The prognosis looked good for Joseph Lister’s wooden wheelchair when it was admitted – in a satisfactory condition – into the medical collection at University College London (UCL).
But events took a turn for the worse recently when the good doctor’s transport was wheeled before UCL’s collections review team. “It was ours because someone had obviously come across it many years previously and thought, ‘Oh, that’s important, we should keep it,’ before promptly covering it in bubble-wrap and placing it in a store. That’s the kind of thing we’re trying to move away from now,” says Subhadra Das, UCL’s collections reviewer.
Lister, it turned out, was not a suitable case for treatment. True, the pioneering surgeon had been an arts graduate at UCL before deciding to turn what proved to be a very steady hand to medicine there in the 1840s.
But as his groundbreaking work with antiseptics was carried out elsewhere, the chair was deemed surplus to UCL’s collection requirements and “contextually anomalous”.
Summarily discharged, the chair is now bound for the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow, already home to a Lister collection. The operation was a result of what is called “rescue accessioning” by UCL, which started its comprehensive collection review in 2006.
An initial aim was to find out exactly what had been amassed by the college’s departments, all of which had managed collections differently with little or no attention paid to details such as records and descriptions.
“A lot of items were collected for scientific research, not for future display in a museum,” says Das. “But by reviewing all this stuff we could explore what it is that makes things important while also working out what we were doing well and not so well.”
The review process also enjoyed a very public display of democracy in an exhibition called Disposal, which enabled visitors to have a go at curatorship by voting for objects they thought worth saving.
The project resulted in new thinking and an inventory of weird and wonderful, though potentially superfluous, objects to place before powerful review committees.
Along with Lister’s wheelchair, for example, the review considered boxes of rocks and fossils originally brought in over the years by students who subsequently left them behind to take up valuable shelf space.
“We didn’t know much about them; they were not a huge amount of use to us or, indeed, anyone else. We asked the powers-that-be if we could get rid of them. They said yes. The rocks went in the skip while a box of ammonites went to a private collector,” says Das.
Across the capital, good old-fashioned curatorial detective work helped the National Maritime Museum (NMM) find a home for some 17th-century furniture, which had been sitting pretty but taking up room at Greenwich.
NMM curators had identified for potential disposal two pairs of chairs that had first been acquired in the late 1930s when the Queen’s House at the museum had a policy of using purely period furniture to dress its rooms. One pair had been bought in a house sale in Devon in 1938 while the other had come from a donor who insisted her gift remain at Greenwich in perpetuity. But which was which?
“The registers weren’t detailed enough to make a positive ID but they were beautiful examples of 17th-century chairs, and the Devon pair could potentially be transferred to a more appropriate home,” says Helen Downes, the collections cataloguing standards and development officer.
The museum tried to locate the catalogue from the original joint sale held by Nutwell Court and Buckland Abbey, two properties associated with the family of Sir Francis Drake, 70 years previously.
Staff managed to trace the original advert for the sale from the Times’s digital archive. The sales company still existed although none of its staff were able to recollect the chairs.
A volunteer at Buckland Abbey suggested the museum try Exeter archives, which had a copy of the catalogue and this included a photograph of the chairs. At the same time, the museum’s own research located a photograph of the chairs, in situ in the Queen’s House. As staff knew the Nutwell Court chairs were the first pair acquired, the date of the photo enabled them to identify the Nutwell Court pair.
This rigorous approach is vital as disposals from NMM have to be ratified by the Board of Trustees and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport after all legalities have been thoroughly researched and reported to internal committees.
“The research and transfer of a collection object doesn’t happen overnight; the case of the chairs took about two years to complete but they are back at Buckland Abbey, which is now in the hands of the National Trust and, largely as a result of the 1938 sale, had little furniture original to the house at the time of the transfer,” says Downes. “They can now be displayed in the appropriate historical context.”
Rehoming objects
Increasing numbers of museums and galleries are undertaking their own collections reviews with disposals in mind as space is at a premium and purse strings continue to tighten, says Sally Cross, the collections coordinator at the Museums Association (MA).
“There’s a huge amount of duplicated social history, the vast majority of which doesn’t have a high financial value and I suspect there’s a layer beyond that which doesn’t even get advertised,” says Cross.
“Some questionable disposals decisions encouraged the sector to tighten its rules, resulting in what became known as ‘a presumption against disposal’,” she adds. Eventually, the MA’s code of ethics was overhauled in 2007, encouraging some innovative thinking behind transfers and loans.
Old Tools, New Uses, for example, is a project run by the Scottish Transport and Industry Collections and Knowledge network where domestic technologies such as typewriters and sewing machines are released by museums to be refurbished and sent “back to work” in Africa.
Many museums also make use of the MA’s Find an Object service to rehouse objects; items range from musical instruments and aircraft spares to entire rooms of radio equipment.
The biggest success story from Find an Object has to be Perseverance IV, a timber grain-barge built in 1935 that came into the ownership of the Museum of London when it merged with the Docklands Museum two years ago.
“Our collections committee ruled that the barge had tenuous connections to the city’s history, while its location made it difficult for museum staff to maintain it, so we decided to pursue disposal,” says Nickos Gogolos, a registrar at the Museum of London.
A conservation report revealed that the vessel needed considerable specialist attention to keep it in tip-top condition. “It would have cost upwards of £500,000 to repair, with £10,000 annual maintenance costs, which is quite a lot of money to us,” Gogolos says. “Dismantling the barge would have cost around £40,000.”
Disposal issues
Luckily, the National Trust sailed to the rescue, agreeing to keep the barge at its current location at Dapdune Wharf on the River Wey – which the trust conveniently owns – and looking to raise further funds towards its long-term restoration.
Disposal reviews procedures can also encourage debate about the precise roles of the museum and its collections. The Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) in Edinburgh, for example, consulted widely during its collections review and found involving stakeholders to be very helpful to its planned disposal of a series of paintings.
“At the time, we were going through Accreditation and asking ourselves questions about the collections, while the Scottish Executive was also in the process of arguing the case for their national significance,” says Joanna Soden, collections curator at the RSA.
“We are a fine-art organisation but some of the material does not fit into that category and was gifted for specific art-related reasons. A review enables us to see if it would make more sense to transfer it because we don’t necessarily have the best expertise to look after it and interpret it to the full.”
John Holt is a freelance journalist
For more on disposals:
Museum Practice Special: collections reviews
Museums Association archive: disposal
Law firm Farrer & Co is hosting a seminar about deaccessioning objects from public collections and possible reform of existing procedure. Foul Play or Opportunity Knocks? is at the National Gallery on 10 May.
It is chaired by Art Fund director Stephen Deuchar. Speakers include Ed Vaizey, minister for culture, and Nick Merriman, director of the Manchester Museum and convenor of the Museums Association’s ethics committee.