BRITISH MUSEUMS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23887, 15 August 1939, Page 13

BRITISH MUSEUMS

THEIR TENDENCY PROPOSALS BY LORD BLEDISLOE (From Our Own Correspondent* LONDON, July 6. Lord Bledisloe presided at the jubile* conference of the Museums Association, held at Cheltenham. In his opening . address he said that British museums could derive advantage by following the example of other countries;' both within the Empire and without. Nothing lingered more delightfully In his memory than the open-air folk museums he had seen in Denmark, Sweden and Holland, in which groups of old houses, with their equipment, were assembled for preservation. Where was there anything of • this kind in England? Only the Manx Museum and the trustees of Ancient Monuments had been active in this line. They had set up the first museum of the sort at Cregneish, in the Isle of Man. '-••.-...' Many old half-timbered cottages and tithe barns were being demolished or were falling into ruins. Nothing would lead to a fuller appreciation ', of cur gems of old domestic architecture than the concentration of groups of them in open-air and folk museums at home and oversea. He urged the marking of the association's jubilee year by the inauguration, with Government support, of England's first museum of that kind. Possibly there could not be found a better setting for it than the Forest of Dean, which had lately been earmarked as the site of England's first National Forest Park, or alternatively a still unspoilt Cots wold village. It was encouraging that there could be seen in the Royal Agricultural Show at Windsor an open-air museum illustrating a century of vehicular transport in England. The equipment of British faxms during the same period also formed part of this temporary museum. But they looked in Vain for any comprehensive agricultural museum. Hungary, Egypt and even Japan, had theirs, and at Dehra Dun, in India, there was a great forestry museum. ;" . A good ethnographical museum Avas also wanted. The trustees of the British Museum would be the first to agree with him that their ethnographical collections were a disgrace to the ethnographicalprofession of this country. Our great Empire was completely lacking in any adequate display in London of its primitive cultures; Instead of radiating culture, stirtrng the imagination, the enterprise and. the enthusiasm of youth, our museums tended to become synonymous with stagnation, atmospheric fustiness and the pardonable weaknesses of the aged obsessionist. There was need for. a return to the original conception of a museum as a fountain of culture alike for young and old. for rich and poor, for layman and expert, adapted to the every-day intellectual and spiritual requirements of the nation as a whole. The eye was the most efficacious channel of entry to the mind, as the kinema was demonstrating, hot always to the national advantage. Consequently, there were no more promising educational agents or more powerful stimulants to the imagination than the museum and the kinema: ~ . - •■\- If visual education: was to Play i™ full part in "the educational system, all museums should be organised on a national basis, brought under some measure of Government direction, and in some cases not merely exempted from rates, but also provided witit assistance from the public purse. Further, if museums were, an indispensable element in the cultural development of the nation, then the buildings must in appearance, lighting, accessibility and freedom from cold and damp receive at least as much .consideration as those of a school, a private house or a kinema. The tune had arrived when the whole museum movement in this country should be given the benefit of authoritative and comprehensive direction by the Government. If at the moment it were not opportune to establish ! the Ministry of Cultural Services he would like to , see, there were irresistible alternative arguments for extending the measure of assistance and advice now furnished by the Board of Education to public museums and art galleries. In any case a royal commission or departmental committee should be set up without delay to investigate the whole problem of the future of provincial museums and to report whether they should be assisted from public funds. Museums—Past. Present, and Future The Times remarks upon the several valuable suggestions made by Lord Bledisloe. and comments in its leader columns: — In popular appreciation museums mav be said to suffer from their ivime, which suggests something mu-sty and dusty. It was. no doubt, partly to remedy this that the Museums Association, which is holding its, Jubilee conference at Cheltenham this week, was founded in 1889. But .the work of the association "to extend the usefulness of museums and art galleries, goes far beyond countering the hypnotic effect of a word, and includes the better and more lively organisation of the institutions themselves. What the Museums Associatipn'has done and is doing to humanise museums can best be appreciated by comparing the average museum of today with the average museum of 50 years ago. In his presidential address yesterday Lord Bledisloe brought up some dismal evidence from the oast, in quotations from Thomas Greenwood and the Markham report, and there is further evidence from another source. By a happv coincidence it was. precisely in 1889, the year in which the association was founded, that Henry James published his "A London Life. As may be remembered, his discreet and exemplary lovers, and for reasons sign'.leant in themselves, forgathered in a certain museum. In a single sentence James indicates a state of things that then appears to have been. general. Our young friends wandered from room to room and thought everything queer and some few objects interesting Mr Wendover said it would be a very good plan to find a thing you couldn't find anywhere else—it illustrated the orudent virtue of keeping. It is safe to say that, thanks largely to the work of the Museums Association, few museums of to-dav would afford the opportunity cherished by James's lovers. "The prudent virtue of 'keeping* remains, but the ettori is now as far as possible .to make everything 'queer' also 'interesting to the most Dreoccupied and the least informed."