We’re not the only ones in lockdown. While the pandemic continues, millions of objects in UK museums – a dizzying array of treasures and oddities – are shut away behind closed doors, visible only to staff.
In last week’s Observer, to remind readers of some of the items gathering dust at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, we asked its director Tristram Hunt to highlight 10 of his favourite artefacts from the collection (his choices included a Rodin bronze and Grayson Perry’s Brexit vases).
This week we’ve gone countrywide, asking the directors of five museums outside London to each choose two favourite items that represent their institution or region.
“The reason that we exist is to care for the collections and make them accessible, so the fact that we’re not able to open the doors and let people see the collections is really heart-breaking,” says Kathryn Thomson, director of National Museums of Northern Ireland.
Directors are rethinking their roles. “We are looking at different ways to tell stories,” says Caroline McDonald, manager of the Great North Museum, Hancock, in Newcastle.
Laura Van Broekhoven
Director of the Pitt Rivers museum, Oxford
Raven Transformation Mask by Haida chief and master carver Charles Edenshaw, 1880
This very striking object is considered to be one of the greatest works of art ever made by the Haida people of western Canada. Raven is an important being in Haida culture, a powerful and mischievous creative force who features in many stories and whose transformation is acted out in dances with the help of masks like this. The renowned Haida artist Gwaai Edenshaw was meant to come to Oxford this year to work with teenagers from local schools in a collaboration with the Oxford company Flintlock Theatre.
Witch in a bottle, collected in Hove, Sussex in 1915
“Witch bottles” were seen as magical tools to protect against evil. This glass bottle was collected by a prominent female scholar in an otherwise male-dominated academy named Margaret Murray. It is said that the old lady it was obtained from warned: “They do say there be a witch in it, and if you let un out there’ll be a peck o’trouble”. At the beginning of the pandemic, we had people jokingly ask whether we had maybe let “un” out? We reassured everyone we had not.
Neil Ballantyne
Museum manager of Kelvingrove, Glasgow
German armour, 1500-10
We have an amazing collection of arms and armour, including a very decorative suit belonging to the Earl of Pembroke, but this plainer suit of armour, which would have been worn by a mercenary soldier, affects me much more. The helmet reminds me of Robocop, rounded with very narrow eye slits. The design is quite simple but brutally effective. You see a guy coming at you with this on, and you’re going to turn and run. It makes you remember how horrible war has always been and always will be.
Spitfire, 1946
Spitfires have an emotional connection for most British people – it’s seen as the plane that saved us in the Second World War – but this one was actually built after the war in 1946, for the City of Glasgow squadron. As a museum item, it comes with its practical challenges: it’s a four-ton object that we’ve got suspended from the ceiling, and every 10 years it has to come down for conservation work, which is a bit of a pain. But it’s a great thing to have.
Esme Ward
Director of Manchester Museum
Endangered harlequin frog, Panama
This is not an artefact as such: it’s alive and kicking. Harlequin frogs are from a remote indigenous rainforest community in Panama. They are beautiful and very small, not that much bigger than your thumbnail. The only place you can see them outside Panama, where they are on the brink of extinction, is in our vivarium.
Manchu headdress (dian zi), China
Dian zi translates as “hat ring”, an accessory worn by noble Manchu women at weddings, festivals and birthdays – all the things I wish I was attending now. This is a beautiful example from the 19th century, so richly decorated. It’s made of thin rattan strips woven into a check pattern and hung with gemstones, pearls, coral and enamel work. The extraordinary blue colour comes from inlaid kingfisher feathers, which when they catch the light are heartstoppingly beautiful.
Kathryn Thomson
Director of National Museums NI
Derry Girls blackboard
This is the much-celebrated “differences” blackboard from Channel 4’s Derry Girls, from the episode in season two where the girls go on a cross-community trip with a Protestant school. The episode created a huge amount of conversation and, though it’s dealing with difficult subject matter, people were able to have a laugh at it. You can take the Derry Girls test to find out how Catholic or Protestant you are. It’s light-hearted and playful, while also challenging stereotypes and showing that, really, we’re not all that different.
Bomb disposal robot
Prior to 1972, explosive devices could only be disarmed by hand. Then disposal experts started to use an instrument codenamed “Pigstick”, which shot a burst of water into the rigged explosive that caused the circuitry to malfunction. Then a retired lieutenant-colonel, Peter Miller, developed a robot that used a similar technique. From 1972 to 1978, 400 of these units were destroyed while dealing with explosive devices. This is part of our permanent exhibition, The Troubles and Beyond, at the Ulster Museum, and it’s a reflection of how far we’ve come as a society in Northern Ireland.
Caroline McDonald
Manager, Great North Museum, Hancock, Newcastle upon Tyne
Hadrian inscription
This is really the Rosetta stone of the north – an incredibly important national object that perhaps gets overlooked because it has remained in the north. It’s an inscription from Hadrian’s Wall that was discovered near Milecastle 38 around 250 years ago, but it wasn’t until the mid-19th century that anyone understood its importance. There was a huge debate around who had built the wall, and this stone confirmed that it was Hadrian who kicked off this monumental building project.
Struggle with the Quarry by John Hancock
Taxidermy is often maligned, but this piece by the great local naturalist John Hancock – in whose honour our museum is named – is a fantastic work of art, made for the Great Exhibition of 1851. In the mid-Victorian era, there was a move away from the sense of nature as serene and pastoral. What Hancock is demonstrating in this piece, where a falcon fights a heron over an eel that’s slithering away, is that nature is vicious, cruel and hierarchical. It’s relevant now, because we see nature surging back.
