How to Steal from a Museum

People who are not fortunate enough to have worked in the magical world of museums are often surprised to discover how much of their collections usually remain shut away in the stores. Sometimes this surprise is tinged with a blush of outrage, as though wonderful things are being kept from them, the curators hoarding them behind the scenes to enjoy without pesky visitors getting in the way. Of course, this is indeed how we regard the wretched masses who come through our doors (or the wretched handfuls, in most cases), but that picture is not really accurate. For the most part, you would find wandering corridors filled with what museums hold in their reserve collections massively dull.

Consider, for instance, the mighty British Museum, arguably the greatest such institution in the world. We will leave to one side, for now, the claims of rivals from the Guggenheim to the Braxiatel Collection, or questions of how it came to in that position in the first place. It has (so we are told) about 8 million items in its vaults, and roughly 80,000 on display, but you don’t really want to look at tray after tray of Anglo-Saxon coins. The other great national museums are the same: only a fraction of the Natural History Museum’s holdings are out on show, but most of what’s in the stores are drawers full of beetles and you have to be really, really interested in beetles to get any fun out of that. The national museums are universities of material culture: they are where you learn to tell an Offan penny from a Northumbrian sceatta, or mormolyce phyllodes from mormolyce tridens.

I have never worked anywhere like that, but even humbler institutions function in the same sort of way. My museum workplaces were the Priest’s House Museum in Wimborne (collection: about 13,000 items, provided you counted ten boxes of iron nails from the Tarrant Hinton Roman Villa as a single entry), the Royal Engineers Museum in Chatham (about 25,000), and Wycombe Museum in High Wycombe (about 20,000). Museums like this don’t usually have vast reserve holdings of single categories of item for scholars to examine, but they tend to store two groups of artefacts: objects that might go on display at some stage, for a special exhibition or when the galleries are reorganised; and things that will probably never fit in a show, but which illustrate the subject at hand and so need to be held onto.

The Priest’s House had undergone a complete evacuation and refurbishment in 1990-1991, just before I arrived there, so we had the advantage that every single item in the place had been recorded during the process, however sketchily, while the RE Museum had pretty well-established documentation procedures dating back to the early 1900s when it was established; even there, we had objects that couldn’t be readily matched up with records due to inadequate description, or things that had gone astray. I vividly remember retrospectively cataloguing a group of items supposedly related to General Gordon of Khartoum that had never been properly listed before, including ‘Gordon’s last pencil’, ‘Gordon’s last buttonhole’, ‘a piece of lace off Gordon’s chemise’, and ‘a fly said to have walked on Gordon’s nose’ which turned out to be a dark blob glued on a bit of card. At Wycombe, we were painfully aware of the odd ‘black hole’ in the attics with boxes whose contents were not completely familiar to us. There was, for instance, a cache of items related to a local man with no information as to how we acquired it: I often thought it would make a nice little temporary display, but I left without even being completely aware of what was in it. The catalogue, then, was fairly good, but unless we needed a particular item we didn’t tend to check. The question occasionally arose, at Wycombe at any rate, whether we should do a random check every now and again, pick a box and make sure its actual contents matched what the computer said should be in it. But it was hard to fit such activities in. Imagine how much harder it might be keep track of 8 million objects, rather than 1/320^th of that.

At the PHM and the RE Museum I was solely responsible for cataloguing, and had some input into that area at Wycombe even though Ms Quercus was the Documentation Officer. But at all three I could wander the stores at will, and when time was on my hands, that was how I occupied it. Most of what we owned, in all three places, was the kind of stuff, generously, that it would have been hard even to give away. Anything that was particularly valuable tended to be big, and it would be a tough job to go home in the evening with a six-foot painting of the Earl of Shelburne unnoticed under your coat. However, technically, had I wanted to, it would have been more than possible to abstract any number of objects to my own use and nobody would have been any the wiser until years later.

You can’t very easily strip-search everyone with access to your museum’s stores before they leave each night to make sure they haven’t got an Etruscan ring up their bottom. As well as relying on the fact that much of what we store is outrageous tat that nobody could sell anyway, we assume that our staff are dedicated professionals who love their collections and the museums they work for. Perhaps we need to check the boxes now and again as well; but then I say I need to cross-reference an odd invoice and payment at the church office every month, and do I manage that?