Clooney trips on marbles
George Clooney has betrayed his ignorance of how Britain’s own Monuments Men protected the Elgin Marbles underground, writes Ben Macintyre.
Armed with only the lightest understanding, George Clooney, in full battledress, rashly wanders into the Elgin Marbles minefield. It would be ‘‘a good idea’’, he declares, if the great marble statues were returned to the ‘‘Pantheon’’.
The actor has reached this opinion (greeted with predictable delight in Greece) via his role in The Monuments Men, a new film about the Allied military unit that tracked down stolen artworks in the final stages of World War II.
What Clooney does not know is that the Elgin Marbles were also the object of a wartime art rescue operation just as extraordinary as anything achieved by The Monuments Men and is still largely unknown.
The safeguarding of Britain’s art treasures during the war was the largest art preservation mission undertaken, an astonishing logistical feat carried out in secrecy to protect its threatened artistic inheritance. Seventy years ago, the British government was in no doubt about its moral, legal and intellectual obligation to preserve such treasures from Nazi destruction, not just for the nation, but for the world.
This is the same reasoning used today by the British Museum to defend its right to keep the Elgin Marbles, an integral part of an unrivalled collection held in trust for the world as part of a universal museum and visited free by millions annually.
With war looming, and the threat of German bombardment and invasion imminent, Winston Churchill was asked whether the nation should begin to shift its great art to Canada until the war was over. Churchill was adamant: ‘‘Hide them in caves and cellars,’’ he ordered, ‘‘but not one picture shall leave this island.’’
So began a task of art evacuation, preservation and concealment on an epic scale, as Britain’s greatest treasures, from mummies to medieval armour were made safe from Hitler’s bombs. The Elgin Marbles were crated up and hidden in a disused Tube tunnel at Aldwych station, where they would remain until 1948.
Some artworks were initially held in stately homes such as Penrhyn Castle, since it was expected that aristocrats would know how to look after them – an assumption that was not always merited. ‘‘One of our troubles at Penrhyn Castle’’, wrote an official, ‘‘is that the owner is celebrating the war by being fairly constantly drunk. He stumbled with a dog into the dining room [where pictures were stacked]. Yesterday he smashed up his car . . .’’
Britain’s written history was also preserved and protected. More than 300 tons of documents from the Public Records Office were stashed in the empty cells of Shepton Mallet prison. A bombproof tunnel beneath the National Library of Wales at Aberystwyth was used to house 90 tons of treasures including Nelson’s Trafalgar memorandum, Scott’s journals and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The Natural History Museum hid its dinosaurs in Tring, while the V&A collections found refuge in a disused underground mushroom farm in Wiltshire.
The Welsh mountains, thought (wrongly) to be beyond the range of German bombers, were selected as the last line of defence for Britain’s art. Disused slate quarries on the edge of Snowdonia were turned into vast secret underground bunkers for the National Gallery collection. Van Dyck’s Charles I on Horseback, more than 3.6 metres tall, would not fit under a bridge until the tyres on the truck carrying it were let down.
The Luftwaffe rained explosives on London, followed by the V1 and V2 rockets. The King’s Library of the British Museum was hit; three bombs landed on the Natural History Museum; almost every pane of glass in the National Gallery was shattered in the Blitz. But the great art exodus was an astonishing success. Only one painting from a major collection was lost: Richard Wilson’s The Destruction of the Children of Niobe, destroyed when the workshop where it was under restoration took a direct hit.
So, far from being ashamed of Britain’s stewardship of the Elgin Marbles, this country has every reason to be proud of how they were sheltered from destruction by a few art experts committed to preserving the world’s heritage. Never in the field of art preservation has so much been owed by so many, to so few.
On the wall of one of the quarries used as a hiding place is an unlikely line of graffiti, written by a wartime art scholar in cuneiform script: ‘‘In that year everything precious . . . we bought down and stored in this cavern under the earth, a place of safety, an abode of quiet, so that they might not perish by fire and the strokes of an evil enemy.’’
Clooney has earned a place in the ‘‘Parthenon’’ of great Hollywood actors, but he should brush up on his art history. Without Britain’s own Monuments Men, the Elgin Marbles might not have survived the war.