How Easter went missing from the National Trust’s great egg hunt...
THERE was controversy yesterday after the word ‘Easter’ vanished from the title of the National Trust’s traditional egg hunt.
The Prime Minister, the Archbishop of York and Jeremy Corbyn led criticism of the dropping of the word from a children’s egg hunt on the charity’s properties. Theresa May, the daughter of a vicar, stressed the importance of Easter as a Christian festival after the chocolate egg hunt event appeared to have been rebranded as the Cadbury Egg Hunt, in reference to its sponsors. Archbishop of York Dr John Sentamu accused the chocolate giant of ‘spitting on the grave’ of its religious founder John Cadbury, a Quaker, and Mr Corbyn said it was ‘commercialisation gone a bit too far’. In reply, the National Trust said it was nonsense’ to say it had down‘ played the significance of Easter – although it also changed its website to add a more prominent mention of Easter in a page about the event. Cadbury said Easter was referred to in its campaigns and marketing. A spokesman said: We ‘ make it clear that it is an egg hunt, for families, at Easter.’ Cadbury, now owned by US food giant Kraft, has sponsored the annual egg hunt at Trust properties for ten years. It has previously been called an Easter Egg Trail but was promoted this year as the Cadbury Egg Hunt. Mrs May said: ‘I’m not just a vicar’s daughter, I’m a member of the National Trust as well. Easter’s important to me. It’s a very important festival for the Christian faith for millions around the world. So I think what the National Trust is doing is frankly just ridiculous.’ Mr Corbyn, also a Trust member, said: ‘I don’t think Cadbury should take over the name.’ Dr Sentamu said John Cadbury had been guided by his Christian faith, adding: ‘To drop Easter from Cadbury’s Easter Egg Hunt in my book is tantamount to spitting on the grave of Cadbury.’ A Church of England spokesman said: ‘This marketing campaign not only does a disservice to the Cadburys but also highlights the folly in airbrushing faith from Easter.’ Some National Trust members used Twitter to voice their disgust, with several saying they would cancel their membership. After criticism, the Trust changed a heading on its website from ‘Join the Cadbury Egg Hunts’ to ‘Join the Cadbury Egg Hunts this Easter.’ A spokesman said: ‘ We already had 13,000 mentions of Easter on our website but thought on reflection another one wouldn’t do any harm to further underline our commitment to Easter.’ A statement released by the charity said: ‘It’s nonsense to suggest the National Trust is downplaying the significance of Easter. Nothing could be further from the truth. We host a huge programme of events, activities and walks to bring families together to celebrate this very special time of year. ‘Our Easter events include our partnership with Cadbury, which has been running Easter Egg Hunts with us for ten years. They’ve proved consistently popular. ‘As part of its wider marketing activity at Easter, Cadbury will always lead on the branding and wording for its campaigns.’ A Cadbury spokesman said: ‘The word Easter is included a number of times across promotional materials, including our website, and even embossed on many of the eggs themselves. Our Easter partnership with the National Trust is also synonymous with Easter and we make it clear throughout materials that it is an egg hunt, for families, at Easter.’
JOHN Cadbury, the devout Quaker and founder of the great chocolate company, would be spinning in his grave.
His old firm has gone into partnership with the National Trust to produce a ruthless, over- commercialised Easter egg campaign.
Not that they call them Easter eggs. Instead, on huge posters at National Trust houses across the country, visitors are asked to ‘Join the Cadbury Egg Hunt’.
In previous years, the Trust called it the ‘Easter Egg Trail’. The Trust’s egg hunt posters also prominently advertise Cadbury Dairy Milk.
John Cadbury would surely be incensed that the Resurrection of Christ has been exploited for financial gain.
The Trust does say on some posters: ‘ Enjoy Easter fun at the National Trust.’ But otherwise, there is barely a mention of the most important Christian festival of all.
Damage
No wonder the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, said this week that this godless egg hunt is tantamount to ‘spitting on the grave of Cadbury’. Theresa May was equally trenchant in her criticism.
The National Trust desperately made some last-minute changes to its website yesterday when the row kicked off.
Instead of ‘Join the Cadbury Egg Hunt’, its promotional material said: ‘Join the Cadbury Egg Hunts this Easter.’ But the damage was done. Last month, I toured National Trust properties while researching a talk for the Charles Douglas-Home Memorial Lecture (named after a former editor of The Times).
It was entitled Betrayal Of Trust: How The National Trust Is Losing Its Way. At the time, those changes to promotional material hadn’t been made.
I’ll give you an example. At Prior Park near Bath, one of the great 18th- century landscapes in Britain, I photographed a National Trust poster that read: ‘Cadbury Egg Hunt at Prior Park, 14-17 April, 10am-4pm — Bunny’s been up to his old tricks again.
‘Go on a hunt for clues around the garden. Work out the password to receive a chocolatey prize. £2.50 per trail.’
So, no Easter, no Jesus, no Resurrection. My, how things have changed since John Cadbury, an observant Quaker, set up Cadbury’s as a tea and coffee business in Birmingham in 1824.
It soon evolved into a mighty chocolate empire, but the Cadbury family stayed true to their Christian faith.
John’s Quaker sons, George and Richard, housed their workers in the new garden village of Bournville.
The Cadbury factory, and the surrounding area, remained alcohol-free for a century, in line with the family’s austere, Christian beliefs.
All that went by the wayside when Cadbury merged with Schweppes in 1969. Any spiritual attachment to the Quaker Cadburys evaporated in 2010, when U. S. giant Mondelez International (formerly Kraft Foods) took over the firm — and turned it into yet another arm of its vast company.
Cadbury’s commercial tie-in with the National Trust is also symptomatic of the Trust’s headlong dumbing down and commercialisation over the past 16 years.
In a desperate bid for punters, Trust properties have been littered with illiterate signs, treating grown- ups like children with an allergy to history of all kinds.
Sublime country houses have been blighted by huge posters advertising the Trust’s events.
Railings next to the elegant, urn-topped gates at Prior Park are draped with a vast purple and white poster advertising that Cadbury Egg Hunt.
At Wimpole Hall, an 18thcentury pile in Cambridgeshire, the railings were hung last month with a huge poster advertising a night run.
At Osterley Park, an exceptional Robert Adam house in West London, an enormous green poster saying ‘We welcome dog walkers’ is a blot on the landscape.
I’m all for walking dogs and running around National Trust properties. But why destroy these exceptional landscapes when local dog walkers and runners already know they can freely do these things?
Recently, the Trust has been organising a special season of events highlighting the gay and lesbian histories of its houses, entitled Prejudice And Pride, ‘as part of the nation’s commemoration to mark 50 years since the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality’.
It’s all part of the handwringing agenda promoted by the National Trust’s Director General, Dame Helen Ghosh and her predecessor, Dame Fiona Reynolds.
Both were previously senior civil servants — Reynolds as director of the Women’s Unit in the Cabinet Office; Ghosh as Permanent Secretary at Defra.
Under them, the National Trust has become, as Sir Roy Strong, former director of the V& A, called it, ‘ the Blair government in exile’.
Indeed, it is increasingly a Disneyfied Kiddy World, where religion, facts, history and beauty fall victim to political correctness and emotional responses. At Prior Park, one fact-free information board says: ‘Think how each area of the garden makes you feel.’
In 2015, Dame Helen said National Trust houses had ‘so much stuff’ in them; so much, that at Ickworth House — an elegant, Georgian house in Suffolk — she temporarily replaced furniture in the library with beanbags.
Dame Helen is intent on turning the Trust into an ecocharity. She has said: ‘Extreme weather is the largest threat to our conservation work.’
Woeful
Under her leadership, the National Trust is producing a warped eco-vision of a world that has never existed — as it did last year in Thorneythwaite Farm in the Lake District, where it bought farmland for £200,000 above the guide price, without buying the farmhouse.
Bang go the chances of a sheep farmer buying both the land and farmhouse.
Now its 300 acres of land enter into the Trust’s fantasy version of the countryside, at the expense of farming practices that have carved out our beautiful landscapes.
Dame Helen has also suggested farming subsidies should prioritise wildflowers, bees and butterflies — rather than food production. But her job is not to save the environ- ment: it is to preserve beautiful buildings and landscapes.
In the rush to dumb down the Trust, intellectual standards have collapsed.
At Hughenden Manor in Buckinghamshire — the enchanting Victorian home of Benjamin Disraeli — I was given a woeful Trust pamphlet.
In one paragraph, there were three spelling mistakes: Isaac D’Israeli, the prime minister’s father, was called ‘ Isaace’; society was spelt ‘soceity’; and closely was spelt ‘closey’.
In the library, the guide reads: ‘Disraeli loved books and the library was the place where he relaxed and conducted his business affairs.’ A library for a man who loves books? I’d never have guessed.
Snobbish
This great prime minister is also reduced to the status of a snobbish social climber.
On the manor’s top floor, in ‘the Elevation Room’, we’re told, Disraeli, who started out as a solicitor’s clerk, was ‘very proud of his social climb’.
Again and again, the National Trust replaces history with childish fantasy. At Knightshayes Court in Devon, they put ‘ Dracula’s coffin’ on the billiard table at Halloween.
At Southwell Workhouse in Nottinghamshire, the Trust laid on a Victorian Workhouse Christmas — where you’re invited to ‘sing along with the pauper choir’.
At Gunby Hall, Lincolnshire, last year, the Trust put on Mystery At The Mansion. The 18th- century rooms were turned into versions of the various settings in Cluedo.
Actors were photographed as Miss Scarlet, Colonel Mustard and other Cluedo characters, and visitors were asked to decide who the murderer was.
The Trust’s childish world view is inevitably politically correct: backing downtrodden servants and attacking their wicked, posh overlords.
The Trust owns some of the finest houses, gardens and landscapes on earth.
But it has damaged them disastrously by drowning them in this commercial Kiddy World — where advertising trumps beauty, desire for money beats facts and political correctness conceals our great history.
In this grim parallel universe, where the eco-religion drowns out Christianity, Easter never stood a chance.