Dry Storeroom No. 1 (41 page)

A specimen of the extraordinarily spiral-shaped native silver “wires” from Kongsberg, Norway

The doyen of mineral collectors, Arthur Russell, eponym of russellite

In the room named after Russell are drawers upon drawers of brilliant minerals—opaque and glittering metallic sulphides, subtle pink and green tourmalines, varieties of spinels and peridots, indeed almost every kind of molecular art that the Earth can produce. Against the wall there is a case of fluorspars from Derbyshire. Chemically, this is just calcium fluoride—but this simple formula provides a rich range of lilacs, and apple greens, or banded displays alternating between colourless and coloured layers, or perfect cubes tumbling like spilled confectionery, making a kind of lithified Turkish delight. Fluorspar is an ancient worked stone, used even by the dynastic Egyptians, but no finer specimens have been collected than those from Derbyshire, on the “backbone of England.” In one corner of the Russell Room there are strange metallic-looking “wheels” of a mineral called bournonite purchased in 1879, and today worth in excess of a hundred thousand pounds per sample. They originated from the Herodsfoot Mine in Cornwall. The Lostwithiel mineralogist Richard Talling—after whom tallingite is named—tried to collect the mineral from the mine but was rebuffed by the tin miners. He covertly bought 51 per cent of the shares in the mine, and when he returned to the mine was able to put the miners on to the extraction of strange mineral species instead of their usual ores. In another corner of the room is the type specimen of the element Niobium (formerly Columbium) given to Sloane in 1754 by John Winthrop and used by Charles Hatchett to discover this rare element, which he formally announced to the Royal Society on 26 November 1801.

Science, treasure, rarity, beauty, scholarship: this hidden gallery made me understand again the heterogeneous attraction of Museum life. Nowhere else could a link with the Mughal emperors be relevant to what happens deep beneath the surface of the Earth; nowhere else would the fanatical collecting of a toffish Russell become a long-term resource for mineral genesis; nowhere else could rummaging in an attic reveal an archive of the Prince Regent. From the Russell Room I looked out on to the Victoria and Albert Museum across the other side of Exhibition Road. The prospect might suggest imperial nonsense and “pomp and circumstance,” a slightly ridiculous inheritance from the nineteenth century when the Sun never set on the British Empire. But South Kensington has become transformed by time and usage into something that is more than just the “BM” and the “V& A,” a monument to a Britain that no longer exists. The collections are there to inform and inspire the whole world, and not just a small corner of it. I am not much of a post-colonialist, and I don’t necessarily admire the principles on which the collections were made. But I do understand the primacy of collections as a record of the world, both human and natural. There is more to collections than the golden rule about never throwing things away. There is inherent value in having people who “know their stuff.” The apparently esoteric can suddenly illuminate unsuspected areas of knowledge. Those who have devoted their lives to collections—obdurate people, odd people, admirable people—actually make a museum what it is and should be.

8

Noah’s Ark in Kensington

Recently, I travelled back in time. Ollie Crimmen, the fish curator, had somehow got hold of an old BBC1
Horizon
programme about the Natural History Museum broadcast on 7 September 1970. It carried the title of this chapter. The whole programme had a faded feel to it, as if it had been recorded in about 1902. All the scientific staff were wearing V-neck jumpers and ties and spoke in clipped, upper-middle-class tones. One could imagine that their pipes had only just been tapped out. The blue-uniformed warders looked as if they were doing the job after a stint on E-wing of a prison for violent offenders. The exhibitions they supervised really
were
still those inherited from 1902, comprising lines of things in glass cases, with technical labels in small type. The Director—Sir Frank Claringbull—was filmed in a classic book-lined study facing the camera as straight as if it were an interrogator, and talking too fast. There were also some of the people who have appeared in this book. Here was the famous whale man Peter Purves, explaining elegantly how he aged whales from the deposits laid down in their ears, as he wandered through the skeletons of a dozen cetaceans that were formerly stashed in the basement. Purves displayed no sign of insobriety at this stage in his career. Then there was Peter Whitehead, fish man and roué, explaining very clearly why taxonomy mattered, his beard still black, the bags under his eyes at an early stage in their ontogeny. Tony Sutcliffe, fossil mammal man, was on film looking just the same as when he retired twenty-five years later—I realized he had always looked about sixty years old. Miriam Rothschild, the Trustee’s Trustee, handsome in a mannish way, wearing a curious kind of cape and backed by ranks of leather-bound volumes, was speaking of collections in a way that showed how deeply she cared about them—
her
BM collections, the value of which was beyond dispute. The kids on the galleries seemed much more timeless, fidgeting and tucking into their sandwiches. I realized that memory is a great deceiver. It muddles things up, it does not square with time, and it does not move along in the way one expects. The documentary evidence of this film proved how it really was. I was alarmed to find that there were people in the film that I remembered not at all: the bat man was somebody I may have never met, or have forgotten, and therefore will always be excluded from my personal museum. The way that he delicately examined a pickled bat’s ears suggested that he might have been interesting to know; that he, too, would have had stories to tell. In a strange way this demonstration of the limitations of memory proves the importance of collections in museums. They defy time; they transcend what any one scholar might make of them; they are outside our own little personal histories.

The official histories of museums tend to be dominated by the few for whom archives are compiled and maintained, and most particularly Directors. This is not so different from the way that the history of England used to be portrayed as the history of kings and queens, or that of the United States of America by the doings and ponderings of presidents. It is certainly a convenient way of keeping a chronology in mind—a kind of temporal mnemonic—but it hardly paints a true picture of what happens among the people: acts and edicts are the least part of history. I have been concerned with what goes on behind the scenes among the practising scientists. I have not referred very much to the politics at the top of the organizational hierarchy. As in William T. Stearn’s history, I could have recounted the scientific story Keeper by Keeper, but that, too, is a history of successive governments rather than a history of fallible and interesting practitioners. However, it would be remiss of me not to write a little about the running of the Museum by the boss—what is today termed “governance,” a word that to me sounds like a cross between “government” and “performance” and automatically carries a whiff of admonishment. The Directors of the Natural History Museum have gradually dwindled in public prominence over the last century and a half. Earlier Directors included figures that could take their place on the world stage of savants; more recent occupiers of the post are competent people put there to run things, not to influence the perception of the natural world in the human one. When Richard Owen agitated for the foundation of a separate Natural History Museum, he could directly commune with the royal family, at a time when that family really counted for something. Nobody disputed that he was also one of the greatest comparative anatomists of the day. Even his independent views concerning evolutionary theory might be attributed to some kind of comparative resentment over Darwin’s intellectual ascendancy—there was room for only one top dog. There were not many people in the nineteenth century who could command influence as effectively as Sir Richard.
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His successor, Sir William Flower, was Director between 1884 and 1898. A convinced evolutionist and friend of Thomas Henry Huxley, he it was who placed evolutionary theory at the centre of the exhibitions. He commissioned a large marble statue of Darwin by T. E. Boehm at a cost of £2,000, a serious sum then. It was unveiled on 9 June 1889 by the Prince of Wales, in the presence of Admirals J. Sullivan and A. Mellersh, both of whom had been on the expedition of the
Beagle.
Owen’s statue had to wait until 1900. Flower is not as familiar a name as Darwin or Owen, but he established the principle of exhibiting informative specimens while protecting the study specimens behind the scenes in the scientific collections. He was a devoted public servant, whose health suffered in the over-conscientious pursuit of his duty; ill health forced him into resignation. He is also the only Director with a surname appropriate to the job.

Edwin Ray Lankester, who followed Flower, was another great figure in public science. He had already been Linacre Professor in the Zoology Department at Oxford, so he was top of the academic tree before he even crossed the threshold of the Museum. His
Textbook of Zoology
(1909) became a standard work. But he was also well enough known to the public to appear in cartoons in
Punch
heavily riding upon the back of the okapi (
Okapia johnstoni
), which he had made known to science and the press in 1901. This odd relative of the giraffe was first known from bands of skin collected in the Congo a year or so previously and thought to be a new kind of zebra. Lankester, through the “Africa hand” Sir Harry Johnston, later acquired a whole skin and two skulls. I like a description of Lankester in the journal
Candid Friend
of 1901: “His own head is shaped like a benevolent biscuit-tin and is packed as full of knowledge as other people’s eggs are full of meat…the only thing that moves the excellent and bulky biologist to unmitigated wrath is a real idiot.” He was a naturally commanding figure, tall and paunchy, with a deep, loud voice that could be heard along the length of the longest gallery. Like many clever people he did not tolerate fools gladly, and he had a most capacious definition of “fool.” This led him into outbursts and confrontations that made his time at the top a difficult one. He had rows with the Trustees. He had rows with the BM. At the end of the nineteenth century the Principal Librarian at Bloomsbury, Edward Maunde Thompson, was one notch up in the hierarchy from the South Kensington Director, something that Ray Lankester found irksome. He was reprimanded by Sir Edward for not informing him of the dates when he was away on leave, at which point the memoranda started to fly. The seriousness with which both men took the definition of the “pecking order” suggests two large egos unwilling to budge, and as often happens in such situations, the conflict escalated until the Trustees eventually had to reinforce the status quo. Now the disappointed Natural History Museum Director sought to take on the Trustees in turn. Lankester was well connected at the Royal Society, from which he would one day receive the highest honour, the Copley Medal, which was awarded to Stephen Hawking in 2007; Albert Einstein and Max Planck were previous winners. Through behind-the-scenes lobbying at his “club” of top scientists, he sought to persuade some influential Fellows to write a memorandum publicly complaining of the inadequate way in which the Museum had been governed by its Trustees. His machinations came to nothing. By 1904 his relations with the Trustees had deteriorated to the point where they appointed a subcommittee to report on the running of the Natural History Museum—which it did, in no uncertain terms. An extract from the report reads:

Edwin Ray Lankester, Museum Director, riding on the okapi he described (from
Punch,
12 November 1902)

When Sir Richard Owen was appointed head of the Natural History Museum he appears to have regarded the post as being in the nature of a reward for scientific eminence, while administration and superintendence were to occupy a secondary position. Sir W. Flower exercised a closer and more systematic superintendence over the Museum than had been the practice of Sir R. Owen. Prof. Lankester appears to take the view that his duties and functions are such as were undertaken by Sir R. Owen, rather than those that were fulfilled by Sir W. Flower…We fully recognize the great value of the scientific researches prosecuted by the Director, but at the same time we are strongly of the opinion that in the interests of the Museum the duties as laid down by the Statutes should be strictly carried out in future…in conformity with the practice usual in the case of other Civil Servants.

Edwin Ray Lankester’s rather large knuckles had been thoroughly rapped, and his days were numbered. He was retired at sixty on 31 December 1907, but not before fighting the Trustees’ rights to dispose of his services every step of the way, including a huffy letter to
The Times.
He was, incidentally, one of nine people at Karl Marx’s funeral. Although his history might suggest that he was what would now be termed an elitist, his prolific essay writing for the general reader shows the contrary: an unpatronizing clarity, and a capacity to charm. I read
Diversions of a Naturalist
(1913) with pleasure, and I maintain that Lankester might be mentioned in the same breath as J. B. S. Haldane as an occasional writer. No doubt his dedication to science and his intemperate and unqualified belief in his own rectitude led to his difficulties. But nobody could deny that he was a man of real intellectual substance and an ambassador for biology.

However, the Trustees had voiced their opinion: administration should come before charisma, efficient systems before science, and “usual Civil Service practice” should obtain throughout. There should be lots of nicely presented reports and memoranda. A Museum Secretary would help the smooth running of things, and indeed one Charles Fagan had proved to be indispensable in this role for decades in the earlier half of the twentieth century. The Director should be the oil between the cogs that makes the whole machine run without a glitch. However, there was at least one more Director of global stature
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—although I should perhaps rather say “globular stature” since Sir Gavin de Beer was both short and stout. He was Director from 1950 to 1960. He was born with such a large number of silver spoons in his mouth that he must have found eating a challenge. He spent his early years in France, which conditioned him to be multi-lingual, a polyglot polymath. While he was President of the Fifteenth International Zoological Congress in London in 1958, he prided himself on addressing all the European delegates in their own tongue. He was most extraordinarily clever, and very aware of the fact. He wrote on evolutionary theory, particularly with regard to embryology; he penned a biography of Darwin; he described
Archaeopteryx,
the famous early fossil bird, and he wrote volumes of history in his spare time. His bibliography extends into hundreds of articles, reviews and books. He arrived and left every day in his Rolls-Royce, immaculately besuited, and it was common knowledge that he had to perch atop a pile of cushions to get a fair view of where he was going.

Sir Gavin de Beer, Director in the mid-twentieth century—Sir Cumference