The Times Magazine 43personable, the 56-year-old half-marathon
runner is the first DG 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 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.”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
the Second World War.
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 cafés 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 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, Sir Winston Churchill’s home,
Bateman’s, Rudyard Kipling’s house, and
William Wordsworth’s residence 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, although 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” and politicised.
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”; 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 make it 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 received, 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 theMcGrady and Mike McCartney outside his childhood home