So-called child advisory boards were brought in to deliver “reverse-mentoring” sessions at a number of historic properties as part of a scheme to ensure the impact of their background could be fully explained to visitors. Staff were lectured on imperial history by schoolchildren who have been taking part in the Trust’s Colonial Countryside project in conjunction with Leicester University academics. None of the Trust’s team was forced to take part.
The university said the four-year project looked at “a range of colonial links, including slave-produced sugar wealth, East India Company connections, black servants, Indian loot, Francis Drake and African circumnavigators, colonial business interests, holders of colonial office, Chinese wallpaper, Victorian plant hunters and imperial interior design”.
But the scheme has been criticised by anti-woke campaigners who claim important aspects of British history are being erased to satisfy a politically-correct agenda.
Tory MP Sir John Hayes said: “It is a source of sadness that the National Trust are out of touch with the reality of militancy that they are explicitly endorsing, out of tune with their increasingly disillusioned members and running out of time to put these wrongs right.”
Sir John is the chairman of the Common Sense Group of Conservative MPs and peers which he launched to challenge the spread of woke culture.
He was enraged by last summer’s attempts to question the legacies of historical figures like Sir Winston Churchill and Lord Nelson.
He said: “When the values on which British society is built are derided and dismissed by all kinds of groups, either because they don’t understand them or because they don’t like them, we are going to stand in defence of them.
“The kind of people who vote Conservative typically, and the kind of people who might vote Conservative who don’t currently, are sick and tired of being patronised by the liberal establishment.”
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Fellow Conservative MP Andrew Murrison said: “Given recent concerns over the use of National Trust assets to pursue an agenda by its leadership, I’m not entirely comfortable that the sensitive issue of children’s education is safe in its hands.
“In my view, the Trust should concentrate on looking after its sites for the benefit of the visiting public who by and large don’t want to be indoctrinated.”
A spokesman for the National Trust said: “Colonial Countryside is a project started in 2018 at 11 National Trust houses.
“The participation of the children, which has now concluded, has tested new ways of working with staff enabling us to hear and reflect the children’s responses.
“It was not a compulsory exercise for staff and volunteers.”
The National Trust has been at the centre of a wider woke-culture controversy since it published a 115-page report into links between colonialism and slavery to 93 of its properties in the wake of last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests.
Thousands of members of the charity threatened to cancel their subscriptions amid accusations the organisation had become too political.
