Time out

All work and no play make Jack a dull curator, conservator or cataloguing standards supervisor. Jill, the museum director, education officer or marketing manager, is unlikely to be a barrel of laughs either if she spends half her time writing reports in the office and the other half polishing her sales figures.

Employment gurus reckon people with outside interests are likely to be healthier and happier than those without and that an absorbing hobby is an effective antidote to work-related stress.

So what do museum folk get up to in their spare time? An unscientific straw poll reveals that - despite their protestations of being far too busy - many do indeed find the odd hour or two to go messing about on the river or rollerblades, write children's literature or browse demolition sites to add to their carefully annotated collections of unusual objects.

But they are not all slavishly following stereotypically middle-class activities and amusements. For every museum professional that spruces up alpacas for the show ring or attempts to visit every castle ruin in the country, there are others who sing anti-establishment diatribes in punk bands or perform potentially stomach-churning magic tricks.

"I think the museum workforce enjoys such a wide range of outside interests because a lot of the job is about creativity. There are many frustrated musicians, artists and photographers," says Alexander Sturgis, who is director of the Holburne Museum of Art in Bath during the day, but a magician rejoicing under the name The Great Xa by night.

Sturgis began performing tricks and illusions as a small boy and eventually developed a routine that eschewed traditional props and instead used household implements. His sideline helped sustain him through his student days and his two worlds collided when he started his first job in the education department at the National Gallery, where he used sleight of hand to interest youngsters in art.

Not-so-magic moments

"I did some shows recreating some of the magical events and myths from paintings, such as using glitter while talking about Tintoretto's The Origin of the Milky Way. Art and magic are all about the same things - a sense of wonder, mystery and illusion."

The Great Xa regularly performed to rowdy adults on the alternative comedy circuit in the 1980s and his 15 minutes of television fame are preserved on YouTube, where he can be seen performing a rather grisly trick involving razor blades on Channel 4's The Word (where he was billed as "The Great Xar").

A rather less-than-magical moment saw him once take a cherished ring from a member of a club audience, intending to have it reappear in a rolled handkerchief.

"It went missing," he says, "and I found it sometime later in the lining of my jacket. I've no idea how it could have got there."

Damian Barton knows a thing or two about keeping crowds happy - during working hours he ensures all runs smoothly in the galleries as operations support manager at Urbis in Manchester, but come the evening he takes on society's ills as the snarling singer with punk band Crouch Mog.

"It tends to be songs about social issues rather than wanting to smash the system," he says. "We don't go in for bondage gear, either. At work, I wear a shirt and tie, but I keep my eyebrow ring in."
Alongside Barton the museum man, the band also features graphic artists, someone who "designs posh kitchens for footballers" and - horror of horrors - a corporate banker.

Barton sees the funny side of the less-than-anarchic dichotomy - "punk is more of an ideology these days" - but also notes how his two roles revolve around each other.

"I wouldn't have discovered information about some of the subjects I've written songs about had I not worked at Urbis. Some of my colleagues have been to see Crouch Mog, but it's not really their cup of tea. It's a struggle to get my partner along, too; she likes Coldplay."

Best ears in show

Many people who work in museums spend their spare time in the great outdoors and Nichola Johnson, director of the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich, enjoys going to small agricultural shows... particularly since her lurcher, Humble, began cleaning up in novelty dog beauty contests.

"By a long chalk, he's the handsomest dog around and he knows it. On special occasions he wears a smart cravat, though he prefers one with skulls, flames and evil words; the Hell's Angels look. He's a bit elegant and he's been 'done', so these are all just compensatory activities, I expect," says Johnson.

She has mixed feelings about one particular award - a gold medal in a dog and owner lookalike competition. "The judge asked me if I knew what won it for us. I said Humble and I both had slightly pointy noses, which is true. He said, 'No, it's your ears.' I didn't know how to take that."

Johnson recognises transferable skills between her work at the museum and appearances on the canine catwalk: "They're both about how to get individuals to do things they don't want to do through sheer bribery and there's also the scope for unpicking explosive in-the-field situations."

A little healthy competition in the open air is also how Stephen Snoddy likes to blow away the cobwebs. Indeed, there are mornings when the director of the New Art Gallery Walsall could be leading management meetings before refereeing a rugby match after lunch.

Snoddy used to play rugby himself, and helped out at his sons' schools before taking his referee's badges; he's now the man in the middle in two or three games a week.

Officiating obviously is in the Snoddy blood: his older brother Alan was the youngest-ever football World Cup referee, taking part in the 1986 and 1990 tournaments.

"Eventually, he had to go ex-directory as he used to get phone calls from supporters telling him what they thought of him," says Snoddy, who hopes that rugby will hang to its traditions of calling the ref "sir".

As part of his own personal "respect agenda", he seeks the views of team captains after a game and was once surprised to be voted man of the match by both sides. He has so far had to reach for the red card on just two occasions - one for violent conduct and the other for serious verbal abuse. Both players received eight-week bans.

"While I can't get the red card out for my staff at the museum, the refereeing teaches you how to make appropriate decisions in an appropriate context. In both, you sometimes have to make unpleasant decisions and you can't be seen to be a ditherer."

It's hardly surprising that many people who work in museums are hoarders at home, with collections that are often inspired or informed by the work they do.

Take Lee Prosser, a buildings curator at Historic Royal Palaces. He now has a sizeable selection of different kinds of bricks, all carefully cleaned and catalogued and stored on shelving in his garage.

He regularly scours demolition sites for rare and collectable examples. "They don't need much looking after. Most of them have been on a building site for 100 years so it's not as if they're going to rot away," he says.

At work, bricks tell him a great deal about the buildings he looks after and that fascination spills over into his own collection.

"There's a very rare type called Hitch's Patent, which is the Holy Grail of bricks," he says. "It was a new-fangled interlocking brick invented by an entrepreneur in Hertfordshire in the 1840s, but they flopped miserably because they were too big to hold in one hand and bricklayers didn't like to use them.

"There are a few listed buildings made of them. In fact, there's a huge wall of them here at Hampton Court, which no one had spotted, but I recognised because I have a couple in my collection."

John Holt is a freelance journalist