Local Museums

David Drew Excerpts

Wednesday 7th March 2018 Westminster Hall

[Stephen Kerr]

I absolutely acknowledge that fact.

[Dr David Drew (Stroud) (Lab/Co-op)]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that, like parks, museums deserve special protection? At the moment, there is no protection for either of those important features that everyone values.

[Stephen Kerr]

Museums and parks deserve protection and the affection of the community, which they have, as we witnessed when the Stirling Smith Museum was threatened. I want to mention in passing the Friends of the Smith, because they devote hours of their time to raise money, conduct tours and help out in many ways to ensure that the Stirling Smith Museum operates fully. That is evidence of the affection and devotion that local people have for their museum.

That brings me to the Dunblane Museum. The Dunblane Museum started life as the Dunblane Cathedral Museum and is a fantastic museum dedicated to preserving the history of the ancient borough of Dunblane. It has a nationally significant collection of communion tokens—the largest in the UK. It holds many items from the cathedral in Dunblane. Perhaps my favourite is a bag that belonged to an 18th-century newspaper boy or girl. This is a museum that truly delivers—boom, boom! The fact that the Dunblane Museum is entirely staffed by volunteers shows the dedication and service of members of the community, such as the honorary curator, Marjorie Davies, and the rest of the team. These are people who want to serve their community, and volunteers have been protecting the museum collection since it was established in 1943. It attracts 10,000 visitors a year. People leave knowing more about Dunblane and its long and distinguished history.

Volunteers struggle, though, because we put more and more expectations on them in regulatory terms. We require them to register with the charity regulator, we require health and safety protection and we require data protection. All that adds to the burden on volunteer groups and disproportionately affects independent volunteer museums that have to do all that while raising the money to keep the lights on. Forms and applications are the bane of all charitable organisations’ lives, and we have a duty to keep those things as minimal as we can while still protecting the public. I saw the Stirling Smith’s submission to be recognised as a museum of national significance, and it was a vast document akin to a PhD thesis.

The third museum in my area that I must mention is the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders Museum. Stirling has a long and distinguished connection with the military of this country. We claim the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders as our own regiment. As the old regiment fought two world wars and countless other conflicts around the world, I cannot imagine that filling in a few forms would intimidate the august institution that is dedicated to its history. Preserving the history of our military is essential, and such museums play a huge part in telling people the story of a regiment that is now merged into the Royal Regiment of Scotland.

That the Argylls are a part of our history and not our future continues to be a note of sadness for me and many other people in the Stirling area, but the history must be preserved. The museum has a superb collection of objects and artefacts from the hundreds of years of military conflict that the Argylls have been involved with. It holds family medals in its vaults, making them accessible for future generations and preventing loss. Again, the local family stories mix with our national story of military commitment playing its part in a global history that goes from the Khyber pass to the fields of France.

Local museums make a huge contribution to life in the UK. They preserve our heritage, help us to understand who we are and create the golden thread from the local to the national to the global. That brings me to a number of questions that I want to raise. I am afraid there are some differences between England and Scotland on these issues, and I acknowledge that from the outset, but why should that be the case, given the level of co-operation around the UK? Before I am interrupted by the hon. Member for Edinburgh North and Leith (Deidre Brock), I hasten to add that I am not suggesting a power grab; I am calling for better collaboration and co-operation, as was mentioned earlier in an intervention about the British Museum.

The national collections in London, Edinburgh and Cardiff should be spread out and accessible. To do that, we need a shake-up of how we indemnify the objects in our museums. I have waxed lyrical about the museums in my constituency, and people might think that I am talking about a museum of national, if not global, significance when I talk about the Smith. The real tragedy is that it is not considered to be such. The bar for a local museum to be considered a museum of national importance is set worryingly high. The committee that makes those decisions is known as the committee of significance. Despite an application outlining all of the wondrous national and internationally significant elements of the museum, it is not considered to be of national significance. Perth and Clydebank museums are museums of national significance, while Stirling and Kirkcaldy, despite the latter’s linoleum collection and superb art collection, recently had their applications knocked back. That is not right. Setting museums against each other is not a useful or good thing to do, and I question the judgment of those charged with such decisions. The Mendoza review in England seems to address some of those issues. Why can they not also be addressed in Scotland?

The question of how museums can gain Government indemnity requires some thought. Government indemnity allows museums to access insurance for items that would be prohibitively expensive to insure. The major national collections are disjointed in how they make decisions. The Government need to consider a single indemnity scheme for the UK. It would help museums lend confidently and borrow well to enrich local communities across the country. It would allow the national collections to be available throughout these islands, bringing exciting and uplifting exhibits to the whole UK.

The treasure trove rules should also be considered. Again, in Scotland we have a different regime, although it follows the English system fairly closely. Treasure trove rules allow people who have found items to sell them to a museum with an assessed reward. The level of reward that has to be paid makes it difficult for local museums to acquire those items. A scheme to allow museums to acquire locally found items at a cheaper rate would help. An example would be the golden torcs found near Blair Drummond in my constituency. Those torcs are beautiful—they are superb examples of Celtic craftsmanship—but to see them people have to go to Edinburgh, where they are part of a large collection. That removes their local significance and what they tell us about the Celtic trading tradition in Stirlingshire, to add to a national story. When artefacts are removed from their local context they lose the local part of their story, contributing only to the national or global story.

The Dumfriesshire hoard suffered the same fate when the local museum was deemed too unsecure to show it and did not have the resources to buy it. It was one of the largest hoards of Viking materials recently to be discovered. Artefacts of huge importance to Dumfriesshire were removed from the community in which they were found. When we consider issues such as the treasure trove rules or Government indemnity, more flexibility is needed. If we lock away our treasures, whether they be national or local, we make our story smaller and lose a part of our identity.