The National Trust and the Long View
On 26th October 2022, Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell in their Podcast The Rest is Politics discussed the National Trust. Unfortunately Stewart got a number of things wrong. I’ve addressed them here. I’ve also reflected on two central challenges that the Trust currently faces; GHG emissions and the distinction between what is past and the writing of history. This difference isn’t understood by Restore Trust, nor indeed by the former Culture Secretary, Oliver Dowden.
The National Trust, the Long View and Why the Difference Between History and the Past Matters
Rory,
Interesting Podcast, partly covering the National Trust. Whilst you were right about some things, you were wrong about several aspects of the Trust. I have run two National Trust properties, so I write from a reasonably informed position. Alastair was quite right to point out the 55 Tufton Street connections behind Restore Trust. Also, right to note the simplifying and amplifying effects of social media and digitised traditional media, which have been exploited effectively by Restore Trust and the New Culture Forum.
Land. You to Alastair, "The National Trust, as you say, owns an enormous amount of the U.K.'s land mass". Wrong; by area, the Trust owns under 2% of the land of Wales, Northern Ireland and England, and 2% is not an enormous amount. Of course, the crude measure of area is not helpful since the Trust’s holdings of land and coastline are often of historical significance, great in quality rather than in great quantity. It’s interesting though to compare enduring social and cultural value (the bedrock of the Trust) with the conventional financial valuation of the holdings other large landowners like Grosvenor, the Church or the Oxford and Cambridge Colleges. It should be noted that the failure to understand comprehensive definitions of enduring value is a signal failure of HMT and HMG.
Membership and Volunteers. You to Alastair, "The Trust is divided between volunteers, who love telling stories about the houses and members, who are frankly embarrassed by them.…" Wrong. There are currently about 6 million members and about 50,000 volunteers. The volunteers, who are part of the interpretation and presentation teams at the properties, have carefully scripted and researched material to deliver. They may enjoy what they do but they are by no means story inventing freelancers; you trivialise what is carefully thought through communication. Further, many volunteers are not involved in frontline interpretation at all but work in the gardens, landscape and wildlife conservation.
I know from running properties that the vast majority of members use the Trust as a source of recreation, refreshment and interest. They are happily indifferent and benignly supportive of the Trust's overall approach. Were it not so, and if embarrassment at the houses were widespread, there would be numerical evidence for their dissatisfaction. As it is, the Trust has added circa 2 million members over the last six or seven years; had those people joined to express dissatisfaction or become dissatisfied, that would be evident either in direct communication to the Trust or through Resolutions brought to the AGM. In fact, only about 2% of members vote at the AGM; there is a very low level of engagement with matters of policy amongst the membership. You represent the Restore Trust view as having much more support than the evidence bears out. 127,000 people voted in the Resolutions at the 2022 AGM just passed, and in each of them, the Board's recommended position was supported by a majority of circa 2:1. The Restore position is no more than a weak whisper voiced by approximately 0.75% of the total membership. That voice sounds much louder than it actually is, courtesy of the amplification, simplification and distortions of Tufton Street, the Spectator and the Telegraph.
Robert Clive. What you termed an 'attack' on Robert Clive at Powis is, in truth, good curatorial and scholarly practice, providing evidence to balance the account of his involvement with the Empire and explain the presence of the collections. I quote: “Employed by the East India Company between 1744 and 1767. Through Clive, the Company deployed its armies to forcibly invade and conquer the Indian subcontinent exploiting and financially profiting from the wealth and rich natural resources of India's southern regions. This began the British Empire in India, meanwhile ensuring a fortune for Clive”. I would say that is correct (apart from the grammar.) William Dalrymple and others have also been scathing about Clive's tenure as Governor of Bengal and, thus, the build-up to the 1770 famine. You are mistaken to term this rebalancing an ‘attack’.
The Significance of the Trust
The N.T. is an important organisation, but for reasons you hardly touched on. Its size, at six million members from England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, makes it unique; no other country has a comparable conservation charity supported by such a large percentage of the population. When I first worked for the Trust in 1980, running the Museum of Childhood at Sudbury Hall, the members were 1 in 50 of the population; today, they are 1 in 10. The World Wildlife Fund, for example, which is international, has five million members. There is no other organisation with a comparable engagement with land, landscape and the built and natural environments here or anywhere else. Also, although not acquired to provide a comprehensive material record of the development of the U.K. (I include the National Trust for Scotland here), those holdings have a remarkable time span; the Trust can offer, directly and indirectly, a connection to every period of U.K. history and can often add to our understanding of its most significant turning points.
By any account, it has been tremendously successful and a quietly effective collector operating on a scale that puts the most acquisitive aristocrat in his pomp firmly in the shade. It has a unique status and significance achieved through continuous evolution, astute leadership and ambition; it touches the Nation and its hugely varied population at so many points. It might seem odd to describe what sometimes feels like a lumbering behemoth of an organisation as ambitious, but the strap-line, 'For everyone, for ever' is breathtaking in its scope. It is also the source of two significant challenges for the Trust.
Restore Trust. The Restore position is confused, but it is muddled in an interesting way. It would be wrong to dismiss it as simply mistaken or unimportant because it is shared by a small minority. Restore, and their acolytes elide the difference between the past, which is a series of unique and unrepeatable events and history where patterns are detected, effects are linked to causes and evidence is assembled into a narrative. While the past is the material of history and history is about the past, it is not the past. Restore and others conflate this difference by saying that history is fixed and should not be rewritten. I quote from their website; "Discussing the slavery report and the recent re-writing of history by National Trust management....". They imply that rewriting this apparently fixed past is somehow, therefore, disrespectful and dishonest. Moreover, any re-thinking is, therefore, politically motivated. Of course, the only credible position is to see history as always plural and to understand that history is always historiography.
In former times, the Trust has played into the idea that history is singular, seeing itself in some way, as in loco patricio, often taking over from the aristocratic owner and acting as caretaker or guardian but with next to no corporate presence; the presentational equivalent of Adam Smith's 'invisible hand'. The Trust used to pretend that looking after a house and its estate and opening the gates and the doors was a neutral act, only making the self-evident available to the public. What so upsets the Restore clique is that the Trust is slowly emerging into a more intellectually credible position where a given history is always seen as an assembly of evidence, always contingent.
It is unlikely that the Trust will become, in any true sense, a public historian; the balance will probably always favour presentation over interpretation. However, at the heart of the Trust's civic purpose and the basis of its informal contract with the Nation, is the idea of access for everyone. The 2021 Census tells us that 10 million of the 60 million in England, Wales and Northern Ireland were born elsewhere. Of the 195 nations of the world, 194 are represented in this contemporary population; everyone starts to mean everywhere.
This represents the first challenge for the Trust because to be available 'for everyone' means moving from merely allowing access to supporting understanding and engagement. For a significant portion of the Trust's holdings, that means engaging with the U.K.'s long history of colonial occupation and Empire; of the 10 million, nearly 10% were born in India. Many visitors will have no interest in the Cuba Gooding, Jr. demand in Jerry Maguire "Show me the money", but many will, and the Trust has a duty of care to make enquiry into the origins of its holdings possible for its members and customers. Recognising the cultural complexity of the U.K. is to venture into the territory of contested histories, but equally, it is an acknowledgement of reality. It is a reality that Restore & Co dislike, but it is a move in complete alignment with the Trust's purpose. It is also essential for building future audiences.
The second challenge centres on the other half of the strap-line 'forever'. In the broader context of the planet's climate emergency, the Trust possesses few powerful levers, yet the variety and geographical distribution of the estate mean it is touched everywhere by global change, and it is often literally in the eye of the storm. The Trust's first response has been to declare it will become 'carbon neutral' by 2030 “By 2030 we'll be carbon net-zero across our own emissions and those created by our supply chain and investments…" This sounds good, but it is not. To be truly carbon neutral, the Trust would have to take fully into account indirect value chain emissions, known as Scope 3 emissions. The USA Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) describes Scope 3 emissions as "the result of activities from assets not owned or controlled by the reporting organisation, but that the organisation indirectly impacts in its value chain." Scope 3 emissions are a real problem for commercial companies because they are out of their direct control and can represent the largest portion of their greenhouse gas emissions inventory.
This poses an interesting question for the N.T. since the emissions generated by visitors travelling to the properties are by far the most significant contributor to the Trust's GHG burden. If it takes the 'forever' element of the mission statement seriously, it will include these Scope 3 emissions in its new zero strategy. Currently, it does not, saying, in effect, that 'visit carbon' is 'off balance sheet'. That might make a certain sense for a manufacturer with little or no control over how its products are used, but it makes no sense for the Trust, where it can directly respond to the GHG emissions central to its operation. The NT has it in its power to offset its Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions through land management, principally forestation.
The Long View
Both of the responses I have suggested above to the challenges have the same philosophical core; taking the human-centred long view of society. We all understand how difficult it is for our species to take a deep-time perspective and how that failure threatens our existence. This is not to say that the Trust might suddenly become a campaigning organisation, nor that it should distort property presentation with a crude morality. It is, however, to assert that the N.T. is uniquely placed to engage with intergenerational issues deeply felt (but not always articulated) by a significant fraction of the U.K. population, specifically how we build resilience across the land, landscape and the built and natural environments of the country. Or, put another way, how do we take a deep time view and cease to make our future toxic?
Stephen Feber
London, November 2022
07515 338535