A History of the British Museum Library 1753‐1973

Citation

Day, A. (1999), "A History of the British Museum Library 1753‐1973", Library Review, Vol. 48 No. 2, pp. 95-111. https://doi.org/10.1108/lr.1999.48.2.95.18

It is not unusual for former senior staff of the British Museum Library to publish histories of that venerable institution: remember Arundell Esdaile’s The British Museum Library: A Short History and Survey (1946); Edward Miller’s Prince of Librarians: The Life and Times of Antonio Panizzi (1967), and his That Noble Cabinet: A History of the British Museum (1974)? But Mr Harris will almost certainly be the last as he presents, at great length, in almost incredible detail, its entire 220 years existence until it disappeared into the great maw of the British Library in 1973. On his retirement in 1986, he undertook his massive task, primarily to preserve some of the common knowledge of the Library’s long and eventful history, which he feared might otherwise be irretrievably lost to sight. He was particularly concerned to call attention to the changes effected by the British Library in the way senior professional staff were appointed to their posts. “The tradition of the British Museum Library was that staff usually spent the whole of their working lives in the library, and so became very knowledgeable about its holdings and its operations. The modern tendency is for staff to come and go much more frequently, and for them to move from one section of the library to another much more often. This has good results in that people become more versatile and less likely to be hidebound but the bad result is that detailed knowledge of the collections and of the history of the various parts of the library is much less common among members of the staff than it was 50 years ago.” Harris is not alone amongst former members of British Museum Library staff, or its users, who, while acknowledging the British Library’s legitimate design to consolidate its own corporate identity, deprecate the transition from scholar to technocrat, and the possible effect this may have on collection development and exploitation. Harris transparently has no desire to arouse controversy, or to grind his own individual axe, but at least we can see where he is coming from (a phrase he would no doubt find lacking in rigour and clarity).

One crucial factor emerges as the British Museum Library built up its collections. For almost the entire period of its existence, the keepers of the collections, and the trustees were continuously engaged in a struggle to accommodate the ever increasing bulk of material arriving at the Museum, whether it was by gift, purchase, or copyright deposit, reflecting the public‐spirited generosity of wealthy benefactors, the prudent and thrifty acquisition of wanted items, and the strenuous efforts to enforce the Copyright Acts in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Harris charts the ingenious efforts of successive keepers to house it all as it encroached on and filled to capacity every basement, passage, gallery, workroom, and outbuilding on the Bloomsbury site. From Montagu House to the new Museum, the Iron Library constructed in the Quadrangle, the King Edward VII Building, the inter‐war planning and, finally, the decision in the 1940s to move the library to a new site, there was hardly a time when library staff were not shifting books, journals and newspapers from one basement to another. Harris charts this constant preoccupation, set against the background of perennial Treasury reluctance to supply the necessary funding, with magisterial authority.

His labours were greatly eased by the museum’s trustees allowing him free access to the museum’s records, most notably to their own minutes. The general reader may find the author’s embarras de choix has its downside as Harris valiantly attempts to exhaust the inexhaustible. For example: “The binding grant for the Department of Printed Books remained at £7,000 per annum (see p. 274) until 1878/9. Then, with the general cut‐back the figure fell to £6,450 for 1879/80. It was restored to £7,000 in 1880/1, but in 1881/2 the sum was reduced to £6,250. Moreover, since the Department of Maps had been abolished, about £400 of this sum had to be spent in binding maps. For the next three years the grant was only £5,200, then in 1885/6 it rose to £5,400, and in 1886/7 to £5,750, at which sum it remained until 1890/1.” Faced with this, the eyes of even the most dedicated reader glaze over, as he learns more about the Department of Printed Books’ binding budget in the 1880s than he really wanted to know. Passages of this nature, relating to acquisitions, stock relocation, shelving, staff appointments, gradings and salaries, etc., are by no means uncommon, but the author is unrepentant, insisting that his “very detailed book is primarily intended as a work of reference”.

But the reference aspect is not allowed to overshadow completely the odd, quirky, and decidedly intriguing gossip which leavens its pages. The ending of the practice of accepting recommendations for readers’ tickets from innkeepers – “such recommendations might not be entirely objective”; readers playing chess in the Reading Room – “their excuse was that they had been consulting books on chess and were merely trying out some of the moves described … Watts’s comment was that if this were allowed, people reading books on cricket would bring in bats and stumps”; thefts and other misdemeanours by readers – “the ticket of Miss Charlotte Birrell was withdrawn when she was charged with being drunk in the street and indecently assaulting a police constable”; while the Reverend W.J. Jenkinson, suspended rector of Fillingham, Lincs, was deprived of his ticket after letters were received concerning his suspicious conduct in London.

A number of striking parallels and contrasts emerge in the British Museum Library’s history in relation to that of the British Library. In the “Report of the Commission appointed to inquire into the constitution and government of the British Museum with minutes of evidence” (1850), “there was heavy criticism of the fact that the Standing Committee, which carried out the bulk of the trustees’ work, had never been appointed since 1755, but had consisted of such Trustees as the Secretary summoned and who chose to attend.” Another of the report’s conclusions was that whenever the Government saw fit to consider the urgent need for an enlargement of the Museum’s buildings, it was essential that “the collections should not be dispersed since the resources of the Department of Printed Books were much needed by the other departments.” Seven years later, after the rapid construction of the Round Reading Room, the then Keeper of Printed Books, John Winter Jones, remarked that there had been daily consultation between Panizzi (Principal Librarian), Smirke (the architect responsible for the final design), and Fielder (the managing partner of the contractors, Baker and Son). It was a pity that this practice was not followed 130 or so years later at St Pancras.

Readers who queued up on the Portico steps to have their bags and briefcases examined in the last years of the British Library’s occupation of the Reading Room, lest terrorists should infiltrate their deadly weapons of destruction into the building, will note with interest that “a resurgence of terrorism in 1883 when an explosion took place in Westminster caused extra police to be drafted in to guard the Museum. The next year the Principal Librarian ordered that visitors’ bags and parcels should be opened and examined if the staff had any reason to be suspicious”. And when the Suffragettes went on the rampage in 1912/13, “the director decided that bags and muffs should be searched in the Front Hall. Similarly, in 1939, when the Irish Republican Army’s campaign against Britain was at its height, the bags of all persons entering the Museum were searched”. In this case, as in others, history repeated itself several times over.

To keep his vast resources of material under tight control Harris arranges it into eleven chronological chapters, each dealing with a distinctive and convenient period, and each, in turn, subdivided under five main headings: accommodation, catalogues, collections, reading rooms, and staff, together with introductory sections as and when appropriate – “The Royal Commission On The British Museum of 1847‐49”, “The War of 1914/18”, and “The National Reference Library of Science and Invention” etc. This simple but effective method enables him to highlight the special events of each period securely within their historical context without continually interrupting the narrative flow. Of course there is some overlap but this is kept to a minimum by the unobtrusive use of page references.

Sixty pages of source notes; lists of senior staff; notes on staff structures 1759‐1971; the names of some eminent readers’ ticket holders; a glossary; notes on the approximate value of the Pound 1750‐1995; an eight‐page bibliography; and 64 pages of plates, floor plans, portraits, interior and exterior views, group photographs etc., underline the lasting value of this formidably comprehensive history which is surely destined to become the definitive work for decades to come.