These days have seen a couple of articles in the national press mentioning the Blake Cottage Trust’s plans to finally restore Blake’s Cottage… acquired two years and some four months ago. Apparently they will reveal a new version of those ever inconsistent plans this week – their only constant aim being, apparently, to invite people to sleep in Blake’s bed and bedroom.

On 12 January the Blake Society will be holding their AGM, so perhaps they will choose the occasion to go on spinning their tale.

I won’t attend the AGM. After the farcical display made by the Blake Society Committee at the AGM of 2016 and 2017, I have understood that they have really no qualms about lying to their members and the public, to bully and shout people down, so I will employ my time in a more edifying way. (If you want to know what happened last year, it’s all recounted here).

However, I do wonder at the BS Committee’s seemingly inexhaustible capacity for lying to their own members. Recently, an intrusion into my account in a professional net called my attention to new developments around the Blake Society. Sure enough, their webpage had new elements of concealment and deception.

In the previous years they had been playing a game of hide and seek both with the former Secretary, who stepped down because of his disagreement with the way the Cottage project had been handled, and then with Trustee Nick Duncan, who has been scurried away, then materialized again at their convenience so that he can be both a Blake Society Trustee and, at the same time, an “independent examiner” of their inaccurate financial reports.

Since I have pointed at that curious prestidigitation in this blog, they have now amended the list of Trustees with a charming asterisk. This is now accompanied by yet another feat of disappearance: whereas in their minutes of the 2017 AGM Ms Paige Morgan had been re-elected as a Trustee (AGM-2017-Minutes Blake Society), since November 2017 she’s been deleted from the list of elected Trustees in the Society’s webpage:

Why should they choose to lie yet again regarding their elected Trustees and make Ms Morgan leave through the back door is not the only problematic issue here. Ms Morgan was an unscrupulous Trustee of the Blake Society for many years, under the protection of its Chairman, Mr Heath. As it has been demonstrated throughout the chapters of my testimony in this webpage (https://blakecottage.com/what-happened-with-the-blakes-cottage-appeal-my-testimony/), she was involved in one of the most dishonest episodes of the Blake Cottage appeal – one that in fact threatened the very existence of the appeal and the Blake Society itself, when Mr Heath and herself hijacked the project.

She was also the supposed editor, for some eight or nine years, I have lost count now, of the Blake Society’s Journal. Only that it was a journal that never materialized under her editorship.

In the Documents section of this webpage there is an account of the inconsistencies of the information given to the Blake Society members regarding the supposedly yearly publication that was promised to them on subscription:

Click to access inconsistencies-and-lack-of-transparency-regarding-blake-society-journal.pdf

Now that Ms Morgan has vanished from their list of Trustees, an outrageous statement has appeared in the Blake Society’s webpage Blake Journal section (under Publications):

That’s it: no explanation whatsoever of why the journal that was being promised to the Society members for nearly a decade never appeared. The Blake Journal issues that they are mentioning here are very old, those published prior to Ms Morgan’s appointment as a Trustee and editor.

It is just in keeping with the Blake Society’s and the Blake Cottage Trust’s belief that they can do as they wish, blurring their actions through cunning and secrecy, and being accountable to no one.

In these circumstances, whatever news they are supposed to deliver regarding their plans for the Cottage, I’d advise the reader to take them with a pinch of salt.

And if any Blake Society member reading this is planning to attend the AGM this week, they might care to ask the Committee for a clear, straightforward and truthful account of whatever happened to Blake Journal.