I confess I was getting quite nettled at our board meeting yesterday. I was trying to put the board off from following a Wilfred Owen-fuelled fad for the miserable and jingoistic.
“Other museums who haven’t lost half their curators will do it much better; it turned out not to be the war to end all wars, it was grim; everyone who had anything to do with it is now dead; it’s been done to death in cinema, theatre and broadcasting; the clips are all the same; it’s not even on Gove’s curriculum; we’ll get hopelessly outflanked by the Imperial War Museum’s monstrous guns; and, most of all, we shouldn’t just climb on this battlewagon just because the staff officers at the arts council think we should – what do they know about museums, anyway?
"The only thing of any cultural value that emerged from the sludge of the Somme was a certain amount of poetry, but even that is now hackneyed."
I couldn’t resist a brief, if pointed, lyrical attack: “This subject is War/ Oh, and the pity of war/ But the butchered budget is the pity/ It seems that out of boardrooms we escape /Down some dull funding tunnel, long since scooped /Yet also there encumbered sleepers groan, /And, as I probe you, one springs up, and stares /With piteous indignation in fixed eyes, /By your dead smile, I know we stand in Hell /Let us sleep again now… and, anyway, what /Passing bells for those curators sacked like cattle? /The pallor of girl-guides shall be their pall? /And each slow dusk a drawing-down of security blinds?”
It was suddenly Boxing Day in no-man’s land; an excruciating silence, a shifting of board papers and bowed heads.
Then my chairman declared coffee, biscuits and an armistice.
“Other museums who haven’t lost half their curators will do it much better; it turned out not to be the war to end all wars, it was grim; everyone who had anything to do with it is now dead; it’s been done to death in cinema, theatre and broadcasting; the clips are all the same; it’s not even on Gove’s curriculum; we’ll get hopelessly outflanked by the Imperial War Museum’s monstrous guns; and, most of all, we shouldn’t just climb on this battlewagon just because the staff officers at the arts council think we should – what do they know about museums, anyway?
"The only thing of any cultural value that emerged from the sludge of the Somme was a certain amount of poetry, but even that is now hackneyed."
I couldn’t resist a brief, if pointed, lyrical attack: “This subject is War/ Oh, and the pity of war/ But the butchered budget is the pity/ It seems that out of boardrooms we escape /Down some dull funding tunnel, long since scooped /Yet also there encumbered sleepers groan, /And, as I probe you, one springs up, and stares /With piteous indignation in fixed eyes, /By your dead smile, I know we stand in Hell /Let us sleep again now… and, anyway, what /Passing bells for those curators sacked like cattle? /The pallor of girl-guides shall be their pall? /And each slow dusk a drawing-down of security blinds?”
It was suddenly Boxing Day in no-man’s land; an excruciating silence, a shifting of board papers and bowed heads.
Then my chairman declared coffee, biscuits and an armistice.
