OPINION:
If ever I sat in the Mastermind chair, I’d be tempted to choose one of two books as my specialist subject. The first is the National Trust Manual of Housekeeping – an indispensable guide to preserving historic houses and their collections.
The second is even more precious and well thumbed through: a book meticulously handwritten by my mother-in-law on how to spring-clean Belvoir Castle.
She handed both books to me, along with an enormous black box of door keys, the day my husband, David, and I moved into the castle in 2001. “Good luck!” she declared with a wry smile. She knew I’d need it. And how right she was.
Living in the 200+ room castle, on the Leicestershire site near Grantham where David’s ancestors have resided for almost 1000 years, has been an extraordinary privilege.
Managing it as I do, supported by a dedicated team of staff and volunteers, brings me unending joy and satisfaction. But trying to preserve a living, breathing heritage site filled with ancient, expensive and often fragile pieces is a constant battle punctuated by drama and incident.
The latest came at the weekend in a video released on one of the castle’s social media channels. It showed an overzealous cleaner using Brasso metal polish on our 19th-century Boulle marquetry desk during our annual spring clean.
Unsurprisingly, the video horrified a furniture conservator expert whose displeasure was reported in The Sunday Telegraph. His dismay was nothing compared with mine. You don’t need to be an expert to see that this was a dreadful error, for which I wholeheartedly apologise.
Household products must not come into contact with the fine marquetry on the cabinet (although mercifully, on this occasion, they didn’t). One needs only to remove surface dust and protect it – so a soft cloth is used and then micro-crystalline wax is applied.
We invite and rely upon many brilliant specialists (including this expert himself) to advise us on how best to maintain and preserve the numerous precious items in the castle. But sometimes mistakes are made. When this happens, we rectify them as quickly as possible and move on to the next task on our never-ending to-do list.
Spring-cleaning the castle is a mammoth process that begins in late January and ends when we open our doors to visitors just before Easter. It starts in the Porter’s Lodge, where the scaffolding goes up and every item of military weaponry on the walls is carefully removed, polished and, if necessary, repaired.
We go through the castle systematically cleaning and dusting every nook and cranny – floors, carpets, windows, the lot – to ensure it’s at its pristine best for the paying public. We don’t receive any grants or other support, so the money we raise from visitors goes straight back into the business of running and conserving the castle and its grounds.
The to-do list features some eye-watering quotes we’ve had recently for conservation work: the State Room rugs and carpets (£390,000 - about NZ$833,000), silk-painted Chinese wallpapers (£420,000) and our magnificent early 17th-century tapestries (£650,000). Not forgetting, of course, our many Boulle furniture pieces – including the cabinet – whose restoration works easily run into the hundreds of thousands.
We welcome hundreds of visitors into the castle every day so the general wear and tear on a range of materials, alongside natural agents of deterioration such as sunlight, mean we must be extra vigilant in our maintenance duties. We very carefully clean items that are fragile and ancient.
The rule is less is more and we use materials that are conservation grade – so regular household products such as Pledge and, yes, Brasso are very much on our banned list.
Some items are so fragile that they are uncleanable, such as the ancient standards from various battles in the Dukedom’s history that hang in the hall. They are catalogued and photographed for posterity and on display until such time that they fade away. Any form of cleaning would cause them to disintegrate.
We love having flowers in the castle but made an expensive mistake when we realised that many of the vases had been placed on leather-topped desks and circular tables, destroying the old leather beneath.
We had to call in Anthony James Beech, a furniture conservation specialist, to re-leather many valuable pieces of furniture. Flowers still adorn the castle but the vases are now placed only on marble.
And then there’s the roof. We’ve spent more than £600,000 on the two-acre roof over the years but it’s a little like roadworks on the M25 – just when one section is complete, another issue springs up elsewhere.
If the roof isn’t secure, nothing is safe, as we discovered to our cost barely six weeks after moving into the castle. I’ll never forget our elder kids waking us up during a storm shouting “Mummy, the castle’s flooding!”
Sure enough, water was cascading through the ceiling walls and into the library of about 8000 irreplaceable ancient books dating all the way back to 1066.
Within minutes I was up on the roof with an umbrella frantically trying to find the source of the flood. Eventually, in desperation, I thrust my hand into a gulley and pulled out the culprits: two dead pigeons.
The incident taught me an essential early lesson about managing a heritage site: you may survive the skirmishes but you won’t win the battle alone.
I sought the help of an amazing charity, the National Association of Decorative and Fine Arts Societies (NADFAS), whose experts went through the painstaking process of restoring our library of sodden books to their previous condition. The transformation was extraordinary and we’ve continued working together ever since.
The flood also marked the beginning of another partnership that continues to this day – a programme where majestic birds of prey live in the castle courtyard to protect the roof from pesky pigeons.
It’s not just the castle that needs attention. It is set within 16,000 acres of stunning grounds that are maintained and enhanced on a daily basis. A decade ago, an amazing discovery was made in the castle archives – the last remaining set of landscaping plans drawn up by Capability Brown, previously thought to have been lost in a fire of 1816.
So we began a two-year restoration project, which involved planting more than half a million trees, to bring Brown’s exquisite plans to fruition.
‘A Sisyphean challenge’
When it comes to running Belvoir, the truth is that, despite having my trusty two books to hand, it’s a Sisyphean challenge – there’s always a new, often completely unexpected issue to resolve. I’ve heard the same from the many other women (and they are mostly women) who manage stately homes across the country.
One very tricky problem we’ve all been tackling in recent years is moth infestation – an issue that’s affected thousands of National Trust properties too.
The damage moths can wreak on curtains, tapestries, books, works of art on paper and other fabrics is swift and devastating and we’ve all swapped tips on how we keep them at bay.
The size of our business does not make it viable to employ a full-time curator. However, we regularly call upon a first-class team of specialists in their respective fields to help us preserve our priceless artefacts – including conservators who inspect our tapestries for moth damage three times a year. Thankfully, so far, they remain intact.
Though none of us ladies have been born into our current roles, we all feel an overwhelming responsibility to do whatever we can, supported by the superb people around us, to help preserve our historic estates in perpetuity.
To adapt a phrase from the late Magnus Magnusson, the most famous Mastermind presenter of all: “We’ve started, so we’ll finish.”