Dry Storeroom No. 1

by Richard Fortey

  The Big Hole diamond pipe at Kimberley, South Africa, source of many giant gems

  They are also a thief’s greatest temptation. The Natural History Museum mounted a blockbuster show on diamonds in 2005, bringing together a selection of famous stones. Rare yellow-or blue-hued diamonds could be seen alongside scintillating giants, each of which doubtless carried a special curse. Security was an important consideration; but it was still evidently inadequate, for the show had to close early on 23 November at a loss. Staff were informed that “reliable information” had been obtained by the police that a bold jewel heist was at an advanced stage of planning, and that the greatest robbery in the history of the world might happen at any minute. For several weeks one had to walk past guards carrying sub-machine guns to get to the office while the splendid diamonds were sent securely back to their several homes. It was a slightly humiliating experience—especially as the London newspapers ran articles along the lines of “Mr. Big Spooks Museum.” The guards had no sense of humour, either, when an employee gestured towards his briefcase and winked. It was rather a relief when the diamonds had gone home. Though what was once the largest diamond in the world still resides at the Natural History Museum…Or, to be truthful, the space that it once occupied is curated in the Museum. It is an odd story. The Koh-i-noor diamond is not only one of the largest diamonds but could claim to be the one to which the cliché “steeped in history” most dramatically applies. It is not merely steeped, but is marinated, stewed and spiced in history; naturally, it also has a whopping curse upon it. It was mined in India in Andhra Pradesh in medieval times, and its early history is more legend than fact, but by 1526 it was probably in the possession of Babur, the first Mughal Emperor. Thereafter it changed hands and country repeatedly as spoils of war: it travelled to Persia with Nadir Shah in 1739; and thence to Afghanistan with the warlord Ahmed Shah Abdali in 1747; and then on to the Punjab in 1813, when it was captured in turn by the Maharaja Ranjit Singh. During its Mughal days, it spent time mounted in the famous Peacock Throne. Finally it passed by right into the hands of the greatest Empress of them all, Queen Victoria. It was an attraction at the Great Exhibition of 1851: “the lion of the Exhibition” according to The Times. But its drop-like shape did not please Prince Albert, and in 1852 the stone was recut over the course of eight days for the then astonishing sum of £8,000. During this process it shrank from 37.2 grams to 21.6 grams (that is a 42 per cent loss)—and became much more brilliant. The original was lost for ever. But, tucked away in an attic of the Mineralogy Department, Alan Hart found a cast of the original Koh-i-noor diamond—it still exists, if only as a hole inside a plaster cast. It had been forgotten since 1852, but could there be a better demonstration of the First Law of Museums: never throw anything away?

  Recutting the Koh-i-noor diamond in 1852. Considering the value of the stone, the figure on the right seems rather nonchalant.

  Notes accompanying the virtual specimen show that the cast was prepared under the supervision of Nevil Mervyn Herbert Story-Maskelyne—one of the leading mineralogists of the time—as a record before the recutting of the famous stone. There was a previous tradition of making glass models of renowned jewels, so replication was common practice. Three hundred and fifty of Sir Hans Sloane’s glass models are one of the better survivors from his original collection in the British Museum. Story-Maskelyne became Keeper of the department in 1857, and he it was who first built up the meteorite collection, and arranged the public exhibitions under what was then the cutting-edge, chemical classification, which still forms the basis of the display. He was a pioneer in the use of chemical methods in mineralogy, and demanded a laboratory, in spite of the fact that he had virtually no assistance for a number of years. Nonetheless, he somehow found time to keep on his Oxford professorship, become a Member of Parliament and develop into one of the important early photographers. He was almost Heron-Allenesque in his versatility, though without the interest in mumbo-jumbo. Are we lesser people today, or do we expect less of ourselves? I imagine Heron-Allen passing Story-Maskelyne on the stairs. “Ah! My dear Maskelyne, I regret I cannot spare time for persiflage just now, as I have to finish my monograph in time for the violin recital. Perhaps we will meet at the Sufic Poetry Society this evening?” “Would that it were so,” Story-Maseklyne might reply. “But I fear I must complete the determination of the latest parcel of minerals from India before I leave for my constituency in Wiltshire by way of the Welsh silver mines, there to glean materials for my photographic plates.”

  Whatever our deficiencies of character, we do have better scientific instruments these days; modern scanning techniques may even allow us automatically to recreate the original shape of the Koh-i-noor from its cast—so to build a solid from the vacuum. As for the butchered diamond, it can be seen in the Queen Mother’s crown in the Tower of London. And there are those who have attributed Prince Albert’s early death to the curse. Although it is a strange kind of death: his ghost still haunts South Kensington—from the Museum and monument that carry his name to the attic of an obscure part of the Natural History Museum.

  From another box hidden in the safe Alan Hart carefully lifted the La Trobe nugget—717 grams of native gold, and not the usual formless mass, either, but a jumble of crystals, piled together like a gilded cubist sculpture. Charles Joseph La Trobe, Governor of Victoria, sold it to the Museum in 1857. It remains one of the most magnificent examples of native gold ever found, and it is priceless. It feels curiously heavy in the hand, and somehow it is hard to credit that it is the real thing. One expects it to have a label on it saying 100% REAL GOLD. Another piece of native precious metal from the safe may be even more valuable. It feels a little tasteless to mention value while looking at the treasures in the national collections—rather like the man invited to an aristocratic high table whistling through his teeth and opining out loud that the dinner service must be worth a fortune. But the Kongsberg silver wires really would fetch something approaching a quarter of a million pounds on the open market. The famous silver mines near Buskerud in Norway were opened in 1623, and at their height employed several thousand miners. They stopped production in the middle of the last century, so no more specimens will be found. The wires are very odd—they club together to make a spiral of native silver threads rising from a calcite base, slightly blackened in the atmosphere, but silvery withal. The form is somewhat reminiscent of the famous if unbuilt Tatlin tower of the Russian Constructivists, which was to have been built in 1917; if one was less generous, one might say it was more like a weathered bedspring. Whatever the comparison, it is an extraordinary production of nature, which is why it is so valuable. This spiral “sculpture” was acquired in 1886, but belonged originally to the Geological Survey, whose Museum was formerly a separate institution with its entrance on Exhibition Road. The Natural History Museum took over both the Survey minerals and the galleries in which they were displayed in 1985. The former Geological Museum became the Earth Galleries of the NHM, and the silver spiral was added to the collections.

  Everyone would like to find his or her own Aladdin’s cave, a jewelclad grotto of the heart’s desire. While I was researching this book I gained access to a part of the Museum I had never visited before: not so much an Aladdin’s cave as an Aladdin’s attic. It was a strange feeling climbing a staircase for the first time in a building where I had spent most of my working life. The Russell Room hides in what would be called the rafters in any regular building. The square columns that pass through the room still carry the effigies of eurypterid fossils—so once upon a time the public would have had access to this corner. But now it feels like the most sequestered recess of a building that is already the apotheosis of nooks and crannies. The room is lined with the polished wooden cabinets and drawers that are the hallmark of the old Museum. Much of it is taken up with the collection of Sir Arthur Russell Bt., who made the greatest ever collection of British mineral specimens. It was received as a bequest by the Museum in 1964. There is an endearing blac
k-and-white photograph of the baronet sharing a tandem bicycle with his mother, all Oxford bags and cardigans. He is alleged to have visited every British mine outside the Isle of Man in search of mineral booty. His name has been adopted for the leading society for amateur mineralogists, the Russell Society, and naturally there is a russellite, with its type locality at Castell-am-dinas Mine at St. Colomb Major, in Cornwall, the ancient county that Russell scoured for fine examples. On the top of the cabinet lies his catalogue, immaculately written out in what I would describe as a boyish hand—perfectly formed letters but not joined together. I leafed through it to look for the usual signs of ageing, but in vain; the first entry is as neat as the thousandth.

  A specimen of the extraordinarily spiral-shaped native silver “wires” from Kongsberg, Norway

  The doyen of mineral collectors, Arthur Russell, eponym of russellite

  In the room named after Russell are drawers upon drawers of brilliant minerals—opaque and glittering metallic sulphides, subtle pink and green tourmalines, varieties of spinels and peridots, indeed almost every kind of molecular art that the Earth can produce. Against the wall there is a case of fluorspars from Derbyshire. Chemically, this is just calcium fluoride—but this simple formula provides a rich range of lilacs, and apple greens, or banded displays alternating between colourless and coloured layers, or perfect cubes tumbling like spilled confectionery, making a kind of lithified Turkish delight. Fluorspar is an ancient worked stone, used even by the dynastic Egyptians, but no finer specimens have been collected than those from Derbyshire, on the “backbone of England.” In one corner of the Russell Room there are strange metallic-looking “wheels” of a mineral called bournonite purchased in 1879, and today worth in excess of a hundred thousand pounds per sample. They originated from the Herodsfoot Mine in Cornwall. The Lostwithiel mineralogist Richard Talling—after whom tallingite is named—tried to collect the mineral from the mine but was rebuffed by the tin miners. He covertly bought 51 per cent of the shares in the mine, and when he returned to the mine was able to put the miners on to the extraction of strange mineral species instead of their usual ores. In another corner of the room is the type specimen of the element Niobium (formerly Columbium) given to Sloane in 1754 by John Winthrop and used by Charles Hatchett to discover this rare element, which he formally announced to the Royal Society on 26 November 1801.

  Science, treasure, rarity, beauty, scholarship: this hidden gallery made me understand again the heterogeneous attraction of Museum life. Nowhere else could a link with the Mughal emperors be relevant to what happens deep beneath the surface of the Earth; nowhere else would the fanatical collecting of a toffish Russell become a long-term resource for mineral genesis; nowhere else could rummaging in an attic reveal an archive of the Prince Regent. From the Russell Room I looked out on to the Victoria and Albert Museum across the other side of Exhibition Road. The prospect might suggest imperial nonsense and “pomp and circumstance,” a slightly ridiculous inheritance from the nineteenth century when the Sun never set on the British Empire. But South Kensington has become transformed by time and usage into something that is more than just the “BM” and the “V& A,” a monument to a Britain that no longer exists. The collections are there to inform and inspire the whole world, and not just a small corner of it. I am not much of a post-colonialist, and I don’t necessarily admire the principles on which the collections were made. But I do understand the primacy of collections as a record of the world, both human and natural. There is more to collections than the golden rule about never throwing things away. There is inherent value in having people who “know their stuff.” The apparently esoteric can suddenly illuminate unsuspected areas of knowledge. Those who have devoted their lives to collections—obdurate people, odd people, admirable people—actually make a museum what it is and should be.

  8

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  Noah’s Ark in Kensington

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  Recently, I travelled back in time. Ollie Crimmen, the fish curator, had somehow got hold of an old BBC1 Horizon programme about the Natural History Museum broadcast on 7 September 1970. It carried the title of this chapter. The whole programme had a faded feel to it, as if it had been recorded in about 1902. All the scientific staff were wearing V-neck jumpers and ties and spoke in clipped, upper-middle-class tones. One could imagine that their pipes had only just been tapped out. The blue-uniformed warders looked as if they were doing the job after a stint on E-wing of a prison for violent offenders. The exhibitions they supervised really were still those inherited from 1902, comprising lines of things in glass cases, with technical labels in small type. The Director—Sir Frank Claringbull—was filmed in a classic book-lined study facing the camera as straight as if it were an interrogator, and talking too fast. There were also some of the people who have appeared in this book. Here was the famous whale man Peter Purves, explaining elegantly how he aged whales from the deposits laid down in their ears, as he wandered through the skeletons of a dozen cetaceans that were formerly stashed in the basement. Purves displayed no sign of insobriety at this stage in his career. Then there was Peter Whitehead, fish man and roué, explaining very clearly why taxonomy mattered, his beard still black, the bags under his eyes at an early stage in their ontogeny. Tony Sutcliffe, fossil mammal man, was on film looking just the same as when he retired twenty-five years later—I realized he had always looked about sixty years old. Miriam Rothschild, the Trustee’s Trustee, handsome in a mannish way, wearing a curious kind of cape and backed by ranks of leather-bound volumes, was speaking of collections in a way that showed how deeply she cared about them—her BM collections, the value of which was beyond dispute. The kids on the galleries seemed much more timeless, fidgeting and tucking into their sandwiches. I realized that memory is a great deceiver. It muddles things up, it does not square with time, and it does not move along in the way one expects. The documentary evidence of this film proved how it really was. I was alarmed to find that there were people in the film that I remembered not at all: the bat man was somebody I may have never met, or have forgotten, and therefore will always be excluded from my personal museum. The way that he delicately examined a pickled bat’s ears suggested that he might have been interesting to know; that he, too, would have had stories to tell. In a strange way this demonstration of the limitations of memory proves the importance of collections in museums. They defy time; they transcend what any one scholar might make of them; they are outside our own little personal histories.

  The official histories of museums tend to be dominated by the few for whom archives are compiled and maintained, and most particularly Directors. This is not so different from the way that the history of England used to be portrayed as the history of kings and queens, or that of the United States of America by the doings and ponderings of presidents. It is certainly a convenient way of keeping a chronology in mind—a kind of temporal mnemonic—but it hardly paints a true picture of what happens among the people: acts and edicts are the least part of history. I have been concerned with what goes on behind the scenes among the practising scientists. I have not referred very much to the politics at the top of the organizational hierarchy. As in William T. Stearn’s history, I could have recounted the scientific story Keeper by Keeper, but that, too, is a history of successive governments rather than a history of fallible and interesting practitioners. However, it would be remiss of me not to write a little about the running of the Museum by the boss—what is today termed “governance,” a word that to me sounds like a cross between “government” and “performance” and automatically carries a whiff of admonishment. The Directors of the Natural History Museum have gradually dwindled in public prominence over the last century and a half. Earlier Directors included figures that could take their place on the world stage of savants; more recent occupiers of the post are competent people put there to run things, not to influence the perception of the natural world in the human one. When Richard Owen agitated for the foundation of a separate Na
tural History Museum, he could directly commune with the royal family, at a time when that family really counted for something. Nobody disputed that he was also one of the greatest comparative anatomists of the day. Even his independent views concerning evolutionary theory might be attributed to some kind of comparative resentment over Darwin’s intellectual ascendancy—there was room for only one top dog. There were not many people in the nineteenth century who could command influence as effectively as Sir Richard.*22