A collector’s collection
What do museum directors collect? After a day surrounded by the best quality objects in a variety of disciplines, what do they go home to? The question arises with the pending sale – at the west London saleroom 25 Blythe Road – of the private collection of Dr Alan Borg, the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum from 1995 to 2001. Dr Borg formed an interest in British war memorials during his earlier post as director general of the Imperial War Museum in the Eighties. “Such memorials are by far the commonest public monuments in this country,” he writes in his foreword to the sales catalogue, “but there was no account of their design and building.” Dr Borg went on to set up the National Inventory of War Memorials, and began collecting designs. One of them was made for Albury Church in Surrey by local artist, Gerald F Metcalfe, who used the village postman as a model for a relief figure. Some of the designs were never built; five drawings by Herbert Hampton, for example, were made in a competition for an equestrian memorial to Earl Haig in Whitehall, which he didn’t win. The majority of Dr Borg’s designs are for First World War memorials, and include stained glass windows, hospitals and a cricket pavilion. The sale is on March 29 and prices range from £100 to £1,000.