In the midst of unrelentingly gloomy reports on the future of museums in Britain, it comes as a relief to read a book that celebrates the glories of some of the unique museums and collections that survive, for the most part, outside the mainstream.
Readers put off by the book’s sensational title can rest easy, since in his introduction, Hunter Davies characterises “mad” museums as those collections that feature just one subject or topic, often instigated and developed by collectors or enthusiasts rather than larger national or municipal institutions.
Shying away from visitor experiences, interactives and “state-of-the-art” venues, the book features 18 museums that will certainly not be in any list of the top-10 national attractions.
Nevertheless, they have collections that are unique, or in some cases, downright odd. The Baked Bean Museum of Excellence, housed in the bedroom of British eccentric “Captain Beany”, is a case in point.
While many of the collections described are physically small, with even smaller visitor numbers, relatively specialised collections such as the Cumberland Pencil Museum in Keswick attract more than 100,000 visitors every year.
Davies, an enthusiast and collector himself, ponders whether he should set up a museum of his own to house the 20 or so collections he has accumulated during his career as a journalist and author.
Unsurprisingly, several of the collections visited reflect some of the subjects Davies has written about. As a Beatles fan, I was very familiar with his biography of the band written in 1968, and he revisits one of the key locations from the Fab Four’s early days, the Casbah Coffee Club in Liverpool, which is still owned by the family of Pete Best, the band’s original drummer who was replaced by Ringo Starr in 1962.
The Casbah is less a museum than a place of pilgrimage for Beatles fans, and Davies reflects on a fact sometimes ignored by our profession – that the objects displayed in our museums can often have little intrinsic value, yet are considered priceless simply because of the stories behind them and the importance given to them by the public.
Davies is the author of what is widely regarded as one of the best books ever written about football, The Glory Game, and takes time on his trip to visit the National Football Museum, which was housed at Deepdale, the home of Preston North End, when Behind the Scenes at the Museum of Baked Beans was being written. He touches on the controversial decision to relocate the collection to Manchester.
The scale and size of the exhibitions at Deepdale mark it out as rather different from some of the other collections featured in the book, such as the British Lawnmower Museum in Southport or Morpeth Chantry Bagpipe Museum.
Davies describes the National Football Museum with the wide-eyed enthusiasm of a fan, and you cannot fail to be carried along by his curiosity and wonder at the material on display.
As Davies travels around Britain, you learn more than a little about the author and a lot more about the people who have set up and run the extraordinary collections featured. Robert Opie’s Museum of Brands, Packaging and Advertising is quite well known, but others, such as Gerald Wells’ British Vintage Wireless and Television Museum, are less high profile.
Despite the somewhat eccentric nature of some of those he meets, Davies resists the temptation to take a reality-TV approach. He writes affectionately and sympathetically about people, trying to explain their single-minded obsession with the subject matter of their collections, whether they are teddy bears, cars or vintage radios.
Part travelogue, part alternative museum guide, Behind the Scenes at the Museum of Baked Beans is a welcome tonic to anyone working in the heritage or museum world, confirming that despite the difficulties facing us, it is still the collections that count, regardless of their size.
Tim Bryan is the head of collections and interpretation at the Heritage Motor Centre, Gaydon
