Making waves

“By tonnage, the National Museum of the Royal Navy (NMRN) has the 35th largest navy in the world,” says Dominic Tweddle, its director-general, who has overseen substantial growth since he joined the newly formed organisation 10 years ago. The NMRN, which has its headquarters at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard adjacent to the Mary Rose Museum, now looks after eight boats and four museums. 

“When we started out, the navy gave us a tiny grant to create a national museum of the Royal Navy,” says Tweddle. “That meant bringing together four existing museums – the Royal Navy Submarine Museum in Gosport, this museum, which was then called the Royal Naval Museum, the Fleet Air Arm Museum in Somerset, and the Royal Marines Museum, also here in Portsmouth. So there were three tribal museums and one that was a whole navy museum.”

Tweddle oversaw the merging of those four sites, which unsurprisingly came up against some resistance. “People don’t like to change, even if their paymasters are saying it would be quite a good idea.”

To prove that it was a good idea, once the organisations had pooled their resources, Tweddle decided that it was important to  develop some exciting new projects to encourage people to take a different view. 

“Some might have thought it weird that the National Museum of the Royal Navy only had two boats – HMS Holland 1, which was the first submarine ever to serve in the navy during the first world war, and HMS Alliance, a submarine that served in world war two,” says Tweddle. “So we took on board Nelson’s flagship, HMS Victory, which I think is the most substantial thing that we’ve done.” 

The organisation also runs HMS Warrior, Britain’s first iron-hulled armoured battleship, launched in 1860, and HMS M.33, a survivor from the Gallipoli campaign in the first world war. Both are in Portsmouth. There’s also HMS Trincomalee, which was launched in 1817 and is the oldest warship still afloat in Europe. This can be seen in the Georgian dockyard in Hartlepool.

And the NMRN is currently basking in the glory of HMS Caroline in Belfast being one of five venues shortlisted for the Art Fund Museum of the Year 2019. The world war one light cruiser, the last survivor of the Battle of Jutland, recently underwent an £18m refurbishment.

One of the NMRN’s newest acquisitions is “the sexily named LCT7074, which is probably the ugliest ship ever built,” says Tweddle. “She landed 10 tanks on D-Day and is the last survivor of all those landing crafts that witnessed the events of the day. We are currently restoring her.”

Tweddle came to the NMRN after 14 years as the chief executive of a design consultancy called Continuum.  “It wasn’t a standard design consultancy,” he says. “It had two major components to it. The first was the design stuff, with an attached media business that consulted around the development of visitor attractions. And then the other part of the business owned and ran visitor attractions.” 

Tweddle and his team managed a variety of venues, including the Emirates Spinnaker Tower, an observation point in Portsmouth, and The Canterbury Tales, a visitor attraction in Canterbury based on Chaucer’s medieval story collection. They also developed and continue to run the Real Mary King’s Close in Edinburgh, also a historical visitor attraction. 

But it was Tweddle’s brief nine months at the British Museum in 1978, right at the start of his career, which provided a galvanising moment. “The British Museum is great, but its problem is that it sucks people in and they spend the rest of their lives there,” he says. “I didn’t want to do that. And that was underlined when I was offered a job cataloguing a million flints, which I turned down. Life’s too short for that.”

Tweddle is a trained archaeologist – his degree got him hooked on the Anglo-Saxons – and the flints spurred him on to find a new job. So, in 1979, he started working on the Coppergate dig in York. The project unearthed 40,000 Viking-age artefacts, and Tweddle witnessed one of its key moments.

“We’d finished the main Coppergate dig and when the shopping centre started to go in, there was a small amount of archaeology that we had to do in advance,” he says. 

“It was then that the Coppergate Helmet was found. Somebody came round to the offices and said, ‘we’ve found an Anglo-Saxon helmet’. I’m thinking, it’s not April Fool’s Day, is it? I mean, that’s ridiculous. But I was finally persuaded to go round and take a look and, fair cop, it was an Anglo-Saxon helmet. It was very exciting – it’s not often that you see a virtually intact object like that just sitting there staring at you. Even now, there are only six Anglo-Saxon helmets known.”

Almost the whole of the archaeological site was Viking though. Tweddle, assistant director by then, and the team launched the Jorvik Viking Centre, a museum and visitor attraction telling the story of Viking-age York. Still a popular venue, the centre opened in 1984 on the Coppergate site. 

Tweddle could see the virtue of having the commercial benefits of the Viking centre, which was helping to fund the background research into the site. 

“We also did some small design jobs and we had a consultancy business advising other people, which all arose off the back of the Jorvik Viking Centre,” says Tweddle. 

“But my colleagues at York Archaeological Trust were not very interested in being commercial – they wanted to be archaeologists. So, we had this silly situation where we developed the Viking centre, whose raison d’etre was to raise the money to do good archaeology, but somehow we weren’t interested in the commercial disciplines that would have allowed us to do that further.”

As the trust didn’t want to pursue the commercial elements that Tweddle was involved in, he offered to buy them. They set the price at £2. “I bought them with a colleague of mine, – we each put in a pound. It was a good deal. Were the businesses making a great deal of money? No, they weren’t, but they had a lot of potential and they were well enough established to at least pay most of the bills.”

Tweddle says that he didn’t go into it to make a lot of money. It was more that he thought there were things worth doing and that he could have fun doing them, while also bringing something to the museum and heritage world.

“Then a rich gentleman who’d helped us with the Viking centre had a business that worked in the same kind of area,” he says. “He came to me and said he wanted us to merge with his business, Heritage Group, but he wanted me to run it, because he couldn’t make any money out of it and thought that I probably could. And we did.”

The merged businesses became Continuum. It developed more than 200 cultural heritage projects and owned five visitor attractions. By the time Tweddle left in 2008 it had an annual revenue of £9.5m. 

Tweddle departed because he wanted to return to the public sector. He applied for the position at the NMRN but was not confident of success. “I didn’t think I’d get it because I’m not an admiral. And then when I asked them why they’d appointed me, they said they appointed me because I wasn’t an admiral. I got that 100% wrong. What they wanted was somebody who brought commercial experience to the organisation.”  

Tweddle has certainly done that and is now fundraising for a variety of projects, including working with the local council to spruce up the Hartlepool site around HMS Trincomalee. There are also plans for a new collections centre in Portsmouth.

Another key project is the £10m redevelopment of the Royal Marines Museum in Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, which is currently closed. The aim is to have the museum open by 2022. “We’ve designed an extraordinary tubular climbing system so that people can climb through the tops of the buildings and then down again, over the exhibitions, to reflect what the Marines have to do as training.” 

Tweddle obviously has lots of other ideas for new projects. “I often joke with our funders and say that I’ve got a Polaris missile, and I’ve got the triggering device which fires it,” he says. “All I need is a submarine and my grant will suddenly be increased.”

Dominic Tweddle has a PhD in Anglo-Saxon sculpture of south-east England. 

In 1978 he was appointed as a research assistant in medieval and later antiquities at the British Museum in London. He stayed for nine months before moving to York Archaeological Trust as the assistant director.

He joined during the Coppergate excavations, which ran from 1976 until 1981 and discovered 40,000 Viking-Age artefacts. The findings were used to create the Jorvik Viking Centre, which opened in 1984 and is still a popular attraction. 

Tweddle left the trust in 1995 to set up a design and consultancy business, which he was chief executive of for 14 years. 

He was appointed director-general of the National Museum of the Royal Navy in 2009. 

The National Museum of the Royal Navy (NMRN) is a charitable trust that runs four museums and eight museum-boats. 

Its headquarters are in Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, with other sites in Gosport, Yeovilton, Hartlepool, and Belfast. 

The sites attracted 650,000 visitors last year, with 350 staff operating all the venues.  The NMRN is funded by an annual £3.3m grant from the navy, with the rest of its income coming from admissions and commercial enterprises. The NMRN runs an MA in naval history with Portsmouth University.