1980  Canons Ashby, Northamptonshire
£1million endowment and £500,000 towards repairs for Canons Ashby, whose condition had deteriorated almost to the point of not return when the National Trust launched it bid to save the house, garden and associated buildings.

1981   Hill House, Helensburgh, by Charles Rennie Macintosh
When Charles Rennie Macintosh created the Hill House in Helensburgh, Strathclyde, in 1902-3 for Mr Walter W Blackie, he designed not only the house itself and its decorations both inside and out, but also every detail of the furniture, ornaments, light fittings and fire irons. Grants totalling more than £490,000 enabled the National Trust of Scotland to buy the house, keeping the house in good order and open to the public.

1982   Works by Poussin
Two marvellous works by Nicolas Poussin were saved for the nation in 1982. The NHMF gave the National Gallery a grant towards the purchase of The Triumph of Pan dated around 1635 and brought to this country in the 1740s. We also helped the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool with their acquisition of The Ashes of Phocion Collected by his Widow.

1983   Belton House
Belton House, the historic home of the Brownlow family, is thought by many to be the finest Restoration house in England. The house dates from the 1660’s and remains very much today as it was at the time of its building. The NHMF made £8million available to National Trust to buy the house, its contents and grounds, a major landmark figure for the organisation.

1984 Beamish Exhibition Colliery
Beamish Open Air Museum is an exciting and imaginative development aimed at giving visitors an authentic flavour and representation of the recent past. A grant of £200,000 enabled the museum to repair and restore two colliery buildings in order to make them accessible to the public.

1985 Sir Walter Scott manuscripts
Sir Walter Scott’s Magnum Opus – a complete set of his works annotated by the author’s own notes -  was brought back to the National Library of Scotland from the USA with the help of an NHMF grant of more than £420,000.

1986 Bangor and Clevedon Piers
These two historically significant piers were saved by grants from the NHMF in 1986. Both piers had been closed to the public, deemed to be unsafe. Considerable grants helped resurrect them to their former glory.

1987 Picasso’s Weeping Woman
Weeping Woman is one of the first and most extreme paintings by Picasso which resulted from his explosive reaction to the rise of Fascism at the time of the Spanish Civil War. It has been in the country since 1937, shortly after it was painted, and there is no doubt that it has been a major source of inspiration to artists and has played an important role in the development of twentieth century British painting.

1988 Paxton House
Paxton House, on the banks of the River Tweed, is important for its restrained classical architecture and fine Rococo plasterwork and for its collection of Chippendale furniture specially made for the house. The Chippendale collection is rated as one of the best in the country and encompasses not only the principle rooms but also the bedrooms, dressing rooms and servants’ quarters.

1989 The Waterloo Dispatch
NHMF contributed a grant of more than £310,000 in order to secure one of the most evocative documents of the most dazzling period in British Military history for the British Library. Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington wrote this autograph draft, which has been on loan to the Library since 1976, on the morning of 19 June 1815. It gave official notification to the British Government of his victory at Waterloo and the end of nearly 25 years of continuous warfare between the European powers.

1990 Mappa Mundi
Acquisition of the Mappa Mundi, allowing it to remain at Hereford Cathedral.

1991 Holbein; Miro’s Maternité
Hans Holbein’s Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling was the most expensive picture acquired by the National Gallery. The Marquess of Cholmondeley agreed to sell the painting to the gallery under a private treaty sale agreement. Miro’s Maternité was also bought by the National Galleries of Scotland

1992 HMS Trincomalee
HMS Trincomalee was built in the Wadia shipyard in Bombay in 1897 by order of the Admiralty. She was constructed unusually of Malabar teak, instead of the more traditional oak. After her maiden village from India to England, Trincomalee was laid up in Portsmouth. When work is complete she will be displayed to the public as she would have been in 1817, fully rigged and the interior fitted out with armament, equipment and stores.

1994   The Three Graces
An export stop was placed on Antonio Canova’s The Three Graces and with the help of a grant of £3million, the exceptionally beautiful work was kept in the country. The work is shared by the Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Galleries of Scotland and is displayed alternately at each site.

1995   Houpeton House
Hopetoun House was built in 1699 for Charles, 1st Earl of Houpetoun and is one of the most ditinguished Robert Adam houses in Scotland. It has been open to the public since 1974. The £4million grant enabled the Houpetoun House Charitable Trust to preserve intact the contents and the fabric of a house. Few ancestral homes nowadays can boast their original contents and this grant meant that an astounding collection of paintings, furniture and tapestries could remain part of the house.

1996   Beckett Chasse
The NHMF used its powers to acquire the casket for £3.65million and gifted it to the V&A. The Chasse dates from around 1190 and is one of the earliest and finest examples of its kind to survive. It depicts the martyrdom and burial of St Thomas a Becket. In 1997, it formed the centrepiece of a special exhibition about the saint in Canterbury Cathedral. 

1997 Messerschmitt Bf109E
The only remaining Messerschmitt known to have taken part in the Battle of Britain.  The Second World War German aircraft was shot down by Hurricanes over Beachy Head in September 1940 and belly-landed in a field at Eastdean, Sussex.  It is now part of the Battle of Britain exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in Duxford, Cambridgeshire.

1998  HMS Cavalier
The Fund helped the Historic Dockyard in Chatham with two grants totalling £961,000 for the acquisition and long-term preservation of HMS Cavalier, the last surviving destroyer to have seen active service during World War II. Now part of  Battle Ships! a major visitor attraction at the Historic Dockyard, her preservation is a striking memorial to the 30,000 men who lost their lives in destroyers during the war.

1999   Antarctic expedition objects
A number of grants secured Scott’s pennant, set up at the South Pole in 1912 and Shackleton’s liquid compass from the Endurance mission and a number of other objects associated with a great phase of exploration. Scott’s sledging flag and Shackleton’s pennant, presented to the Imperial Trans-Atlantic Expedition by Queen Alexandra in 1914, will be displayed in the new ‘Explorers’ gallery at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, which reopened recently after the completion of a major HLF funded extension and redesign.

2000 Seurat’s Bateau près de la berge à Asnières (1883)
Acquired through Private Treaty Sale for the Courtauld Institute of Art, part of the University of London, this significant oil sketch, which has rarely been on public display, led directly to the creation of Seurat’s first major masterpiece Bathers at Asnières’in 1884.

2001 St Sebastian reliquary
The acquisition by the Victoria and Albert Museum of a silver reliquary figure of St Sebastian dating from 1497, with £1.1million from NHMF


Further information

Lydia Davies or Katie Owen, National Heritage Memorial Fund press office
Phone: 020 7591 6032/6036