Who do you Trust?

Visitors to Thomas Hardy’s birthplace in Dorset, a small thatched cottage built by Hardy’s great-grandfather, used to be met by a bare house and a guide book. Now they are greeted by a fire in the grate and a curator at the parlour table, dispensing tea and cakes and chatting about the author’s childhood. Those irritated at such intrusion can walk through the house and enjoy the garden undisturbed. Most are entranced.

When I arrived at the National Trust as chairman two years ago, I received two clear messages. One was to relieve its 330 houses open to the public from the ‘dead hand’ of the Trust’s house style, and the other was to cut the suffocation of its centralised bureaucracy. Both were born of past necessity — to rescue the houses from the parlous condition in which most had been received from often destitute private owners, and to put in place controls against runaway costs. In other words, the need was to lighten up. The houses were too aloof and too restricted in their appeal.

Needless to say, I could now draw a Bateman cartoon of the reaction from some Trust conservatives to the chairman who dared move a teaspoon from the ducal sideboard. The art critic Stephen Bayley has recently paraded himself as a fastidious blimp, appalled at the idea that the working classes should enjoy a visit to a National Trust property. In the Times last week, he said that taking down ropes and allowing people to stray into upstairs bedrooms was ‘queasy voyeurism’ and ‘soft porn’. The offending property, Berrington Hall in Herefordshire, will disappoint the crowds who may flock to see such titillation. Bayley clearly has personal issues that are beyond the Trust’s capacity to meet.