The National Trust is working on a policy on the return of stolen objects in its properties, the charity’s chair has told the Hay festival.
The restitution or repatriation of objects that were taken from other countries during colonial rule was a huge issue, said René Olivieri, adding: “Provenance needs to come into public access, public benefit.”
Speaking as part of a panel discussion titled “The British country house: revealing the bigger picture”, Olivieri responded to a question about whether Indian artefacts in Powis Castle brought to the UK by Robert Clive, who established British rule in India, should be returned to their country of origin.
He described the query about whether looted items should be returned as “a question for the future” but disclosed that the National Trust was “in the process of creating our own policy” that would follow advice given by the Museums Association and the Arts Council England (ACE).
The Museums Association’s guidance states that “repatriation or restitution of museum items can be a powerful cultural, spiritual and symbolic act”, while ACE’s guide for museums says that while “there is no such thing as a single, uniform process or set of procedures which constitute a ‘restitution blueprint’”, responding to a restitution case “requires you, the museum, to (re)consider your relationship with objects in your collection, their history, origins and acquisition – and most importantly, the people for whom they may have a special meaning today.”
The historian David Olusoga, another panellist at the Welsh literary festival event, said the cliche he had heard about country houses was that if a family were walking around, “the parents and grandparents are looking at the architecture and enjoying the gardens, and of course having tea and scones, and the kids are on their phones Googling it to see where the money came from. And I think it’s probably a cliche and an archetype but there’s a lot of truth in that.”
He said there was a generation emerging “for whom the idea that history should be uncomfortable and challenging is absolutely instinctual”.
“In the 60s we had the social history revolution which transformed the relationship between the visitor and the country house – freezing attics where the maids lived were suddenly part of the tour, the kitchens were suddenly at the centre of a visit to a stately home,” Olusoga said.
The next step, he said, was asking: “Who are the people who never set foot on British soil, whose labour was stolen, whose product was stolen, land was stolen, to build those houses. If we aren’t able to incorporate that history, it does go back to that fundamental question: what is history for?”
Sathnam Sanghera, the journalist and author of Empireland, compared museums to his experience of zoos as a child. “I remember at the age of seven seeing a tiger trapped in Dudley zoo and thinking ‘why is it here? It’s not really fair’.” He said young people “feel the same about museums that we felt about zoos in that they don’t really understand why they exist.”
The historian Suzannah Lipscomb, also on the panel, said many items in museum and country house collections “have resonances far beyond the aesthetic, they actually have spiritual significance or cultural significance in ways that haven’t been expressed, necessarily.” Such items “in some ways need setting free in the same way that that tiger does, or at least they need a bigger space,” she said.
A National Trust spokesperson, responding to a query about the policy mentioned by Olivieri, said: “Arts Council guidance recommends that museums should work towards establishing and publishing on their website a policy on restitution and repatriation. The National Trust does not yet have a policy but this is our intention, in line with the guidance. Currently, we would follow the Museums Association code of ethics and the Arts Council guidance on restitution and repatriation around any requests made.”
