III  PRESENTATIONS

WELCOME REMARKS BY STEPHEN DAVIS

Chairman, Woodchester Mansion Trust

Your Royal Highness, Ladies and Gentlemen, a very warm welcome to Woodchester and thank you for coming today, some of you from farthest Scotland and some of you from even farther away in East Anglia.

This is an extremely distinguished and learned gathering, some of you scholarly gamekeepers and some of you artful poachers. We’re really grateful for the sacrifice of time your journey here represents.

We share a common cause - to make constructive use of the valuable research done in the last two years or so in the field of conservation training, and to hand on these fragile skills to our children in better shape than we have often found them.

I want to make a pledge that those of us in this room who represent the local and regional providers and trainers, both Woodchester Mansion Trust and our partners in the Heritage Academy initiative, are working hard and will continue to work hard to deliver our local solution to the problem of conservation craft skills training. We need your advice, your experience and your support.

We pioneered on-site training of student masons, the only historic site in the country so to do, and for 16 years the experience of working at Woodchester has inspired generations of young people, and they have gone on to enhance the built environment of this country.

This project already represents a network of investment from the HLF, English Heritage, The Monument Trust and The Ernest Cook Trust, among other leading trusts, and practical, course-setting co-operations with the SPAB, the pioneer and lodestone in this field, The Prince’s Foundation, Weymouth, Bath, and the Building Crafts Colleges, and The College of Estate Management, among others.

We are now looking to build on our training role and we are attentive to the requirements identified by The National Heritage Training Group for a successful and sustainable national strategy.

In my experience - I work in the arts - a very great number of young people are preoccupied with finding creative careers rather than merely lucrative ones.

What we have to do is help them to broaden the current definition of what ‘creative’ means, and at the same time of course to keep creativity itself alive in a society whose economic forces are ranged overwhelmingly against it.

Human creativity, however, is an unquenchable urge and that should and will embolden us.

What was left unfinished here at Woodchester in the nineteenth century has become a unique resource. The Mansion’s young architect, Benjamin Bucknall, his client William Leigh and Cardinal Vaughan, for whose Episcopal visit this room was hurriedly finished in 1894, are all no doubt looking down benignly on us today, delighted that we are intent on fashioning something so productive from what they were obliged to leave to such an uncertain fate more than a century ago.

You will see a beady and wise owl looking out at all of us in this room today, carved for the occasion by our talented new director at Woodchester Mansion Trust, Steven Woodman. He says that the unfinished look is deliberate.

There are many other extraordinary creatures and creations waiting for you in the Mansion today, other than Steven that is, and I hope you will use this opportunity to explore this marvellous building in the breaks in the programme.

Later on Kate Clark, our facilitator, will tell us how the day is designed to work.

Meanwhile I want to welcome Peter Lobban, Chief Executive Officer of CITB Construction Skills, one of the three signatories of the NHTG Report on Traditional Building Craft Skills 2005, to set the scene for the day.