What should we think about Sir Roger, stuffed and stared at?
In her new book, Esther Woolfson considers man’s relationship with other animals. In this extract, she considers the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Musuem and some of its best-known exhibits
I’ve been coming to Kelvingrove Art Gallery since before I can remember, brought early as an indivisible part of a Glasgow childhood. Now, it’s one of these indelible markers of who I am, of person and place, of habitat and niche. In a way, I’m amazed it still exists, as solid as evidently it is because for so long, it’s been a place of – if not dreams then origins, ideas and appears, on this morning of falling blossom and chilly rain, pretty much the same. It may be in places like this, museums and galleries, where once, we learned the things we know.
As I walk in, I can’t remember exactly how everything used to be. Impressions and sensations have lasted more than the memory of anything particular. A lot has changed since then – there was a major refurbishment a few years ago although some of the display-creatures I remember are still here: the giraffe, the elephant, both just the same. I’m overwhelmed for a second. I feel as though I should greet them: You! After all this time – the three of us, here together again! They stand the way they always did, looking out with the same fixed and limpid gaze.
By the time I first knew them, the layout and display cases were no longer the same as when the gallery opened in 1920. According to museum records, they were divided into zoology, geology, palaeontology, minerology and ethnology – ‘the natural history of Man’ on the ground floor, ‘fine art’ – the art of Europe – elevated to the floor above. The lower galleries had to be repaired after damage during the heavy bombardments of Clydeside in 1941, which provided an opportunity for the ethnology displays to be changed and ‘modernised’. The galleries were redesigned by Dr Henry G Farmer, linguist, musicologist and one-time director of Glasgow’s Empire Theatre whose aim was to present the displays in a way which might provide a better understanding of the ‘arts and crafts of primitive peoples.’ He colour coded them into terracotta, light green and sky blue to provide backgrounds for the lives and artefacts of ‘lower primitive’, ‘middle primitive’ and ‘higher primitive’ societies. Australian indigenous people, the Saan people of Southern Africa and the people of Tierra del Fuego were assigned to the first category, Melanesians, some south and east African peoples, Inuit and indigenous inhabitants of the Great Plains to the next, with Polynesians, west and central Africans and coastal indigenous North Americans to the last, as the world’s human beings were given their place on this ascending, chromatic scale. Objections were expressed by the Argentinian consulate about the placing of the people of Tierra del Fuego but the displays were not changed. The layout must have been much the same by the time I was first brought here, when I was too small even to consider what they meant, or what the elephant and giraffe, or more accurately their preserved and moulded skins, were meant to tell me or whether their immobile presence might say more about us than them.
The late art critic John Berger talked of the human attempt to possess animals through image and its inevitable failure, ‘for in the act of possessing our images you make us what we never were.’ Both elephant and giraffe are silently eloquent about what they never were and now, passing between these cases of creatures, I think of how images and words have signified, influenced and described our relationships with other species, with insects, birds, and every other life-form. It’s these frozenin-the-moment creatures, in zoos, in depictions of all kinds, in film, story, cartoon, fable, allegory, poem, in nursery rhyme and picture book, which have formed the way we see and think, the ones which have moulded our ideas and consequently, our behaviour towards the natural world.
Perhaps there really is nothing remarkable about a pair of long-dead, large, southern hemisphere creatures standing on plinths on the black and white marble floor of a northern hemisphere museum. Perhaps it’s only what you should expect to see anywhere natural history’s displayed – exhibits in fixed glass cases, creatures poised or perching, clambering wired on a branch, marching nowhere, flying in a painted, artificial sky. So many people must have had their first sight of wild species and the world beyond from seeing creatures just like these. The lessons may have been, and still are of great value, the collections in museums unparalleled and important but looking beyond the creature and their presence, I wonder what we’ve learned from husks, from dry, disconnected displays of someone else’s things.
I look for the bust of James Watt, inventor of the steam engine and son, if not of this parish, then of one not too far away. It used to stand majestic but I can’t find him where he used to be amid the surrounding cases of engineering marvels contained in all their bright and promising precision, heralding everything we couldn’t have known. ‘This epoch may be defined to have started about two centuries ago, coinciding with James Watt’s design of the steam engine…’ the atmospheric chemist Paul J Crutzen said in defining his own term, ‘the Anthropocene’ – ‘the epoch of the human’.
I turn from the cases and look out of the window onto Kelvingrove Park, to the strollers and dog walkers crossing the grass, to the dripping trees. In the later years of school, I came here with my Higher art class, half a dozen of us marched through the West End streets from our school, carrying our art materials and drawing boards. ‘Af tae a board meeting girls?’ a wag called once from the busstop as we passed. In the final months before we both left Glasgow for good, my friend Ishbel and I came here every Saturday to drink coffee and mooch around the galleries and draw.
I love this museum, the building, my own enduring, imperceptible place in it. Before I leave, I go back to see the elephant and giraffe, worn now, old and fading. The giraffe must have come from somewhere in Africa, the elephant from Asia. He was probably brought from India to be part of a travelling menagerie. He was made to pull a cart until he was put into the ‘Scottish Zoo and Variety Circus’ in 1897. In 1900, as a result of normal seasonal hormonal changes, he became aggressive, regarded as a danger and no longer of any use. He was shot and taken to the taxidermist Charles Kirk whose establishment at 156 Sauchiehall Street opened in 1896. Someone gave him the elephant the name, ‘Sir Roger’.
The day has gathered rain while I’ve been in the museum and now, the sky is a deep grey. The rain will begin as I’m driving north over the bridge, a dark sweep over the city as I look back. While I’m walking down the steps, a deep sense of the familiar surrounds me. A flight of pigeons soars and turns over the roof of the Kelvin Hall across the road, glittering in the watery afternoon light. I watch them but can’t tell if they’re wild or the, spoiled inhabitants of a devoted pigeon fancier’s loft.
The elephant was put into the ‘Scottish Zoo and Variety Circus’ in 1897. In 1900, as a result of normal seasonal hormonal changes, he became aggressive, regarded as a danger and no longer of any use. He was shot and taken to the taxidermist Charles Kirk