The Press Scandal of 1939
Board of enquiry had decided in its second
Interim Report not to proceed with a public statement. It seems
there were second thoughts, however, and many Trustees were
undecided as to whether a press statement should be issued or not,
and if so what form it should take.(77) On 3 December 1938 Sir
Charles Peers wrote to Forsdyke as follows:
'The form of announcement as proposed to be
appended to the Report of the Board of Enquiry is as well worded as
is possible in the circumstances, and I can't object to its being
used.
But there is no doubt that the publication of
this, or any like statement, will result in what I should like by
every means to avoid, namely, a serious blow to the reputation of
the B.M. It seems to me that what is principally entailed on the
Trustees is to order the preparation of a careful report on each
piece of sculpture which has suffered, so that any student studying
these marbles in the future may be safeguarded against mistakes
arising from the condition of the damaged carvings. This is our
real duty to knowledge, but I do not think that a publication of
the fact that damage has been done is of any importance in
comparison.'
Lord Harlech was in turn anxious not to
provoke an 'unduly alarmist reaction by the lay press, and
questions in parliament which will drag out the horrid truth bit by
bit and produce the kind of comment we may expect in Germany and
Greece anxious to twist England's tail.'
Stanley Gardiner, a Trustee, recommended
publishing at once, so as to avoid the Press making 'a big
show.'
The Archbishop of Canterbury had been talking
to Macmillan and they agreed that 'no such express publication of
what has happened to the Elgin Marbles should be published. He
thinks . . . that it would be sufficient that you should be ready
at any time when any expert calls attention to what has happened to
give careful and considered reply. Certainly the last people to
whom I think any statement should be voluntarily sent would be the
Greek Government!'
On 15 December Forsdyke replied in agreement
to this letter:
'In the first place we are not yet able to say
what the effect of these improper processes has been, and an
incomplete statement would serve no purpose. There is no question
of repairs: these could not even be attempted. It will take a long
time to make an accurate record of the pieces that were improperly
cleaned, and we regard the making of this record as our real duty.
When it is made, the Trustees may be asked to consider its
publication in an archaeological journal; but I do not agree with
Sir William Bragg that we should find any kind of condonation among
the experts, least of all from the Greeks. We can offer no excuse
for what happened. The stress of war alarms on this occasion, as I
explained to the Standing Committee, was invented by Hinks for his
defence; and Pryce's health will doubtless justify his retirement,
but not his neglect of duty during the last two years.'
Rumours began to circulate and on 9 February
1939, the Archbishop wrote again:
'I have heard a rumour that a section of the
Press -- probably the Beaverbrook Press -- has got wind of our
recent trouble at the Museum and that if so it may be necessary to
have some reasoned statement on behalf of the Trustees ready
explaining shortly but adequately the grounds of their action. You
may already have prepared a statement. I am sure you will agree
with me that it would be a mistake to dwell too fully in any public
statement upon the extent of the mischief which was done even
though you and I may feel it was very serious. If you have
prepared, or are ready to prepare, any such statement I suggest
that it might be well for you to consult Lord Macmillan as to the
form of it, whose judgement in these matters is always sound.'
Press interest increased and short notices
began to appear in The Telegraph, which newspaper Forsdyke claimed
was hostile to him.(78) There was speculation that the resignations
of Pryce and Hinks were connected with an internal dispute over the
cleaning of the Elgin Marbles.(79) On 21 March there was a further
report of rumours that 'as the result of their recent cleaning the
metopes and frieze have lost the warmth of their patina.' The
Director was called upon to give 'the facts of the case.'
On that same day the Daily Mail wrote asking
for clarification of the situation. Forsdyke replied that, 'When
the Trustees of the British Museum have such statements to make,
they issue them through the Press Agencies, and you may be sure
that no information on this subject will be available for any
newspaper which is not also given to the Daily Mail.
But it seems to me that there is no more that
can be said about these matters. As regards the sculpture itself,
this is on public view, as it has always been, and any intelligent
observer has been able to form his own opinion about its cleaning
for the last six months or more.'
The statement that the sculpture was on
'public view' was only partially true for on 21 March, The Star
remarked upon 'sinister blanks' where some of the pediment
sculpture was missing from the display in the Museum and repeated
the speculation that the 'exquisite patina' of the Marbles had been
tampered with. The 'blanks' can be explained, however, by the
process of removing the sculptures into the new Duveen Gallery.
On 25 March the Daily Mail went ahead and
published its 'story': 'Elgin Marbles (Worth £1,000,000) Damaged in
Cleaning' in a piece which was well informed and broadly right:
'Traces of patina have been removed leaving an unnatural
whiteness.'
Also on 25 March, the Daily Express demanded a
statement from the Trustees. Forsdyke had one in readiness. In a
letter to him dated 29 March 1939, the Archbishop approved of the
'very quiet and temperate statement'. Still the Museum held back
from issuing it and Forsdyke sought to play the incident down. On 1
May an article appeared in The Telegraph claiming that the Museum
was resorting to 'ingenious methods' to conceal from visitors the
true state of the Marbles. Casts had replaced the original pediment
sculptures of 'Iris', Helios and the head of the horse of Selene.
The metopes were nowhere to be seen. The report goes on, 'A rather
ungrateful whispering campaign has been started to suggest that the
treatment the Elgin Marbles have undergone is the responsibility of
Lord Duveen'. And then, after some observations about the Director,
comes a very curious touch: 'I understand that whatever artistic
damage may have been done to the sculptures mineralogists from the
Natural History Museum consider that the Marbles, viewed purely as
stone, are unimpaired.'
Forsdyke took the articles that were appearing
in The Telegraph to be the result of a personal animus against him
for his having fallen out with a journalist, 'whom I found
established here when I succeeded Hill, and whose expulsion Hill
approved.' There had, however, also been a letter addressed to the
Editor of The Telegraph by D.W.S. Hunt, fellow of Magdalen College,
Oxford (11 May 1939). This was the don, later turned diplomat and
champion of champions in BBC TV's Mastermind, Sir David Wathen
Stather Hunt. Forsdyke dismissed his intervention as 'ignorant and
foolish' remarking that if its demands were met the nation would be
discredited abroad at a politically critical moment.(80).
On 14 May 1939 a long letter addressed to the
Editor by Robert Byron appeared in The Sunday Times demanding
either a statement from the Museum or the asking of a question in
Parliament. Meanwhile, the correspondent had already made up his
mind on the matter:
'anyone who knows the patina of Pentelic
marble, who has run his hands over the knife-like edges of the
Parthenon or the objects in the Acropolis Museum and felt those
innumerable tiny asperities and translucencies which make that
stone the most vivid material that ever rewarded a carver's skill,
can see at once that the marbles in Lord Duveen's new gallery have
lost this patina. The lustre and the gentleness have vanished. The
lumps of stone remain, robbed of life, dead as casts.'
This was a different appreciation of the
sculptures from that of Byron's illustrious ancestor , who had
dismissed them as Elgin's 'Phidian freaks'.(81) The author
backtracks somewhat in his next paragraph when he says: 'The Museum
authorities may argue, possibly with absolute truth, that the
armour of grime with which the marble was coated had already
devoured the patina beyond hope of recovery.' Not unreasonably,
however, he points out that the Trustees 'do not argue this. They
argue nothing at all.'
At last the statement was published in The
Times newspaper on 18 May 1939:(82)
'The Trustees of the British Museum have had
under consideration the recent cleaning of the Elgin Marbles in
connexion with their rearrangement in the new galleries which have
been built by Lord Duveen. They found that unauthorised methods
were being introduced in some instances, with the intention
evidently of improving the appearance of the marble by removing
spots of discolouration from its surface. Since this was done
without the knowledge of the officers of the Museum who were
responsible for the cleaning, it has not yet been possible to
determine precisely the extent to which these methods were applied.
To anyone but an expert their effect is imperceptible. The Trustees
do not allow any departure from their approved methods, and at once
took the necessary steps to ensure that no such innovations should
be adopted in the Museum.'
It immediately prompted an indignant response
from The Press Association asking why the statement had not been
put out on general release and why The Times had been 'exclusively
favoured.'(83)
The statement deliberately understated the
seriousness with which the Museum viewed the incident. The affair
was similarly played down by The Times leader that accompanied it.
Forsdyke justified this understatement with the theory, which in
the event was borne out, that, 'However full the announcement may
be which the Trustees send officially to the Press, it will be
amplified by the representatives of newspapers in London from their
own enquiries and observations. I would therefore advise that the
official announcement be as brief and bare as possible, and that I
be authorised to add details within certain limits in answer to
personal enquiries by accredited representatives of the Press.'
There then follows a list of sample questions as follows: 'What
were the improper methods? What damage has been done? (This
question to be referred to the enquirers' own powers of
observation); Who wanted to improve the colour? Who made the
unauthorised efforts? Why were the efforts made? Why were they not
stopped? Who are the responsible officers? What has been done about
them?(84)
Forsdyke's note against the question, What
damage has been done? suggests his continuing unwillingness
publicly to confront the issue. In spite of this reticence,
however, an accurate report of what had occurred was slowly
building in the Press.
The full picture began to emerge when the
Daily Express tracked Arthur Holcombe down to his home in North
London and on 19 May published an interview with him on its front
page.(85)
' I was told to begin cleaning them two years
ago. As head man I was put in charge of six Museum labourers. . .
.To get off some of the dirtier spots I rubbed the Marbles with a
blunt copper tool . Some of them were as black with dirt as that
grate," said Mr Holcombe pointing to his hearth.
The other men borrowed my copper tools and
rubbed the Marbles with them as I did. I knew it would not do them
any harm, because the copper is softer than the stone. I have used
the same tools for cleaning marble at the Museum under four
directors.
One or two of the slabs of the frieze came up
rather white, and I am afraid they caused the trouble.'
Jacob Epstein, the sculptor and a veteran of
previous run-ins with the Museum saw the piece in the Express and
wrote angrily to the Editor of The Times.
'When will the British Museum authorities
understand that they are only the custodians and never the creators
of these masterpieces?'
He was promptly interviewed for The Evening
News and the report was published the next day with the headline:
'Epstein is very angry about the way British Museum treated the
Elgin Marbles' and a photograph of a suitably irate looking
sculptor.
'Eighteen years ago I protested against the
cleaning and 'restoring' of Greek marbles there . . . The only
result was that I was ridiculed and abused by everybody and
especially by the people who had never in their lives worked on a
piece of marble, though artists all over the world were shocked by
the news that the Museum authorities had added a false nose to the
Demeter of Cnidus.
Now comes the revelation that for 15 months
some workman has been scraping the Elgin Marbles with a copper
tool. It is admitted that this method is unauthorised; what needs
explaining is how it came to be used for all that time without
action being taken.
I hear that two officials have resigned, but
in the meantime the damage has been done.
I have had some dealings with these museum
authorities, and have found them ignorant and opinionated almost
beyond belief . . .
The obvious and only sensible thing for the
Trustees to do is to have an advisory panel of working sculptors
whom they can consult on these matters, instead of leaving them to
a group of archaeologists and chemists.'
One of those implicated in Epstein's attack on
the Museum was Sir George Hill, numismatist and Director of the
Museum 1931-36. In a letter to The Times, 22 May 1939, he expressed
irritation at the fact that in his letter to The Times, Epstein
revived an attack made 18 years previous,(86) in which the sculptor
had accused the Museum of maltreating the Demeter of Cnidus. Hill
denied it. Epstein was stung into a reply in the letter page of The
Times for 25 May 1939 which included the remark 'Putting me in my
place seems to be of greater importance to the museum officials
than the proper care and protection of the Greek marbles .' He went
on to speak of public unease over the present state of the
Marbles.
Hill replied in the next day's issue of the
same newspaper. The correspondence was, as he remarked, taking a
personal turn: 'I should be the last to wish to "put him in his
place" as to which we have all of us made up our minds by this time
. . . The public may well feel uneasy, owing to the agitation
which, as Mr Epstein's own experience will remind him, can be only
too easily worked up artificially; but how far they can trust those
who seek to instruct them in the public Press may be inferred from
the fact that they have been asked . . . to believe that the group
of "Cecrops and his Daughter" has been a victim of such drastic
"cleaning" that it now seems "little better than withered stone".
Since the original is still in its place on the Parthenon and is
represented in the British Museum only by a plaster cast, it is
hardly reasonable to hold the Trustees responsible for its present
condition.'
This was a reference to a piece that had
appeared in The Daily Telegraph for Monday 22 May by the art critic
T.W. Earp. The writer said he had gone to the Museum to see the
Marbles cleaned, arranged and newly opened again with the intention
of finding out whether reports of damage were true. He claimed he
found them to be so:
'This is especially the case in the procession
of Athenian cavalry on the north side of the frieze. Removal of
patina has left the incongruity of stone as bright as though it had
been freshly quarried, yet indented with the usage of time.'
As we shall see, the cavalcade of the north
frieze in fact largely escaped the treatment. There then follows
the mistake about Cecrops and his daughter being original marble.
He goes on,
'Thus the sculptures' previous unity of tone
and of surface-effect has been destroyed, the cleaning either
having been checked at some stage or unevenly carried out.'
The writer's folly is mitigated by his own
complaint at the Museum's reticence about what actually had
happened. It highlights, however, the extent to which even
so-called art experts found it difficult to tell by looking at the
sculptures. Curiously, the next day Earp published another piece in
the same newspaper saying that he had asked to see the damaged
pieces, but that they were in the new Gallery and that he was
refused admittance. He goes on to lament the loss of what he
regards as the former unifying patina:
'In their new-found brightness the precious
relics of Greek art have lost much of their former aspect of mellow
antiquity.
It is the surface mellowness, the patine (sic)
which is time's gradual imprint, which for many was so important an
element in the beauty of the sculptures as a whole. It knit them in
a single unity, and made less obvious the hurt sustained in rough
usage at some past period.'
Seeing Earp's piece in The Telegraph for 22
May, Forsdyke wrote to F.N. Tribe at the Treasury, which was then
the Museum's Government Department (87):
'It is quite evident that this art critic
(presumably an "expert") has no idea of what is going on in regard
to the Parthenon sculpture. His "now open to the public again" and
"not yet replaced" means that he does not understand that the old
Room has never been closed and that the Metopes and other pieces,
which are not on view in it, have been removed to their permanent
places in the new Room. The examples that he specifies of pieces
that have been touched, the Cavalry of the North Frieze, are
actually among those that we know were not touched and that the
figure of Cecrops and his daughter are not the originals at all,
but plaster casts, to which nothing could be done.
This effort entirely bears out what the
Trustees said in their statement except that they might have gone
farther and said that the effects of cleaning are imperceptible
even to an expert of the newspaper kind. It is a pity that there is
no means of dealing with this kind of false statement as
libel.'
Suddenly, in the midst of this controversy, on
25 May Lord Duveen died at the age of 69. The obituaries that
appeared in The Telegraph and The Times the following day did not
dwell on the current debate, but focused on his role as a patron of
the arts. The Times, however, spoke of his delight at providing a
new setting for the Elgin Marbles. It was, he was quoted as saying,
the best thing he had ever done. He had spent months in finding the
perfect background for them. 'He believed that cleansed they would
come as a revelation to the world.
"Wait until you see them with the London grime
removed and in their first purity. They will be luminous. To me
there has never been any loveliness in dirt."
By contrast, a news item in The Telegraph for
26 May reported that he had been worried by the scandal and hurt by
suggestions that he was somehow behind the cleaning.
The death of Duveen seemed to take the heat
out of Press interest in the affair of the cleaning. The last major
piece on the subject was a letter addressed to the Editor of The
Manchester Guardian (9 June 1939) and signed N. of London.
This intelligent and well-written statement
forms a suitable last word on the affair:
'The ultimate question at the bottom of the
Elgin marbles controversy is what is meant by the magic word
"patina." No one denies that some of the marbles have been pretty
drastically cleaned, in certain cases by methods of which no expert
could possibly approve. Nor is it denied that this method of
cleaning had been going on unsuspected at intervals during the last
fifteen months. The authorities discovered what had been happening,
were very properly scandalised, and ordered a return to the
harmless soap-and-water method. Folk who like to think that they
have scented out a first-rate scandal have not been slow to move
and a good deal has been said about it, including the suggestion
that the Marbles have been "ruined." The same kind of thing
invariably happens when any dear Old Master (Velasquez's "Silver
Philip" was a case in point) has its face washed.
But what, in fact, has happened? The
sculptures are about to be housed in the new Duveen Gallery in the
British Museum, and, doubtless, the cleaners were anxious that they
should look spick and span before moving in. For over twenty
centuries before Lord Elgin brought them to London, they have stood
up to the weather on the Acropolis. On their way to England they
spent some weeks at the bottom of the sea. None of them were
unscathed. Few if any portions of them have rertained their
original surface. Some of them are wrecks of their former selves.
What has now been done to them is negligible by comparison with
what is happening to the portions still on the Parthenon. Casts of
these latter taken in 1802 and again in 1872 reveal the lamentable
results of open-air weathering.
The removal of a layer of London soot from the
British Museum sculptures - especially from the metopes - has
certainly altered their colour; uniformity of colour they never
had. Indeed, slight variation of colour is a characteristic of
weathered Pentelic marble. But the fact that the Museum authorities
themselves are not quite certain which of them have been subjected
to the unconventional methods of cleaning and which have not (some
of them certainly have not) is proof that the aesthetic damage is
unimportant. Subtleties of modelling, like the veins on the horses'
bellies and the sharp chiselling of their manes are still
unimpaired. Only a microscopic comparison between the Marbles in
their present state and a set of full-sized photographic
enlargemets of their old surfaces could reveal the damage. That is
a question for the expert. I doubt if the average vistor or even
the average art-lover would notice any change beyond that of
colour. But then, how many average visitors ever gave them more
than a passing glance? If the controversy does nothing else it will
teach us to look at them a little more closely in future.'