Caught in the Culture Wars / Times Magazine 15.5.22

I’m fortunate. For my visit to 20 Forthlin Road, the tiny Liverpool council house where Paul McCartney grew up, I’m accompanied by McCartney’s younger brother, Mike, and Hilary McGrady, Director-General of the National Trust which owns the so-called ‘Birthplace of the Beatles’. When Bob Dylan turned up out of the blue several years ago, he was told he had to join an official tour.

Mike McCartney - tall, thin and silver-haired at 78 - relates how his mother, Mary, decorated the living room with carpet offcuts and mismatched ends of Sanderson wallpaper rolls. When she died of breast cancer a year after they arrived in 1955 their father, Jim, a cotton salesman earning barely £10 a week, had to raise his two boys alone. To occupy them he bought Paul, then 14, a guitar and Mike, 12, a drum set that “fell off the back of a lorry”. 

Paul met John Lennon at a church fete and joined his group, the Quarrymen, which became the Beatles. Mike would also have joined had he not broken his arm at a scout camp - he instead formed a comedy trio called The Scaffold which produced the 1960s hit Lily the Pink. By the time the family moved to the upmarket Wirral in 1964 it had to do a midnight flit because Beatlemania was in full spate.

I admire the parlour where McCartney and Lennon wrote the songs that changed musical culture for ever; the black bakelite telephone which Mary needed as a midwife, and was the envy of the street; and the drainpipe down which the teenage boys would shimmy at night. 

But the focus of our attention today is the tiny upstairs loo, for Mike recently let slip that he and Paul used to doodle on the walls while doing their business - Mike on the left-hand wall because he was right-handed and Paul on the opposite wall because he was a southpaw. “You didn’t have I-phones in those days,” says Mike. “You just sat on the bog, bored out of your head, and doodled.” 

Neither brother can remember what they drew, but the National Trust is finding out. It has commissioned a specialist to remove several layers of later paintwork, a square inch a day over several months, to reveal Paul McCartney’s earliest artwork. “I’m fascinated to know what we did,” says Mike. “I’m uber excited about it,” says McGrady.

Ostensibly we are here to promote the Trust’s plan to commemorate Paul’s 80th birthday, and the 60th anniversary of the Beatles’ debut single Love Me Do, by inviting unknown musicians to perform their own songs in the famous parlour. It will then broadcast the ‘Forthlin Sessions’ on digital media.

But another, unstated reason is, I suspect, for McGrady and the Trust to regain the initiative after two years of seemingly relentless adversity. 

During that time they have found themselves on the front line of Britain’s escalating ‘culture wars’, accused by right-wing critics of rampant “wokery”, kowtowing to the Black Lives Matter movement, dumbing down, turning the Trust’s stately homes into “kiddies theme parks” and disdaining its traditional membership. The Trust was also hit so hard by the Covid lockdowns that at times McGrady doubted whether Europe’s largest conservation charity could even survive.

She readily acknowledges that the past two years have been by far the toughest of her career. She has been crucified in certain newspapers. She has received death threats and other abuse. She admits she has at times been reduced to tears - “One hundred per cent. Of course, of course.” At one point she had to hire a public relations company because the Trust was under “very significant attack”.

But she believes the Trust has now weathered the proverbial storm. She says membership and donations have rebounded to near record levels. And she has no intention of capitulating to attacks that she considers unwarranted. “So much of the criticism I got was unfounded. It was just not true.”  

She is determined to press ahead with her plans for “levelling up”, by which she means broadening the Trust’s appeal far beyond its traditional white, middle-class, middle-aged membership (when she asks the make-up woman preparing her for a Times photoshoot what she thinks of the Trust, the woman replies: “Old buildings and fusty”). 

To do that she is highlighting its natural, cultural and urban treasures as well as (but certainly not instead of) its stately homes and country houses.

Forthlin Road is a prime example. A tiny council house in the middle of a city, it is the polar opposite of a stately home but generates global interest. Tours are booked up far in advance. Tourists from around the world gather outside all day long. “This project is going to reach a whole bunch of new people who would never normally think of the National Trust,” McGrady says of the ‘Forthlin Sessions’.

She points out that when her predecessor, Martin Drury, purchased Forthlin Road in 1995 he “came in for a huge amount of abuse because it absolutely didn’t fit with the notion of what the National Trust was all about, big stately homes etcetera. This is the complete antithesis to that but he absolutely had the right instinct.” 

She clearly draws strength from his example.

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McGrady is not a conventional Director-General of the Trust. Open, energetic and personable, the 56-year-old half-marathon runner is the first not educated at a top university, not drawn from the ranks of the great and good, and not from England.

She was born in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, in 1966, the daughter of a working-class Protestant  builder. She grew up under the “big dark cloud” of the Troubles, from which she sought refuge  by roaming the hills near her home. When she was 15 her (segregated) school took her to Mount Stewart, a magnificent National Trust property beside Strangford Lough. “I was completely blown away by the art,” she says. 

She duly went on to art college where she met Frank McGrady, a Roman Catholic from staunchly nationalist West Belfast. To the initial dismay of both sets of parents they married (and now have three adult children). McGrady worked for a drinks company, Diageo, and then for an arts charity, until the Trust bought Divis Mountain overlooking West Belfast in 2004.

For decades the army had used the mountain as a surveillance post. The Trust turned it into a shared green space for Catholics and Protestants alike. “To acquire Divis on the hard edge of the city was extraordinary, a really audacious move on the Trust’s behalf,” McGrady says. She was so impressed that she joined what she had previously regarded as a “stuffy English organisation” as its regional director.

She worked her way up through the Trust’s ranks until, in 2018, she replaced Dame Helen Ghosh as Director-General. Her pitch for the top job was to ensure the Trust was “truly accessible” to all - rich and poor, urban and rural, black and white. She cites the Trust’s motto -  “Nature, beauty, history. For everyone, for ever” - with an emphasis on the word ‘everyone’.

“Some people definitely perceived the Trust to be a cold house, or an organisation that was not for them,” she acknowledges. “I myself didn’t think the Trust was an organisation for me until I was in my late teens.” 

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      The year 2020 was supposed to be a landmark for the National Trust. It expected to celebrate its 125th anniversary, reach six million members and attract a record number of visitors to its 550 historic houses, castles, monuments, parks and gardens, 620,000 acres of open country and 780 miles of coastline.

McGrady also intended to embark on a campaign that echoed the original vision of Octavia Hill, one of the Trust’s three founders - restoring nature and providing access to wide open spaces for the inhabitants of Britain’s crowded cities. “We all need space,” Hill wrote in 1875. “Unless we have it we cannot reach that sense of quiet in which whispers of better things come to us gently”. By contrast, the Trust’s quest to preserve stately homes only began in earnest after World War Two.

To that end McGrady unveiled plans to make the Trust carbon neutral by 2030, plant 20 million trees, restore carbon-absorbing uplands and low-lying wetlands, clean up rivers and beaches, and open 20 ‘green corridors’ leading from Britain’s inner cities out to open countryside.

Then Covid hit. The Trust had to close its stately homes with their cafes and gift shops. New members dried up. Old members did not renew. Membership plunged by half a million, and the Trust lost £222 million in revenues - a third of its usual total - that financial year.

“There was a moment when I thought I might be the Director-General who oversees the demise of the National Trust,” says McGrady, who had to lay off 1,700 of the Trust’s 9,500 employees. Her eyes still well up at the memory. “It was without a doubt the worst moment of my entire career - just awful.”

But her troubles were only just beginning. That May Minneapolis police killed George Floyd. Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests erupted across Britain as well as the US. In that febrile atmosphere the Trust published a report revealing that 93 of its historic properties had links, however tangential, to slavery and colonialism. They included Chartwell, Winston Churchill’s home, Bateman’s, Rudyard Kipling’s home, and William Wordsworth’s home in Cumbria.

The inevitable outcry from traditionalists was further fuelled by the leak of an internal Trust document that appeared dismissive of its historic houses, though McGrady insists it merely explored possible options for attracting more visitors to those properties that ranged from the safe to the “outrageous”. 

The document’s proposals included junking an “outdated mansion experience…serving a loyal but dwindling audience”. It suggested some stately homes be “repurposed”, and talked of the need to “flex our mansion offer to create the more active, fun and creative experiences that our audiences will be looking for in future”.

After that it was open season on the Trust - at least for conservatives and Conservatives who had long suspected it of becoming excessively ‘woke’, politicised and dumbed down. 

Newspaper headlines asked: “Is the National Trust turning into a national joke?’, and proclaimed ‘Wanted: A National Trust leader who can be trusted to love its heritage all over again’. 

Commentators complained that “the Tweedies are being pushed out by the Trendies”; that the Trust had “allowed ideology to run riot”; and that it had been “rolled over by extremists who care nothing for the membership or the collections”. One wrote that it should “spare us its Dad-dancing efforts to look relevant and hip.”

Tory MPs joined the chorus. They called the Trust’s leadership “clueless”, “out of touch” and “all over the place”. Bendor Grosvenor, the art historian, accused it of “one of the most damaging assaults ever seen on the UK’s art historical expertise.” Some 6,000 past and present members launched a pressure group called Restore Trust to “get the National Trust back to its real mission”.

McGrady was dismayed by the vitriol. “Any kind of abuse like I got, directed at anyone, is unacceptable in my view,” she says.

She was also “shocked at the lack of willingness to understand what was going on”. She says she met her critics, but they refused to listen. “I don’t think the criticism was justified because the vast majority of it was completely lacking in understanding of what we were trying to do.”

She says the slavery report was merely an attempt to explore the history of the National Trust’s properties - “essentially a piece of desk research that would inform what comes next.” Properties like Dyrham Park in Gloucestershire, which were built with the proceeds of slavery, would include that information in their displays. Properties whose links to slavery or imperialism were marginal would probably not.

McGrady regrets only the timing of the report. It had actually been commissioned in 2018, and was not a response to the BLM protests, she says. Moreover, given the Trust’s financial crisis, “I had so many other things to worry about that we didn’t have the capacity to cope with the media storm…In a normal world I’d have had time to help people understand why we were doing it, the relevance of it, why it’s not criticism, why it’s important to tell the whole history of our places.”

Asked why the report attracted such flack, McGrady exclaims: “Oh, I’d love you to tell me that, because every other organisation has been doing this work. English Heritage has been doing it for years. Kew Gardens was doing it at the same time. Every museum out there is doing this work.”

She thinks one problem was that the report challenged the idealised view of English stately homes portrayed in television costume dramas like Downton Abbey, Upstairs Downstairs and Brideshead Revisited. For traditionalists the National Trust “epitomises what a lot of people consider to be the halcyon days of Britain”, and “anything that vaguely poked at that” was bound to upset them.

 McGrady also believes the Trust was caught in a “vortex” of wider issues including Britain’s political polarisation following Brexit, the BLM protests, Covid grumpiness and the way that  newspaper stories about the Trust attract readers because of its size and iconic status. “It was not just what we did that vexed people,” she says.

She flatly denies the Trust has become woke. “It’s such a ridiculous term, wokery. No-one has yet defined what they mean by woke. I’m interested in bringing nature, beauty and history to the nation, and I don’t even know what ‘woke’ means in that context.”

 She flatly denies the Trust is dumbing down. “Absolutely not,” she says. “This is one that really does wind me up because there’s some sort of assumption that because you’re trying to reach different audiences you have to dumb down. Where’s the evidence behind that? We have more curators than five years ago.  We do more research than we ever did before. We’re really committed to in-depth understanding of our history. That’s the opposite of dumbing down.”

And she flatly denies that the Trust is focussing on outdoor spaces and city dwellers at the expense of its stately homes. “Two-thirds of our spend goes on our country houses and our collections,” she says. “I’ve spent more than any previous Director-General. We have more visitors to our country houses than we’ve ever had before because we’re working really hard. I’m passionate about getting people into our houses.” 

She adds: “It’s not a zero sum game…I don’t want to take anything away. I want to add and enrich.”

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In March last year the Charity Commission rejected a complaint that the Trust had breached its charitable status by publishing its slavery report.

Last October, at the Trust’s annual general meeting in Harrogate, the Restore Trust insurgency backed six candidates for election to the 36-member council. Three were elected, but one disassociated himself from Restore Trust and another was backed by the Trust as well. 

McGrady also cites an internal survey showing that only 12 per cent of the Trust’s members felt let down or disappointed by the slavery report. “It was a really small number.”

She believes the worst is now past, and while Covid nearly bankrupted the Trust it has proved an unexpected boon in another sense. The public could not visit its stately homes during the lockdowns, but it flocked to places like Snowdonia, Exmoor and the Peak District in record numbers. “People took advantage of our open spaces in their millions,” she says. “We saw numbers at our outdoor sites that we’ve never seen before.” They parked badly and dropped litter, but “I was absolutely thrilled because an awful lot of people came to us for the first time.”

McGrady believes the Trust really proved its worth during the pandemic, and says that is reflected in the statistics. During the last financial year it raised a record £108 million in donations. Membership has rebounded from 5.3 to 5.72 million, and should reach a record six million within a year. “For all the letters of criticism we got, we also got bagfuls of letters saying how grateful people were to the Trust throughout Covid, that we brought them sanity and solace and a sense of escape,” she says.

She believes her efforts to reach out beyond the Trust’s traditional base and appeal to city dwellers were vindicated by Covid. “The vast majority of our members are really happy with the line of travel. That’s why they’re joining. That’s why they’re maintaining their support and giving us their money…We have to change carefully, but we have to keep changing because the demographics of this country are changing.”

The Trust is now pressing ahead with its plans for carbon neutrality and green corridors. It is seeking greater diversity in its workforce and membership, though McGrady admits it has a long way to go. And it is trying to broaden its appeal with city-based projects like the restoration of the Victorian Moseley Road Baths in Birmingham, and developing or protecting green spaces in cities from Newcastle and Nottingham to Bournemouth and Plymouth.

From Liverpool McGrady and I drive to another such project in the old industrial heartland of Manchester. There, in Castlefield, the Trust has enlisted the support of various local partners to convert a long-abandoned Victorian railway viaduct into an urban ‘sky park’ - a smaller version of New York’s High Line. 

“We’re bringing something into the heart of the city,” McGrady says proudly as we watch workmen laying paths and planting trees between the viaduct’s rusty steel girders. “If we want to reach more people we have to go to where they are…People are realising there’s more to the National Trust than country houses, important as country houses are.” 

Mancunians are evidently delighted. Of the 330 replies to a public consultation exercise the Trust conducted, all but one backed the project.