National Trust really does not help itself

Sorry,not sure how that "H" got into the header,think I am right in saying there is no edit facility available on Gransnet.

Rather funny to have made a spelling mistake yourself infoman!! Will I be banned for pointing it out? Too late you found it yourself.

infoman

Sorry,not sure how that "H" got into the header,think I am right in saying there is no edit facility available on Gransnet.

Just use the Preview facility before posting, to check it all out.

What is wrong with the NT? Sacking volunteer gardeners, refusing to allow entry to people with a pram and now the spelling police.

infoman

Sorry,not sure how that "H" got into the header,think I am right in saying there is no edit facility available on Gransnet.

The NT have stated that no volunteer would be sacked just for a spelling mistake but that they cannot discuss individual cases.

I am no great fan of the NT and its recent developments but I suspect there is more to this than has been reported.

HelterSkelter1

Rather funny to have made a spelling mistake yourself infoman!! Will I be banned for pointing it out? Too late you found it yourself.

You might - @justsaying🤣

Madgran77

infoman

Sorry,not sure how that "H" got into the header,think I am right in saying there is no edit facility available on Gransnet.

The NT have stated that no volunteer would be sacked just for a spelling mistake but that they cannot discuss individual cases.

I am no great fan of the NT and its recent developments but I suspect there is more to this than has been reported.

How has the motive for the banning of this volunteer been completely inverted in the course of four posts?

The OP says absolutely clearly that the volunteer was banned for pointing out spelling mistakes. Not for making them.

Mr Jones took is upon himself to create a dossier of spelling and grammatical errors found on the National Trust’s website which he sent to Hilary McGrady, the Trust’s director-general, who is from Northern Ireland.

According to the Daily Telegraph, a couple of months later, having not receive a reply he quit:

^Frustrated, he quit as a volunteer at his local site. He sent a strongly worded email to his manager, part of which said:

“Still no reply, acknowledgement, let alone thanks from the Oirish [sic] Dame on over 400 hours spent on her crappy not fit for purpose webs—te.”^

a) Nobody asked him to and b) We are not party to what else he wrote but we might assume it was in a similar sarcastic and rude vein.

A manager responded: “I was really disappointed by the language contained within your email. These comments are not in line with our organisational values.”

She said his relationship with the Trust had “irreversibly broken down” and that “we will no longer consider you for any future volunteer positions at any of our places”.

"Mr Jones admitted to The Telegraph that his comments were not appropriate but claimed that he was stressed at the time as he was suffering from stage-two prostate cancer."

Allways more to a story than a headline.

As a fully paid up member of the Pedants' Association I feel his pain; though there was no need for a) the NT to ignore his dossier by not even acknowledging receipt and b) for him to be so rude...

I do wonder where the DT got the story from...

What fascinated me about this thread was the way the story was completely changed in the course of 4 responses.

We tread on eggshells...
But -
I wonder if his dossier was the only reason for being sacked.

I don’t understand the “four posts” reference, but can fully empathise with the NT volunteer’s frustration.
Even a worm will turn .

He sounds like an incredibly rude man and the "Oirish" comment was racist. I doubt this was the first time he'd been a pain in the arse.

While errors may jar with us, we all make mistakes, as the irony of the typo in the thread heading shows.

In a website running to several hundred pages, errors are bound to have crept in.

If ever I have cause to complain about something, I discover and write to the person likely to have the most power to get the issue fixed soonest.

It’s unclear why Jones sent the dossier to Hilary McGrady other than that she is Director General. As he had already spent 400 hours (the equivalent of 50 days of full time work) scouring the website, he presumably saw the page which lists senior personnel and their responsibilities. He would have learned that Celia Richardson, Director of Communications and Fundraising “ is responsible for the Trust’s web and digital services”.

One can imagine the chain of events. The dossier arrives on the desk of Grady who asks her secretary to pass it to Richardson who then tasks the staff responsible for web content with correcting the errors. It will take time, human resources and money. Creating and editing webpages requires a very different skill set to proofreading.

We don’t know the tone of any covering letter Jones wrote to accompany to the dossier but it may not have been polite. Nevertheless it should have been acknowledged. Maybe everybody was assuming someone else (or someone else’s secretary) had done it.

Mr Jones took umbrage that his unasked for work wasn’t acknowledged and accorded the importance and priority he thought it deserved so fired off a rude email including a jibe about Grady’s Irish ethnicity.

Richardson (not McGrady) has responded to the DT on X writing:

"Case study for journalism students showing how papers mislead people. Based on a fallacy known as ‘post hoc ergo propter hoc’ meaning ‘after this therefore because of this’, it’s used to imply that sequential events are causal without directly claiming it."

As Esmay says, I suspect Mr Jones has “history” with the NT and this may have been the last straw.

He wasn’t sacked. He had a fit of pique and resigned.

Although it is claimed that Jones found “thousands” of errors on the website, the most the DT journalist Albert Tait can do is point out that web information for visiting one site has the word “toliets” instead of toilets, in another “permanant” instead of permanent and that artist Lucy Madox-Brown’s name has been typed as Maddox. Irritating for the typo pedant but hardly hanging offences.

Tait is junior, worked on local papers from 2022 until 2024 when he got his break with the DT. He hustles for human interest stories. I’m betting Jones went to the paper.

So, he wasn't sacked. He resigned.

*How has the motive for the banning of this volunteer been completely inverted in the course of four posts?
The OP says absolutely clearly that the volunteer was banned for pointing out spelling mistakes. Not for making them*

I wasnt deliberately inverting it. Just meant that I think it may well be more than the spelling mistakes issue!!

What fascinated me about this thread was the way the story was completely changed in the course of 4 responses

No it wasn't! I accept my phraseology was possibly misleading if read literally rather than as a general reference to the spelling mistake issue, but I was not "changing the story" .

To be fair I have just seen a list of the spelling errors, I don't care anymore if he was sacked or resigned, the National Trust should be closed immediately 😃

I've seen a few mistakes on the BBC news site. I may write to the DG ......if I could be bothered.

I wonder if the volunteer was a touch as racist in his volunteering work as he was in his letter. I expect a sigh of relief was heard on his resignation.

Not quite sure what the story is here. I have probably got the wrong end of the stick but my understanding is that Mr Jones spent ages fact checking and proof reading some NT copy and sent it in to them. They did not respond so he sent an obnoxious message which they did reply to pointing out that his email meant that his relationship with NT had "Irreversibly broken down."

What happened next is unclear to me. Did he resign or was he pushed?

Galaxy

To be fair I have just seen a list of the spelling errors, I don't care anymore if he was sacked or resigned, the National Trust should be closed immediately 😃

You think his obnoxious use of Polish is ok? I'm surprised.

oirish not Polish. I wish my phone didn't think it knows what I mean more than I do.

The NT just don’t like to be corrected or don’t care.
They employ anybody! I fear other organisations are the same.

I had an email a few years ago supposedly from the Office of the Public Guardian which I thought was a hoax or scam because there were about 5 lines of type and there were over 20 spelling and grammatical mistakes.

I contacted the office to warn them and they confirmed the sender’s name and position were genuine! I could not believe it, so sent in a complaint. All they said was they would speak to her. It was obvious to me, from her name, that English was not her first language yet she managed to get a senior position in an important department.

I think Galaxy was joking?

An update on my post from yesterday as Celia Richardson who is the National Trust’s Director of Communications and Fundraising and responsible for the Trust’s web and digital services has explained more on X.

Yesterday she wrote:

This story has run for 3 days. It was created by the Telegraph and was inaccurate from the start. It’s since been reproduced in many newspapers without checks, and further wrong claims have been added along the way…”

It’s wrong to say or imply that the volunteer has been ignored. There’s a long history of conversation/correspondence with various teams. I certainly responded to the January email the Telegraph cited, thanking the volunteer & saying his corrections were shared with our web team.

A Director General cannot personally respond to the thousands of messages an organisation the size of the Trust receives (although she does a lot). Editors know this. When I and others complain to the Telegraph Editor it’s usually the legal team that responds on his behalf.

Other outlets should be careful before reproducing a Telegraph story about the National Trust. The paper has often had to correct and apologise for inaccurate or false claims about the organisation and we will be following up on this one.

x.com/CeliaRichards0n/status/2007824300053504224

This is what happens when a disgruntled person contacts a national newspaper or a journalist pick up a story from local papers, doesn’t check the facts and spins the story to make an organisation look bad.