The collectors, excavators and insufferable snobs who founded Britain’s museums
Collectors like Hans Sloane may not have been saints, but they changed our world, says Rachel Morris
In the store rooms of the Hull and East Riding Museum is a collection of prehistoric artefacts gathered up by a tall, argumentative Victorian archaeologist with a beard like a waterfall and a defensive sense of his own social status.
It was John Mortimer (1825-1911) and other early museum men who helped map the vast and unknown era of British prehistory. Without them, we would know far less about the people who lived in this country before the Romans came; we would in fact be living – as the British historian William Camden once said – like strangers in our own country.
Mortimer specialised in the early history of the Yorkshire Wolds. Down in the South West, meanwhile, William Pengelly, the genial son of a Cornish sea captain, was excavating Kents Cavern near Torquay, where early human beings had lived alongside now-extinct animals such as cave lions. And – a third example among hundreds – Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers (rather posher than the other two – he inherited a baronetcy) was excavating earthworks in Dorset and Wiltshire.
All three men were obsessed with their own local prehistory. Mortimer came from a Yorkshire farming family, had been brought up on the Wolds, and knew every local wood and field and stream and village, inside out. (He was only two generations away from the rural poor, hence his chippiness about his social status.)
Museums are, among many other things, tools for thinking with – ways of making sense of the world. At the end of the 18th century, you couldn’t have laid out British artefacts in date order with any confidence – there was not even a sense of three prehistoric eras: stone, bronze and iron – whereas by the end of the 19th century, myths were being discarded and Pengelly’s excavations at Kents Cavern had shown how far back in time human beings went.
Mortimer, Pengelly and Pitt Rivers were instinctively museum people. They picked up their finds, turned them over and over in their hands to see what they could learn from them, laid them out to make meaningful patterns, invited in their friends to look at them, and, lo and behold, they were half way towards making a museum.
Pengelly’s collection from Kents Cavern went to Torquay Museum and is at the heart of their very early prehistory collection. Pitt Rivers’ finds in Dorset and Wiltshire went to Salisbury Museum, while the vast number of artefacts he collected overseas – 26,000 in total – were bequeathed to the University of Oxford and used to establish the museum that bears his name.
Mortimer went one step further and built his own museum in his local town of Driffield, diverting so much money into it from his farming business that it contributed to his later bankruptcy. (Not that he appeared to take any notice of this fact, but went on excavating just as if nothing had happened.) His collection ended up in Hull’s museum.
Most of the early archaeologists were also members of local literary, philosophical and antiquarian societies, with day jobs as clergymen, businessmen and schoolteachers. It was in their spare time that they became early and passionate archaeologists.
Some of their portraits have survived, and they are – I have to admit – intimidating to look at, with stern faces and long white sideburns,
and waistcoats and high collars and cravats.
But museums are always changing. Within a couple of generations, local authorities started taking over the Lit and Phil museums. The process was driven by a great deal of civic pride, particularly in the northern towns, which were wealthy from the industrial revolution. Local museums were an embodiment of this pride.
If you want to explore these museums, then try a northern journey, from Preston’s Harris museum, which looks like a Greek temple, to Blackburn’s museum, which resembles a beautiful, gothic stone casket, to Paisley’s museum, outside Glasgow, which is built like a Greek temple-cum-classical-villa and has a 19th-century observatory and telescope for examining the stars. Down south, the Museum of Oxford is half way between a cathedral and an extremely grand 19th-century railway station.
Mortimer and Pengelly are now largely lost from sight, though you may find traces of them, as I did, by drifting around the museum shops and picking up those old printed booklets of the proceedings of some local history society (usually first printed about 50 years ago and not changed since).
I have one such booklet on my desk right now. It’s titled “Torquay Natural History Society”, and every bit of it is redolent of a long since vanished world. When I open it at random, I see the heading “1854” and, under it, “Mrs Amelia Griffiths, one of the first ladies to join the Society, presented a complete collection of British Sponges”.
I don’t want to romanticise these early museum makers. The Lit and Phil societies were probably riddled with small-town snobberies. And they were certainly men’s worlds, with women mostly relegated to supporting roles as wives and daughters.
Mortimer’s books are illustrated by stunning line drawings created by his teenage daughter Agnes, as he himself acknowledged. “I am solely indebted to my daughter Agnes, who from the time she was thirteen years old until she was nineteen, devoted many of her leisure hours to the completion of this, which at her age must have been a tedious and an irksome task.”
But though I suspect that many of these early archaeologists, Pengelly excepted, were irascible, reserved and married to their museums, even so, they were trying to make sense of their world. And if I cannot tell you that they were charismatic in themselves, there is definitely something mysterious and charismatic about our search to understand what it was like to be alive in those prehistoric millennia.
Without the work of those early archaeologists, and their mapping of prehistory, I couldn’t begin to imagine what kind of bedtime stories the prehistoric people of the Yorkshire Wolds told their children on winter nights, or what kind of view there was on a summer’s morning from Kents Cavern, when sea levels were much lower, the land on either side much wider and therefore the walk from the cave to the sea shore much further.
It is these small details that make the past sing out.
Without these early museum men we’d be living like strangers in our own country