Dry Storeroom No. 1 (42 page)

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 other 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.

I was involved with the beginnings of all this. The first of the new galleries was the hall of human biology—“making an exhibition of ourselves” as the label eventually read. As a very young scientist, I was in charge of the first steering group for this trail-blazer for the new exhibition schemes, a show all about human biology, perception, the brain, development, genetics and even society. It could not have been more of a departure from the old public galleries. My team made out the first brief for the exhibition, full of bright ideas, not all of them practical. I read everything from Richard Gregory on visual perception and the brain to Jane Jacobs on the growth of cities; it probably did me a lot of good. By the time the exhibition actually opened in 1977, most of the original outline had disappeared. By then, an able ex-palaeontologist, Dr. Roger Miles, had been placed in charge of the modernization of the exhibitions. He was a rather formidable figure: serious-minded and with distinctive convictions about the educational value of the new displays. He approached the exhibitions with the purposefulness he had previously applied to the description of the Devonian fossil fish from Gogo, Australia. Some people did not approve of his high-mindedness, which they associated with a Nonconformist strictness. As one of them remarked to me at the time: “There is Methodism in his madness!” But if Miles had a didactic side, I do not believe it mattered a jot when it came to applying it to the galleries. The Human Biology galleries were a great success. They managed to be both fun and informative, with plenty of knobs to turn and audiovisual displays. It is easy to forget how revolutionary these exhibits were at the time, and even thirty years on they do not seem out of date. I will give one example of their effect. I had noticed that not long after the exhibition opened there seemed to be a large number of young Spanish girls going into the exhibition. This was a time when Spanish au pairs were a common sight in London. I followed them (in the most academic way) and noticed that they beat a path to one particular exhibit, which dealt with the growth of the foetus, inside a womb-like room, illustrated by a riveting film of this vital part of the reproductive cycle. One or two of the girls were making notes. I suddenly realized that this was important to them for one simple reason: this was probably the only sex education they had ever received.