 million to host and promote a “Cadbury Easter Egg Hunt” although in 2017 when Cadbury excised “Easter” from the billing the Archbishop of Canterbury, Teresa May and Jeremy Corbyn all joined the chorus of critics, with Corbyn observing that the Trust’s 'commercialism had gone too far'.

The claim that 'Cadbury’s Easter Egg Hunts are the perfect way to unleash your inner explorer and connect with nature' is absurd as junk food produces unnaturally fat kids with rotten teeth. Cadbury was reminded of this in 2018 by the Advertising Standards Authority who found the firm guilty of breaching junk food advertising regulations.

Internationally, Cadbury is widely recognised as an environmental vandal for the parent company’s role in deforestation, particularly in central Africa and in Indonesia, causing critical habitat loss, to chimpanzees and orangutans respectively.

Greed is Good

Unsatisfied with partnering eco-villains, the Trust also has millions of pounds invested in oil, gas, mining and similar industries whose core activities are environmentally devastating. Exposed by the Guardian in 2018 the Trust responded by promising to limit the extent of such investments in the future but insisted that the trustees of its pension fund must be left to operate as they wished. One might expect 'Europe’s largest conservation charity' to lead the way in such matters but the Trust does nothing until caught out, then there are grudging excuses followed by token improvements. NT should play an active role in managing its billion pound portfolio, directing fund managers to intervene, vote and report back on AGM’s of its invested companies instead, 'Investment managers are given the flexibility to achieve maximum returns on investments'” The Trust boasts of installing a few solar panels on toilet blocks but is morally derelict in permitting Black Rock and its other fund managers to invest its vast wealth in raping the planet.

Countryside to Command Centre

Ignoring protests from members, the local Parish Council and CND, in the 1980’s NT backed a NATO scheme to build a military command centre on eleven acres of Trust land in the Chilterns, along with a twenty acre spoil heap. Despite the Braddenham Estate having been donated as 'inalienable' the development went ahead and in the 1990’s this Command Centre functioned as Headquarters of the UK’s Gulf War operations, it also played a key role in directing the RAF’s bombing of Iraq and Kosovo.

At National Trust’s 1937 Annual General Meeting a member, Mr J L Cather, proposed the banning of hunting and shooting from Trust land but his resolution was vehemently opposed by NT bosses and the motion was lost. This pattern was sporadically repeated over the following half century – members proposed and bosses opposed, employing increasingly sophisticated measures to get their way. Even after the membership won the vote in 1993 it wasn’t implemented. When Parliament eventually legislated against fox hunting the Trust still went along with the farce of permitting 'trail hunting' where riders purport to follow an artificial scent as terriers rip to shreds foxes that 'just happen to break cover'. When members backed a ban in 2017 the Chairman employed the dubious device of proxy votes to “conserve” the killing.

Giant Eyesore

I saw the Giant’s Causeway for the first time in the 1970’s as I rambled along the spectacular Antrim coast. It wasn’t long after NT took over the site and ever since I’ve retained a powerful visual memory of an awesome array of hexagonal basalt columns set against a beautiful, simple, unadorned natural seascape. Returning in recent years I was shocked by the utter despoliation caused by NT’s commercial exploitation of the site. The Trust boasts that it now attracts more than a million visitors a year to its 'Causeway Car Park', shops and appalling 'visitor centre'. To anyone with respect and love for nature this is desecration. A place for quiet contemplation has been transformed into a theme park for the uniformed and little interested who clamber all over the stones, take selfies and then drive off to the next advertised attraction. Anyone sufficiently concerned to properly prepare themselves for a visit would at least consult a map and realise that it’s more appropriate to approach the site via the footpath which also offers free access. The Trust prefers to fleece the ignorant and channels tourists through its airport terminal-style building as they’re relieved of £13.00 each.

What do we Want – More Car Parks!

Ruskin inspired the National Trust’s founders and warned of the environmental threat to the Lake District posed by the coming of the railways – what would he think of what the magazine Private Eye recently described as 'The National Trust’s rampant enthusiasm for car park building.' As I write, residents of a tiny picturesque Oxfordshire village are campaigning to 'Save Buscot' from the National Trust. The National Trust’s money-making Buscot proposal is to transform one of the village’s buildings into eight business units and create a 24-space car park.

At Devon’s, Woolacombe Down, the National Trust's planned to turn a redundant sheep pen into a 30-space car park together with signage and a pay-and-display ticket machine. Rather than come clean on yet another act of commercialism, NT bizarrely claim 'a purpose which will allow the public to enjoy the biodiversity improved wider landscape.' Savaged by local critics, NT have apparently backed down and withdrawn the planning application – at least for the present.

At Trelissick House & Gardens in Cornwall, the Parish Council are pushing the Trust to improve access for walkers and cyclists arriving via the King Harry Ferry but the Trust is only interested in creating a new 266-space car park. NT outlined their proposal for the Council who recently expressed its concern at 'the visual impact of the car parking areas on the landscape character of the AONB and the setting of the historic parkland and buildings'.

Meanwhile, 'Hidden away in a secluded Kent valley is this perfectly preserved medieval moated manor house. Created in the natural landscape almost 700 years ago, Igham Mote is built from Kentish ragstone…' (NT Handbook) except NT is determined to end the seclusion by creating an enormous gravel car park for more than 300 vehicles. Situated in a designated Area of Natural Beauty (AONB) the local planning authority recently rejected the scheme but the Trust are undeterred and ominously assured the local press they don’t regard this as defeat but merely “feedback” from which they will 'learn'.

Unfit for Purpose

The National Trust’s original aims have been irretrievably corrupted and its power structure is beyond repair. In the next and final instalment of this 4-part polemic I’ll analyse how the hierarchy maintains its control, how members are effectively disenfranchised and along the way I’ll reveal some more inconvenient truths.

(CMD August 2020 – part 3 of a 4-part NT series)

Posh Lives Matter!

    by Christopher Draper

 

IF Germany preserved the mansions of the men who organised the Nazi slave camp system and published accompanying guidebooks detailing architectural features and the aesthetics of looted art works whilst concealing the source of their former owners’ wealth we’d be appalled, yet Britain’s NATIONAL TRUST lovingly maintains the heritage of Britain’s aristocratic slave traders with scarce a mention of their iniquities.

For Example…

Buckland Abbey – home of Francis Drake, who with his cousin John Hawkins started Britain’s slave trade in 1562, owned by Drake’s descendants until NT took over in 1946

Chirk Castle – acquired in 1593 by Thomas Myddleton, a founder of the rapaciously racist East India Co. Managed since 1981 by NT, the Myddleton family remain in residence

Tyntesfield – owned by the Gibbs family whose African slave trade profits were re-invested in the exploitation and virtual enslavement of Chinese labourers in their Peruvian guano pits

Powis Castle- lavishly displayed Indian artefacts plundered by Robert Clive

Newark Park – owned from the 18^th century until 1946 by the Clutterbuck family, in 1837 Sarah Clutterbuck “of Newark Park” claimed compensation for 110 Jamaican slaves

Quarry Bank Mill– erected by Samuel Greg who jointly owned, with his brother, a Dominican plantation with 139 slaves

Speke Hall – purchased in 1795 by Richard Watts an immensely rich slave trader based in Liverpool and Jamaica, owned by Watts family until 1943

Dyrham Park– according to NT, William Blathwayt was a “Hard working civil servant” and Dyrham Park -“An early example of how a fortune made from empire was invested in a landed estate.” According to history he was a tireless advocate for the slave trade who readily accepted bribes from its practitioners.

Convenient Lies

There’s no objectivity to NT guidebooks which feature aristocratic family trees, portraits, pottery and fine furniture but rarely mention slavery. As air-brushed exploits of the gentry are extolled at length, the histories of the enslaved blacks and poor whites they exploited are ignored. To visit an NT property is to worship at the altar of aristocracy and with twenty million paying visitors a year, NT is a powerful advocate of reactionary worldviews.

As we perambulate NT’s pastoral palaces we gaze up at portraits of generations of be-knighted toffs who richly deserve to be pulled from their pedestals and consigned to the dustbin of history. Whilst acquiring country houses and arranging exhibits, NT bosses may not fully comprehend their complicity in concealing the gentry’s genocidal role but as Hannah Arendt observed, such is the banality of evil.

Rewarding the Guilty

Britain’s slave traders were never held to account for their murderous record. On the contrary, when their slaves were “emancipated” in 1833 Parliament rewarded the traders with £20 billion (2020 equivalent) “compensation”. In the following century, when food imports undermined agricultural land values, Parliament again intervened to sustain aristocratic privilege. Whilst some toffs auctioned off the family silver, pulled down crumbling piles, sold off estates and reinvested in liquid assets, traditionalists fought to maintain their God-given social and political pre-eminence and discovered a surprising ally.

Polite Subversion

Although NT’s founders were Christian Socialists who opposed privilege and campaigned for workers’ access to the countryside, from the late 1930’s onwards, the Trust and the toffs became affectionate bedfellows. This ideological volt-face was engineered by James Lees-Milne, who in 1936, was appointed as Secretary of NT’s newly created “Country House Committee”. Lees-Milne was an arch-snob infatuated with “aristocracy” who’d spent the previous five years as Private Secretary to Baron Lloyd. Together with his posh chums and their Parliamentary lackeys, Lees-Milne devised a plan granting tax relief all round for NT to bail out aristocrats who wished to remain in residence. NT shouldered the burden of running and renovating their mansions on condition that the public was granted limited access. The deal was sealed by an act of Parliament passed in 1940 as “The Country Houses Scheme”. Lees-Milne was in his element socialising with the toffs, encouraging a succession of Lords, Ladies, Dukes, Earls and other assorted gentry to take up influential positions within NT.

Rebel in the Ranks

NT was soon stuffed full with both grand Country Houses and Country House grandees and these came to characterise NT. A campaign to return the Trust to its original principles was in 1967 led by an employee, Conrad Rawnsley, the grandson of one of its founders. He claimed NT’s original aim to provide “open air sitting rooms for the poor” had been subverted to offer “aristocratic drawing rooms for the middle classes.” Headlined as, “Rawnsley versus the Reactionaries”, NT’s reactionary Chairman, Randal McDonnell, 8^th Earl of Antrim (ed Eton & Oxford) responded by sacking him but was forced by Harold Wilson’s government to commission an internal enquiry. Lord Antrim appointed Henry Benson CBE, a senior partner of accountants “Coopers & Lybrand” and member of a shooting syndicate that leased NT Land, to head that enquiry. Benson suggested bureaucratic reforms but did little to restore NT’s founding principles.

Vulnerable

Confronted by Black Lives Matter NT bosses feel suddenly vulnerable and have hidden away incriminating items of slave imagery (see previous post). Dr Tarnya Cooper, NT’s “Curatorial and Collections Director”, insists NT has the matter in hand, “The National Trust has just completed the first phase of a ten-year internal inquiry into links between its properties and slavery, during which it found that almost a third of its world-famous 300 houses and gardens are tied to wealth from slaving practices…and the number could well rise”. The implicit message is, “Trust us, we’ve got everything under control and with a few more years research we’ll eventually correct our minor errors and oversights”, but NT cannot be trusted.

I emailed Dr Cooper requesting details of the properties NT had identified as linked to the slave trade but received no reply. I searched the web in vain for further details of NT’s “ten-year internal inquiry into links between its properties and slavery”. I wonder - When did this inquiry commence? When will it conclude? Who are the members of the inquiry? Does it accept external submissions? Does it even exist?

Curious Case of the Disappearing Display

NT exploited the 2007 bicentenary of Britain’s “abolition of the slave trade” to claim the moral high ground and made great play of a special exhibition it mounted at Penrhyn Castle. A Trust property built by the Douglas-Pennant family who made a fortune from their Jamaican slave plantations which they re-invested in exploiting Welsh slate quarrymen, provoking what remains Britain’s longest ever industrial dispute. On 11.12.2006 the National Trust obtained £45,700 from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) to mount a permanent exhibition at the Castle entitled, “Sugar and Slate – The Penrhyn Connection”. Tipped off that NT had duplicitously ditched the exhibition, in 2016 I investigated and emailed Martin Buckridge of HLF who confirmed that permanence was a condition of that grant and, “It is clear that at the time of your enquiry and for a period beforehand, the permanent exhibition was not on public display”. All sorts of feeble excuses followed and ultimately only a fragment of the original exhibition was remounted in an out-building but this was sufficient to satisfy both NT and HLF. Tokenism at its most cynical!

NT doesn’t like exhibiting inconvenient truths, they upset resident aristocrats and spoil the aesthetics of the Country House experience. As Andrew Loukes, an NT “House & Collection Manager”, told the Financial Times, “The more alien paraphernalia that you introduce into these spaces, the more you take away from their power to impress as historic interiors.” What a give away! - NT is concerned only to present the aristocratic perspective. Playing cat and mouse with critics, NT makes token concessions when forced but retrenches when no-one’s looking.

Inconvenient Truths

Clevedon Court is a grand north Somerset country pile and the NT handbook explains, “The house was bought by Abraham Elton in 1709 and is still the well-loved family home of the Eltons today”. Abraham Elton was a slave trading Mayor of Bristol and all three of his sons invested in slave ships. Throughout the eighteenth century the Elton’s received money from their Jamaican plantations and the refining of slave produced sugar. At their peak the family owned a quarter of the land around Bristol. They handed Clevedon Court over to the NT in the 1960’s in lieu of death duties but were permitted to remain in residence. In the 1980’s the Trust published a short guide to Clevedon Court which briefly referred to its slave trade connections but this was excised from the 2003 edition that was co-written by Julia Elton (sister of the current Baronet, Sir Charles Abraham Grierson Elton). Asked about her family’s involvement in the slave trade by Andy Beckett of the Guardian, Julia Elton insisted, “They were fighting for Bristol, you could argue that they were giving an economic opportunity to the local peasantry...”

After listening to an NT guide who, “Eagerly describes the Eltons’ successes as 18^th-century industrialists, property dealers and shipping magnates” Becket asked,

“Were they slave traders as well?” “We don’t know that they were,” - “the guide says tersely” - “There’s no proof”.

In reality, there’s ample proof and when NT again revised and reprinted its Clevedon Guidebook there remained no mention of slavery.

Time for a Change

Black Lives Matter achieved more in one afternoon by toppling Colston’s statue than many years of Bristol Council reviews and committee meetings. A child visiting Charlecote Hall recently suggested an Indian sword’s label should be changed from, “Taken During the Indian Mutiny” to “Stolen during the First War of Indian Independence”. The National Trust’s perverse misrepresentation of history demands immediate action not nebulous promises of internal review and future reform.

Christopher Draper

(no. 2 in a 4-part NT series, August 2020)

 

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