A Scheme of 1891, lightly redrawn in 1966, and the eight people who carry it today.

The trust dates from a moment when the Charity Commissioners — newly empowered by the Charitable Trusts Acts of the 1850s and the further reforms of the 1880s — were tidying up the patchwork of small medieval and early-modern parochial endowments that lay across the English shires. In the Parish of Great Barr, on the boundary between Staffordshire and the Black Country, three older bequests had for generations supported the church of St Margaret: the so-called Glebe Rent, the Lobley's Charity, and an anonymous fund recorded only as 'the Church Lands money'. A Scheme of 13 November 1891 brought all three under a single trustee body and gave them seven plain charitable objects.

Those objects, in the order they appear in the founding document, are as follows: payment in or towards the maintenance of a Parish Clerk to serve in the church of St Margaret; payment to the Churchwardens for the maintenance and ordinary repair of the fabric of the said church; the Church Repair and Restoration Fund; the defraying of expenses for fittings and furniture; the defraying of expenses incurred in the performance of Divine Service; the maintenance and enlargement of the graveyard; and, where a small surplus remains, the ecclesiastical purposes of the Church of England generally. The list has barely changed in a hundred and thirty-four years.

The 1891 Scheme was lightly varied in March 1966, principally to adjust the quorum, to bring the language of investment powers into line with the Trustee Investments Act 1961, and to clarify that the Diocesan Board of Finance for the Diocese of Lichfield could be a custodian trustee. Those are the only material changes since Victoria's reign.

'A trust whose objects are deliberately small can be made to last a long time, provided its trustees are content to do the same thing over and over again.'Howell, Foreword to the 1991 Centenary Account

In practical terms, the trust operates as a grant-maker rather than a service-deliverer. Each year the Parochial Church Council of St Margaret's submits a small slate of fabric, furnishings and graveyard works that fall within our objects. The trustees consider each item, ask follow-up questions if needed, and grant — almost always in part, occasionally in full — from the income of the year. Larger works are met from the Restoration Reserve, which has been built up patiently over decades for exactly that purpose. We employ no staff. We rent no office. The work happens at kitchen tables in Streethay, in Pheasey, in Walsall and in Newton.