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Recognising land as a vital part of our heritage
The rediscovered role of the National Heritage Memorial Fund
Brian Wilson
It was perhaps more appropriate than even they realised, that last week’s announcement by the John Muir Trust that they are to purchase Strathaird Estate in Skye fell so close to Armistice Day.
The purchase has been made by the National Heritage Memorial Fund, which started life 48 years ago as the National Land Fund, created by the post-war Labour government as a war memorial which, in the judgement of many, is better than any work of art in stone or bronze.
For many years, the Fund was channelled away from its original purpose - a trend, which has previously been criticised by the Free Press, notably in the early 1980s when it refused to help in a community-based purchase of Knoydart.
However, the fund’s substantial donation of £400,000 to allow for the purchase of Strathaird appears to confirm an increased willingness to recognise land as a vital part of the national heritage and to assist quasi-public bodies in its purchase. If so, it could become a highly significant factor in the Highland land market.
For this welcome shift comes at a time when the National Heritage Memorial Fund has been entrusted with the distribution of that part of the national lottery proceeds which are to be devoted to national heritage. This will mean a substantial increase in its current annual budget of £11 million.
A glance at the latest annual report confirms where, until now, the Fund’s priorities have lain. Certainly, there was some money spent on land - including £25,000 to the John Muir Trust itself, for Sandwood Estate near Cape Wrath. But these were the exceptions which proved the rule.
Overwhelmingly, the money has been going on works of art and buildings. The three biggest grants in 1993-94 went to the British Museum to buy the Hoxne Roman Treasure (£1m); the National Gallery, towards the cost of a Holbein Painting (£1.5m); and the National Trust for Scotland, to acquire Holmwood, the great Greek Thomson house in Cathcart (£1.1m).
All doubtless, worthy causes; but a very long way removed from the original intentions of the Fund’s creator, Hugh Dalton, the Labour chancellor in 1946. Originally he set aside £50 million for the purchase of land - a visionary act in the immediate post-war conditions, and equivalent to £297 million at today’s prices.
The National Land Fund was the last item in his historic Budget statement and Dalton could be forgiven the flourish with which he concluded his speech. "It is surely fitting in this proud moment of history, when we are celebrating victory and deliverance from overwhelming evils and horrors, that we should make through this fund a thankoffering for victory and a war memorial which, in the judgement of many, is better than any work of art in stone or bronze".
"I should like to think that through this Fund we shall dedicate some of the loveliest parts of this land to the memory of those who died in order that we might live in freedom, those who for our sake went down to the dark river, those for whom already ‘the trumpets have sounded on the other side’. Thus let this land of ours be dedicated to the memory of the dead, and to the use and enjoyment of the living for ever".
In its early days, the fund worked well. Its first purchase was a rundown, 39,000 acre estate in Wales, which was developed by the Ministry of Agriculture. Then the 12,370 acre Rowardennan Estate on Loch Lomond, with the lodge going to the SYHA, Lochalsh House was bought and handed over to the National Trust for Scotland. An 18,600 acre estate in Ross-shire was taken over by the Forestry Commission.
But from the day they took power in 1951, the Tories had set about negating the purpose of the Fund. The freedoms they worshipped were rather different from the ones Dalton believed to have been saved.
Its demolition was swift and subtle. In 1953, an amendment to the Act allows for the contents of properties acquired by the Fund to be bought also. In 1956 this was extended to works of art, whether they were in acquired properties or not. Much later, in 1973, prints, books, manuscripts, items of scientific interest were dragged in as well. It was no longer a National Land Fund, with all the political significance of that description, but overwhelmingly an arts fund.
The main weapon against the Fund’s significance under the Tories was, however, disuse. Because so little was acquired under it the capital tied up in it actually increased - until1957, when the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Peter Thorneycroft dealt it the effective death blow. He clawed back £50 million of the £60 million then in the Fund, for general exchequer purposes, £350 million at today’s prices.
Twenty years later a House of Common expenditure committee report condemned this action which it described as "one of principal rather than of economic significance". The principal was clear - they hated the idea of any device which could be used to bring land into public ownership. Dalton, then within three years of his death, protested manfully about Thorneycroft’s action. He called this rape of the Fund’s coffers "a dull and reactionary proposal". He called for the Fund to be expanded to acquire land from the living as well as in lieu of death duties, adding that even under the law as it stood there would be many opportunities for its use "over the next 10 to 15 years".
Everyone forgot about the National Land Fund until 1977, when it was called into play to buy up the Mentmore art treasures - the kind of non-political cause, which the Treasury could safely approve of. It was then that the Commons expenditure committee looked hard at what had happened in the past 30 years. It found, quite simply, that the aims of the Fund as laid down by Dalton had been perverted. The Treasury was using it only as a book-keeping exercise and was instructed, in unusually strong terms, to "cease this accounting practice forthwith".
But Thorneycroft and the Treasury had by this time done their dirty work. The National land Fund concept - the great memorial to the war dead-had been successfully eroded.
In 1980, in response to the criticisms in he House of Commons committee report, the National Heritage Fund was established. The word land had disappeared from the title, which seemed to denote the final abandonment of any pretence of pursuing Dalton’s original aims.
Happily, this now seems to have been a premature conclusion. The word environment carries a lot more resonance in heritage circles now that it did even in 1980. The case for acquiring land in the public interest is now often as strong environmentally as it is socially or economically.
There are dangers in allowing too many trusts and conservation bodies to become major landowners, unless they are very sensitive to agendas other than their own. But it is certainly a lot better than leaving the market in Highland land to the hunters, fishers, shooters and wasters.
As an interim measure at least, the rediscovered role of the National Heritage Memorial Fund is greatly to be encouraged in the spirit of Dalton.
Source: West Highland Free Press , 18 November 1994