MUSEUMS AS DUMPS

Evening Star, Issue 20167, 6 May 1929, Page 6

MUSEUMS AS DUMPS

FREAK GIFTS FOISTED OH CURATORS It will be many a long year before the public receives with anything but wide-eyed amazement a declaration that a museum is not a mere dump °f mixed curies, writes a collector in the Loudon ‘Star.’ Personally, 1 feel that the museum curators and directors themselves are to blame for this. They take for granted that the people who troop in through the. turnstile, with lack-lustre eye and a sigh of relief at getting out of tiro rain, know what the museum means—what it is for: whereas if they took' the trouble, to ask a hundred visitors they would not get half a dozen correct replies. More than half of the visitors believe, with the small boy irom Tloxton, that if there be an admission fee one or two days a week the museum _is there “to get tuppences for the government." The more relined visitors look uncomfortable, as is the wily of the English middle classes when asked why they think or do what they think or do, and answer: “ Well, I suppose the museum is a place, where one comes to look at interesting things."

Them is not a museum in the land that would not be infinitely more valuable for having in a conspicuous place in the entrance hall, at any rate, a i old blackboard discarded by the nearest hoard school, or a chalked placard declaring naively to the naiyo minds that glance at it: “No! This is Not a Dump of Queer Things to Stare At. It Means Something.” And then go on in a few sentences to explain what your particular typo of museum does mean. TWIDDLY-BITS.

The damage is done very early in life when the' child stares, sucking its thumb, at the locked cabinet of ,-urios in grandma's frowsty Mid-Victorian drawing room, and is encouraged to bring its contributions to the meaningless dump- of curios in the school museum. It is this school collection of oddments and hitmcnls which is the worst breeding ground of misconceptions as to the proper function of an intelligently-conducted imisenm.

London museums are offered a constant flow of undesired contributions, but they arc in that position of glorious independence—oh, how envied by their municinal bond slaves in the provinces! —of being able to refuse unsuitable gifts, like the dead dogs so frequently offered to the Natural History Museum in South Kensington by people who carp but won’t, afford to pay a taxidermist to skin and stuff their pet. '’Such n naico deg, too, my dear!” One institution received a mysterious box cf brown dust which, * when (nodded about, revealed a card announcing with simple directness; “This, gentlemen, is all that remains of a large dog”; it was the result of an .experiment in economical cremation bv charcoal.

Strayed exotic fowl from park lakes arc a favourite offering some years, with a broad hint that the generous donor is only a poor working man who has missed the emoluments, of a morning’s toil by his public-spirited trek ti the museum". “They're usually afraid to cook them when they’ve pinched them.” explained a curator friend of mine in a Midland city, “or the missus objects.’’ Freak vegetables, razors that belonged to grandpa, stuffed pets, tiles from old houses in which local bigwigs used to live, modern foreign coins, bairballs found in cows’ stomachs, faded and damaged collections of butterflies, pressed flowers and ferns, dirty and damaged unlabellcd fossils, all the familiar “junk” sold to homebound tourists by peddlers of every port from Yokohama to the Suez Canal, and a heavy assortment of all the rubbishy steel engravings, gimcracl; furniture, hideous “ornaments,’’ and genera! knieknacks to be seen in the average old-fashioned lodging house at the seaside are offered to the Jong-suffering provincial curator.