Rachel Morris conjures up a fascinating family story as she uncovers the life and work of collectors and curators

REVIEW BY SUSAN FLOCKHART

WSeptember Publishing, £16.99

HAT went on in museums during the long months of lockdown closure? Probably very little, if you discount the virtual bustle of digital tours. Within the buildings, the stillness would have been almost complete – broken, perhaps, by the occasional flash of a caretaker’s torch or the flit of moth-wings emerging from glassy-eyed taxidermy.

As for the exhibits: forget notions of Night At The Museum-style uprisings. Without visitors to bring them to life, all those stuffed corpses and suits of armour are utterly inert. That shard of grey stone becomes a Neolithic arrowhead only when someone imagines the hands that sculpted it or the hunter who held it aloft.

It also requires someone to tell its story and Rachel Morris’s book is about the people who operate behind the scenes of our museums: the collectors and curators who gather artefacts and interpret their histories, labelling and arranging them to show what they were and how they were used – in the process, offering glimpses of vanished worlds.

A museum-maker who’s worked on collections in the V&A, British Museum and many others, Rachel Morris has written an appreciative account of her professional forebears, from 18th-century pioneers who trawled the world for specimens to heroic warzone curators who risked their lives defending national treasures against cultural genocide.

The book is also part-memoir, recording the author’s attempts to make sense of her confusing childhood. Born into an lineage of artists and writers, Morris’s knowledge of her family’s complicated history had been hazy. With their mother in and out of hospital and their father inexplicably absent, she and her brothers had been raised in bohemian penury by their grandmother, an inveterate storyteller and unreliable narrator of the family history.

In middle age, Morris decided that having spent her working life sorting through objects to “make meaningful patterns out of the muddle and confusion of the universe”, she would do the same with the ancestral ephemera that had mouldered for years in her attic. Sifting through boxes of letters, diaries, photographs and locks of hair, she determined to try to make sense of her “incomprehensible childhood” by creating “the Museum of Me”.

The process would take her back six generations of a family tree that shimmers with luminaries including a pre-Raphaelite painter (William Gale), a composer (Henry Holmes) and two detective novelists (Edgar and Selwyn Jepson). Despite Morris’s observation that “most of the women in my family … died utterly anonymously”, the female celeb-count is high, including a sculptress and a concert pianist. Her maternal grandmother, the inveterate storyteller, Margaret Birkinshaw (nee Jepson) was a well-known novelist whose death in 2003 was recorded by a lengthy obituary in The Times. Moreover, Morris’s late mother’s sister, referred to in the book as “the London aunt”, is the hugely successful author and playwright, Fay Weldon.

Anyone familiar with Weldon’s autobiography will know about Margaret Birkinshaw’s arrival in London from New Zealand with her teenaged daughters, Jane and Fay, in 1946. They’ll know that the adult Jane became severely mentally ill then died of cancer aged just 39.

Reading about this tragedy from the perspective of Jane’s then 12-year-old daughter is heart-rending and it’s clear that for young Rachel, the secrecy that had surrounded her parents’ circumstances helped create an enduring sense of loneliness. Aged 16, she decided to search for her father, Douglas “Guido” Morris, an enigmatic artist-printer who’d been absent for most of his children’s lives. A few years before he died, she found him, living alone in alcoholic squalor.

Decades later, sifting through Guido’s old letters, Morris would despair over the impossibility of gaining genuine insight into the person her father had been. “How difficult it is to resurrect the past... to get the dead to stand up in all their contradictory but coherent whole.”

That, surely, is the crux of the museum-maker’s challenge. The past is not only a foreign country; it’s also hotly disputed territory and as Morris points out, “even museums do not always tell the truth”. Victorian institutions used plundered treasures and racist “craniometry” to glorify empire and legitimise colonial power, and although contemporary curators have increasingly sought to present the perspective of history’s underdogs, we no longer believe they “breathe the air of moral goodness and objectivity”.

The Museum Makers was written before the recent debate over slaverylinked statuary but Morris warns against dismantling the “versions of history” with which we now disapprove, suggesting instead that “past attitudes need to stand as documentation, some beautiful, some repugnant – although preferably, in ways that allow visitors to argue back”.

What about people’s personal histories? Memory is notoriously subjective: even siblings’ recollections of their shared past can vary greatly and families have been torn apart by disputes over the veracity of events related in misery memoirs.

The Museum Makers isn’t that kind of book and Morris doesn’t play the ancestral blame game. Her grandmother, on the other hand, seems to have been racked with guilt, even blaming herself for Jane’s mental illness. She was also haunted by the fatalistic notion that “bad blood” ran through her family, visiting “the curse of sadness” on each generation.

There was certainly plenty of scandal. Margaret’s grandfather,

Henry Holmes, was an ardent practitioner of “free love” who was sacked from the Royal College of Music for “debauching pupils entrusted in his care”. Her sister, Faith Jepson, was locked away in an asylum aged 17, after she’d been found in bed with her uncle (who seems to have got

OBJECT LESSONS: EXIT Laura Waddell

Bloomsbury Academic, £7.21

What is the book about?

Exit is the latest in a series by various authors known as Object Lessons in which each book takes one object that could seem simple and examine angles from which to look at it.

Who is it aimed at?

Perhaps older than fourteen.

GEMMA McLAUGHLIN

What was your favourite part?

What stood out to me most about this book is the balance struck between laying out the facts and ideas to be presented and the unique style of the writer which could have been lost. This is not the case with Exit where Waddell adds a personal touch that ties everything together.

What was your least favourite?

As it’s a shorter book which in many ways certainly enhances the experience, it can also feel a little short moving on between so many connected thoughts.

Which character would you most like to meet?

Where there are no written main or side characters, the majority of my interest is with the author, Laura Waddell.

Why should someone buy this book?

A great introduction to this series.