Below is a book review I wrote that was published in this month’s edition of Museums Journal. As you can probably tell from the review, I really enjoyed the book:
Dry Store Room No. 1: the secret life of the Natural History Museum
By Richard Fortey, HarperPress, £20, ISBN 978-0-00-720988-0
The title of this engrossing book refers to a room in the basement of the Natural History Museum (NHM) containing the discarded detritus of exhibits and objects from times past, described by the author as “a kind of miscellaneous repository, a place of institutional amnesia”.
Richard Fortey, a senior palaeontologist at the museum until his retirement in 2006, uses the room as a metaphor for the institution’s subconscious, and as the starting point for a guided tour of its hidden histories. This is a subjective and partial tour, but that is the key to its charm.
Fortey’s 30-something years at the museum make him a knowledgeable insider, and his knack of articulating complicated ideas in an easily understandable way, drawing parallels with Bill Bryson, a writer he professes an admiration for, allows him to take you through the museum’s many and various departments without losing your attention along the way.
Like Bryson (who reciprocates Fortey’s admiration in an endorsement on the book’s jacket), his humour is as dry as the storeroom of the title. The writing, on the other hand, is anything but, full of jokey asides, poetic quotations, puns, ambiguities and word play.
He is not above an ambiguous mention of the museum’s fossils in the same breath as the stratigraphic palaeontologists of the 1970s, but neither is he afraid of quoting Wordsworth or Dryden.
An expert on trilobites, Fortey explains why he has devoted much of his life to these “esoteric extinct animals”, and the book is full of erudite digressions on everything from the study of maggots in determining the age of a corpse to the development of taxonomy.
On the rare occasion that the narrative strays into more esoteric territory, Fortey’s effervescent style and obvious passion for his subject mean that it never feels didactic. Rather, you are carried through on a wave of enthusiasm.
But what truly elevates this book above a straight history of the NHM is Fortey’s description of the museum’s alumni over the years, a cast of characters so much larger than life that at times you have to remind yourself that this is not a work of fiction.
There is the permanently sozzled whale man who is rumoured to secrete bottles of booze in the rotting blubber of his specimens, the obsessive palaeontologist who files the string from the parcels of fossils that he is sent, and – a personal favourite – the palaeobotanist who keeps a large loom in her office and spends her time weaving instead of working. There are few museum histories that will have you laughing out loud in public, but this is one of them.
For all that the book is entertaining, it also contains a serious message. The narrative arc, such as it is, explores the evolution of the museum from its origin as part of the British Museum, when employees were civil servants and directors preeminent scientists, to its current incarnation, which Fortey implies places too much emphasis on front-of-house and corporate image.
Fortey is nostalgic for the days when “there was more leisure for people behind the scenes to cultivate their eccentricities like prize vegetable marrows”, but he is also angry about the way in which he claims science has lost its primacy over the other functions of the museum.
He has little good to say about Neil Chalmers who, as director from 1988 to 2004, oversaw the morphing of five departmental keepers into one director of science. Fortey is equally scathing about the subsequent appointment to the role.
Throughout the book he convincingly argues the case for the work of the scientists behind the scenes at the museum, pessimistic as he is about their standing, and declares mournfully that “the day of the scientist at the centre of the Natural History Museum is over”.
He is appalled at the way in which some of his former colleagues lost their jobs in the rush to modernise, and awed that, nonetheless, many of them have continued their work at the museum unpaid.
Without ever succumbing to polemic, this fascinating and idiosyncratic history is both a lament for times past and a call to arms to anyone concerned for the future of scientific research.
