It’s been over a year now since the Blake Cottage Trust acquired Blake’s Cottage, and only this week have they managed to put in the steel supports to stop it from collapsing, though they still don’t have the means to actually repair it.

There is some information going round that is not quite accurate, at moments wilfully distorted – this sad story has become a case of Chinese whispers and a curious display of human foibles, but one thing is clear to all: the Blake Cottage Trust doesn’t have the means to repair or care for the Cottage, let alone to honour the beautiful project we – those of us who created and ran this campaign – promised to the public that we would create.

This is so because the Blake Cottage Trust is an illegitimate organism set up in secret by Mr Heath alone, for his own rather unclear purposes, rather than the large consortium of accountable organisations and individuals that we promised to create. Had that consortium been created, work on the Cottage would have started immediately after its purchase, the fund-raising would have continued, the public would have been duly informed, with all transparency, about the work being done and the actual whereabouts of the money donated. We would have a clear project now, and something to celebrate. That was precisely the reason why a large and accountable consortium was deemed necessary in the first place.

The Blake Cottage Trust is not being trusted and for good reason. The Cottage must indeed be in the hands of responsible, and honourable, people, and the Blake Society and the Blake Cottage Trust do not fit that description at all. On the contrary, they have proved to be woefully unprincipled and incapable to run a serious public project.

It is about time that they own up to it, acknowledge that they have done much harm, apologize to the public and become part of the solution by letting go of the Cottage and allowing responsible people to take proper care of it. They have had more than enough time to understand that nothing handled with such lack of care, principles, respect for others, with such lack of rigour too and such an alarming disregard for truth, can turn up well. They can still sit down with those of us who do care and do the very least that they can do now: honourably get out of the way so that the Cottage doesn’t simply collapse.

That nothing done with lack of principles or regard to truth ever comes to any good should be borne in mind too by those who think they can jump on the bandwagon now that everything around the Cottage is chaos. Truth always reveals itself.

It is about time too that more of the national press starts taking this seriously, that people stop fearing the powerful firm of lawyers appointed by Mr Heath – the only thing he seems to have managed to do with the money we all raised, in an attempt to consolidate the power that he has used, and abused, against all of us – and ultimately against himself, for this is indeed an incredibly sad way to destroy his own work of decades around the legacy of William Blake.

Please look at my previous posts in this blog: regarding the worrying inconsistencies in the BS and BCT finances, regarding the lack of a coherent, transparent project, the lack of respect for the public and for Blake himself at the hands of these two Trusts that thought they could get away with lying and destroying. Please do spread the word.