Sometimes, beyond the scones and sconces, there rises a sense that the National Trust is, as a friend sorrowfully remarked, “going a bit RSPCA”. It isn’t just the proliferation of unnecessary signs and exhortations to feel a particular way, or the departing leader Dame Helen Ghosh cooing: “A number of people still find our houses irrelevant to their lives.” That last, by the way, is an odd thing to say when Downton Abbey and Poldark get lapped up by every class and background. Who wants dreary relevance when you are offered escapist fantasies about going a-scything with 18th-century Cornish hunks or being snubbed by Maggie Smith in a lace jabot?
I have loved the National Trust, paid subs, roamed its houses, eaten its flapjacks and refrained from wincing at the naffer bits of the Sutton Hoo visitor centre. I venerate Enterprise Neptune’s protection of the coastline. But I jib at its latest wannabe-cool bit of self-righteousness, not least because it is embarrassingly allied to a cause I was out supporting for decades before it.
For the trust has leapt on to the footplate of gay liberation, and is riding along tooting the horn deafeningly and waving a rainbow flag. And its methods are neither fair nor graceful. At the 17th-century Felbrigg Hall in Norfolk, loyal volunteers were ordered, on pain of being put on backroom duties, to wear a rainbow badge, signifying welcome for LGBTQ visitors. This is not because previously the mild and gentle volunteers used to drive gays away with pitchforks and crucifixes, but because of the trust’s “Prejudice and Pride” campaign to mark 50 years since the decriminalisation of male homosexuality.
Rainbows are issued at Felbrigg because, with barely contained glee, the trust “outed” the late owner of the hall, Robert Wyndham Ketton-Cremer, a former high sheriff and justice of the peace. His godchildren are distressed. They say there was no proof he was gay, certainly not on their visits, and that anyway “sexuality is a private matter”. Others have said his acquaintances knew but, it being illegal until two years before he died, the high sheriff never came out.
Now, in a rather soupy film narrated (obviously) by Stephen Fry, the trust speaks of the deceased gentleman’s scholarship, biographies, poetry and possible friendship with poets such as Auden. It states that he led a “free and expressive life”, nudge-nudge, before duty took over, and lived among “creative, unconventional people”. Among his books they gleefully found a copy of the Wolfenden report (look, he was a JP, and it was proposing a change in the law). The final proof the film proffers is that after his brother died, the squire left the family home to the trust “in the knowledge that he himself would never marry and that there would be no heirs”. So, Fry concludes, “we must celebrate our LGBTQ histories [and not let] past prejudice and discrimination go unchallenged”.
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The first instruction was that volunteers must wear rainbow badges or be taken off any “visitor-facing role”, with the unpleasant implication that they are not right-thinking, and thus might be unwelcomingly homophobic. The rule has been reversed, in rather panicked fashion, after a slew of newspaper letters threatening to withdraw support.
The whole thing grates because, to be honest, few outside Norfolk had heard of the squire of Felbrigg. But now this literary-minded, gentle, shy chap will be remembered only for the one thing he never publicly spoke of and may never even have exercised. And because sexuality draws primal curiosity, visitors to Felbrigg are implicitly coaxed to peer around, looking for pretty boys in paintings, phallic follies, suggestive chintzes . . .
The trust promises more LGBTQ events, “working with artists to create new exhibitions and installations to bring these stories to life and uncovering previously untold stories”. Hanbury Hall has 18th-century paintings suggestive of “chaotic love and desire and LGBTQ issues”, poor persecuted William Bankes fled from Kingston Lacy, there are tasty echoes of Virginia and Vita and Harold at Knole and Sissinghurst. Expect interactive exhibits by a “queer artist” in Hackney and podcasts by Clare Balding. Rainbow badges all round, lots of sexy publicity!
Meanwhile on my beloved Radio 4 (an auditory doppelgänger of the National Trust, some would unkindly say) trails for the BBC’s Gay Britannia season fill every gap: Armistead and The Archers, Lily Savage and Little Britain, Gareth Thomas and Stephen Tennant and Aids and Polari and gay-punk and persecution. Much is interesting (Against the Law had the story of Peter Wildeblood movingly interspersed with old men’s memories). But even if you have long supported gay and transgender rights, even if squads of your friends and idols are gay, the overkill can make you flinch.
There is a danger in coercive liberalism, one-note righteousness and the guilt-tripping of harmless guides as if they bore a share of blame for old oppression. Crassly reducing any human being to a sexuality, posthumously enlisting him or her in a phantom regiment under your orders, is almost as belittling as persecution itself. It alienates many on both sides of the rainbow. Why risk that when we are still so early, and globally too uncertain, on the upward curve of sense and tolerance?