His successor, Sir William Flower, was Director between 1884 and 1898. A convinced evolutionist and friend of Thomas Henry Huxley, he it was who placed evolutionary theory at the centre of the exhibitions. He commissioned a large marble statue of Darwin by T. E. Boehm at a cost of £2,000, a serious sum then. It was unveiled on 9 June 1889 by the Prince of Wales, in the presence of Admirals J. Sullivan and A. Mellersh, both of whom had been on the expedition of the Beagle. Owen’s statue had to wait until 1900. Flower is not as familiar a name as Darwin or Owen, but he established the principle of exhibiting informative specimens while protecting the study specimens behind the scenes in the scientific collections. He was a devoted public servant, whose health suffered in the over-conscientious pursuit of his duty; ill health forced him into resignation. He is also the only Director with a surname appropriate to the job.
Edwin Ray Lankester, who followed Flower, was another great figure in public science. He had already been Linacre Professor in the Zoology Department at Oxford, so he was top of the academic tree before he even crossed the threshold of the Museum. His Textbook of Zoology (1909) became a standard work. But he was also well enough known to the public to appear in cartoons in Punch heavily riding upon the back of the okapi (Okapia johnstoni), which he had made known to science and the press in 1901. This odd relative of the giraffe was first known from bands of skin collected in the Congo a year or so previously and thought to be a new kind of zebra. Lankester, through the “Africa hand” Sir Harry Johnston, later acquired a whole skin and two skulls. I like a description of Lankester in the journal Candid Friend of 1901: “His own head is shaped like a benevolent biscuit-tin and is packed as full of knowledge as other people’s eggs are full of meat…the only thing that moves the excellent and bulky biologist to unmitigated wrath is a real idiot.” He was a naturally commanding figure, tall and paunchy, with a deep, loud voice that could be heard along the length of the longest gallery. Like many clever people he did not tolerate fools gladly, and he had a most capacious definition of “fool.” This led him into outbursts and confrontations that made his time at the top a difficult one. He had rows with the Trustees. He had rows with the BM. At the end of the nineteenth century the Principal Librarian at Bloomsbury, Edward Maunde Thompson, was one notch up in the hierarchy from the South Kensington Director, something that Ray Lankester found irksome. He was reprimanded by Sir Edward for not informing him of the dates when he was away on leave, at which point the memoranda started to fly. The seriousness with which both men took the definition of the “pecking order” suggests two large egos unwilling to budge, and as often happens in such situations, the conflict escalated until the Trustees eventually had to reinforce the status quo. Now the disappointed Natural History Museum Director sought to take on the Trustees in turn. Lankester was well connected at the Royal Society, from which he would one day receive the highest honour, the Copley Medal, which was awarded to Stephen Hawking in 2007; Albert Einstein and Max Planck were previous winners. Through behind-the-scenes lobbying at his “club” of top scientists, he sought to persuade some influential Fellows to write a memorandum publicly complaining of the inadequate way in which the Museum had been governed by its Trustees. His machinations came to nothing. By 1904 his relations with the Trustees had deteriorated to the point where they appointed a subcommittee to report on the running of the Natural History Museum—which it did, in no uncertain terms. An extract from the report reads:
Edwin Ray Lankester, Museum Director, riding on the okapi he described (from Punch, 12 November 1902)
When Sir Richard Owen was appointed head of the Natural History Museum he appears to have regarded the post as being in the nature of a reward for scientific eminence, while administration and superintendence were to occupy a secondary position. Sir W. Flower exercised a closer and more systematic superintendence over the Museum than had been the practice of Sir R. Owen. Prof. Lankester appears to take the view that his duties and functions are such as were undertaken by Sir R. Owen, rather than those that were fulfilled by Sir W. Flower…We fully recognize the great value of the scientific researches prosecuted by the Director, but at the same time we are strongly of the opinion that in the interests of the Museum the duties as laid down by the Statutes should be strictly carried out in future…in conformity with the practice usual in the case of other Civil Servants.
Edwin Ray Lankester’s rather large knuckles had been thoroughly rapped, and his days were numbered. He was retired at sixty on 31 December 1907, but not before fighting the Trustees’ rights to dispose of his services every step of the way, including a huffy letter to The Times. He was, incidentally, one of nine people at Karl Marx’s funeral. Although his history might suggest that he was what would now be termed an elitist, his prolific essay writing for the general reader shows the contrary: an unpatronizing clarity, and a capacity to charm. I read Diversions of a Naturalist (1913) with pleasure, and I maintain that Lankester might be mentioned in the same breath as J. B. S. Haldane as an occasional writer. No doubt his dedication to science and his intemperate and unqualified belief in his own rectitude led to his difficulties. But nobody could deny that he was a man of real intellectual substance and an ambassador for biology.
However, the Trustees had voiced their opinion: administration should come before charisma, efficient systems before science, and “usual Civil Service practice” should obtain throughout. There should be lots of nicely presented reports and memoranda. A Museum Secretary would help the smooth running of things, and indeed one Charles Fagan had proved to be indispensable in this role for decades in the earlier half of the twentieth century. The Director should be the oil between the cogs that makes the whole machine run without a glitch. However, there was at least one more Director of global stature*23 —although I should perhaps rather say “globular stature” since Sir Gavin de Beer was both short and stout. He was Director from 1950 to 1960. He was born with such a large number of silver spoons in his mouth that he must have found eating a challenge. He spent his early years in France, which conditioned him to be multi-lingual, a polyglot polymath. While he was President of the Fifteenth International Zoological Congress in London in 1958, he prided himself on addressing all the European delegates in their own tongue. He was most extraordinarily clever, and very aware of the fact. He wrote on evolutionary theory, particularly with regard to embryology; he penned a biography of Darwin; he described Archaeopteryx, the famous early fossil bird, and he wrote volumes of history in his spare time. His bibliography extends into hundreds of articles, reviews and books. He arrived and left every day in his Rolls-Royce, immaculately besuited, and it was common knowledge that he had to perch atop a pile of cushions to get a fair view of where he was going.
Sir Gavin de Beer, Director in the mid-twentieth century—Sir Cumference
Everything had to be just so for Sir Gavin: a flunkey had the small lift awaiting his arrival in the morning, his desk was laid out in a particular way. His loyal and efficient Museum Secretary, Thomas Wooddisse, took care of much of what the Trustees expected, leaving Sir Gavin time and opportunity to play the Great Man. Many honours were loaded upon him. He did have a pompous grandeur that the shop-floor staff were pleased to mock. Edmund Launert tells me that the Director was described as “Sir Cumference.” In the Botany Department he was known as “Volvox,” which is a small green alga forming spherical colonies in perpetual motion in water. Many of the stories from this time relate to his vainglory, and the puncturing thereof. My favourite tale involves sausages. One of the oddities of oral history is that you get similar stories from several sources, but the details change. There is no holotype for a story, as there is for a butterfly species. Nobody seems to know who the original sausage actor was, although there are several people who attest to the story’s veracity. In the basement, during the 1950s, it was the custom of members of staff to cook up breakfast on one of the Bunsen burners that were plumbed into the offices there. According to Phil Palmer, one of the sausage cookers
was called off to do something else during the middle of a breakfast fry; by the time he got back he was horrified to find the sausages ablaze in a haze of fat. Without thinking too hard about it, he recalled the drinking fountain in the main hall—just the place to put out a modest fire. He took off up the stairs with his flaming frying pan only to run into Sir Gavin in the company of King George VI on an impromptu early-morning visit. As the Punch cartoons used to say: collapse of stout party. I do hope the story is true, and not the product of wishful thinking.
Vainglorious or not, Sir Gavin Rylands de Beer was certainly a scientist of global significance, the last of such stature to hold the post of Director. Sir Terence Morrison-Scott, who succeeded him, was a snobbish, smooth civil servant, a worthy but hardly spectacular mammalogist, whose natural habitat was probably an establishment club like the Athenaeum. I am sure that he would have been approved by the same Board of Trustees that reprimanded E. Ray Lankester. Sir Frank Claringbull, who was Director from 1968 to 1976, when the documentary film was made, was a mineralogist by trade, and his main achievement will be seen as the initiation of the modernization of the galleries, which looked so dated on the old Horizon programme. Updating the “show” was the most important change in the public perception of the Natural History Museum, and soon was responsible for a vast increase in visitors. During the war years Claringbull had the curious distinction of growing the largest crystal of Trinitrotoluene (TNT) known to mankind, and would suddenly produce it from a large matchbox to discombobulate his visitors. Ron Hedley, Director from 1976 to 1988, was the last to be recruited from the ranks of the scientists. He was one of very few Directors not to get knighted for his services, and one can only speculate why. Possibly he resisted the “business first” philosophy which was being pressed upon all the public services during the Thatcher years. For the shop-floor scientists he was still one of us, and, with the Keepers of the departments still around the table, the central administration continued to have a scientific flavour to it. In the vaults, the work carried on as usual.
Ron Hedley had initiated one political change that proved to be more significant than we could ever have known at the time. The Natural History Museum had for some years had the status of Research Council. Much of government money in science is channelled through the Research Councils; the giant among them is probably the Medical Research Council that supports laboratories up and down the length of Great Britain. The Natural Environment Research Council is another large organization which handles science that is generally closest to that pursued by natural historians. The Natural History Museum was a Lilliput by comparison, and there was a feeling abroad that we passed under the radar as far as inevitable government cuts were concerned. Hedley took us out of the Research Councils and into what was then the Office of Arts and Libraries—where we joined the other national museums like the British Museum, V& A, and the National Gallery. It may have appeared a logical move at the time, because it seemed likely that the Research Councils would be required to make economies yet again—and governments are less prone to snip at flagship cultural establishments because it doesn’t go down well with Tory voters. The finances were already difficult enough because entrance charges had been introduced by the Tories, and it was unclear what long-term effect this would have on attendance. Whatever the combination of reasons for the administrative move—and it was effective financially—the result was to end the unique status of the Natural History Museum as a research establishment dressed up in the clothes of a tourist venue. Now we were just one museum among several. “Front of house” was as important as behind the scenes, and science had to pay its way, with no space for slackers or eccentrics or unaccountable presences like the Baron of Worms. It was evidently time for reform.
Reform came in the person of Neil Chalmers, formerly Dean of Science at the Open University, who took over as Director in 1988. He had published a number of papers on monkeys, but I am sure he appealed to the Trustees mainly as an administrator of the new school. It was time to break the link with scientists that had supplied Directors for so long. Scientific distinction simply became less important for the job. I have already described the bloodletting that happened subsequently as many of the staff were “let go.” Peter Whitehead’s novelistic prophecies began to have a ring of truth about them; there was a certain madness abroad. Perpetually smiling, Chalmers always seemed so pleasant and enthusiastic, rather like a vicar welcoming the parishioners to a car-boot sale, yet people around him had a habit of “disappearing”: Clive Bishop, Keeper of Mineralogy and Deputy Director, went early and unhappily; Julian Legg proved to be the last Museum Secretary, having been dismissed for some irregularities which were never explained in detail; he was followed by Dr. Lawrence Mound, Keeper of Entomology. It began to seem rather dangerous to be too close to the new Director. The shop-floor scientists looked on, buffeted and bemused. A new post of Director for Science was introduced—a capo dei capi for science in the Museum, and the first one appointed was John Peake. But on the central management team the Director of Science replaced what had previously been all the Keepers of the five departments—so now he was a lone voice for science, outnumbered by the newly minted Directors of all the other functions of the modern museum: human resources, public engagement, finance, estates and so on. The day of the scientist at the centre of Natural History Museum life was over. By the time Chalmers, by then Sir Neil, left in 2004, a new Director, Michael Dixon, could be appointed who had spent virtually all of his life in administration rather than at the scientific coalface. I cannot see a return to the magisterial, if slightly comical and egocentric, style of a Sir Gavin.
And there will certainly be a new logo. One of the first things that happened when we said goodbye to the British Museum (Natural History) was the appearance of a new logo—for the Natural History Museum, finally and officially named as such. It was decreed that the logo should appear on all the stationery and the posh envelopes. I do not suppose that many of us had heard of branding at the time—but this was our brand. It was designed by Wolf Ohlins, a company which had designed a fair number of logos and brands, down to the last detail of typeface. One got to recognize their designs: they were a kind of calligraphic shorthand crafted to convey the spirit of the product. The Liberal Democrat Party got a skeletal phoenix; the World Traveller class of British Airways got wavy lines. The Natural History Museum got a treelike form, which might have suggested an evolutionary tree—or even perhaps a real tree—or perhaps a metaphysical quality of “treeness.” Whatever the intention, the shop floor soon christened it the “zebra’s bum” and that is what stuck. It got on our personal visiting cards and we all grew quite fond of it. A new carpet, adorned with thousands of little zebras’ bums, appeared along the gallery floor that led to the Palaeontology Department. When Dixon was appointed he decided that the Museum’s logo was “a little tired,” and out went the zebra’s bum and in came a large capital “N” to replace it. Up came the carpet. I could just imagine Sir Gavin spinning around in his grave like a corpulent top. In fact, I find myself spinning around just a little in sympathy.
The logo for the Natural History Museum introduced by Dr. Chalmers, and ubiquitous for the “brand.” It soon became known as the “zebra’s bum.”
At the same time, important changes were happening everywhere else in the organization. The Museum took over its own freehold, and became responsible for the upkeep of the famous building. Scientists were freed up to apply for grants from the Research Councils now that we were just another organization competing on the open market. These grants were always very difficult to get, and would get still harder to win during the last decade of the twentieth century as competition from the universities increased. So far in the twenty-first century nothing much has changed. Furthermore, grants became more and more important for the mere survival of research programmes that had hitherto been core funded from the central pot. Management loved grants because they brought in “overheads”—which meant money for ot
her parts of the Museum. But many fundamental kinds of taxonomic research have not proved attractive to granting bodies so that research is increasingly tailored to win grants. The requirement to bring in as much money as possible led to the expansion of the shopping area in the galleries and the proliferation of all manner of trinkets for sale to the kids who come to see the dinosaurs. Small, fluffy tyrannosaurs will growl at you and sing the theme song from The Sound of Music. The Museum increased the number of books and catalogues it published and expected them to make a profit. The area given over to children and education increased mightily. All these activities required more staff, so that the proportion of scientists in the total staff roster continued to shrink. We needed to make more of a fuss about everything we did—including science—in order to increase our media presence, and the Public Relations staff increased commensurately. Nice women with smart suits and lipstick and bright smiles attempted to bring out the scruffy old scientists from their hidden redoubts. Their elbow patches were confiscated. Corporate culture had arrived, and sent that old sepia world packing, and not before time, most people would have said. The Natural History Museum had become an Attraction! Roll up! Roll up! And nobody could regret too much the passing of those galleries full of ranks of glass-topped cases that would have been recognizable to E. Ray Lankester. Everything was somehow so much brighter out there now.
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