The British Museum in wartime
04OCT
The wartime, many of people’s favourite pastimes were curtailed. Professional football was suspended, bank holidays
were (temporarily) cancelled, and some of London’s best-loved museums shut their doors. The British Museum closed
to the public in March 1916 and did not fully reopen for nearly three years.
“The British Museum : Removing sandbags in the Assyrian Saloon” by Sir Henry Rushby, 1918 ( (c) IWM)
The British Museum is one of London’s (many) iconic buildings. Free to enter since opening its doors to the public in
1759, it is one of the world’s great museums. In 1914 it still also housed the Reading Room that later became the
British Library; it also had a branch in South Kensington that became the Natural History Museum.
For the first months of the war the Museum continued as usual, albeit with many of its staff off in the armed forces. By
March 1916, 110 British Museum staff (and 53 at the Natural History Museum) were serving in the armed forces, while
another 42 were sent to work in other government departments.
In November 1914, a series of lectures were held at the Museum in aid of Belgian refugees. In April 1915 a poem by
Edward Shillito (published in the Times) described the visit of a wounded soldier to its galleries. In August, the
Museum put out a call for regimental magazines to be sent to the Reading Room so that a national collection of them
could be kept.
In February 1916, the Government announced that several London museums would be closed for the duration of the
war – much to the shock and indignation of MPs and writers of letters to the editor of the Times.
From March 2nd 1916, a long list of museums were closed:
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The British Museum (except the Reading Room)
The Natural History Museum
The Science Museum (except to students)
The Geological Museum, Jermyn Street (now part of the Natural History Museum)
The Bethnal Green Museum (now the V&A museum of childhood)
The Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain)
The Wallace Collection
The London Museum (now part of the Museum of London)
The National Gallery and Victoria & Albert Museum were not closed, while the National Portrait Gallery had already
closed.
Early 1916 must really have felt like a time of change. Conscription was introduced (with single men liable for
conscription from the very same day that the museums were shut), bank holidays disappeared, and priceless
antiquities disappeared from public view into tunnels under the city (as in the case of the Rosetta Stone and other
smallish items) or covered with sandbags in empty galleries to protect them from air raids:
“The British Museum : Sandbagged sculpture in the Egyptian Gallery” by Sir Henry Rushby, 1918 ( (c) IWM)
Temporary openings seem to have taken place in August 1917 and again in August 1918, but otherwise the museum
remained closed apart from its famous Reading Room.
Another big shock hit the Museum’s supporters in the dark days of the winter of 1917-18, when the Government
announced that the Air Ministry was to be housed in the British Museum building in Bloomsbury (as part of the
expansion of civil service accomodation that had already seen St James’s Park occupied). There was considerable
protest in Parliament, in the press and from learned people and groups.
After a few weeks of these protests, the Government backed down and announced that the building was “no longer
necessary” for housing the Ministry. Handily, it turned out that there was enough room at the Hotel Cecil on the Strand
and the Ministry moved there – marked today by a plaque on the site.
The British Museum did not remain completely empty, though. When the war ended and calls came to reopen the
closed museums, it turned out that part of the Bloomsbury building was being used by government departments (as
were the National Gallery and Portrait Gallery) that had to be moved out at the same time that the Museum was being
repopulated with antiquities. The building gradually reopened over that first winter of peace.