Bernadette Gillow

You have lived and worked here for over 25 years. Do you think you know every part of the building now or does is still have some surprises up its sleeves? Well, because we were doing a major conservation project when I arrived, we had a unique opportunity to explore a lot of nooks and crannies, like the Great Hall roof or the attics where the staff had lived and the building was, in effect, taken apart and put back together again. So that gave us a great chance to have a nosy. For me, I like the social aspects of a building as much as it’s physical structure. Is it the same for you? I think it’s a bit of both. There’s the fascination of a building of 1320, where you can go on a scaffold in a room with a Tudor ceiling and be a foot away from original Tudor iconography, the Tudor rose and all of that. Did you physically get to do that – were you hands on? Yeah, it was the first time for hundreds of years, so that felt very, very special. And similarly with the Great Hall, going beyond the lathe and plaster, so the fascination of a building that’s been here for 700 years is very, very strong and that’s the spirit of place that reveals itself to visitors. I came from a background of medieval and modern history, but I did then specialise in social history, so for me it’s also about the people. Who’s lived here before, who’s walked these corridors, it has changed hands very many times from Tudor courtiers, to Knights from the 14th century who fought with the Black Prince, right up to an American gentleman who saved it for the nation and everybody in between. Things like the alleged discovery of the skeleton in the cupboard in the 19th century, where the walled up skeleton of a young woman was supposedly found. Really getting up close and personal with the building, means these people come to life.

What kinds of things did you find? We found concealed shoes, that was a tradition where they used to hide the shoes, usually on staircases, and conceal them so that the spirit of the person lives on because the shoe takes the shape of the human it belongs to, from children’s shoes to adult’s, going right back to 1600. And when you found those, did you leave them in situ? No, we didn’t. We rescued them, as it were, because they would simply have decayed if we hadn’t. So, they are on display in our archaeology room and we carefully recorded the context in which they were found. We had Time Team here and they were obviously keen on that side of the project because they didn’t do any digging themselves, it was the first special they did, The Ten Million Pound House and they got very excited about some of the reveals. Griff Rhys Jones, who loves old things and old buildings, opened the north west quarter when we finished that work so we asked him to bring one of his shoes and, along with a message, we put it into one of the ducts of the floors in the rooms he was opening.

…there’s never a moment where I don’t think, wow. How special and important it is, how privileged we are to be here, to be involved with it, play our tiny part in…leaving it in a better state than when the Trust acquired it.

When you come back to work here every day, does it ever lose some of that initial emotional impact? No, never. When it does, that’s time to go off and run my cats home. No, there isn’t a day goes by when, A, I don’t learn something new about the property or the place or the people, and B, when I see the house in its reveal, whether it’s in snow or in drizzly rain or blowing a gale or a beautiful day like today, there’s never a moment where I don’t think, wow. How special and important it is, how privileged we are to be here, be involved with it, play our tiny part in hopefully leaving it in a better state than when the Trust acquired it. But the best feeling is when you come in through the visitor reception and head down the slope to the house and you hear people who’ve been for the very first time, they stop and it literally takes their breath away and that is enormously satisfying. Yes, that initial view. You look through the trees, you catch a little glimpse, don’t you. It’s incredibly photogenic. But photos don’t do it justice. It’s special. How emotionally attached to it are you. Has it ever become a he or a she? That’s an interesting question that I can honestly say I’ve never been asked before. No, it doesn’t have a gender. It’s kind of all embracing in terms of its character and its presence and its perfection. So no, Ightham Mote is Ightham Mote. There’s only one, it has a character and it has moods. Tell me more. Well, it’s always friendly and always atmospheric and that atmosphere changes with the weather and your own mood, I suppose, but it never ceases to lift the spirit. Is a lot of your time spent wandering around the place? I wander around a lot. It goes with the job. And is it possible to say what that day to day job is or is that an impossible question? Does it change every day? It definitely changes every single day but there are themes that run throughout it. It’s about the place, the people, the resources and making things happen. So, the big project at present is the £5 million infrastructure project, which we’ve been working on for 15 years. That started in May and will enable us to create a new parking area so that we can ultimately reinstate the historic Walled Garden. Will the garden be designed to a specific format? Well, we don’t have that much evidence. We have an estate map from 1692, which is where we discovered that it was historically garden space. We know it was a very productive garden rather than decorative, so we will be going along those lines. It will be about sustainability, gardening through climate change and using that space to engage communities. We have an indicative design and some wonderful photographs of the gardeners in the early 20th century, but otherwise we have quite a free rein. So very exciting and long been on my wish list.

And when will that be finished? The car park, new visitor welcome area and shop we hope will be completed by next summer. That will enable us to start on the reinstatement of the historic Walled Garden space – a new visitor component, engaging and involving local communities and visitors.

Tell me about the volunteers. The National Trust is a beast of an organization, could it survive without the volunteers? Well, I think it’s fair to say it would be very different. We have over 400 volunteers and 33 staff who work as 1 team but our volunteers are extraordinarily significant and contribute a massive amount of time, energy, effort, enthusiasm and skill. Do they have previous experience of what they do here or do you train them? Both really. Some people come in with a very different experience, they may have been high flyers in their world be it actors, bankers…or they can come from a similar interest, so they could have been history or primary school teachers. Others simply want to do something different and to reconnect with nature, the outdoors or with culture – it’s a very social thing to do as well, there’s a lot of camaraderie. Yes, I imagine it is good for a person’s well-being. Yes, absolutely it is. Obviously it’s a very beautiful environment but if you have done something that is, say, very office based, what a joy to come and if you’re physically able to do so, to get involved in gardening or maybe in admin or archives or research. We have people who do performance art here. We have people who work in the café and across our other sites as well. Which reminds me, it’s not simply Ightham Mote that you manage. No. So Ightham Mote is kind of the hub of the wheel. It’s a classic property of house, garden, estate. Not all of them are as big as this but there are 8 sites across Kent. I need to go on some dog walks don’t I? You do indeed. Our pooch passport starts in September. What’s that? Well, with some of the more smaller properties, about 50% of our audience want to bring their dogs and about 50% say, actually I love coming because my toddler can run around, there aren’t dogs or I might be in a wheelchair. So we’re trying to get that balance right. So, here we’ve got a 500 acre estate, doggy friendly all year round. We have the South Lake, which is doggy friendly all year round and then, because the garden paths are quite small and it is quite an intimate garden, during the summer, we ask that it’s assistance dogs only. And then from September through to March, we will have a pooch passport. So, you take your dog to a National Trust property and you get your passport stamped. There’s a real drive within the Trust to enhance the dog facilities. For example, we are about to do some work on this veranda at the café, we’re going to have a dog water fountain and a little area where those who are on their own with a dog can get the staff’s attention, hook up their dog safely and get served because it can be quite tricksy. We’ve had lots of dog shows here and lots of us have been dog owners.

I am trying to envisage Bernadette as a young girl. I’m seeing her in the library, in the history section of course. Were you always into history? Yes, I was actually. I went to a convent school for 7 years. I liked my history and my arts. That was my strong point. I had a brilliantly inspiring history teacher and, as is usually the case, whichever teacher you favour, that tends to be the path you go. So, I did History and Medieval Modern History at Uni. Which Uni was that? Liverpool and I then went to Leicester to do my Museum’s Diploma and I also did a year of Art History at Manchester, so I’ve been around a bit. I came to London and worked as a volunteer in the Museum of Labour History in Limehouse, which is now the People’s History Museum in Manchester. That was fascinating, so I then moved to curator there. This was always going to be your path then? That’s right, after some voluntary work to build up my CV, I became Head of Education and Social History in Essex Museums for a while and then went to Greenwich where I stayed for 6 years. Then I saw a little ad in the Guardian newspaper for Ightham Mote. I’d never heard of it and I’d only joined the National Trust a month before. Wow, were you worried when you went to the interview that they may check how long you’ve been a member for!? Well, no, I felt that I could bona fide, hand on heart say, I am a member of the National Trust. I was living in London which was kind of 24/7 shop open down the road, so when I came here for my interview, it was like, whoa, this is interesting. I’d only ever been through Kent to go to Dover, to the Channel. It was all new territory, really, but in for a penny, in for a pound, so I bought some wellies. I mean, I’d grown up in the country and couldn’t wait to get to the city, but then I thought about it long and hard and here we are, 26 years later.

And am I right in saying that you started off living in the actual property? Yes. At that stage, the property manager lived in the house, in what was Mr. Robinson’s apartment. And then when the building work proceeded around the house, we wanted to open those apartments, so we moved into the southeast corner. I’d always wanted to open the kitchens to our visitors because it was a missing piece of the jigsaw, in terms of the story of the development of the house, and we got that opportunity when one of the cottage tenancies was vacated, which meant we could move there and open up that part of the property. Is that where the safe is? No, that’s in the butler’s pantry. I have to ask, what’s in the safe? At the moment, nothing, but that was where they kept the silver and the butler looked after the safe. It’s a tremendous safe and a big talking point for visitors. So you now live next door to the old stables? Yes, that range was stables originally. It was the other stable courtyard. The shop is currently in the coach house and that will be vacated when we have our new shop so the coach house will then be freed up for telling the story of that building. It’s a lovely building, so that’s exciting too.

The Trust has become part the country’s DNA hasn’t it? The same as Wimbledon or Chelsea Flower Show. Yes, and even if people aren’t members, hopefully they have it on their radar and they think it’s a good thing. It is about working really hard. There’s nearly 6 million members, so something’s going quite well. But it’s also about those folk who, for whatever reason, choose or aren’t able to join. How can they access in different ways? How do we have more engagement with a more diverse mix of volunteers? Traditionally we’ve had retired folk and we still need retired folk, but we also need people who maybe just want to get a bit of experience on their CV, or they want some pop up volunteering, as we call it. Maybe they’ve got 6 months off and they’re going to come and help us, but then they’ll go back to work, or they’ll travel. How do we make sure that all of those opportunities are there? I think more people are now dipping in to what we have to offer and seeing it as something they can connect with and that it’s contemporary because we have places like the Beatles houses, we have The Workhouse, we have Quarry Bank Mill. We’re not just about stately homes, we’re definitely not that anymore but even those places are pushing to tell the stories that haven’t been told before. Looking back, if you were forced to start again at a different property, which one would you choose now? I would say Quarry Bank Mill. It’s stunningly beautiful but it’s also got this industrial heritage. I’m from Lancashire and my mum was at the Mass Trespass of Kinder Scout in 1932, so she was brought up in Manchester and Quarry Bank was on her radar so I heard tales of it before I could visit it. When I was at university there, it was just as the Trust was acquiring it and we went along and saw it in its naked kind of reality, with the residue of it being a working mill. I’ve kind of tracked its progress. I was there recently for a course and, yeah, it was lovely, so I’d say there, but there are literally dozens of places that are wonderful. Tell me, what’s the difference between the National Trust and English Heritage? The joke is that we have roofs and they don’t. Mostly they are ruins or near ruins, they do have houses that have interiors and have beautiful interiors, like Eltham Palace, but I think the difference is that they had an administrative role as a grant giving arm of the government. They gave us a lot of support when we were doing the building work. They look after things like the buildings at risk register across the country and the blue plaque system. There’s a lot of working in partnership, for example, Old Soar Manor, where we own it, and we have a kind of working arrangement with them to share the care of that site.

We’ve talked about the walled garden and the new car park but what’s next apart from those? What I did love when I walked around was seeing the Sargent paintings. Are more acquisitions going to be on the cards, do you think? That’s always on my shopping list but lots of things, really. Next year is obviously about the launch of that project and there are a range of areas that are linked to that where we want to enhance the facilities. We started with the house and we fixed that and we did it to a quality so it won a Europa Nostra award. It won lots of awards, actually. But now we’ve spread outwards and we always aim high. We have an area down there which is also on the shopping list. How long is your shopping list?! Quite long. Another 10 years and we’ll be sorted. We just need to get the money. How does that work? You have some grants coming to the National Trust, but primarily I presume it’s membership fees. It’s membership, admissions and commercial income. As a manager, do you have to put in your case for various projects or are you divvied up a certain amount of money each year? A little bit of both, really. There’s money earned at the property, so obviously that gives us an accumulated pot and then each property is assessed for what it needs in terms of compliance and conservation and that is allocated to the various departments and then we do a lot of fundraising. For example, you mentioned the Sargent paintings. We raised £360k to fund that purchase and a lot of that was from Public Appeal on site. Some of it was grant aid but we raised £70K in 1 season here to fund it. We will be fundraising again in the near future in order to reinstate the walled garden when that space is handed back to us. So it’s a variety, it’s quite complex and all the time we are trying to match the project demands with the priorities. Obviously a building of this age, you can’t just slap a coat of paint or go to B&Q. It has to be a proper job. I don’t know if you saw the TV program about the wallpaper? I did, can you quantify that kind of project? Well, it varies but the project that was shown on the telly, we’re talking at least £15k. And those were your own conservators? We do have conservation teams and there’s a massive skills base there but we also have regional conservators and national specialists, so we also tap into them. The lady who was working on the wallpaper was an external consultant but often it’s quite a tight pool of people, it’s nice if people can come back and stick with that job. Our Tudor chapel ceiling, for example, every 5 years, we have a close inspection when any reinstatement work is done. It’s lovely if you have that continuity over a period of years, because you’ve got that knowledge base.

Mr Robinson said nobody ever owns a house like this. You look after it for the next generation.

Looking at the last few years, can I ask what the impact of Covid was and have you fully recovered from that? Like every big organisation, it’s taking a while. It did impact and we had staff cuts. A lot of staff were furloughed, we had minimal cover here, we had essential tasks making sure everything was cared for. We then started to gradually reopen, but initially we were gardens only. You forget about those things don’t you. I know, it’s all like we dreamt it, isn’t it? But gradually, we started opening the house and café as we were allowed to. I’m presuming that was the worst time that you’ve experienced here? No, I would say there were 2 other very challenging issues, the first being foot and mouth, in 2002. I hadn’t been here very long and I got a phone call. It was bad in every sense but there was a lot of concern about which properties could and couldn’t open for that year. We were on the cusp because we had sheep in the field adjacent to the entrance. I was a bit green and naïve and I got a phone call from head office saying, would you be interviewed on News at Ten by Ben Brown about foot and mouth and you just say yes, don’t you, to anything like that? So I was like, right, what do I know? It was only about a 10 second interview in the end. It was exciting but I could write everything I knew about foot and mouth on a postage stamp but it was really important to raise the profile of what the issues were. Thankfully we were able to open that year with all the compliance in place in the end. And the other time was the flooding in 2016, which gosh, seems like yesterday. We had major flash flooding into the house. It was up to my knees. Were you actually open at that time? It was a Saturday afternoon and we were just closing when the heavens opened and within an hour, wow, you’re watching it as it literally flows through the courtyard into the house. It was in June, which was rather bizarre, and the next day was like this sunshine so we could put everything outside to dry out but the damage it did in that brief hour and a half or so was the most upsetting. The power of nature was amazing but for the wrong reasons. It was actually 10 days after the Antiques Roadshow had been here with 5,000 visitors, which was a wonderful occasion. I’m just glad it was that way around not the other.

And to counter that, what would you say have been the high points so far? The main building project, because if we hadn’t done that, it wouldn’t be here today. It was also an absolute pleasure to work with a great property architect, a great team, and experience that excitement. Would you like to go back to that? I did miss it a great deal when it stopped because it was very exciting. I would also say the acquisition of the Singer Sargents because that’s very personal to me and I was very involved in that. I think I need to wrap up but I’d like to ask you one final question. When you eventually hang up your National Trust staff badge and are faced with having to leave your home, how are you going to feel about that? Well, obviously I’ll miss it desperately. I have lots of other interests and lots of things I’d like to do and places I’d like to see. Ightham Mote will always be indelibly marked on my heart but it has survived 700 years. I’ve been incredibly privileged to play a part in its continuum and Mr Robinson said nobody ever owns, in his case, a house like this. You look after it for the next generation. So, yes, I’m sure I’ll need a box of tissues, but I will come back and enjoy it in a relaxed mode and wish the next person the very best.