The National Trust has blacklisted a 71-year-old volunteer after he pointed out thousands of spelling mistakes and factual errors on the charity’s website, and then expressed irritation when his painstaking efforts were met with stony silence.
Sensible charity managers overlook minor human imperfections, concentrating instead on volunteers’ generosity
Andy Jones had volunteered for the Trust for more than a decade, turning his hand to everything from gardening to membership queries and guiding visitors on walks. Acting entirely on his own initiative, he devoted more than 400 hours to compiling a detailed dossier of errors on the organisation’s website. He sent it, politely enough, to Hilary McGrady, the Trust’s director-general, asking whether she would ‘be so kind as to forward this to whomsoever has the authority and resources to address these errors’.
When he received no reply, he sent a follow-up email a few months later, stating: ‘I sincerely hope my work is helpful to the National Trust.’ Again, he received no response. After being ignored twice, Jones resigned as a volunteer and wrote to his local manager in terms that were undeniably tetchy, referring to the ‘Oirish [sic] Dame’ and her ‘crappy not fit for purpose webs**te’.
This time he did get a reply: a local manager wrote that she was ‘really disappointed by the language contained within your email’, adding that ‘these comments are not in line with our organisational values’. She said his relationship with the charity had ‘irreversibly broken down’ and told him that ‘we will no longer consider you for any future volunteer positions at any of our places’.
A spokesman told the Daily Telegraph that ‘no-one would be told they were no longer welcome as a volunteer simply for pointing out grammatical errors on a website’, before lapsing into the managerial argot charities now favour, explaining that ‘relationship breakdown tends to occur after a series of incidents’.
What were the ‘series of incidents’? The only one we’re aware of in this case is the tetchy email Jones sent his local manager after he was ignored twice. Speaking to the Telegraph, he agreed that his comments were not appropriate but said he was under stress at the time as he was suffering from stage-two prostate cancer.
I’m not sure it’s Jones who should be explaining himself. He only sent the tetchy message after his sterling efforts were rudely ignored twice. No one had asked him to undertake the task, true enough, but would it really have been so difficult to acknowledge his effort, or even to say thank you?
Volunteers are typically people with time on their hands who hope to find purpose, usefulness and human connection. That means they are often older, and sometimes a little out of step with the fashionable values and language of the day. But how serious a defect is that when they are offering their labour freely?
I have volunteered at food banks, animal sanctuaries, homeless groups and litter picks, and I have encountered many dozens of volunteers. There is always an Andy Jones: an older person, perhaps socially awkward, possibly a little rough around the edges. Some are driven less by sentiment than by exasperation, even anger, at the state of the world. Sensible charity managers overlook such minor human imperfections, concentrating instead on volunteers’ generosity and working out how best to deploy it.
There might be more to the Jones story than meets the eye, but as far as we can see he has been treated a bit shoddily. Learning how to manage volunteers is a big part of a charity’s work, so if the National Trust’s bosses can’t manage that, I have to wonder if they’re fit for purpose.
The median pay for chief executives at the UK’s largest 100 charities was around £192,000 in 2025. I do not know what McGrady earns, but her apparent failure to acknowledge the efforts of an unpaid septuagenarian volunteer looks arrogant. I think she owes him an apology.
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