Virginia Smith
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In 1851, at the height of a global natural history craze, the naturalist and museum collector Philip Gosse famously complained that his discipline was mainly conversant with dry skins furred or feathered, blackened, shrivelled and hay-stuffed; with objects, some admiringly beautiful, some hideously ugly, impaled on pins, and arranged in rows in cork drawers; with uncouth forms, disgusting to sight and smell, bleached and shrunken, suspended by threads and immersed in spirit . . . the whole is enveloped in a mystic cloud of Graeco-Latino-English phraseology (often barbaric enough) – and this is Natural History!
Well, yes, and that’s no less true today, though in recent years natural history museums have laboured to reinvent themselves as guardians of biodiversity, not warehouses of pickles. Most have cleared away their Victorian cabinetry for bright displays, with lighted buttons to press and carefully measured doses of conservation rhetoric, the experience properly capped off with a T-shirt from the gift shop. Yet a century and a half after Gosse, natural history museums are still meaningless without their vast silent stores of dried and shrivelled things, and they know it. The usual compromise has been to place the theme park out front, and hide all the beetles, butterflies, pressed plants and trilobites in the back, cordoned off with the scientists who love them.
Perhaps it is no accident that in the past decade, as collections have receded deeper into the hearts of natural history museums everywhere, several behind-the-scenes books have emerged, rife with eccentricity and intrigue. People want a look at what they can’t see. The Harvard and New York museums have recently been the subjects of irreverent biographies, and Richard Fortey’s wonderful Dry Store Room No 1: The secret life of the Natural History Museum takes this mini-genre to a whole new level. London’s Natural History Museum’s mystic cloud is a good bit thicker than those of its counterparts in the United States, its rules and hierarchies suited better to an ancient priesthood than some scruffy taxonomists in elbow patches. This makes Fortey’s revelations, accumulated over thirty-six years in the museum’s service, all the more fun.
As a freshly hired palaeontologist in 1970, Fortey explored the dim back corridors at South Kensington with awe, disgust and the fear that he might go mad. A room of antlers appeared to Fortey like “the entrance lobby to some stately home owned by a bloodthirsty monomaniac”. The butterfly drawers seemed disquietingly infinite. Fortey’s sole assignment was to do whatever he pleased with ammonites, but he wondered how his contributions could possibly mean anything. Amid tens of millions of specimens, it is easy to feel puny and useless. One of Fortey’s predecessors, a young entomologist, was plagued with similar doubts in 1913, when the collection was a fraction of its size today. “How hopeless it all seems!”, he wrote, before dying at the age of thirty.
Fortey found his footing, published on his fossils, and discovered plenty to love in the museum’s cathedral-like atrium and hermitage of science cells, though some of what went on in them was downright unholy. Dry Store Room No 1, as Fortey knew it, was a dusty limbo for racist anthropological displays, threadbare stuffed fish, giant tortoise shells and at least one box of forgotten human remains. Apart from this, it seems to have served as an unlikely place for romantic trysts. Fortey’s book offers more in this vein – some mysterious mattresses in the entomologists’ attic; a botanist, after whose death “a card index was found which contained a series of neat entries filed in alphabetical order. On each card was the name of one of his sexual conquests accompanied by a neatly pinned sprig of pubic hair. They might have been so many delicately coloured ferns”.
A fair share of intellectual torpor, madness and drunkenness appear to have been the norm at the museum during Fortey’s tenure, and well before it. One palaeontologist arrived from Cambridge to much fanfare, only to publish nothing for forty years and be spotted wandering desperately up Knightsbridge in a deep-sea diving suit he’d tried on one evening, then found himself unable to remove. A scientist down the hall from Fortey kept a loom in her office, producing rugs instead of research. Apparitions of a ghostly yogi, searching for his lost amethyst, tortured a distinguished museum benefactor. The whale man hid bottles of whisky in sheaths of blubber, and was prone to falling in his pit of caustic chemicals and bones.
By the 1980s, the crazy times were over. A business sensibility crept in, and the museum, which had been for most of Fortey’s career “a research establishment dressed up in the clothes of a tourist venue”, was forced in the reverse direction by budget cuts. “Science had to pay its way, with no space for slackers or eccentrics or unaccountable presences”, Fortey writes, and several of his friends were fired. The work performed on the museum’s shop floor continued largely unchanged, though how it was presented to the public changed considerably. Old terms for what goes on in a natural history museum – “taxonomy” and “systematics” – were phased out for the catch-all phrase “biodiversity”, which means largely the same thing, with a conservation twist. The finding, naming and classification of specimens – even fossils – is now swathed in the broader mantle of conservation; to know something, the logic of biodiversity goes, is the first step to saving it. New technologies, such as DNA sequencing, were added to the taxonomists’ toolbox, suffusing the centuries-old discipline with a whiff of cutting-edge science (and perhaps another sort of mystic cloud). For the resident scientists, publishing regularly was a job requirement. Yet science was no longer the centre of museum life. The public relations minions had to remind themselves, and the public, that there was something going on back there. “Nice women with smart suits and lipstick and bright smiles attempted to bring out the scruffy old scientists from their hidden redoubts”, Fortey writes. “Their elbow patches were banned. Corporate culture had arrived.”
At this point in the story Fortey’s sense of humour, robust throughout, becomes a bit muted. He is uncomfortable with what corporate culture wrought, particularly the phasing out of the sort of single-minded personality the museum once nurtured – the type devoted exclusively to brachiopods or lichens, more interested in their subjects than in making a splash in the journals. Big science has been cold and stingy towards natural history, which doesn’t conduct radical experiments, but just plods on in its inventory of all life. Young talent has been forced to go where the grants are. Fortey predicts that a new class of amateur naturalists will emerge to pick up the slack (“the day of the botanizing vicar will return”, he says), but this sounds like wishful thinking, especially since natural history has spent the last century professionalizing, distancing itself from the vicars who supplied it in its heyday. That strategy, intended to elevate the discipline, wound up isolating it.
Corporate culture may, in the end, provide natural history with some of the recruitment it needs. It has certainly provided it with ample exposure. Aggressive fundraising and marketing gives the Natural History Museum huge crops of visitors, particularly young ones, and annual budgets of around £75 million. Some of that wealth has trickled into the Darwin Centre, a new storage facility for the collections with a distinctly sterile, all-business, non-tryst-conducive feel. Every day a few visitors are allowed to tour it, and it can’t be an accident that the museum has chosen to leave certain extraordinary specimens – little fishes collected by Charles Darwin in Brazil, a twenty-eight-foot giant squid – there in the centre, rather than in the exhibit halls. Visitors believe they are seeing something secret, and all the more special for that. If the trick works, the magic must still be good.
Richard Fortey
DRY STORE ROOM NO 1
The secret life of the Natural History Museum
318pp. HarperPress. £20.
978 0 00 720988 0
US: Knopf. $27.50. 978 0 307 26362 9
Virginia Smith is a freelance science reporter in Florida. Her book
about reptile smuggling will be published in 2009.
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