Dusting off national treasures

As a romantic place for popping the question, this location looks a winner. It's a move which will surely earn a nod of approval from Sir Simon Jenkins, the chairman of the National Trust. Recently he outlined his view of how to improve their general welcome. "There should be a fire in the grate, candles on the table, comfortable seats in which to relax and something to read. There should be billiard tables in use and croquet lawns to be enjoyed."

Is it time the National Trust changed it's ways? Maybe we would all welcome a loosening of the stays for a corseted body whose appeal is largely to the white middle-aged middle class, coming to peer at how the toffs once lived and ready to open their purses in a twee craft shop for frilly tea cosies, cute tea towels and heritage jars of jam with gingham tops.

The trust's membership is 3.8 million – larger than the three major political parties put together, and it can also call on the services of 50,000 volunteers. So why change a winning formula? It's partly because they have a recruitment push to increase membership to five million.

But look beyond that and you discover something surprising in the background of this staid organisation. There's radicalism and a burning desire for social justice in the trust's blood. For starters, how about the hammer and sickle that its first stately home benefactor, Sir Charles Philips Trevelyan, painted on his gateposts?

Sir Charles was a Yorkshire Liberal MP for nearly 20 years at Elland. He switched sides and was in Ramsay Macdonald's Labour cabinets before turning towards Communism. In 1928, Sir Charles inherited Wallington Hall in Northumberland where his innovations included utopian schemes for his workers, such as employment benefits and a people's theatre. During the war he took in an entire school from the Scotswood Road slums of Newcastle to live with his family.

Sir Charles was also Lord Lieutenant of the county. He balanced that title and his Communist leanings by having the hammer and sickle on one side of his gates and a coronet on the other. He bequeathed Wallingford Hall to the National Trust believing that what he had should belong to everyone. But his graphic statements had long gone from the gateposts by the time that Lloyd Longley appeared on the scene.

Lloyd is based here at Wallington Hall and is the trust's housing collections manager for the Yorkshire and North East region. He has recently taken several months out from his daily tasks to make an intensive university-based study into all the properties in his area including the Treasurer's House in York.

This came the trust's way from a rich Edwardian. There's no treasure and no treasurer – Henry VIII pinched the Minster's riches and the last treasurer became redundant in 1547. The house only received this name in 1897 when the old place – by now fallen on hard times – was acquired by a Yorkshire dandy called Frank Green. More of him later.

Lloyd Longley's visit here and his other travels carry a faint echo of pre-war trips made by a predecessor, James Lees-Milne. Early in 1936 Lees-Milne was appointed as the first secretary of the newly-formed country houses committee of the National Trust. Until then the trust, founded in 1895, had mainly acquired open spaces.

Progressive taxation was making it harder for the landed classes to cling on to what they had. Death duties – eight per cent in 1904, were 50 per cent by 1934. Lees-Milne wrote a report and the outcome was a law allowing the handing over of a stately home to the National Trust free of death duties.

Lees-Milne buzzed around, often on his bicycle, visiting grand houses where he might unearth a relic of a once powerful dynasty, now in reduced circumstances, trying to keep warm in front of a one-bar electric fire. The title for his 1946 published diaries was Caves of Ice.

His efforts helped bring about a very English revolution. In Russia, the instrument of social justice was probably a workers' commissar who would seize a noble's house, shoot the occupants and smash up its contents. Here we a had bicyclist (whose background was Eton, Oxford and the Guards) assisting by stealth to take over private riches and in effect nationalise them.

We, the people, embodied in the trust, got both the houses and the loot – in the shape of unique collections and contents – at extraordinary places such as Cliveden in Buckinghamshire, Knole in Kent and Capability Brown's Petworth in Sussex.

There was a personal down side for Lees-Milne who confided his ambivalent feelings about the direction of his mission in diaries he kept all his life. After one country house visit he wrote, "What a lot they are, redolent of the worst aspects of the Edwardian age. A crowd of fatuous, arrogant drones, waited on by a regiment of servants..."

Not all the gentry were like this. Visiting Wallington, Lees-Milne's hosts suggested an after-dinner general knowledge quiz. All the intellectual Trevelyans scored in the nineties, their guest scored nought.

York's Treasurer's House was the first to come to the trust complete with contents in 1930. It is dark at the moment and Lloyd Longley's visit coincided with work to restore part of the great hall. His particular interest is architecture and how to present his specialism to non-specialists.

"I'm interested in how a house evolved and analysing that in more detail," he says. "Our region is a microcosm of the properties you might find around the country. I'm studying 27 properties and have visited 21. I go as a visitor with no specific privileges and look at it with new eyes."

He stepped into the house's shuttered Blue Drawing Room where the furniture lay shrouded in dust covers, a ghostly setting which might have been arranged to encourage an appearance of one of the house's four spectral presences. The charge of tweeness levelled at the National Trust is one Lloyd Longley is happy to answer. "There is that perception and we are aware that the visitor base needs to be broader," he says. "Survival depends on not being elitist."

He argues that change is already well underway. The evidence he points to is at a recently acquired place on his patch, Seaton Delaval Hall. This was built from the profits of Seaton Delaval colliery and the old mining communities have volunteered in numbers to help shape the hall's new future. It's a bottom-up process which contrasts with the trust's instinctive desire for uniformity from

the top-down.

"The public was more closely involved in its acquisition and there's tremendous momentum there," says Lloyd Longley. About 100,000 local people of all ages are actively involved and by popular demand, the recently-opened caf serves fish and chips.

Creating demand is behind the plan to entice couples into the Treasurer's House to make an event out of a marriage proposal. It's the idea of the property operations manager, Jane Whitehead, whose other wheezes, such as Edwardian breakfasts, are already selling well. She started out as a seasonal employee for the trust in Yorkshire and has worked her way up.

Jane underlines a point made by Lloyd Longley that they need to make more of the personalities who inhabited these great houses. "The world changes and you have to meet people's expectations," she says. "We are not here to conserve in aspic.

"We've been an island and expected people to come to us. Now we're going out to them and creating reasons for people to come. We need to reveal what's behind these bricks and mortar. People are interested in people. These places are repositories of stories as well as furnishings."

The story-tellers, more often than not, are volunteers. The trust's ratio of volunteers to staff is 10 to one. The Treasurer's House has 300, one of whom is a builder currently doing the pointing free of charge. They are still trying to recruit more. Are they looking for a certain type? "They can turn up in jeans. If you've got tattoos and an ear-piercing, it doesn't matter. The question is, how good are you at dealing with people?"

They have workshops to discuss ways of putting over stories in a way that engage visitors. In many respects, they don't have to try that hard here. The building's foundations go back to the Romans, who supply the oldest ghosts in the country.

At lunchtime on one February day in 1953, a teenage apprentice plumber (later a policeman) called Harry Martindale was fitting a central heating pipe in the cellar. Standing four rungs up on his ladder to work in the ceiling, Harry turned to watch as a squad of bedraggled legionaries marched through one cellar wall and exited from another.

Harry's detailed recollection of what he'd seen did not tally with what was known in the 1950s about how fourth century Roman soldiers dressed. Several decades of archeological inquiry later, Harry's description has been shown to be accurate.

Ghosts apart, the house's real story is Frank Green. When he bought it, the house had become a botched three-flat conversion and a flea-ridden slum. Three years on, Frank had turned it into a house where he could host a stay by the Prince and Princess of Wales, shortly before their coronation as Edward VII and Queen Alexandra.

How did he become so pally with Royals? Frank Green's grandfather was an engineer who made a mint in Wakefield. The nouveau-riche Greens bought a shooting estate in Norfolk next to Sandringham and fostered good relations with their neighbour the Prince of Wales.

When Frank came to York he was a filthy-rich bachelor whose mission was to die without giving any of his money to the taxman. Frank was so fastidious in his habits he had his laundry done in London, presumably because York washerwomen weren't up to his standards. He died in 1954, penniless, a triumph over the taxman. With a story like Frank's to tell, you can't go far wrong.

"This was almost like his doll's house, he played with it," says Jane Whitehead. "He put brass studs on the floor to mark the correct spot for the staff for each piece of furniture. He said he'd come and haunt us if we moved it."

Jane is now digging further into how Frank managed to get the future King to come to stay. "It's intriguing that a commoner hosted the Royal family. Why were they here and where did they sleep? I'd like anybody who has photos or magazines from around 1900s to loan them to us."

Frank's great-nephew had been to visit Jane the day before we met. She can also draw on first-hand stories from one of her volunteers, Mollie Gawthorpe, who is the granddaughter of Frank's chauffeur.

How does this openness to new ideas square with the fact that the Treasurer's House's doors were locked and will remain so until April?

Proper conservation demands that light levels have to be restricted and winter is the time for maintenance. And because this place, in theory at least, belongs to all of us, their methods have to be different to those at a house in private hands.

"A dark room isn't the best way to view objects, but unless we do that they will have faded and gone away and dropped to bits," says Jane. "We are looking after everything for everyone for all time.

"This is an unusual house, there's no memorabilia, it's a bit of an enigma. People haven't a clue what we are.

"A family who stayed all morning said they had only come in for an hour. They said it was like a Tardis."

The Treasurer's House, York, reopens April 1.