The end of the First World War and the establishment of mass democracy after 1918 raised concerns amongst Britain’s ruling classes about the need to educate the newly enfranchised electorate in their rights and responsibilities as citizens. Following the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the emergence of alternative political systems such as Bolshevism and fascism, there were heightened fears that political power might be challenged by the irrational masses. Even museums were implicated: the Walker Art Gallery became a site of political protest in 1921 when it was occupied by unemployed workers.1 Improvements in education were seen as a way to combat proletarian revolutions by offering working class people opportunities for betterment within the current framework of society. The 1918 Education Act and successive education reports on primary education and teaching methods identified museums as institutions that could make a useful contribution to schooling and social enlightenment.
Education, the electorate and museums
The 1918 Representation of the People Act expanded the electorate from 7.5 million to over 20 million by enfranchising the male population over the age of 21, abolishing the historical link between voting and property ownership and granting women over the age of 30 who met minimum property qualifications the entitlement to vote. The subsequent Representation of the People Act in 1928 completed the process towards establishing a democratic state by giving women the same electoral rights as men.
The 1918 Education Act in turn made important changes to schooling, raising the school-leaving age from 12 to 14 and considering provision for compulsory part time education up to the age of 18. Adult education was also scrutinised, and libraries and museums were seen as having an important contribution to make to state provision in this field. In 1921, the British Institute of Adult Education (BIAE) was established to coordinate these different providers and develop opportunities for informal education for the masses. In 1926, 1931 and 1933, the Hadow Committee reviewed the contribution that museums might make to schooling in successive reports on primary education and teaching methods.
Arising from the 1918 Education Act, in 1919, the Ministry of Reconstruction’s Adult Education Committee recommended that all museums and libraries should be placed under the Board of Education and administered by local education authorities ‘in order to ensure the closest relationship between the activities of schools, libraries and museums’.2 The Museums Association (MA) debated these proposals at its annual conference that year but agreed that:
they did not think that transfer to Education Committees would be in the best interest of museums, since they were not fundamentally educational institutions. The functions in order of importance were: – (1) Collection and Preservation; (2) Research; (3) Education and Display. If transferred to Local Education Committees, the last would be developed at the expense of the first two.3
By adopting this stance, the museum profession retained its independence but ensured that the service remained starved of funding. This was the first of a number of subsequent debates within the MA about the place of education in museum practice, and the issue would continue to destabilise the museum profession at key moments in the reform process throughout the middle years of the twentieth century.
Despite rejecting the 1919 education proposals, in 1922, the MA called for a Royal Commission to be set up to investigate the provincial museum sector. The MA felt that this sector more urgently needed reform than the national museums. This time they agreed to argue that museums would be better financed if the Board of Education were to recognise the educational role of local museums through a Royal Commission, but the government prevaricated, delayed their response to the MA until 1925 and eventually declined, since it considered non-national museums to be a local and not a national responsibility.4
The 1919 Public Libraries Act had removed rate limitations on museum and library expenditure and sanctioned – but did not compel – the transfer of museum and library services to local education committees. In practice, therefore, there was little incentive for local authorities to increase funds to museums and the main beneficiaries were libraries whose lending services saw considerable expansion under County Council authorities.5 By the mid-1920s, it was becoming clear that museums were falling behind libraries in both status and financial resources, and that in the MA’s Memorandum of 1919, rejecting Board of Education finance, they had effectively sealed their own fate.
In this context, three significant reviews were undertaken of the UK’s museums during the inter-war years, prompted by the museum profession’s rejection of the education developments ushered in by the 1918 Education Act. These surveys were among a number of measures addressing the country’s political, social and economic state in the wake of the First World War and were aligned with wider political and ideological aims for society. In 1927, a Royal Commission was appointed, but to undertake a survey of the national museums and galleries, excluding non-national ones, despite the Museums Association’s argument that it was those that more urgently needed review. It was the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust (Carnegie UK Trust) that commissioned reviews of the country’s non-national museums, in 1926 and 1936, published as the Miers Report (1928) and the Markham Report (1938). In these three reviews, the complete sector was subjected to detailed outside scrutiny for the first time.6
