My Day As a Room Steward at Stourhead House by Simon Heptinstall

The first visitors were waiting outside Stourhead House as the Collections Manager unbolted the huge Georgian front door.

The specially-trained team of conservation cleaners had finished their morning rounds and, like me, the stewards were taking their positions in each of the big empty rooms. Like Stourhead, all our great houses, palaces and castles are enjoying an unprecedented boom in visitor numbers. I was about to get a room’s-eye view of this new wave of popularity.

I’d volunteered to spend the day as a National Trust Room Steward at this classic National Trust stately home set in world-famous gardens in the rolling Wiltshire hills.

Wearing a Steward’s lapel badge, security alarm round my neck and clutching the ‘room folder’ of detailed information, I was dispatched to the Dining Room alone to await the public.

Surrounded by Chippendale furniture and scores of wonderful paintings, I positioned myself between the personally-monogrammed Wedgwood collection and the oval Georgian wine cooler made of mahogany, fruitwood and padouk. Naturally, I was anxious about facing a barrage of tricky historical questions or having to police rowdy visitors - but I was also fascinated to see which of the fabulous artefacts would attract most attention.

As the hours passed to the resounding tick of a gorgeous brass-faced long case clock (made by Vigne of Charing Cross in 1720) I stood and observed the steady trickle of humanity through my Dining Room.

About protecting the contents, I needn’t have worried. No chainsaw-wielding vandals or initial-carving teenagers today. Not even any wayward ice-creamy fingers. Long-serving room stewards say such problems are rare - the worse anyone could recall was an exhausted visitor slumping down in a priceless Georgian armchair.

But what about the astute quizzing of antique sleuths? Well, around 400 people came through the room that day. Only one asked a question that I, as a complete stranger to the house, couldn’t answer. The large lady in a tracksuit thoughtfully wondered: “How far were the kitchens away from the dining room?”

Everyone else’s posers were a doddle. I didn’t even need to consult the guide book to answer: “What’s that silver plate made of?” and “Which room is this?”

I’d been warned that visitors’ behaviour is so predictable that I’d only need to know one thing. The gigantic gilt piece with two eagle’s heads on the table is an unusually large seventeenth-century salt cellar.

True to form, over and over again, visitors asked: “Excuse me, what’s that big thing on the table?” And on hearing that it was for salt, one-in-three retorted: “I wouldn’t fancy sprinkling that on my chips.”

Ha ha - yes, thank you sir. Dealing with a stream of the public is always a depressing experience and it’s too easy to poke fun at the badly-dressed sunburnt-legged families who spend more time in the National Trust shop than the house.

But the big question is why on earth are more and more people like them wandering round the inside of a dimly-lit dusty old house on a nice sunny day? They don’t look like they’re having a good time, shuffling along as if they were attending a state funeral. All conversation is hushed, all faces acquire an oddly-pious seriousness.

One clue was my eves-dropped observation that so many are making a bizarre comparison between their own humble home and this huge Palladian mansion built by a fabulously wealthy Georgian Lord Mayor of London.

“Think about having to clean that”, “imagine the four of us spread out round that table” and “you wouldn’t fit that in our dining room” are typical comments. One woman stepped onto the vast Turkish carpet (mid-nineteenth-century in a Waterloo pattern) to mutter, “that reminds me, we need a new stair carpet.”

Others glanced at a painting for a few seconds, then announced thoughtfully: “I don’t like that one” as if shopping for new posters at Habitat.

Indeed the often-repeated “what’s that worth?” shows people are seriously totting up the chances of one day - if things turn out okay - purchasing one or two nice pieces like these for their own place. They seem so disappointed when stewards reply, in the name of deterring potential thieves: “It’s impossible to value.”

A small proportion of my Dining Room visitors were digesting the full available dose of history. They entered the room, occasionally announcing “the Dining Room” out loud as they did so, then stopped to read the entire guidebook entry for the room. Then left, saying “thank you” to me on the way.

The air of history is obviously an attraction, hence the popular furrowed-brow question, particularly from American visitors, of: “And which king is that?” while pointing at any of the 482 paintings displayed in the house, none of which show a member of Royalty.

Like my salt cellar question, each room comes with a characteristic behaviour. Stewards nickname rooms accordingly. The Music Room is “point duty” - because clueless visitors have to be directed to the Library. The Picture Gallery is “The Coffins” - because a huge percentage of visitors ignore the 50-odd paintings and home in on the large unusually-shaped window boxes. The standard conversation is: “Is that a coffin?” “No, ha ha, it’s actually a Chippendale jardinière.” “Oh. Thank you.” Then they creep out, slightly embarrassed.

In the Dining Room, people noted the “nice floorboards” by the door and the “lovely paint” on the wall but I saw no-one even glance at the wine cooler with its intricate marquetry. No-one approached the 200-year-old clock, no-one spotted the Chippendale sideboard with legs featuring the carved faces of leopards and nobody noticed that one of the old paintings was painted, unusually, by a woman. Or that she appeared in the portrait above, looking frail. Or that she died young and her husband remarried and was displayed on another wall, next to his second wife who looked a sturdier sort of prospect.

“Cor, if only these walls could talk they could tell some stories,” squawked one visitor. Well madam, on behalf of the Dining Room walls let me tell one important story. The average time visitors spend in the Dining Room is 90 seconds.