A very British dispute
ONE BY ONE, they tackle the steeply winding path to Penrhyn Castle, pausing halfway to admire the view over a sparkling blue sea. Extended families grapple with pushchairs and picnic cool boxes; there are dapper older gentlemen in panama hats, and panting labradors. A blackboard at the entrance advertises traditional games every Thursday, while the gift shop is a soothing vision of gardening tools, tea towels and jars of chutney. As Eleanor Harding, the National Trust’s thoughtful young assistant curator for Wales, enters the castle’s ornate library, a volunteer guide says brightly: “No negative comments today!”
Over the past year, the trust has attracted its fair share of those. An institution best known for stately homes, scones and bracing walks has been plunged into an unlikely culture war over how the history it is charged with preserving for the nation should be interpreted.
Years of grumbling about efforts to move with the times – or, as a leaked internal document last summer put it, improve on an “outdated mansion experience” – erupted into a full-blown row in September last year over a report tracing its properties’ connections to colonialism and slavery. Published after a summer of Black Lives Matter protests, during which the statue of a slaver was pushed into Bristol harbour and Winston Churchill’s statue on Whitehall was boarded up for its protection, the report brought together three years of work exploring the histories of 93 estates. Some were built on the proceeds of slavery – Penrhyn’s original owners made their fortune from sugar plantations in Jamaica – while others had been home to abolitionists. Powis Castle on the English-Welsh border made the list for holding spoils of war brought back by the military commander Clive of India, while Rudyard Kipling’s former Sussex home earned its entry for his writings on empire. But it was the inclusion of Churchill’s home at Chartwell, Kent, on grounds including his early opposition to independence for India, that really put the cat among the pigeons.
“A clique of powerful, privileged liberals must not be allowed to rewrite our history in their image,” thundered 28 members of the Common Sense Group of Tory backbenchers, a rightwing grouping founded to counter what it regards as “woke” thinking, in a letter to the Daily Telegraph accusing the trust of having “tarnished one of Britain’s greatest sons”. The former Conservative cabinet minister Tina Stowell, who was chair of the Charity
