Читать книгу Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum - Richard Fortey - Страница 7

This book is my own store room, a personal archive, designed to explain what goes on behind the polished doors in the Natural History Museum. All our lives are collections curated through memory. We pick up recollections and facts and store them, often half forgotten, or tucked away on shelves buried deep in the psyche. Not everything is as blameless as we might like. But the sum total of that deep archive is what makes us who we are. I cannot escape the fact that working for a whole lifetime within the extravagant building in South Kensington has moulded much of my character. By the same token, I also know the place rather better than any outsider. I am in a position to write a natural history of the Natural History Museum, to elucidate its human fauna and explain its ethology. There are histories that deal with the decisions of the mighty, and there are histories that are concerned with the ways of ordinary people. An admirable history of the Natural History Museum as an institution, by William T. Stearn, was published in 1981. What Stearn largely left out was an account of the achievements, hopes and frustrations, virtues and failings of the scientists who occupied the ‘shop floor’ – the social history, if you like. My own Dry Store Room No. 1 will curate some of the stories of the people who go to make up a unique place. I believe profoundly in the importance of museums; I would go as far as to say that you can judge a society by the quality of its museums. But they do not exist as collections alone. In the long term, the lustre of a museum does not depend only on the artefacts or objects it contains – the people who work out of sight are what keeps a museum alive by contributing research to make the collections active, or by applying learning and scholarship to reveal more than was known before about the stored objects. I want to bring those invisible people into the sunlight. From a thousand possible stories I will pick up one or two, just those that happen to have made it into my own collection. Although I describe my particular institution I dare say it could be a proxy for any other great museum. Perhaps my investigations will even cast a little light on to the museum that makes up our own biography, our character, ourselves.

At first glance the Natural History Museum looks like some kind of cathedral, dominated by towers topped by short spires; these lie at the centre of the building and at its eastern and western corners. Ranks of round-topped Romanesque windows lie on ‘aisles’ connecting the towers which confirm the first impression of a sacred building. Even on a dull day the outside of the Museum shows a pleasing shade of buff, a mass of terracotta tiles, the warmth of which contrasts with the pale stucco of the terraces that line much of the other side of the Cromwell Road. Courses of blue tiles break up the solidity of the façade. The entrance to the Museum is a great rounded repeated arch, flanked by columns, and the front doors are reached by walking up a series of broad steps. Arriving at the Natural History Museum is rather like entering one of the magnificent cathedrals of Europe, like those at Reims, Chartres or Strasbourg. The visitor almost expects to hear the trilling of an organ, or the sudden pause of a choir in rehearsal. Instead, there is the cacophony of young voices. And where the Gothic cathedral will have a panoply of saints on the tympanum above the door, or maybe carvings of the Flight from Egypt, here instead are motifs of natural history – foliage with sheep, a wolf, a muscled kangaroo.

The main hall still retains the feel of the nave of a great Gothic cathedral, because it is so high and generously vaulted. But now the differences are obvious. High above, where the cathedral might display flying buttresses, there are great arches of steel, not modestly concealed, but rather flaunted for all they are worth. This is a display of the Victorian delight in technology, a celebration of what new engineering techniques could perform in the nineteenth century. Elsewhere in the Natural History Museum, a steel frame is concealed beneath a covering of terracotta tiles that completely smother the surface of the outside and most of the inside of the building; these paint the dominant pale-brown colour. Only in the hall are the bones exposed. This could have created a stark effect, but is softened by painted ceiling panels; no angels spreadeagled above, but instead wonderful stylized paintings of plants. It does not take a botanist to recognize some of them: here is a Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris),* there is a lemon tree (Citrus limonum), but how many Europeans would recognize the cacao plant (Theobroma cacao)? Many visitors, and most children, don’t even notice these charming ceiling paintings. Their attention is captured by other bones: the enormous Diplodocus dinosaur that occupies the centre of the ground floor, heading in osteological splendour towards the door. Its tiny head bears a mouthful of splayed teeth in a grinning welcome.

The Diplodocus has been there a long time. It is actually a cast of an original in Pittsburgh, which was assembled in the Museum during 1905. The great philanthropist Andrew Carnegie presented the specimen to King Edward VII who then handed it over to the Museum in person at a grand public occasion. Diplodocus was proudly in place when I first came to the Natural History Museum as a little boy in the 1950s, and it was still there when I retired in 2006. I am always glad to see it; not that I regard a constructed replica of an ancient fossil as an old friend, it is just consoling to pass the time of day with something that changes little in a mutable world.

But Diplodocus has changed, albeit rather subtly. When I was a youngster, the enormously long Diplodocus tail hung down at the rear end and almost trailed along the floor, its great number of extended vertebrae supported by a series of little props. This arrangement was not popular with the warders, as unscrupulous visitors would occasionally steal the last vertebra from the end of the tail. There was even a box of ‘spares’ to make good the work of thieves so that the full backbone was restored by the time the doors opened the following day. Visitors today will see a rather different Diplodocus: the tail is elevated like an extended whip held well above the ground, supported on a brass crutch which has been somewhat cruelly compared with those often to be found in the paintings of Salvador Dalí; now the massive beast has an altogether more vigorous stance. The skeleton was remodelled after research indicated that the tail had a function as a counterbalance to the extraordinarily long neck at the opposite end of the body. Far from being a laggard, Diplodocus was an active animal, despite the smallness of its brain. Nowadays, all the huge sauropod dinosaurs in films such as Jurassic Park show the tail in this active position. Many exhibits in a natural history museum are not permanent in the way that sculptures or portraits are in an art gallery. Bones can be rehung in a more literal way than paintings.

Diplodocus carnegii, the giant plant-eating dinosaur, with its tail uplifted. The Diplodocus skeleton was moved to its present position in the main hall from the former reptile gallery in 1979.

Diplodocus carnegii. Photo © Natural History Museum, London.

Now animatronic dinosaurs flash their teeth and groan, and carry us back effectively to the Cretaceous period, a hundred million years ago. Small children shelter nervously behind the legs of their parents. ‘Don’t worry,’ say the parents, ‘they aren’t real.’ The kids do not always look convinced. The bones that caused such a sensation in Andrew Carnegie’s time a century ago, and that still command attention in the main hall, are now sometimes considered a little too tame. There is, to my mind, still something eloquent about the Diplodocus specimen: not merely its size, but that it is the assembled evidence for part of a vanished world. All those glamorous animations and movie adventures rely ultimately on the bones. A museum is a place where the visitor can come to examine evidence, as well as to be diverted. Before the exhibitions started to tell stories, that was one of the main functions of a museum, and the evidence was laid out in ranks. There are still galleries in the Natural History Museum displaying minerals, the objects themselves – unadorned but for labels – a kind of museum of a museum, preserved in aspic from the days of such systematic rather than thematic exhibits. Few people now find their way to these galleries.

The public galleries take up much less than half of the space of the Natural History Museum. Tucked away, mostly out of view, there is a warren of corridors, obsolete galleries, offices, libraries and above all, collections. This is the natural habitat of the curator. It is where I have spent a large part of my life – indeed, the Natural History Museum provides a way of life as distinctive as that of a monastery. Most people in the world at large know very little about this unique habitat. This is the world I shall reveal.

I had been a natural historian for as long as I could remember and I had always wanted to work in a museum. When there was a ‘career day’ at my school in west London I was foolish enough to ask the careers master, ‘How do you get into a museum?’ The other boys chortled and guffawed and cried out, ‘Through the front door!’ But I soon learned that it would not be that easy. Getting ‘into a museum’ as a researcher or curator is a rather arduous business. A first degree must be taken in an appropriate subject, geology in my case, and this in turn followed by a PhD in a speciality close to the area of research in the museum. When I applied for my job in 1970 this was enough, but today the demands are even greater. A researcher must have a ‘track record’, which is a euphemism for lots of published scientific papers – that is, articles on research printed in prestigious scientific journals. He or she must also be described in glowing terms by any number of referees; and, most difficult of all, there must be the prospect of raising funds from the rather small number of public bodies that pay out for research. It is a tall order. Even so, the most important qualification remains what it always was: a fascination and love for natural history. There is no other job quite like it.

The interview for my job was conducted in the Board Room. It was 1970. To reach the rather stern room on the first floor of the Natural History Museum I had passed through several sets of impressive mahogany doors. A large and very polished table was in the middle of the room, the kind of table that is always associated with admonishment. On one wall there was and still is a splendid portrait of the first Director of the Museum, the famous anatomist Sir Richard Owen, by Holman Hunt. He was an old man when he sat for the portrait, and is dressed in a brilliant scarlet robe, beautifully painted to show the glint of satin, indicative of some very superior doctorate. His glittering eyes survey the room, intent on not tolerating fools gladly. Each candidate was interviewed by the Keeper of Palaeontology – who was the head of the appropriate department – and his Deputy Keeper, together with the Museum Secretary, Mr Coleman. The Secretary was a rather grand personage at that time, who more or less ran the museum from the administrative side. There was also a sleepy-looking gentleman from the Civil Service Commission, who was there for some arcane purpose connected with the fact that the successful candidate would be paid out of the public purse. I was dressed in my best, and indeed only, suit and very nervous.

I was applying to be the ‘trilobite man’ for the Museum. The previous occupant of the post was Bill Dean, who had gone off to join the Geological Survey of Canada. He left behind a formidable reputation. Trilobites are one of the largest and most varied groups of extinct animals, and being paid to study them is one of the greatest privileges in palaeontology. I had not yet completed my PhD thesis, and was young and inexperienced. My fellow candidates were ahead of me by a few months or years. We would all get to know one another well over the course of our professional lives, but for the moment conversation was restricted to twitchy pleasantries. We sat on uncomfortable chairs in a kind of corridor and awaited our turn in the Board Room. Eventually, I had to go in to face the piercing eyes of Sir Richard. The questioning began. Fortunately, I had made some interesting discoveries in the Arctic island of Spitsbergen where I had been carrying out my PhD research at Cambridge University, so once I got going I had a lot to talk about, and my general air of nervousness began to subside. I had discovered all kinds of new trilobites in the Ordovician* age rocks there, and studying these animals seemed a matter of pressing excitement. Youthful enthusiasm can occasionally count for more than mature wisdom. The man from the Civil Service Commission stirred himself once and asked if I played any sport. The answer was no, except for tiddlywinks. He then sank back into apparent torpor. The Keeper smiled at me benignly. Hands were shaken, and it was all over. Did I imagine something less severe in Sir Richard Owen’s expression as I left the Board Room?

Several weeks later I was offered the job. In view of my youth I was taken on as a Junior Research Fellow, which meant, I think, that if I did not work out I could be politely escorted out of the cathedral. But important to me was that I was entitled to go behind the mahogany doors into the secret world of the collections, and to receive a modest salary for doing so. I was being paid to do work that I would have done for nothing. I had a season ticket to a world of wonders.

To trace my journey behind the scenes, follow me along one of the few galleries remaining from the old days of the Museum, one flanked by a high wall lined with cases bearing the fossils of ancient marine reptiles: ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs. They look as if they are swimming along this wall, one above the other, making a kind of Jurassic dolphin pod (although of course they are not biologically related to those similar-looking living mammals). They comprise a famous collection, including some specimens that are the basis of a fossil species name. One of the ichthyosaurs probably died in the process of giving birth to live young, although few visitors notice the label explaining this curious and fascinating fact. Several of the skeletons were dug out by the pioneer fossil collector Mary Anning, who was one of very few women scientists in the first half of the nineteenth century; on summer afternoons an actress may play the part of Miss Anning on the gallery, much to the bemusement of Japanese visitors who think she must be selling something. At the end of the gallery stands the skeleton of a giant sloth from South America, geologically very much younger than the ichthyosaurs. This fine specimen is routinely mistaken for a dinosaur by the more desultory Museum visitors, but it is a mammal, albeit of a special and monstrous kind. Behind the sloth there is a door. And behind the door lies the Department of Palaeontology, home of the really old fossils.

Pen-and-ink drawing of a Jurassic plesiosaur made by pioneer fossil collector Mary Anning in 1824.

Plesiosaur drawn by Mary Anning, 1824. Photo © Natural History Museum, London.

The door opens with a special key. When I first joined the Museum, the keys were issued every day from a key pound staffed by a warder. Every department had a coloured disc attached to the key, a different colour for Botany, Palaeontology, the Office, or whatever. Each member of staff had an individual number. So when I arrived at the key pound in the morning I had to cry out ‘47 Grey!’ and within a few seconds I would be handed my keys by a uniformed warder. When a member of staff became well known to the warder, the arrival of the right keys might anticipate the hollering. The keys were massive, old-fashioned steel affairs such as you might expect to be carried by a ‘screw’ in a prison, or by a miser to open an antique oak chest, and they turned in the locks with a satisfying clunk. There was a specialist locksmith hidden away somewhere in the bowels of the Museum, whose job it was to oil the locks, and keep the keys turning. I soon learned that had I attempted to get into the room where the precious gems were stored I would have discovered that my keys would not fit into that particular lock. There were hierarchies of trust. Presumably only the Director had keys that worked in every lock. We were instructed to keep the keys on our person at all times. Graven into the metalwork were the words ‘20 shillings reward if found’, a measure of the antiquity of the keys, since even in the early 1970s a quid was not much of a reward. From time to time the Secretary would tour the Museum to see which naughty boys and girls had left their keys upon their desks while they went off for a cup of tea, and a ticking-off from above by means of a pompous memorandum would follow. An even worse crime was unwittingly to walk out of the Museum bearing the precious keys. At the end of the working day, the warder could spot a miscreant by an unfilled space in the ranks of keys. Forgetful members of staff were commanded to come back late at night from Brighton or East Grinstead to restore their keys to the hook. A dressing-down would follow from the head of department the following day. The locks were changed in the 1980s to modern Yale varieties, but the new keys were still tailored to different security needs, so I still cannot get to steal the diamonds. By one of those weird volte-faces that only bureaucratic institutions can manage, it is now against the rules to fail to take the keys home with you.

Let us go through the doors to the collections. They are housed in a long gallery, across which run banks of cabinets, each some ten yards or so long. There are fifty-seven such banks on the ground floor of the Palaeontology Department, every cabinet neatly sealed by a sliding door designed to keep out the dust. Most of the doors are locked as they are supposed to be. But there is one that has obviously not been sealed away. Carefully slide open the door, and there lies revealed a series of a dozen or so mahogany drawers inside each cabinet. There are labels attached to the middle of the drawers, any one of which might be deeper than the typical cutlery drawer at home. A curator has written a scientific name of an animal in a neat hand on the label, together with some locality information. Pull open the drawer and peer inside: it slides easily on metal runners. There are white cardboard trays on which rest a number of what are evidently bones of various kinds. Even without specialist knowledge it is possible to recognize teeth of several varieties, alongside fragments of limb bones. One of the teeth is a massive affair, a kind of ribbed washboard on a massive bony base – this is completely characteristic of the elephant family, a monument of masticatory might. These teeth allow elephants to crush tough vegetation of many kinds. All the bones and teeth are more or less stained a yellowish colour. And all of them are fossils, retrieved from the ground by searching strata, digging or scraping in quarries or cliffs; they have acquired the stain of time from their long interment of several hundred thousand years, possibly as a result of the action of iron-rich fluids. Every fragment, no matter how unspectacular it is, tells a story about past time, each one is a talisman for unlocking history. The specimens in this drawer are all fossil mammals, distant cousins of the sloth that guards the entrance to the department.

The collections in this particular part of the Museum and in this particular aisle are devoted to vertebrates from the geologically recent period known as the Pleistocene, a time slice that includes the last ice ages. Inside the tray on which each fossil rests there is a neatly written label which tells us that this particular collection was derived from the cliffs at Easton Bavents, near Southwold in the county of Suffolk, a place where the sea is eroding some of the youngest rocks in Britain, though they are still over a million years old. Sharp-eyed local collectors had spotted these organic remains as winter storms excavated them from the soft sandy cliffs. Had they not been collected and housed in a museum, a few seasons of weathering on those harsh shores would have reduced the bones to meaningless rubble. So the Museum provides a way of cheating decay, of sequestering information from the degradations of time. Doubtless, each specimen provoked a thrill of recognition in its discoverer, the satisfaction of a search rewarded. This single drawer preserves the record of days of endeavour and an archive of pleasure in discovery, or secret gloating over finding the best specimens of the season. Each bone could tell a story of the relative roles of luck and perseverance in science. Fossil fragments have an eloquence that belies their yellowish uniformity. Perhaps the observer will feel a twinge of disappointment at the incompleteness of the specimens, having seen reconstructions in books and films of whole animals striding about the landscape. These remains are just scraps, bits and pieces, odds and ends. The truth is that much fossil material is like this. The skill of the scientist often lies in being able to identify small pieces of a whole animal: from tooth to elephant. Every morsel of the past is useful.

The writing on the labels does not betray any drama of discovery. Old labels like these are written in the hand of the curator at the time the specimen is identified. They are small slips, about the size of one of those special postage stamps issued by countries like San Marino. The writing has to be very neat. Old labels are frequently found written in the copperplate script preferred by the Victorians. Newer ones favour small, neat script. Everything is written in Indian ink so that time will not allow the messages to fade. After all, the 1753 Act of Parliament that set up the British Museum specified that the collections ‘shall remain and be preserved in the Museum for public use for all posterity’. These labels were meant to last. An old label is a message from a curator whom one might never have met, but a little personal message on paper nonetheless. There was a time when the hiring of curators was accompanied by a writing test; nobody with overly large writing would be employed, nor any scribblers, nor any who employed extravagant curlicues. Graphologists would have had a very dull time with those who came through the interviews. More recently, the computer has replaced the skilled human being, as so often, so that neat little labels can be spewed out of a laser printer at the touch of a button. In future, labels will always be impersonal (and if there is a mistake, probably nobody will know who made it). At the top of the label accompanying the large tooth is the Latin, or scientific, name of the animal concerned: Mammuthus primigenius – an ancient mammoth. Any visiting scientist will recognize that name. The rock formation from which it was recovered (Easton Bavents Formation) is given next. The age of the specimen within the Pleistocene period follows. Beneath this again is the locality, specified quite precisely. Nowadays a locality might well be given by a GPS position, but British specimens could be fairly precisely located by reference to the national grid, and I have seldom had a problem relocating a locality if this information was given. Then there is the name of the collector of the specimen, who also happened to donate it to the Museum ‘for all posterity’. Many labels will include more information, especially if the specimen to hand has been mentioned or figured in a scientific paper. This is how the importance of the material is conveyed to the outside world: not everybody can come to root around in the drawers of the Museum to see the specimens themselves. Specimens are made known to experts around the world primarily through catalogues and technical publications. So the label might also bear something like: ‘Figured by Ann T. Quarian in Transactions of the Society for Ancient Things Volume 1, Plate 1 figure 2’.

That is just one specimen taken at random from a single drawer in a rank of drawers in just one cupboard from one row of cabinets. Some drawers may contain a hundred specimens or more – the next one down includes tiny vole teeth, for example. There may be a dozen or more drawers in a single rank; and there are some ten ranks of drawers in a row. On this floor there are fifty-seven rows or lines of cabinets; except where very large specimens are accommodated, almost every drawer carries a full burden of specimens. In this department alone there are three floors of fossil collections of comparable or greater size. That adds up to a very large complement of drawers, and a vast number of specimens. It does not require a calculation to show that only a tiny fraction of the material held by the Museum is on display to the public: the galleries show the merest sample from a colossal collection. In the secret world behind the scenes there is no shortage of specimens; indeed, one of the main problems is how to accommodate the sheer bulk of new material. Much of it is fragmentary, like the Easton Bavents bones. Its value is scientific and it would not fetch much on the open market. A few specimens are precious and valuable in their own right. ‘Million dollar fossils’ might include the famous original of the Jurassic bird Archaeopteryx or the exquisitely preserved fossils of Cretaceous fishes from Brazil. But that is not why we have museums with collections of natural history specimens. A few scraps of bone can tell us what the climate was like three hundred thousand years ago: that is a value that cannot be reckoned in euros or dollars.

Countless specimens: rows of cabinets and drawers for storing the insect collection. In 2007 this storage was being replaced and renewed.

Museum cabinets. Photo © Natural History Museum, London.

My first office was not in the present palaeontology wing, which was officially opened in 1977 – by which time I was already an old hand. I originally had an office in the old building, tucked away in the basement beside the main entrance. On busy days I could hear the chattering of children as they swarmed up the steps. It was a hugely tall room, and not like an office at all, lit from a large window that looked out on to the lawn in front of the Museum. The collections – my part of the collections – were stored within the room in old storage cabinets. The office was so tall that it had an extra gallery halfway up, reached by a steel staircase. If I wanted to examine some part of the collections I would have to clunk up the stairs, carrying my hand lens, like an antiquarian gaoler, and open drawers in this upper storey. There were railings all around it to ensure that I did not fall off. The cabinets were beautifully crafted. Each drawer had an independently suspended glass top to keep out the dust. The mortise and tenon joints that formed the corners of the drawers would have struck dumb any carpenter. Labels on the front of each drawer recorded the scientific names of the fossils within. They were cupboards made for eternity. From my first day in that office I felt like an expert – the man from the BM.

I should explain that the Natural History Museum was then known in the scientific trade as the BM, the British Museum. The official title of the museum at the time of my employment was in fact the British Museum (Natural History). The South Kensington museum had split off from the original BM at Bloomsbury when the natural history collections had become so large as to require separate accommodation. The divorce from the mother institution was slow and legalistic. Formal separation from Bloomsbury did not happen until an Act of Parliament of 16 August 1965. The old BM title nonetheless had a magisterial presence that could not be instantly erased. My colleagues would call me up to make a date to ‘come to the BM’ as if that were the only way in which it could be referred to. At conferences, I would still describe myself as belonging to the British Museum – after all, there were other natural history museums all over the place but only one BM, which housed collections made by Sir Joseph Banks and Charles Darwin. However, since the public at large referred to it as the Natural History Museum, in 1990 that finally became its official title. Farewell to the BM, with the finality of the end of the gold sovereign or the landau carriage. Even so, some of my more senior colleagues still sneakily find themselves talking about ‘finding time to call in at the BM …’.

So there I was in my official premises, surrounded by the collections upon which I was to work and to which I was supposed to add. My contract had specified only that I ‘should undertake work upon the fossil Arthropoda’, which left me free to roam through hundreds of millions of years. It might as well have said: ‘Amuse yourself – for money.’ But I did have a boss to whom I was accountable. As I have mentioned, the head of department in a British national museum is called the Keeper. This may call up an image of a man in braces mucking out a gorilla cage, or it may have connotations of somebody jangling keys and going around inspecting security locks. It is, however, rather a grand title, one that entitles the bearer to an entry in Who’s Who. My boss, the Keeper of Palaeontology, was H. W. Ball – Harold William. Above a certain level in the hierarchy one was allowed to call him ‘Bill’; otherwise, it was always ‘Dr Ball’. He had the room directly above me, a place of leather-topped desks and filing cabinets. He was guarded by the kind of devoted secretary who exists mostly in the pages of spy novels, like the prim Miss Moneypenny in the James Bond thrillers. She was called Miss Belcher. She was an unmarried lady who lived with and cared for her mother; in the Palaeontology Department she was omniscient. Some years later, I discovered that her Christian name was Phoebe, but I would have no more dreamed of addressing her by that name than I would of addressing the Queen as ‘Lizzie’. She occupied an anteroom through which one had to pass to access the presence of the Keeper; and she always called him that, just as she always called me ‘Dr Fortey’ until she retired. She regarded such access as a rare and precious commodity, and an audience was a privilege to be awarded reluctantly. In fact, one usually went to see the Keeper because one was summoned. Few employees dropped in for a chinwag.

Occasionally, the summons was for doing something naughty. It was easy to anticipate these occasions. Normally, Dr Ball gestured towards a chair, beaming, and said something like: ‘Sit ye down, dear boy.’ He had a slightly polished-up, satisfied air, like the head boy of a posh school. On the other hand, if you had transgressed one of the rules, you earned a particular stare that P. G. Wodehouse described as ‘basilisk’ when emanating from one of Bertie Wooster’s more terrifying aunts. Once I was ticked off for the key offence – leaving them displayed to the world upon my desk. Then there was a diary infringement. The diary was a hangover from the early days of the Museum, being a little book into which the employee was supposed to write his activities, morning and afternoon, and which was collected every month and signed off by the head of department. It was a very tedious bit of bureaucracy, and nobody on the shop floor took it seriously. I took to writing ‘study trilobites’ on the first day of the month and ditto marks for the rest of it. Miss Belcher called me up to say that the Keeper didn’t regard this as adequate, and would I please put in more details. So the following month I put in entries like ‘a.m. open envelopes’ and ‘p.m. post replies’ and at the end of the month: ‘p.m. write diary’. My attempts at humour were not appreciated upstairs. The Keeper gave me a flea in my ear and sent me on my way, remarking that nobody was indispensable. Such encounters were, fortunately, infrequent. Diaries were abolished after a few years, and nobody mourned their loss, not even Miss Belcher. The concept of accountability was fairly rudimentary then, so a more usual meeting was an interview once a year with the Keeper to check on my progress. After the ‘sit ye down’ invitation this grilling usually consisted of noting that I had finished one or two publications that year, jolly good, and see you next year. I had to report on my curatorial assistant, Sam Morris, in similar terms.

Once I was settled into the Museum I vowed to explore the five science departments: Palaeontology, Mineralogy, Zoology, Botany and, in some distant redoubt, Entomology. The hidden museum seemed to stretch in every direction. As more and more new corners were discovered there seemed no end to it. The public galleries were flanked, underlain and overlain by hidden rooms and galleries and laboratories. There were separate wings and towers. There were odd blind alleys, others that opened into another unsuspected gallery. Some corridors were narrow and poorly lit, and suddenly took a turn downwards into flights of stairs. Others were wider, lined on both sides by mahogany doors carrying the names and titles of the researchers who hid behind them: Dr J. D. Taylor, Mr F. Naggs and Miss K. Way were just down the way from my office in the basement. Most of the names were to be matched with faces over the coming months. There were a few I never met face to face. Down here in the vaults, there is none of the grand decoration of the public galleries; plain slab floors are the rule, pipes and cable housing run here and there, and almost everything is smothered in institutional cream paintwork. On all sides there are locked cabinets bearing tantalizing labels: Blattidae; Lucinidae; Phyllograptidae. What could they all mean?

Outside my office loomed stuffed elephants and giraffes covered in tarpaulins, dead exhibits that had once graced the main hall. They were now slightly down-at-heel and neglected, with a few bald bits, and rather sad, like a disused sideshow at a fair. The corridors were sealed off into sections by doors that could be opened using the magic keys. It is said that rats, when learning a new maze, make short dashes from home base to start with, gradually extending their range so that unfamiliar territory becomes familiar. So it was with my exploration of the underground or behind-the-wall labyrinth of the Museum. I was able to probe my way from my office in several directions, and I could usually find my way back again. If I got lost, I could pop out of one of the doors into the nearest public gallery to locate my position. Gradually, the most arcane corners of the Museum yielded their secrets.

Westwards along the basement, I let myself through a heavy door just beyond the dead giraffes. There was a notice on the wall that read ‘Departmental cock’ – I never did find out what that meant. Beyond the door, a corridor stretched away lined with polished cabinets on both sides. I had left the Palaeontology Department and entered Zoology. The cabinets housed shells; thousands upon thousands of shells. This was the mollusc section of the Zoology Department, a place where the lingua franca was shells. The cupboard labelled Lucinidae was just one family among many of clams. Any drawer in the stack housed a dozen different species belonging to that family which might come from anywhere in the world, packets of shells laid out neatly in labelled boxes. Many of us have made desultory collections of shells while pottering on the beach on summer holidays: these collections were like an almost infinite and systematic multiplication of that brief acquisitiveness. Dr J. D. Taylor and his colleagues occupied the offices whose doors opened between the cabinets. Like my own office, they had windows facing out on to the lawns in front of the Museum, and their offices, too, were lined with collections and books, which gave them a cosy, nest-like quality. I soon got to know John Taylor, Fred Naggs and Kathy Way as the mollusc people, the conchology gang, at home with gastropods and bivalves, squids and slugs, nudibranchs and pteropods. As I write this, they are still working in the same rooms, tucked away in their basement redoubt, John Taylor labouring on his beloved molluscs long after most of his contemporaries have taken to the golf club or the allotment. Downstairs from John Taylor’s room there was a collection of octopuses and other soft-bodied animals stored in jars, pickled in alcohol and formalin, dead things all pallid and covered in suckers, slightly threatening, as if they might creep out of their accommodation when no one was looking.

Giraffes’ heads stored behind the scenes as part of the zoology collections.

Stuffed giraffe specimens. Photo © Natural History Museum, London.

At the end of the corridor a small door led to a narrow, dimly lit staircase. It looked as if nobody had passed this way for years. At the top of the stairs was another curious little door, which bore the legend ‘THIS DOOR MUST BE LOCKED’. What secrets could be hidden behind it to require such inviolability? It opened out into a broad atrium, and across the way were some huge photographs of insects – beetles, I believe – and a fine formal entrance with double mahogany doors, above which was the notice ‘Department of Entomology’. I had passed through the Zoology Department into the kingdom of the insects. Who could resist the region of the hexapod, the realm of a different Keeper, the habitat of another batch of experts all tucked away from the world in this secret place? Through the doors and beyond there lay another vast empire of the natural world, rank upon rank of cabinets bearing labels identifying the family of insects to which the specimens belonged. I knew that there were further floors above me, and I had a brief vision of swarms of insects beyond number, as in films I had seen of plagues of locusts. Around the perimeter of this huge squarish gallery there were offices with names on doors, Dr This and Dr That, all presumably the authorities on the insects in the drawers that lined up in their thousands in ranks in front of me. Perhaps it was not surprising that the drawers themselves were only half as deep as those I had opened in the Palaeontology Department, because insects are mostly rather small, and you can fit a lot into a confined space.

A tray of molluscs from the original Sloane collection that formed the nucleus of the Natural History Museum.

Tray of molluscs from the Sloane collection. Photo © Natural History Museum, London.

Still, opening one drawer at random, it was a surprise to find that there were dozens of butterflies inside, all neatly lined up, as if they were brooches in a jeweller’s shop. Every butterfly was pinned tidily through its thorax, with wings spread out to display the fore and aft pairs, each wing shimmering with iridescence as if it had met its death only minutes ago deep in the Amazon rainforest. Some specimens were laid out to show the underneath of the wings instead, which were brown-blotched and mottled, although no less intricate than the dorsal surfaces, if less spectacular. Pushing the drawer closed again, my gaze wandered along row upon row of similar ranks of drawers. Some part of me tried to do the arithmetic: there must have been about a hundred butterflies in the drawer I had been looking at. Multiply that by the number of drawers in the rank before me, and that number again by the number of cabinets – the mind soon began to reel as the noughts piled on. And to think that the butterfly specimens I happened to be examining were some of the largest and most spectacular of the Class Insecta – the Lepidoptera, the show-offs of the Entomology Department. To be sure, most insects are flies and small beetles, and maybe five times as many of these modest animals could be shunted away inside a single drawer. Many, many more of these insects must have been secreted away on other floors of the department. Hundreds of thousands soon became millions. I need hardly add that very few of these are on display.

My heady calculations were infused with the smell of naphtha, which provided a general fug throughout the Entomology Department. This is a chemical designed to keep away the pests that might otherwise gorge on the insects in the drawers – insects that eat long-dead insects. For of all the members of the animal kingdom the insects are endlessly inventive, experts at survival under almost any conditions, able to prosper where nothing else can earn a living. For some of them, the glue on an old label is a feast. When our own vainglorious species gets its eventual come-uppance – as it will – this will not disturb the cockroach (ah! So here are the Blattidae) one whit, nor jeopardize the prolific weevil, nor distract the swarming aphid. I soon learned that the very success of the insects poses the greatest problems to the entomologist. There are so many species, particularly in the tropics, that simply cataloguing and naming them all can seem an insurmountable task. There is still a long way to go, despite more than two hundred years of descriptive endeavour. We shall see later how scientific ruses have been suggested to get around this labour of Hercules. But, for now, I retreated back down the little hidden staircase into the familiar world of the basement of the Natural History Museum, and to the embrace of the trilobites.

Not far from my office door there is a tiny lift. A brass plaque in the lift informs the passenger that it was installed thanks to the beneficence of Prof. Oldfield Thomas FRS, and it certainly saved the poor curator from walking all around the galleries to get upstairs. I took the lift upwards to the third floor, where the all-purpose key had to be used again to let any passenger out. A kind of cage encloses the elevator’s inmates, and as it whizzes away there is an odd sensation of being carried upwards through solid walls. I emerged close by a cross-section through a great giant sequoia tree propped against the wall; this specimen had been displayed to the public ever since the early days of the Museum. I remembered seeing it as a child. Time was spelled out in the tree rings that circled the richly red wood. As evidence of the antiquity of the tree, human events were ticked off along one of its diameters at the appropriate number of annual tree rings. The tree was so big when America was ‘discovered’; it was of such and such a size when the Black Death stalked through Europe.

There is probably no more graphic way of comprehending earthly time than the stately chronometry of this tree. This one individual plant had seen more than a thousand years of modern human history, yet this was perhaps one-hundredth of the time since our species emerged from Africa. Then again, this life span of Homo sapiens (at most a hundred thousand years) was just a late sliver from the great trunk of geological time. The stretch of time life has been on Earth runs to at least 3.5 thousand million years. Or, if you prefer, more than a million times the age of the great arboreal Methuselah of living organisms that I was contemplating. Every specimen preserved in the Museum is a product of time, and evolution, cradled in the bosom of our planet. The Natural History Museum is, first and foremost, a celebration of what time has done to life. If the world is to remain in ecological balance, there is a pressing need to know about all the organisms that collaborate to spin the web of life. The planet’s very survival might depend upon such knowledge. I want to drag all the visitors to the Museum up to the tree and explain about time, and how we exist atop a vast history that has made us what we are, and that we ignore that history at our peril. But if I did, I fear that I should be branded with the same label as that funny old man who comes up in the street to tell you about his messages from angels.

Not far from the famous tree there is another of those locked doors. By now I knew what to expect. Behind the door there would be a further secret domain, and so it proved. This was the portal to the Herbarium, centre of the Department of Botany. Built almost at the top of the west end of the original Museum, it was the greatest surprise so far. I had become accustomed to the idea that behind the scenes I would find workaday spaces, functional and purposeful, but scarcely matching the grandeur of the public galleries. The Herbarium disabused me of that notion, for before me lay another grand hall, spacious and airy, illuminated naturally from skylights high above. Running along almost the whole length of the ‘nave’ of the hall (which indeed was as long as a large church) there were two ranks of polished hardwood cabinets. By now I knew what to expect of these – they would house the collections. And so it proved. Where a door was ajar I could see folders neatly stacked side by side in the cupboards, a different kind of collection from any I had seen so far. On tables between the cabinets some of the folders lay open for study: each one contained a number of herbarium sheets a couple of feet in length, on which were laid out pressed flowers; well, not just the flowers, but whole plants, leaves, stems and all. The one before me seemed to be a kind of Aquilegia, and it was spread out in the most delicate way, so as to display the beauty of its lobed leaves, and the pendent flowers. The fresh green colour of life had faded to a yellowish hue, tinged the colour of dry sherry. But the sheet had preserved the essence of the plant, much as a sepia photograph might preserve a Victorian street scene. There in immaculate copperplate script was the scientific name of the plant recorded by some long-retired curator – the date of collection showed that the plant had been pressed well over a century before, 24 May 1867. These herbarium sheets were clearly as permanent as the other collections I had seen, for all that the ‘fairest flower [is] no sooner blown but blasted’ as Milton said. Death could evidently be stopped in its tracks by using the correct procedures. Then all the archival information could be recorded on the same sheet of paper, not only the name and date, but also the locality, collector and identifier, and details of other specimens in the collection. Once more, I glanced along the rows of cabinets – and there were more on either side of the Herbarium – and tried to guess the vast number of records that must be stored in this great room. Since the herbarium sheet was little more than a slip of paper there would be dozens of specimens in a folder, many folders to a cabinet, and so on, apparently for ever. The mind soon went dizzy with the calculations. I learned recently that there are more than two million plants stored in the Botany Department.

To either side of the ‘nave’ of the Herbarium there were aisles in which worked the botanists. To be more accurate, the arrangement was like a series of private chapels, tucked away on either side of the long hall. There were no doors to separate the workrooms from the main part of the Herbarium, but rather a narrow opening led into a concealed office area, hidden behind the flanking cabinets, a secret niche protected from the prying eyes of the casual visitor. Nowadays, these niches are partly occupied by computers, but when I first visited there were old black typewriters sitting on the desks, and piles of papers and sheaves of carbon paper for making copies for the files. Old monographs lay open at pictures of weeds. The niches did have a Dickensian atmosphere, and one half expected a Sam Weller to pop out from his niche and cry out that he was ‘wery sorry to keep you waiting, sir’. On my exploratory trip into the Herbarium, I was foolish enough to poke my head around the corner of a niche belonging to a very cross-looking senior curator, who threw a kind of generalized snarl in my direction. I decided it was time to flee back to the safety of the trilobites.

Later, I took another trip out through the basement, but this time I popped out of the back of the old building into a kind of alley; this was the ‘tradesman’s entrance’ to the Museum, where bicycles were parked, and pallets and unwanted pieces of furniture were piled up. There was often a funny smell (see p. 149). Many pieces of surplus wood or furniture had the words ‘Rosen wanted’ scrawled upon them in white chalk. I subsequently discovered these rejects had been bagged by Brian Rosen, the coral expert. Because his room commanded a view of the alley he could nip out with his chalk quicker than anybody else. When I got to know Brian better I visited his house in south London and found complex constructions in his garden entirely fabricated from Museum detritus. There was a kind of apotheosis of the garden shed, a thing with porticoes and pillars, and inside the shed yet more stuff retrieved from the clutches of the skip. I have a vision of a Watts Tower one day rising from the back streets of West Norwood, entirely composed of bits and pieces discarded from the Natural History Museum. Today, the back alley by the bikes is where smokers go to puff furtively, just as they did in their school days.

At the further end of the passageway, an intriguing notice: ‘Spirit Building’ pointed the visitor to a newer block than the original Museum, entirely undistinguished from the outside, no ornament at all. This building proved to be another part of the Zoology Department. The spirits lived in jars. These were the wet collections: pickled, preserved and potted zoology. The store rooms were dark and sealed off from the world, so that when a light was switched on a battery of round glass jars with similar lids stretching away into the distance would suddenly be illuminated … and inside the jars maybe a huge python curled up and pallid, like the intestine of a giant, or perhaps a fish all spiny and phantasmagorical, or a lizard that seemed to paw the edge of its jar, or a long-dead lobster. There were several floors of these jars, arranged by zoological kind, cupboard after cupboard full of fishes, or crustaceans, or frogs, or lizards. It was like a store room for warlocks, where eye of newt and toe of frog came in a thousand varieties, and fillet of fenny snake was as easy to order as buttered toast.

The specimens were preserved in alcohol or formaldehyde. Colour seldom survived this treatment for long, so that fish and newt, frog and worm, jellyfish and jeroboam, shared a kind of tuberous pallor, something like that of a parsnip. The jars ranged in size from tiny phials crowded together and containing dozens of small shrimps to great towers of glass holding goannas from the outback or carnivorous lizards from Comoro. Here was the profusion of the animal world pickled in perpetuity, a washed-out parade of the panoply of life. It was a place to make one think of the transience of all things. I had never realized until I slid open one of the cupboards in the Spirit Building that many fish have a naturally depressed appearance. A grouper in a jar is a sorry thing indeed, the corners of its mouth turned down in a parody of gloominess. Worst of all is the stonefish, an immensely ugly animal that lurks in estuaries in Australia. It is stout, and covered in warty excrescences, with fins more like props than agents of propulsion; its mouth is gloomier than a grouper’s; it seems to have plenty to be gloomy about, looking as it does. I discovered that it spends most of its life camouflaged and motionless, its ragged skin a perfect disguise, until some prey comes near enough – then that apparently dejected mouth can engulf the unfortunate prey in a trice.

On another expedition I encountered the General Library (and this is just one of five libraries in the Museum), after entering it accidentally by a side door off one of the public galleries. It was difficult to believe that there could be so many books pertaining to natural history. Situated in a newer part of the Museum, the main reading room was vast, with tomes on shelves all around the perimeter stretching as high as one could reach – and beyond this room there were galleries of further books, and here they were piled so high on shelf after shelf that there were little ladders to help the reader retrieve some of the higher volumes. There are those who find libraries intimidating, but I am not one of them. I like to see the books in their old leather bindings, the shelves stretching away, deeply filled; it gives me a sense of continuity with past scholars. Even so, encountering an enormous library like this for the first time is a humbling experience. Think of all the thousands of workers putting pen to paper to add to the knowledge of the natural world, or to communicate scientific ideas to their colleagues. If all this is known already, how can a new intruder into the world of learning make any mark at all?

I took down one of the volumes at random: Acta Universitatis Lundensis – the scholarly publications of the University of Lund in Sweden. Well over a century of labours by Scandinavian scientists were preserved here in perpetuity, in volume after volume, or at least until paper crumbles away. The older volumes had green leather bindings, scuffed with use and age; newer volumes were cloth-bound – doubtless in the interests of economy. This part of the library was devoted just to Scandinavian journals, for nearby was a huge run of the organ of the Royal Society of Sweden some yards in length, and over there a great swathe of journals from the University of Uppsala, one of the most ancient universities in Europe. In these pages the great Linnaeus published some of his work, which is still cited today. So it went on, with publications from universities and institutes in Sweden and Norway that meant little to me then. And if the works in this segment of the library were just from one little piece of the world how much greater would be the literature of the United States, or Russia? Or China? The Museum was dedicated to trying to collect everything that was published on the natural history of the planet. Once more I attempted in vain to calculate the size of the holdings on the shelves, floor on floor, only to boggle hopelessly, baffled by bibliographic boundlessness. I crept back to my own little corner.

So my exploration continued, up dark stairwells and down dim passages. I came across a room full of antelope and deer trophies, the walls lined with dozens of ribbed or twisted horns, as if it were the entrance lobby to some stately home owned by a bloodthirsty monomaniac. On another occasion I found my way into one of the towers that flanked the main entrance to the Museum – only to find that to get there one had to take a path that led over the roof. I came across a taxidermist’s lair, where a man with an eye patch was reconstructing a badger. I failed to find the Department of Mineralogy altogether, apart from meeting some meteorite experts in their redoubt at the end of the minerals gallery. There seemed to be no end to it. Even now, after more than thirty years of exploration, there are corners I have never visited. It was a place like Mervyn Peake’s rambling palace of Gormenghast, labyrinthine and almost endless, where some forgotten specialist might be secreted in a room so hard to find that his very existence might be called into question. I felt that somebody might go quietly mad in a distant compartment and never be called to account. I was to discover that this was no less than the truth.

The geography has changed profoundly since I first entered the British Museum (Natural History). Science departments have been rehoused – my own department, Palaeontology, being the first of them. I had to say goodbye to my polished cabinets, balconies and nineteenth-century haven to relocate to the third floor of the rather characterless modern block tacked on to the eastern end of the old building, an extension as typical of the utilitarian (some might say cheap) 1970s as the old building had been typical of the Victorian love of detail. The relevant minister, Shirley Williams, opened the new wing in 1977. Moreover, the space was generous, and necessary, because the palaeontologists had formerly been dotted all over the place; now they could be together. The Zoology Department, including all those sad fish, has been moved to the much more glamorous Darwin Centre at the western end of the building. Farewell to the Spirit Building, and to its dusty and slightly romantic gloom. Only my old friends the molluscophiles are still secreted in their old haunts in the basement. Nonetheless, the sense of the three-dimensional maze has not been lost. The whole thing just got bigger. Gormenghast lives on.

On one of my forays through the basement I came across a door that I had not noticed before. This was on a corridor with an air of being seldom visited on one side of which were tucked away the osteology collections – bones, dry bones, where oxen strode naked of their skin and muscles, and great bony cradles hung from the ceiling, the jawbones of whales. Here, ape and kangaroo met on equal terms in the demotic of their skeletons, with no place for the airs and graces of the flesh. Strange though these collections might seem, they were as nothing compared with what lay behind the mysterious door opposite. For this was Dry Store Room No. 1. Neglected and apparently forgotten, this huge square room entombed the most motley collection of desiccated specimens. Fishes in cases were lined up species by species in their stuffed skins; they were presented in faded ranks like a parade that had forgotten the bunting. At one end there was a giant fish that seemed to have been cut off mid-length, such that the posterior part of its body was apparently missing, and it had a silly little mouth out of proportion to its fat body. It was a sunfish, and its cut-off appearance was entirely natural – a faded notice attached to it proclaimed it was the ‘type’. Elsewhere there were odd boxes, one of which contained human remains, laid out in a kind of slatted coffin. The shells of a few giant tortoises hunkered down like geological features on the floor. There were sea urchin shells, and some skins or pelts of things I couldn’t identify. Most peculiar of all, on top of a glass-fronted cupboard there was a series of models of human heads. They were arranged left to right, portraying a graded array of racial stereotypes. One did not have to look at them for very long to realize that there was a kind of chain running from a Negroid caricature on one side to a rather idealized Aryan type on the other. This was a remnant of an old exhibit, heaven knows from what era, with more than a sniff of racism about it. Dry Store Room No. 1 was a kind of miscellaneous repository, a place of institutional amnesia. It was rumoured that it was also the site of trysts, although love in the shadow of the sunfish must have been needy rather than romantic. Certainly, it was a place unlikely to be disturbed until it was dismantled. I could not suppress the thought that the store room was like the inside of my head, presenting a physical analogy for the jumbled lumber-room of memory. Not everything there was entirely respectable; but, even if tucked out of sight like suppressed memories, these collections could never be thrown away. This book opens a few cupboards, sifts through a few drawers. A life accumulates a collection: of people, work and perplexities. We are all our own curators.