CULTURAL EXCHANGE

Should Scotland’s artifacts abroad be returned to their rightful home?

Afew months ago a ceremony took place in the Borders to repatriate a Maori war flag to Wairoa Museum in New Zealand. The flag was appropriated by Crown forces from a Maori tribe during the 1865 Battle of Omaruhakeke and was presented to the Hawick Museum by local artist Tom Scott in 1921. It’s not known why Scott was in possession of the flag or why he gave it to the Hawick Museum. However, the repatriation of the flag is a ‘powerful symbol’ for Maori tribes in the Hawke’s Bay area and a significant step towards laying to rest ghosts of the past.

There is also pressure on other Scottish institutions to return items such as Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum’s pastel of Millet’s The Angelus and Salvador Dali’s painting of Christ of Saint

John of the Cross to France and Spain respectively. Isn’t it time to redress the balance and bring more of Scotland’s cultural treasures home? For starters, how about the only known manuscript of Robert Burns’ To A Mouse? This poem, written in the bard’s own fair hand, currently resides in the New York Public Library. I’m sure they’re taking good care of it, but shouldn’t its rightful place be in the wonderful Robert Burns Birthplace Museum in Alloway?

Over the centuries, in this game of musical chairs, many objects relating to Scotland’s cultural heritage have ended up in obscure places when the music, or more likely the money, stops. The reality is, artifacts will gravitate to where there is interest and money, but where do you draw the line?

Despite the combined efforts of various museums in Scotland, a medal belonging to suffragette Frances ‘Fanny’ Parker, was sold to New Zealand’s Te Papa Museum a few months ago. Lord Kitchener’s New Zealand-born neice famously cycled from Glasgow to Alloway in 1914 with fellow suffragette Ethel Moorhead to attempt to set fire to Robert Burns’ Cottage. For the Wellington museum, Parker’s Woman’s Social and Political Union Medal for Valour is the only suffragette medal with a New Zealand connection. Their gain is Scotland’s loss.

Then there’s Jacobite memorabilia which is very popular and often snapped up by overseas collectors. The world’s most comprehensive auction of Jacobite rebellion artifacts last year at Lyon and Turnbull to mark the 300th anniversary of the 1715 Uprising, fetched almost £500,000. Yet there was nothing stopping any objects worth under £42,000 going abroad, never to be seen again in Scotland. The National Museum of Scotland were unsurprisingly equally coy about revealing how many of the objects for their Jacobite exhibition next year were sourced from overseas collections.

Many Scottish treasures are frustratingly close, kept just over the border. While the Stone of Destiny was returned in 1996 after an absence of 700 years, 82 of the exquisite – and iconically Scottish – Lewis Chessmen are in the British Museum in London, compared to just 11 in the National Museum of Scotland.

An almighty stushie blew up in 2007/8 between the Scottish Government and the British Museum over where the chessmen should be kept. In 2009 a compromise was reached and 30 Lewis chessmen, taken from both collections, toured Scotland. This is not good enough – the whole collection should be together in Scotland, although no doubt a tussle would then break out between Edinburgh and Lewis for the hosting rights.

Repatriation is a difficult, sensitive, and at times political issue but if the new orthodoxy is that each country should own its history, it’s time for Scotland to reclaim all its artifacts.

‘The reality is, artifacts will gravitate to where there is interest and money’