Dame Helen and a series of controversies
THE Trust has been embroiled in a string of rows during Dame Helen Ghosh’s time director-general. They include:
MARCH 2015: Dame Helen says that she wants its stately homes to have fewer exhibits because rooms often have ‘so much stuff’ that it puts off all but the middle classes.
APRIL 2015: The trust enrages heritage experts by replacing antique furniture dating back to 1820 from the library at Ickworth House in Suffolk and replacing it with four beanbags.
SEPTEMBER 2016: The charity is accused of using ‘Mafia tactics’ by buying Lake District farmland at an inflated price, thwarting locals who had hoped to keep it as a working farm.
APRIL 2017: It is accused of ‘airbrushing faith’ after posters at National Trust houses asked children to ‘Join the Cadbury Egg Hunt’. In previous years the conservation charity called it the ‘Easter Egg Trail’.
AUGUST 2017: Volunteers mutiny after the National Trust makes them wear gay pride badges to mark 0 years since the decriminalisation of homosexuality. The Trust is also accused of seeking ‘cheap publicity’ for ‘outing’ Robert Wyndham Ketton-Cremer – the late writer who gave Felbrigg Hall to the Trust in 1969 – as gay.