REMOVAL OF NATIONAL TREASURES

Evening Star, Issue 23421, 11 November 1939, Page 3

REMOVAL OF NATIONAL TREASURES

As soon as war was declared on Germany the task of removing the chief treasures of London’s art galleries and museums to places of safety was begun. Government departments, banks, insurance companies, and other companies, and private firms, also commenced to remove their records. The most valuable art works in the National Gallery and the Tate Gallery have been removed to country houses and stored in specially prepared cellars. Specimens from the Natural History, Museum, South Kensington, have been sent to the late Lord Rothschild’s museum at Thring, Herts. England’s most valuable collection of scientific books and periodicals in the Science Museum, South Kensington, has been sent to the country. All the records and most important books of the Royal Astronomical Society have been removed fo the Radcliffe Observatory, Oxford. The world-famous Hunterian collection of surgical specimens in the Royal College of Surgeons, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, has been removed to a bomb-proof vault in the college basement. The Mansion House and the Guildhall have sent their valuable plate and documents to places of safety. Many of the exhibits of the British Museum will be stored in country houses and the basements of provincial museums. But the library of 5,000,000 books in the British Museum is to remain on the shelves, protected by sand bags.