Books: Men from the Ministry

Histories of the heritage movement are legion. Sometimes they are the product of independent academic investigation, but often they are written by people who work for the organisations that they are writing about.

A footnote in Simon Thurley’s new book complains that histories of the National Trust are, as a result, often overly hagiographic. Yet his book also falls into that category.

Thurley, the chief executive of English Heritage, tells the story of how government took an increasing interest in the protection of monuments, buildings and other historic sites from the late Victorian period onwards.

Civil servants, ministers and parliamentarians all play prominent roles, and the story is punctuated by milestone pieces of legislation: the 1882 Ancient Monuments Act, its successor Act of 1913, and the Historic Buildings and Ancient Monuments Act of 1953.

The latter is the point at which the government finally settled on a mixed economy approach to heritage protection, limiting its own acquisitions to the sorriest monuments and leaving country houses to the care of private owners.

This is a book about heritage politics, which also has a political motive. Thurley wishes to restore the reputation of the faceless men from the ministry, so often written out of the history of conservation by those who would rather dwell on the more colourful accounts of the earliest campaign groups.

In doing so, he wishes to remind government of the value of heritage, defined here as a “national collection” of monuments and historic buildings.

Heritage has shrunk from the national political agenda, Thurley maintains, reaching its nadir with the Millennium Dome and its whitewashing of the past in favour of a New Labour vision of the future.

Political fashions

Thurley sees more welcome developments of late. The Olympic opening ceremony showed a country “comfortable with its historical roots”, while government departments have now been forced to replace their New Labour-branded corporate logos with the more traditional Royal Arms.

This swing in the pendulum of political fashion could have implications for the perception of the National Heritage Collection, Thurley notes mysteriously, as if logos are a bellwether for government attitudes to heritage.

A series of thematic chapters explores the shifting limits of state intervention in the built heritage.

We learn of the development of the Office of Works’ responsibilities for archaeological sites, and the period of “collecting” ruins that followed the 1913 act.

This built a national collection to rival the artworks hanging on the walls of the national museums and galleries (which came into being somewhat earlier). But there was constant tension about which types of site to protect and the degree to which the state should interfere with individuals’ property rights.

English perspective

Financial constraints also limited how much government could take full responsibility for places, and debates about whether or not to charge for admission have been perennial since at least the 1840s.

The story finishes in 1983, with the creation of English Heritage as a “next steps” agency, continuing the work of the ministry at arm’s length from government.

(Despite the subtitle, this is a book largely written from the English experience.)
The book seeks to rescue the men from the ministry from the condescension of posterity, accentuating their importance in the saving of built heritage.

This sets up something of a dichotomy between the public sector on the one side, and private or voluntary endeavour on the other. Such a distinction is very evident today, in a world where government has reached a size far beyond anything that the Victorian statesmen who feature in the book could ever have imagined.

Yet 100 years ago, such distinctions were perhaps not as stark. Sir Robert Hunter, solicitor to the General Post Office, was one of the most senior civil servants in the country.

His spare hours, however, were spent campaigning for heritage and open spaces.

Although he is mentioned just twice in this book, as well as being a senior government official, Hunter agitated for the creation of the National Trust, and served as its first chairman from 1895 to his death in November 1913.

Hunter also prepared the 1907 National Trust Act, which does earn the briefest mention as being “integral to the national system of heritage protection”.

State involvement

The story of the emergence of the National Trust is complementary to that of the growth of state involvement in heritage, as first commissioner of works William Ormsby-Gore told the trust’s AGM in 1935 on the eve of the establishment of the country houses scheme.

Nevertheless, the author’s intentions are to reiterate the value of government intervention in heritage at a time when English Heritage is under severe financial pressure.

Thurley has written a history of his own organisation in order to make a political point about the relative importance of heritage compared with other parts of “culture”. It is an entertaining yarn, full of colour and a cast of lively characters.

Yet one suspects that the full independent account of the emergence of heritage as a public concern is still to be written.

Ben Cowell is the regional director, East of England, at the National Trust. He is the author of Sir Robert Hunter: Co-founder and ‘Inventor’ of the National Trust and The Heritage Obsession