Museum keeping childhood alive

Press, 4 October 1977, Page 45

Museum keeping childhood alive

By

CORDELIA OLIVER,

As the capital of Scotland, Edinburgh plays host to all the national galleries and museums and so manages to avoid the necessity of keeping up a large municipal collection. But one small museum is entirely Edinburgh’s own, and it knows no rival in popularity. The Museum of Childhood, brainchild of a former city councillor, Patrick Murray, is now more than 20 years old. It began as an overgrown personal collection of bygone playthings and mementoes of childhood covering several generations.

When Mr Murray first put it on public view in 1955 it formed no more than a top floor adjunct to the collections of Bums, Scott and Stevenson relics tn Lady Stair’s House, one of the remaining 17th century town mansions off the High Street. But so promptly did the cupboards and attics of Scotland, let alone Edinburgh, yield up their toy treasures that the Murray collection soon outgrew its available space and was forced to find a new home in Hyndford Close, another tall, ancient building nearby, where it could spread upwards into three floors.

“Guardian”

There, with Murray as its first director (and no one was better than he at cajoling coveted items from young and old), the Edinburgh Museum of Childhood was officially founded with backing from the city council.

And there it remains, having once again all but outgrown its breathing space, for miraculously, though the rocketing value of antique playthings makes nonsense of the

museum’s slender budget, and, for the same reason, donors are both less plentiful and less generous, the collection continues to grow. Indeed, the resulting atmosphere of intriguing clutter, rich as Christmas pudding, is not without its own nostaligic charm. For this is preciesely how I remember the museums of my own youth, not sterilised and neat as they so often are today.

Essentially, this museum is an essay in nostalgia — for one’s own childhood if one is over 40 — and offers a vivid childhood picture of several generations of anyone’s antecedents. Here at one end of the scale are the lavish toys of the middle and upper classes — the French dolls with their trunks of exquisitely made finery and accessories, gloves and fans and trinkets; the

music boxes and automata; the magic lanterns, rocking horses, splendid model railways and clockwork motor cars. At the other end are the ageless, classless, and invariably attractive worldwide simplicity of balls and rattles, rag dolls and wooden toys. Dominating the museum’s second floor is one of those massive 19th century dolls’ houses which,

like man} 7 a full scale mansion, evolved over a period of years, in this case 1897-1935. Called after the onetime home of its former owner, Mrs Graham Montgomery, Stansbrig Eorls boasts not only the customary grand apartments, including an exceptionally fine music room where the furniture is craftsmanbuilt in the style of Sheraton and where the musical instruments are

precious minatures rather than true toys, but also an attic junkroom stuffed with sufficient period odds and ends to send any present day dolls’ house furnisher mad with envy.

However, to think of this museum as merely an endearing collection of antique playthings is seriously to underestimate its importance. True, it was founded by an avid collector, but Patrick Murray is also a genuine historian and the museum he created is like a history of childhood preserved in aspic.

Not only playthings — though naturally these predominate — but all aspects of childhood through the ages are here to be enjoyed and studied. For example, there are children’s clothes, from the impractical taffetas and satins of the 18th century to the übiquitous Victorian sailor suit, as well as likenesses of children wearing them.

Here tpo are nursery medicaments (who, having suffered it, could ever forget the torture of “castor oil?”) and literature, from educational books to comics and adventure weeklies such as “Magnet” and “Boys’ Own,” as well as all manner of schoolroom impedimenta, desks and inkpots, pencilboxes, textbooks and copybooks, even a school report or two, and several painstaking juvenile letters.

On the lighter side are some of those “giveaways” with branded foods, such as the enamel badges which came with Robertson’s marmalade.

It has been said of Patrick Murray that he lives a paradox; that although childhood is his chosen subject he is known to hold children, as such, in

abhorrence. Both Murray and his successor, Mr Hutcheon, would be quick to refute the calumny, or at least to qualify it. Children in general are not anathema, only those without an adult to control them while they are inside the museum. In any case, the place is nothing if not conducive to good behaviour: there is so much to see and discover that boredom, that primary source of unruliness, is easily kept at bay. For even the youngest visitor there is a seemingly inexhaustible

satisfaction in watching dolls’ heads roll under the fatal impact of Madame Guillotine, a ghoulish old penny-in-the slot machine so perennially popular that it is now' yet again, temporarily out of repair (who says that a juvenile relish of violence is inspired by television?). But then again, a far more creative fascination is visibly aroused by all the evidence of the as-

tounding 19th century juvenile patience and proficiency in all manner of craftwork, from Berlin woolwork to pinprick picturemaking and fretwork. Mr Murray’s refreshingly objective captions (aimed at adults and worth reading for their dry humour as well as their information) also mention the “slightly lunatic skills” in exploring the decorative potential in onion skins and seaweed.

The toy shops, especially the butcher with his minature joints of painted beef, have their devotees, and even more so the toy theatres, from the large troupe of true marionettes,

so disturbingly half alive and watchful, to the little Pollock theatres with their paper scenery cut from “penny plain and tuppence coloured” sheets.