A real blast from the past
To introduce this year’s Telegraph Family Friendly Museum Award, Dan Snow celebrates the national attractions that bring history’s greatest treasures to life
From tiny, one-room galleries to our fine national institutions, Britain has some of the best museums in the world. And the Telegraph Family Friendly Museum Award is the best and biggest museum award in Britain. Run by charity Kids in Museums, it gives families a powerful voice in what they want in a museum visit. Huge changes have happened in the four years the award has been running. Museums are no longer silent, dusty places, but are vibrant and lively, full of activities and events for all ages. The Telegraph Family Friendly Museum Award celebrates this, and here Kids in Museums patron Dan Snow explains why museums are important to him. Who am I? How did I get here? “Dan, how and why did you become interested in history?” It’s the most common question I’m asked. By a mile. And every time, I’m still taken aback. Why am I interested in my past? Is anyone not interested in their past? Does anyone think their childhood, their formative years, are irrelevant? I’m interested in history because I want to work out who the hell I am, where I am and how I got here, and I’ve been interested since before I can remember. In the first decade of my life there was no such thing as history. No separate, isolated, one-hour period after lunch break. It was simply the ever present force that underpinned my existence. It swirled through every conversation around the dinner table. Mum and Dad were journalists, their attempts to understand and explain current events inevitably took them into the past. My extended family were hurled around the globe like chess pieces by an empire that had ceased to exist just before I was born. My Welsh great-grandfather was serving in the Indian army in the Middle East when he married my great grandma; they had my grandmother in Bangalore. She married a Canadian serving in the navy during the Second World War and settled among the red barns and silver grain silos of Ontario when it came to an end. None of this was “history”; it was vivid, inescapable context. Without embracing it and understanding it, none of our lives made any sense. The past was also present in our weekends and holidays. Every Saturday morning we went to a National Trust property, museum, battlefield, gallery, castle or, ideally, some combination of all of them. In driving rain we re-enacted the Battle of Hastings, marvelled at the perfection of Bodiam Castle, tried to imagine Turner at Petworth. There was no choice, no apparent alternative to spending our weekends engrossed in the mighty treasures of the past; the most beautiful, ingenious and enduring buildings and objects left to us by those who went before. On holidays we hiked, also in the rain, around the castles of the Welsh Marches, along Hadrian’s Wall, and sailed through vicious squalls to stare at HMS Victory in her dry dock in Portsmouth. I remember soggy sandwiches in tea rooms retrofitted into what was once an 18th-century oligarch’s orangery, with ancient volunteers who scowled at children from their flimsy fold-up chairs. Dad despised guided tours, opting instead for a flamboyant, errorstrewn, but far more exciting, description of his own invention. We loved every minute and that was before the revolution in “interpretation” turned museums into entertainment. Now families dodge re-enactors firing black powder muskets, glass-blowing demonstrations, giant pistons sliding in and out, Sherman tanks clanking by and screens with a choice of videos. As a father, I have been reminded of the joy of Britain’s museums, galleries, parks and castles. Dinosaurs, steam trains and siege catapults are once again central to my life. I can honestly say that my three-year-old daughter and I spend our happiest moments together in museums. We are blessed here in the UK to have perhaps the world’s finest assortment of heritage attractions. They educate and entertain us Britons while drawing in millions of foreign visitors – a stunning resource that, both spiritually and financially, enrich our lives. Royal Gunpowder Mills, Waltham Abbey (royalgunpowdermills.com) There’s “eggsplosive” fun at this weapon-packed museum. Try your hand at launching rockets and firing Airsoft rifles. On Easter Sunday and Monday, there are twice-daily shows featuring live gunpowder and pyrotechnic explosives. You can even help load the cannons.