Heritage is a word so often used and abused as practically to have lost its meaning now. Is it what we have inherited? If so, what is it, and from whom, and – not to put too fine a point on it – who are “we”? A generation or so ago these questions would have been easier to answer. It meant things, buildings, even the landscape, all that had survived from the past, through weather, war and neglect, and was thus worth preserving. Vikings, Reformation, Civil War, Industrial Revolution; all took their toll, but much was left, preserved as much by accident as by the care of our ancestors. But it existed, and this was their legacy to their posterity. The principle of “entail” gave it legal force, already eroded, as Blackstone saw in the eighteenth century, under Henry VII and Henry VIII. Rot of a different kind came with the Industrial Revolution, its pollution accurately predicted by Faraday in 1842. William Morris, Sir John Lubbock and Canon Rawsthorne all did their bit to preserve the immobile. It took longer to realize the danger to the mobile, the “chattels” released from entail by the Cairns Acts between 1879 and 1883. Some protection was offered by the 1896 Finance Act. Hugh Dalton’s National Land Fund in 1946 was the first attempt to define as well as protect both, what together we now call the “heritage”. That was consolidated in the National Heritage Memorial Fund in 1977. A new “Department of National Heritage” set up the National Lottery in 1995, a fifth of its proceeds directed to the Heritage.
It was clear from the outset that those who framed this venture had no idea that it would bring in so much money, and still less of what to do with it. The Department of Culture, Media and Sport, the newly named child of the unexpected success of the Lottery, immediately went back on the promise that none of this wealth would be diverted into extant activities; cutting this, that and the other was less obvious if sometimes it could be set off by a lottery grant. More recently, a government directive to the Fund to channel its funds to deprived areas, educational projects and inner city regeneration has created more confusion. What is the “heritage”, who is heir to what, is less clear than ever. Whitehall seems to be against it, as “elitist”; the public, by contrast, for it, as witness the success of Restoration.
Where does the “literary heritage” fit in? The English language and its literature are all-pervasive, and, as our largest and most successful export, might seem to need no defence. In cash terms, demands were small. The British Library has made its not very generous funding go a long way in pulling in important papers and books, while a modest fund provided by the Pilgrim Trust and administered by the Arts Council used to offer contemporary writers an alternative to American libraries (the British Library has recently set up a working group to look into this). But in 2003, there was a dramatic change of scale. Two great monuments, the Macclesfield Library and the Murray archive, needed rescue, almost simultaneously. Both had been around for a long time. There was no question that they were “heritage material”. The problem was what to do about them, and here the machinery, devised only to meet casual emergencies and with no long-term policy, broke down.
This did not go unrecognized. In July 2003 the Treasury issued a consultation document entitled “Saving Art for the Nation”, and invited Sir Nicholas Goodison “to review the effectiveness . . . of support to regional and national museums and galleries to help them acquire works of art and culture . . . that might otherwise be sold abroad, and to make those accessible to the public”. If overtly designed to add a toot to the Government’s self-trumpeted success in abolishing museum charges, its underlying theme was to simplify and enhance the complex Treasury machinery of tax-relief and exemption. The Goodison report in January 2004 gave the Treasury rather more than it bargained for. No fewer than forty-five recommendations covered almost every aspect of the field; in general, the Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries (then “Resource”, now MLA) was to become the “major source of advice and guidance to owners of pre-eminent objects and to museums and galleries”.
While this was in progress, the Macclesfield Library came up for sale. It was housed at Shirburn Castle, a mock-medieval pile built (long before Horace Walpole) by the first Earl of Macclesfield (1663–1749) on the site of a real medieval castle. There he built up a remarkable collection of old and new books, from medieval manuscripts to the latest scientific tracts, with the help of the great mathematician and scholar, William Jones (1675–1749), his tutor and later adviser, also the close and admired friend of Sir Isaac Newton, who left him a significant part of his papers. The Macclesfields live long; there have been only three since 1895. The seventh Earl, succeeding then, only died in 1955. He early saw the danger of death duties to this inheritance, and in 1926 decided to convert it to a limited company in which his descendants would hold the shares. No change took place under the eighth Earl, a recluse who died in 1992. A bitter quarrel broke out among the shareholders thereafter. A law-suit ensued. Under the terms concluding it, the estate had to be sold and divided, the present Earl retaining the library. He had already parted with the Newton papers, sold to Cambridge University Library (with a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund) at a preferential price. He now turned to the rest, formed by Jones to accompany the Newton papers. Having done his duty by them, he did not see why he should get less than the market value for the library, but both he and Sotheby’s (his agents) were anxious not to break up so important a collection.
Was there a way to preserve the scientific library intact, either with the rest of the library or with the Newton papers, or even remaining with Lord Macclesfield as “exempted property retained in situ”? All the existing procedures assumed a tax liability on which remission might be awarded. Lord Macclesfield did not have a tax bill; he simply wanted the nation to help look after his nationally important library. I put this essentially simple problem to the authorities. I pointed to the precedent of the Britten papers, bought with government funds but left in Britten’s Aldeburgh home. Failing this, Cambridge University Library should select from the scientific collection those books relevant to the Jones–Newton connection, to be purchased at an agreed price. Either way, all the Government had to do was to say, “We agree that the library is important; let us help preserve it”. This might create a precedent, but not a bad one; it would come cheaper in the long run than buying part privately, or piecemeal in a public auction where prices would certainly run high.
In October 2003, by letter, telephone, email or in person, I put the case to the Treasury, the DCMS, Resource and the HLF. Liz Forgan, chair of HLF, was the first to respond, with characteristic warmth and sympathy but ending sadly, “I’m afraid we are a long way from a situation in which the HLF could think about helping even if we could find the resources”. Next came Resource: “As the material is still private property and not yet put up for sale, there is nothing that we can do. Should the owner of the library wish to come to us for advice, we would do all we can to ensure that every avenue is explored to find a solution”. Last (the DCMS did not answer at all) came Paul Boateng, Chief Secretary of the Treasury. “I appreciate your concern”, he wrote,
“but the decision to sell must be for Lord Macclesfield. If the library does go to auction, public bodies, as well as private individuals, will have the opportunity to bid. Officials have advised me that it is likely that the majority of the printed items in the Shirburn Library are already represented in [the national libraries]. In the context of our existing public collections . . . . I do not believe there is a case for going outside the normal channels of funding for any public purchase or preservation of items from the library.”
This classic piece of Treasury-speak was belied by an affectionate autograph PS:
“Thank you so much for taking the trouble to write as you did and for your work to preserve our heritage.”
Whoever drafted his text missed every point. The value of the library was greater than the sum of its parts. The books were the working tools of all the major figures in British science, many with their notes. Newton was our greatest scientist, and these books were acquired to go with his papers. The words “scientific collections” were written into the 1896 Finance Act. Why not, in so pre-eminent a cause, go “outside the normal channels”? I did not give up, and wrote again to Boateng:
“The real issue is not whether the books are or are not in national collections, although many are not. It is this. Must the individual always reach out to the state, never the state to the individual? Years ago, the Treasury ended a minute to the Secretary of the Standing Commission on the Fine Arts with the words: “H. M. Treasury must, therefore retain the option of having its cake and eating it, with no strings attached”. Ever since, I have thought of the Treasury as a vast mouth, entirely full of cake, with pieces of string hanging out of the corners. Isn’t it time this image was consigned to history? There is a precedent for it in the listings of historic buildings, which imposes responsibilities on both owners and authorities, national and local. At least it encourages dialogue between the two.”
I ended by urging on him the necessity of a permanent Heritage agency to anticipate and help the needs of owners anxious to do their patriotic bit, as the Goodison Review recommended. There was no reply. I kept on at Resource and the DCMS. Gerry McQuillan at Resource, unable to take the initiative and with no funds, could not have been more sympathetic. Finally, on January 14, Andrew McIntosh, Minister for the Media and Heritage at DCMS, put the boot in. It was not for Resource to approach private owners, “as auction houses would take great exception to this” (this unusual sensibility for their finer feelings struck Sotheby’s as particularly rich); Lord Macclesfield was “also free to make an application direct to the HLF” or “to approach the British Library”; but “I am not able to assist further as the Department has no funding for this type of purchase”. Irritating though these feeble apologies were, more shameful was the inertia that lay behind them. They just couldn’t have cared less. As one nameless voice in DCMS said with indiscreet accuracy, “When it comes to priorities you have to read DCMS backwards”: Sport before Media, Media before Culture, and, on the Treasury’s funding scale, the Department was right at the bottom. So I gave up. It was a far cry from 1977 when a poorer government had found half a million pounds to rescue the residue of John Evelyn’s library.
The first sale, natural history books, on March 16, 2004, made some £1,342 000. Then, on June 22, came the medieval manuscripts (£1,998 000), including the pearl of the whole collection, an English illuminated psalter made about 1320–30. This once had a twin, taken to Douai at the Reformation, but it was destroyed in a peculiarly ironical way in the First World War; sealed in a box and buried, it was crushed by a British tank, an unforeseen hazard. But the Macclesfield Psalter had miraculously survived. The Fitzwilliam Museum was set to acquire it, and duly applied to the HLF for help. Here it fell foul of the new political correctness. Endless inquiries about exhibition and educational facilities, all rather demeaning, were patiently answered. But at the last minute the blow fell: no HLF funding would be made; the psalter was too small to be seen by a large public and made no appeal to Britain’s modern multi-ethnic society. I was shocked beyond measure; it was, I wrote to Liz Forgan, a lot to ask of a medieval manuscript; worse, it was a personal insult to the curator, Stella Panayotova, Bulgarian by birth and as typical of our “multi-ethnic society” as could be. Liz Forgan was reassuring, but by now the damage was done. The book was sold to the Getty Museum, which applied for an export licence. The Fitzwilliam launched an appeal, at great cost in both time and money, and finally the NHMF, faced with the certainty of export, chipped in £880,000; the book was saved and was the centrepiece of a great exhibition last summer.
The Macclesfield sales have gone on, marching through the scientific alphabet. Archimedes to Copernicus went on June 10, 2004, with seventy-five volumes of arithmetic and astronomy, many made unique by the notes of John Greaves and John Collins, England’s first internationally famous astronomers and mathematicians. November saw Descartes, Euclid, Flamsteed, Galileo, Halley and Harvey dispersed, with a score of books annotated by Greaves, Collins, Jones and other heroes, such as Henry Oldenburg, the legendary secretary of the Royal Society. On April 12, 2005, Jones’s own books and Newton’s, one at least given to Jones by the author, and a book that belonged to Thomas Harriot, Ralegh’s friend and geographer of the New World, went the same way. With the final sale in October, the last of the raw material for the history of British science in its first great era went to the four winds. So far it has netted £15,799,448, already more than the £10,000,000 for which Lord Macclesfield would have been prepared to settle for the whole. A legion of new owners will no doubt find out more about individual items, but the great advantage of consulting the library as a whole is irretrievably lost.
Meanwhile, the future of the “literary heritage” had found its way into unexpected limelight. In RSL News, reprinted in the Guardian on February 7, 2004, Andrew Motion, the Poet Laureate, made a plea for the preservation of today’s writing: “Manuscripts form a crucial part of our heritage”, he wrote; “no wonder people get steamed up about their purchase and preservation”. He seemed oddly unaware that means already existed, and that his bugbear, the predatory American library, was not the threat it had been. The HLF had set a twenty-year bar before modern manuscripts could be considered “heritage” material (sound principle but poor practice), and he applauded its reduction to ten years. He also praised the Friends of the National Libraries, especially its Philip Larkin Fund for modern writers’ works, and the British Library, first and last resort for the nation’s literature, but felt it would be better if there were a national “Manuscripts Czar”. This was innocent stuff, but six weeks later John Sutherland, Emeritus Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London, wrote a longer piece in the London Review of Books, taking up Motion’s theme and suggesting that the “heritage barrier” should be abolished altogether. But, after pleading the importance of publishers’ archives as a special class of the “literary heritage”, the history of how British writing of all periods got into print (his own speciality), he proceeded to launch an intemperate attack on the potential acquisition by the National Library of Scotland of the greatest of them all, the archives of John Murray, 1768–1920.
John Murray II made a fortune out of Byron, and he and his successors also published Jane Austen, David Livingstone, The Origin of Species and Darwin’s other books, Ricardo and Malthus, Babbage, Faraday and Sir Charles Lyell, Disraeli and Gladstone, Samuel Smiles, Washington Irving, and Herman Melville before he became famous in America. They employed Turner and David Roberts to illustrate their books. Their record bestrides the intellectual and literary worlds of the nineteenth century as the Macclesfield library does the eighteenth. Nor is the archive limited to the business of putting these writers into print. Murray after Murray looked after their other needs: 50 Albemarle Street was the London address for them all, and the Murray files are full of letters from friends as well as authors, about everything and everybody from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. In the Byron archive alone, some 10,000 letters, there are those from James Hogg, Lady Caroline Lamb, Shelley and Mary Shelley, friends, politicians, artists, actors, mistresses, lawyers and bankers, acquaintances and fans who wrote out of the blue. At a less stellar level, there are the records of “Murray’s Travellers’ Library” and the “Murray Guides”, a serious English rival to the ubiquitous Baedeker. Underlying it all are the firm’s ledgers, the records of printers’ bills and sales, expenditure and revenue, the engine room that kept this great ship afloat for over two centuries.
Maintaining this archive has been a labour of love for generations of Murrays, but the burden of dealing with all the scholarly correspondence that it generates exceeds what can be expected of a small independent publishing firm. All this apart, such firms have a tough life in a world now dominated by large international groups. So the first move that John Murray VII and the family made was to sell Murray’s the firm as a going concern to one of the new combines, Hodder Headline. What then of the archive, an even greater national responsibility? They approached the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh, whence the first John Murray had come to London to set up the business. An independent valuation put the price at £45 million, reduced by the Murrays for the Library to £33.2 million, throwing in a further £3 million as an endowment for the maintenance of the archive. The NLS were immediately sympathetic: Martyn Wade, the Librarian, said, “The archive has a distinctly Scottish flavour and it would be as though the collection were coming home”. He did not add, though no less true, that its possession would turn the NLS from a great into a world-class library. This enthusiasm was caught by the new Scottish Executive, which instantly contributed £6.5 million towards the price, the Culture Minister, Frank McAveety, adding “The archive is a link to the critical role that Scots have played in the development of ideas and the imagination through the centuries”.
This heart-warming general agreement was not shared by Sutherland, who sourly observed that the firm’s list was marred by its “traditional dislike of fiction and poetry” (Byron?), that the price was far too high, that the Scottish connection was tenuous – and oddest of all – that the care that the firm had taken to publish its wealth (eg Byron’s Letters) had devalued the originals. He missed the point that he of all people should have made most of. Great though the Murray authors have been, this is a business record of untold importance. Literary history is a rather old-fashioned discipline these days; social history, economic history, are more gripping. Here, in Murray’s ledgers and account books, as well as in the letters they wrote and received from their widespread commercial network, is the inside story of the greatest Victorian revolution, the one that put printed words in the hands of the poor as well as the rich, and told people what to look for in places they might never have reached without modern transport, creating a real “link . . . in the development of ideas and imagination”.
Where has the rest of the money come from? Well, it hasn’t, quite. Although the HLF has done its best in a negotiation that has taken over two years, the final grant of £17.5 million was only agreed on February 24 this year. The NLS has still to raise the matching funding, some £6 million in all. The parties to the deal remain patient and optimistic, but everyone knows that the last pound is the hardest to get. It will be an effort, which will tax the NLS, not over-staffed, to the limit. It is a reminder that libraries and museums, like the Fitzwilliam and the NLS, have other, more important, tasks than fund-raising. Yet that is what the Government, as passive over the Murray archive as it was over the Macclesfield library, seems quite content to see happen. Does it never occur to ministers that professional trained staff might be better employed doing their proper jobs than writing begging letters, hosting parties in exchange for sponsorship, and all the other expedients thrust on them by funding inadequate to their needs?
What has happened to the Goodison Review and the Treasury’s “Saving Art for the Nation” initiative, now two years old? Precious little. Few of the forty-five recommendations have been implemented. The complex tax provisions still obstruct the transfer of heritage material from private to public ownership, export licensing procedure is unchanged, and the NHMF and HLF remain much as they were, with slightly less money and grant procedures still encumbered. Above all, none of the plans for concentrating and simplifying all the functions and regulations, grown up ad hoc since 1896, has been implemented. An MLA with real power to anticipate the heritage needs of the country is conspicuously, unarguably, needed. Yet the DCMS and the Treasury cling to these tasks, even though they can’t comprehend them. Between 2001 and 2006, the DCMS will have increased funding for sport by 91 per cent, the arts by 63 per cent, and museums, libraries and archives by 26 per cent. A report by the London School of Economics says there is nothing for the last but “to prepare for an orderly management of decline”. Everyone is convinced that the Olympics craze will see yet more funds removed from what is already at the bottom of the pile.
“Culture” has always led a threatened life. Jennie Lee was the first and last minister to achieve positive good, and the post since has always been held by those who, for one reason or another, have passed their sell-by date. Many tried hard, and there have been some successes to set against the general downward drift. Whether the Lottery has been an effective substitute for direct investment from taxation is doubtful, but it has made a dent in the Treasury’s monolithic opposition to spending on what it regards as something frivolous, despite evidence to the contrary, such as the TV ratings for Restoration and the fact that no fewer than 50 per cent of all schoolchildren visit museums. But the outlook is not good. If Macclesfield has gone and Murray is still in the balance, there is plenty left that needs help. What about protecting the heritage “in situ”, a cheaper and better option than the slow cumbrous drift into underfunded repositories? Perhaps that is too much to ask, but a properly funded MLA would be a big first step in the right direction.
