Forget finance, tech and sport – our museums show Britain at its best
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Version 0 of 1. In 1898, a group of construction workers on a railroad in Wyoming thought they’d hit a stone. Instead, they’d found the fossilised bones of a diplodocus. “Most colossal animal ever on Earth,” shrieked the headlines. The Fife-born philanthropist Andrew Carnegie fell in love with the beast – and went on a mission to make it the most famous dinosaur in the world. America was gripped by bone fever. Keen to be the winner of The Great Dinosaur Rush, Carnegie took the skeleton to his Pittsburgh museum. It was dubbed Diplodocus carnegii in honour of him and casts were sold to museums across the world. Edward VII saw a sketch while visiting Carnegie in Scotland and expressed a desire for one for South Kensington. The dinosaur cast arrived in 36 boxes and was shown to the public in a ceremony in May 1905. But African elephants dominated the entrance hall; it wasn’t until 1979 that Dippy moved to take prime position. Scroll forwards 100 years and Dippy has created a media frenzy again. When the news broke last week that he was going to be moved from his prime position in the entrance hall of the National History Museum and replaced by a 98ft blue whale skeleton, there was an outcry. “UK’s biggest controversy today is over a fake dinosaur,” noted American ABC News, slightly baffled. A petition on change.org has nearly 30,000 signatures and #savedippy has been trending on Twitter. The pop group Right Said Fred have indicated that their 1992 hit Deeply Dippy could be a campaign song. Dippy isn’t destined for obscurity. He’s to go on tour; anyway, there are nine other casts of him across the world. But whatever happens, the Natural History Museum has pulled off a PR coup. More than five million of us visit every year (sometimes it seems like double that on a rainy half-term Monday) and over the next year or so, thousands more will travel to South Kensington to decide for ourselves if Dippy should stay or go. It is not the first time that the Natural History Museum has managed to bring media attention to the task of refreshing and evaluating its exhibits. In 2012, the curators obtained a stegosaurus skeleton at the Tucson Rock and Mineral Fair. The new acquisition was kept top secret; as Professor Paul Barrett, head of fossil vertebrates, wrote in the Guardian, the museum wanted to research the skeleton, but also to “maximise the impact” when it was unveiled to the public. It took a year to mastermind its presentation – Sophie the stegosaurus was finally revealed to wide acclaim in December last year. Nowadays, museums have to have a foot in both camps – maintaining their research and curation while attracting the public and making waves in the media. The two largest groupings of the 850 strong staff, the science group and the public engagement group, have to strike a balance between educating us and giving us what we want to see. And museums are big business – the government-funded museums and galleries raised £100m between them last year. The revolutionary decision of the Labour government to make the country’s major museums free in 2001 has dramatically increased engagement and visitor numbers. Since then, museums have been engaging their public in ever more exciting ways – from wedding dress displays at the Victoria and Albert Museum to dinosaur sleep-overs under Dippy’s watchful gaze. Temporary exhibitions and events pull in huge crowds. I am part of a team organising an Emma Hamilton exhibition for the National Maritime Museum for 2016 and the amount of planning is a revelation – borrowing from museums and collections all over the world. The British Museum was our first real museum, the property of the public rather than the monarch or the church. When Hans Sloane bequeathed his hoard of manuscripts, books, natural specimens and antiquities to the nation in 1753, they needed a home. George III agreed to the British Museum Act and the museum was opened in Montagu House in Great Russell Street. The collection really kicked off when British envoy Sir William Hamilton sent back his antiquities from Naples in 1772 – and then another load when he fled Italy along with his wife, Emma Hamilton, and her lover, Horatio Nelson. The 19th century became the age of the museum. Objects were scrambled for, specimens seized and friezes and antiques grasped. By the middle of Queen Victoria’s reign, there simply wasn’t enough space to house the acquisitions in Bloomsbury – and curators worried that the natural history specimens were being lost. After much discussion about plans and layout, the new Natural History Museum was opened in 1881. Ten years later, the South Kensington curators bought a whole female blue whale for £250. She had beached in Wexford, on the Irish coast, after being hit by a whaler. What followed was a painstaking effort of cleaning and polishing to create the beautiful skeleton that was unveiled in the new Mammal Hall in 1938. There she remains – until 2017, when she will take Dippy’s place. Once upon a time, monarchs and governments set off on crusades or entertained fellow regents at the Field of the Cloth of Gold to show off their grandeur. Now we open museums. What was the Millennium Dome but the most failed museum in British history? Museums are the new cultural capital; if we conquered somewhere now, we would add a museum. Indeed, critics would say that our museums still reflect the attitudes of the conquering British Empire, from the Elgin marbles to mummies from Egyptian tombs. One in four visitors to London visits the British Museum and they can soon visit its overseas venture, Zayed Museum on Saadiyat island, or “museum island”, in Abu Dhabi, along with a Louvre branch and a New York University campus. In his Sackler Lecture at the V&A last Thursday, Boris Johnson praised the wonder of museums, for the development of the Olympic Park – or “Olympicopolis” – which contains an outpost of the V&A and a partnership with the Smithsonian. So why do we care so much? Why do we worry whether Dippy or a whale is in the main hall? The museum is stuffed with dinosaurs, after all. We see museums as our possessions, our most important attractions. The modern museum has multiple purposes – to curate and preserve, to research and to reach out to the public. They challenge us and ask us to question our assumptions about the past or the world around us. Even if this does mean moving Dippy. Historian Dr Kate Williams’s books include Young Elizabeth: The Making of Our Queen and Josephine Bonaparte: Desire, Ambition, Napoleon |