Museums Will Forget: Critical Approaches to Catalog-Centered Historical Research

Abstract

This article shares the approaches, research and consequences of catalog-centered historical research at the Museum of Cornish Life, a result of the author’s Art Fund Headley Fellowship in 2022. It argues that museums are inherently forgetful institutions that avoid and often do not preserve their own history. If museums are to think and do things differently, particularly when employing decolonial approaches, they must start with reconstructing and understanding their own institutional and documentation ancestry. In the absence of an organized institutional archive the author turned to using critical close readings of both the historic and current collections catalogs to reconstruct patterns of curatorial preference, language, terminology, and classification use, and their impact on collections making. This research, coupled with piecing together scattered fragments from newspapers and surviving correspondence, led to the start of a major long-term effort to create a new museum knowledge base in the form of a digital archive to preserve the multiple voices and influences of the museum and its collections.

When I started my Art Fund Headley Fellowship at the Museum of Cornish Life in January 2022, I wanted to do things differently. The Headley Fellowships were created in response to a need to support extended and concentrated collections-based research, an activity that is absent from most museums, and when conducted, is usually within academic disciplinary frameworks that face away from the museum and its own history. ¹ Throughout a career spanning over twenty years variously as a museum and exhibition curator, researcher, historian, and collections consultant, I long noticed how little those who worked in museums were aware of, and understood, their own institutions’ history and ancestry. This was particularly apparent when observing and supporting efforts to decolonize collections which are dominated by the race to scrutinise and update the language of documentation and description without knowledge of the institution’s history and memory. ²

While this project paid close attention to language and classification in catalog records, the main goal was to reconstitute a critical institutional memory of past collecting habits and the attitudes they represented. Most scholars of museum methods conclude that catalog records, once written, persist across generations and outmoded, value-laden or offensive descriptions enter interpretation on gallery labels, and online records without much intervention. ³ Mass digitization efforts since the turn of the twenty-first century exacerbated this situation resulting in millions of online object records containing at best, poorly researched information, and at worst, perpetuating derogatory stereotypes of people and places—past and present. While most attention has been paid to so-called ethnographic or world cultures collections, the effect of this inertia and lack of curatorial intervention affects social history collections just as much. Ciraj Rassool describes these original records as “birth certificates” providing an object with persistent authenticity. ⁴

Museum registers and catalogs provide the sensation of legitimacy that the curatorial descendants of these original registrars can be reluctant to question, particularly when documentation is undertaken by a voluntary workforce as is prevalent in most United Kingdom small to medium-sized museums. This extends to repetitious habits across generations where certain styles of language use and even redundant hierarchical classifications, originally created for analog index card catalogs, have been transferred to computerised databases for no functional reason. This situation is especially prevalent in folk and social history museums like the Museum of Cornish Life, as will be demonstrated. When catalog records are all that are left when objects have gone missing or are no longer in the last documented location, those records become the embodiment of the object itself. In these situations, there is little chance to review and update those records and while unsatisfactory, inaccurate legacy data lives on into the next generation, they have a value in reconstructing the history of a museum. ⁵

The notion of curatorial ancestry is important to me, not in a way that eulogises, but in a way that acknowledges that my practice is one of furthering an unending story of collecting, organising, and caring. The Headley Fellowship was the first time I had the opportunity to put this way of thinking and working into regular practice. Jenny Davis and Krystiana Krupa have beautifully, and tenderly, made a case for the benefits of adopting the language of ancestry and beings in the documentation of collections, particularly but not exclusively to the material culture of indigenous peoples past and present. ⁶ Can we apply the same world view to the museum itself and begin to consider institutional research in the same way as family history or genealogy? In this article I will describe the circumstances that made this research project possible, share some key findings from the catalog-centered research undertaken, and suggest ways in which reconstructing the museum’s family history through its catalogs can help better understand its role, purpose, and perception in society today.

The Value of Trust and Independence

The call for applications in 2021 was the first time the Art Fund permitted entries for the Headley Fellowship from curators outside institutions. At the time I was directing the Curatorial Research Centre (CRC), a small agency I had founded in 2018 to develop and support modern, ethical curatorial practice based on my own practice-based philosophy. ⁷ Prior to applying I had established a long relationship with the museum. The museum had participated in the Citizen Curators programme (2018–2021) I had designed on behalf of the CRC and Cornwall Museums Partnership for seven museums across Cornwall. Unlike so-called citizen science, Citizen Curators were not the “crowd” from which knowledge was to be sourced, rather the term “citizen” referenced a specific relationship of reciprocity between the museums and the people for whom they professed to exist. The program provided curatorial training to volunteers from their respective communities as a way to support those who wanted to get involved with collections but lacked confidence and understanding to do so. ⁸ Citizen Curators sat fluidly between community participants outwith the museum and a voluntary workforce with decision-making influence within the museum.

During this time Annette MacTavish, the museum’s director, consulted with me about a number of ethical and knotty issues that came up in the museum, particularly around the collection. ⁹ These included confronting unacknowledged racism and racialised stereotyping in the toy, doll, and photographic collections, safeguarding issues raised by items that had been historically donated to the museum but never properly researched, and dealing with the abandoned collections of Camborne Museum, a neighboring town museum that closed down in 2005 and whose collections were transferred and then stored in the attic of the Museum of Cornish Life (at the time called Helston Folk Museum).

By the time we shaped our joint application for a Headley Fellowship we had built a trustful relationship. This meant that my request for “access all areas” was agreed to without condition. The director’s decision was in turn supported by the Board of Trustees of South Kerrier Heritage Trust, the museum’s governing body. These were the conditions required if I was to successfully apply a philosophy born from a decolonial understanding of curatorial ancestry, a critical realization that museums are forgetful institutions, and a desire to act independently of any institutional agendas, for example, those tied to funders. The Art Fund and Headley Trust themselves made no stipulations whatsoever about the research they were financially supporting. In return I was trusted to conduct my research ethically and independently of stakeholder ideology and agenda. My job with the collections and the museum’s own history was to reveal, without taking a stance or making value judgments about past curatorial action and inaction, including classification, language, and description in catalogs.

The place I started and ended this program of curatorial and historical research were the museum’s catalogs.

Forgetful Documentation

The practice of cataloging has not much changed since museums adopted apparently orderly museum classification and documentation as a means to assert ownership, manage collections, and recontextualise objects in the museum’s own image. As Ananda Rutherford commented, “we are still working with colonial era behaviours and understandings of the world, fitted into 19th century pseudo-scientific classification systems, in 20th century databases for a transnational, global 21st century audience—why?” ¹⁰ Far from serving historical and community memories, the architecture of museum documentation is designed to forget, remodel, smooth out, and misremember. The habits of catalogers across generations have been customary in the way particular rituals and habits are within families and small communities.

In the capitalised societies in which most museums were created, numbers, and monetary value count more than anything else because these are the things that are most often repeated in publications, reports, the news, on websites, and social media. The shallow depth of a museum’s ability to express its purpose in relation to lineage and origins is often expressed as an estimate of numbers of items in the collections, a reductive list of objects it feels are the most important (famous or financially valuable), or unsubstantiated claims of being “world-leading.” ¹¹ When fame and financial value cannot be drawn upon, such as in collections of social history in museums like the Museum of Cornish Life, many objects are reduced to curios to provoke nostalgia and anemoia rather than be promoted as witnesses to historical cultural attitudes and records of people in their communities.

The problem of the museum object as curio is revealed by the way in which documentation took place (or did not) and the way in which catalogs were developed (or were not). This scenario is familiar to many museums like the Museum of Cornish Life whose collecting history and curatorial influences varied and morphed since it established itself. This is most clearly demonstrated with changes in a museum’s name over time. The Museum of Cornish Life began in the 1930s as Helston Borough Museum in recognition of its very specific geographical focus, then in 1980 changed to Helston Folk Museum to emphasize its speciality as a social and cultural museum dedicated to the material memories of “ordinary” people’s lives and occupations. This change also came about at a time when theories and practices around folk museums were much more prevalent academically than they are today. In her discussion of the history of folk museums, Gaynor Kavanagh contrasts the purposeful, organized, and detailed approach of folk museum collecting and documentation in Wales, Isle of Man, Sweden, and Scotland with that of English folk museums. ¹² Using the example of York Castle Museum, Kavanagh comments on the influence of its progenitor’s, Dr John Kirk, approach to collections and documentation: “The legacy of Kirk’s work to museum practice in England has been the continuation of an eclectic, erratic, ‘bygone’ approach.” ¹³ It could be argued that the Museum of Cornish Life could fall into either category given the region’s long history of promoting Cornish distinctiveness and its close relationships with other modern Celtic nations, as well as being part of the wider phenomenon of community-volunteer-run or amateur English local town and village museums since the mid-nineteenth century. In 2012 a further name change took place, this time eliding the museum’s name in Kernewek, the Cornish language, Gwythi Hellys with its English name, now Helston Museum—dropping the word “folk.” Finally in 2018, the museum adopted its current name to reflect the much wider geographic spread represented, but hitherto unacknowledged, in its collections. This recent change is also reflective of a broader interest among many UK museums to rebrand to ensure better visibility in the digital world. ¹⁴

(Re)constructing the Memory of the Museum of Cornish Life

Although the museum never organized an institutional archive, or formalised history files relating to acquisitions, it was possible to piece together some basic institutional history from correspondence and cuttings kept in various office filing cabinets. Some original material was even found in front of house information files—the kinds used to rapidly answer visitor enquiries. The British Newspaper Archive offered another dimension into the early histories of the museum, from its inception in 1937 to its public opening at its current site in the old butter and egg market of Helston in 1949. ¹⁵ There were even fewer documents relating to Camborne Museum, the closed museum whose collections were transferred to Helston. I found the files thin and quite random. I could only imagine what kinds of documents had been disposed of. As both museums were governed by Kerrier District Council from 1974 until the local authority’s dissolution in 2009, some museum history was noted in formal council records now archived at Kresen Kernow, Cornwall’s record office and largest library. In addition to these documentary sources, I also targeted digital documents that I could access on the museum’s server. On a number of occasions, I was able to speak with and interview former curator Martin Matthews. Matthews was an influential curatorial figure in the 1980s and 1990s particularly expanding the collections and museum building in Helston. Matthews was also the museum officer for Camborne Museum.

The historic catalogs for both museums were the most comprehensive sources I had to interrogate. These comprised: four historical museum registers of the two museum collections, dating from 1937 to 2002. Two are manuscript registers of objects accessioned by former curators and two are typescript inventory registers created by catalogers on a late 1970s job creation scheme; in addition, one set of manuscript index cards from Camborne Museum dating to the 1960s; and two sets of typescript index cards (one for each museum) with hand-drawn object illustrations or black and white photographs, 1977 to 1978. In addition to these is the active database collections management system, Modes, ¹⁶ which contains records that were largely derived from the card catalogs. Parallel to the computerization of the catalog, manuscript accession registers were kept and remain part of the process of accessioning to this day.

My methodology involved close reading and comparison of catalog and inventory entries. Indeed, my first act as Headley Fellow was to methodically read the whole database of nearly 20,000 object records which just relate to the Museum of Cornish Life. Camborne Museum had never computerised its collections catalog, albeit the museum has since created a spreadsheet of the paper inventory as a basis for reconstructing a fuller catalog on a database in the future. While reading the database I was primarily interested in learning two things, firstly, to rapidly get to know the collections on display and in store, and secondly, to build a picture of provenance and therefore gain insights into the choices made when collecting. I took note of the style and detail of descriptions, the range of donors, and circumstances around acquisition. I also noted the categories or classifications that objects were placed in as these are indicative of the cataloger’s own lived experience and attitudes. My notes comprised annotated graphics of specific records or sets. These were either compiled from exported PDF reports, and then annotated digitally, or screenshot and annotated. The result became a compilation of a range of knotty issues related to classification, documentation style, and description.

The most enigmatic category I came across was entitled “Problems” and it remains a mystery to me why particular objects were placed in this category. Was it a problem with identification, classification, display, location, or with provenance? The objects classed as “problems” varied from an undated brass casting of a “death’s head and snake”—an emblem that might have been used as a charm—from a well-known Cornish foundry, six photographs of an archaeological investigation into an ancient monument in 1928, and a granite mortar. While the earliest registers of both museums did not use any kind of classification and comprised a chronicle of accessioned objects in date order, hierarchical classification was adopted in 1977 during the systematic re-cataloging of the collections using template index cards with hand-drawn illustrations or occasionally black and white object photographs. The classification system used at the museum eventually became the Social History and Industrial Classification known as SHIC. ¹⁷ However, the museum did not update its categories and retains the system in place in the late 1970s, even on the collections database.

While most of the museum’s catalogers have instinctively shifted to using classification fields for subject keywords (uncontrolled) others retain the hierarchies set out in the museum’s documentation manual dating from around 2013, but itself substantially based on older guidance and lists of controlled vocabulary dating from the 1980s and 1990s. This differentiation in documentation style is telling. Some catalogers, past and present, showed a preference for following the documentation procedure exactly, providing three to four-level nested classifications, for example, when describing an arrish rake (a large agricultural tool pulled by hand or a working animal to collect the loose hay left in the field) its index card and digital record used the classifications: Trades and Occupations > Agriculture > Harvesting > Hay Raking. The word farming was not used anywhere in the record in spite of its more common usage among the community and researchers today. ¹⁸ Other catalogers adopted a freestyle approach simply based on describing the object in front of them and using the main fields in the database as their guide but otherwise they do not follow any particular guidance for description, classification, or keyword. This has resulted in a number of mis-identifications, particularly when describing the purpose or function of an object.

My findings may be familiar to anyone who has interrogated museum catalogs wishing to critically engage with historical and recent collections practices. Like so many other museum researchers I found that the original descriptions and (mis)identifications of older objects in the collections were most often repeated without question when the database was created in the early 2000s. I found less than five percent of items documented in the Modes catalog comprised any additional information, for example, from public contributions or new research undertaken at the museum, even when that information existed elsewhere such as researcher enquiries and student projects. For objects which came into the collection post-computerization the descriptions followed a similar style to former descriptions, most only at inventory level, most choosing to focus just on physical description, and very, very few that included any references to publications, notes, or correspondence issuing from enquiries.

Another cataloging style I observed was emulation. All catalogers from the early 2000s to today emulated the language and formats of older object records. While the vast majority of documentation at the Museum of Cornish Life has been undertaken by people outside of the museum profession as part of a volunteer workforce, and this situation remains today, the quality of catalog records cannot be related to professional status as many problematic records were made by those formerly employed at the museum and many excellent records were created by volunteers. However, the domination of volunteers undertaking this work has accentuated the reliance on following rigid, written museum procedures and not actively questioning the information being added or edited, the language used, or shying away from undertaking object-based research because of a lack of training and confidence. There remains a prevailing belief at the museum that the purpose of the object database is simply to know what is in the collection, and where. The idea that the catalog should be treated as if writing an historical chronicle did not enter catalogers’ imaginations until I introduced the idea during the Fellowship. The mentoring I undertook with both documentation volunteers, trainees, and interns, significantly raised confidence in questioning the museum’s existing records and not making an assumption they must be right simply because they are on the database.

These passive styles of museum documentation are particularly evident in the records of the museum’s photographic collection. This collection comprises an extensive archive of twentieth-century photographs of social and cultural life from farm work to carnivals. While major efforts have been made, and continue, to digitise the whole collection, the level of catalog information remains basic and often just reproduces a caption written on the reverse by an unknown source, or makes an attempt at a description of the scene from the point of view of the cataloger. This passivity has largely been caused by the development and imposition of universal museum procedures during the 1990s and 2000s, particularly for documentation. By making the following of procedure pre-eminent, the museum sector has inadvertently downgraded the value of documentation, regardless of whether it is conducted by a professional or volunteer. When objects are cataloged there is rarely any peer-review of the records meaning it is extremely easy for misidentification, poor quality, and judgment-laden documentation to be perpetuated. Developed initially as part of the Citizen Curators curatorial training course, I took the opportunity to teach critical thinking skills to everyone involved in collections work.

Towards the end of the Fellowship, I commissioned the digitization of all of the manuscript and typescript registers and reorganised the 1970s illustrated inventory index cards so they will always be available for ongoing and future collections and museum research. I involved collections volunteers and trainees in these processes to engender an interest and sense of responsibility for the sources they continue to create during documentation. The Fellowship came with a materials and fees budget which was critical to ensure there was legacy and continuity to this work. A project to unite and organize key information and media relating to collections and the museum’s history is ongoing. The aim over the next few years is to create a well-organized knowledge-base of digital documentation and information relating to the collections, the institution, and the themes the museum represents.

Regardless of the nature of descriptions in catalog records, by the time of my Fellowship, the museum had documented the vast majority of its collections, with photographs making up the bulk of a backlog. This made reconstructing its history from its collecting habits much easier than it might be at many other museums whose backlogs are irresponsibly large. As we shall see, from its earliest days, the Museum of Cornish Life had taken documentation seriously, even if it was sometimes lacking in detail, prone to errors, had used value-laden language or not acknowledged the full context of its objects. Although the existence of such catalog records—the birth certificates—has made some stains indelible, it was important to think about how to preserve them, while also taking responsibility for updating them.

Legacies for Dubious Descriptions and New Histories

Reading the museum catalogs gave me a sense of the idiosyncrasies and styles people adopted during documentation. Photographs in particular drew a range of descriptive responses. I was particularly alert to descriptions of photographs because many of them were the subject of contention, such as the representation of racist and racialised stereotypes, including blackface—white people painting their faces black in the manner of “Black and White minstrels” to satirise Black people—at pantomime productions and village carnivals. None of the descriptions acknowledged the racial context of the people and scenes being depicted and rather focused on what was represented, where and when. In December 2020 the museum had posted online two of these pantomime photographs dating to the 1970s. ¹⁹ It showed characters dressed for village pantomime productions of Aladdin and Robinson Crusoe, both of which showed the costume of racial and ethnic stereotypes, including wearing blackface. The captions were lifted from the catalog directly with an additional question, “Were you in either, or both of these pantos and can you identify any of the cast?” Had the catalog records been more fulsome and included reference to the extensive literature on cultural stereotypes perpetuated in pantomime, the public post might have been an opportunity to provide a less one-sided view of such productions.

However, the starkest result of this ethical scrutiny was the gendered differences in descriptions of how men and women were described:

9 wives dressed for a night out?

Pretty young lady in a white jumper.

Lady with spotted dress and smile.

Large lady seated posing by a brick fireplace.

(Museum of Cornish Life Modes catalogue, 2022).

Photographs of men and boys were rarely given qualifying descriptions like those of women and girls. They were much more matter of fact, for example, “a man in heavy duty protective clothing,” and focus on the action or activity, rarely their clothing. Although there were some “lads” in the catalog records. My approach to improving these descriptions reverts back to training. Rather than re-doing these descriptions they will form the subject of new cataloging and description training with an emphasis on accuracy, thinking about what audiences and researchers will need, and how the people that relate to those represented in those photographs may feel about such descriptions. It is important to highlight the issue while providing support so the solution is sustainable and new, better, habits are formed.

As I was interested as much in reconstructing the museum’s institutional history as I was in provenance and interpretation (these three aspects of museums are inseparable), I felt it was critical to preserve former descriptions, however questionable. I frequently revisited my ethics of revealing, not judging, several times during this process. My goal was to demonstrate that the museum catalog is an active chronicle, a record of the museum’s own social and cultural attitudes and the changes in them. Another example of this came when dealing with the racist, racialised and highly gendered stereotypes in the museum’s toy, doll, and children’s book collection, particularly the figure of the golliwog—a doll, popular among white British families, based on a fictional character inspired by American blackface performers, originally created by Florence Upton in 1895. The museum had identified their display and interpretation of the golliwog as being a key embarrassing problem and ethical issue that needed focused attention. Although a subject of sustained discussion since the 1990s, the public debate about the significance and visibility of the golliwog in British society bloomed since 2020 and a number of representations made to the museum resulted in a number of artifacts, including Black dolls that had nothing to do with the Golliwog, to be hidden in the stores. ²⁰ A temporary exhibition I curated called Dolls! in July to October 2023 provided the first opportunity to thoroughly research and explore these issues in public. ²¹ However, I realised this “new” knowledge, which addressed both the popularity of the doll in white British-Cornish childhoods as well as its racist symbolism and foreboding presence for many Black British people, would have a short shelf-life. Prior to my research these objects were simply documented without history or discussion about changing attitudes. They were also uninterpreted in the museum’s permanent “Toyshop” exhibit.

While one of the results of this work included a redisplay and new interpretation for a renewed “Toyshop” exhibit, I knew that the longer legacy of this work would lie in new documentation, after all I had already seen how sometimes seventy-year-old descriptions in historic catalogs remained the primary source for public interpretation. Following the Dolls! exhibition, when the research and interpretation was fresh and quick to access, I devoted time to ensuring all of the exhibition interpretation was attached to the records of relevant objects, including new sources of information such as provided by the curator and historian Debbie Behan Garrett about the museum’s 1930s and 1950s Black dolls (erroneously classed as racist by the museum just prior to this research program). ²²

Very few museums have clear routines to do this kind of post-exhibition or post-project work which enables new research to be retained in the institution’s memory. However, the majority of museums in the United Kingdom simply do not have the resources to prioritise this kind of activity or have not thought to include it in their documentation strategies. The result of this means that in spite of great strides in object-based and contextual research, particularly that prompted by new exhibitions, this rarely reaches the museum catalog and so the museum remains in a state of amnesia. An unintended consequence of treating research in such an unsustainable way is that the same research is often repeated again and again. I have observed this particularly looking back at the collections enquiries the museum has received over the years.

Hopefully, by centralizing and organizing this knowledge into a digital institutional archive, an attempt can be made to ensure that research is treated with as much care and thought as the objects themselves, and that the central site for preserving it is the museum catalog. The remaining task was to address the problem of anonymity in museum catalogs. Kathleen Lawther, a contemporary Headley Fellow at the Powell-Cotton Museum, commented, “museums have historically recorded the contributions of only a very few individuals—those with the influence, wealth, and privilege to collect, donate and ensure their names were remembered. Yet there were usually many other individuals who contributed to historic collections.” ²³ Referring to the anonymity of catalogers, a key recommendation of Lawther’s work was the importance of recording the source of documentation, including the catalogers themselves. I therefore included a short biography of myself and the Headley Fellowship work in the Notes fields of the key records I had updated or amplified. I also included a short biography of those who contributed new knowledge. The next task is to persuade documentation volunteers to do the same.

Writing the Museum’s History

The collections of the Museum of Cornish Life, unlike that of Dr Kirk’s York Castle Museum, were not the product of a single collector’s object dilettantism, albeit the constitutions of both museums were contemporary. In British politico-cultural terms, the Museum of Cornish Life’s history captures the zeitgeist of its changing times, the beginning of the end of Empire, the desire for post-war modernity, and an effort to remember the loss of traditional ways and things through the act of collecting directly from the community. Researching the origins of the museum helped me and the museum team better understand its purpose and meaning today. Unlike the museums that emerged from private passions and performative benevolence (a gift to the town of. . .) this museum was the product of a purposeful collaboration of mainly working and lower middle-class men.

The collection began to be assembled at the turn of the twentieth century. The interwar years for Cornwall, like in many other rapidly industrialised regions, was denuded of its wealth by the same colonial forces that siphoned resources from the far reaches of the British Empire. In Cornwall’s case this was principally experienced during the decline in the hard-rock mining business caused by the cheaper production of metals from mines elsewhere in the empire, the repositioning of Cornwall “at the end of the railway line” far from London, as Atlantic maritime traffic in which Cornwall was once at the center gave way to a road network heading to the larger southern and eastern ports. At the same time, a national demand for farming to industrialize and mechanise so the need for specialist tools, machines, and labor, began to vanish, as did the biodiversity supported by these traditional methods. The earliest objects in the museum’s collection, such as the ceremonial trowel and wheelbarrow that initiated the Helston Railway in 1882, are important witnesses in these stories, and were not then thought of as bygones and curios. ²⁴ The current museum building, its second and current venue, opened in 1949 in the former butter and egg market—itself a witness to Helston’s centrality as a place of commerce and the exchange of agricultural produce.

The initial collecting and campaign to create a new town museum was conducted under the auspices of Helston’s “Old Cornwall Society” from the 1930s. The Old Cornwall, or in Kernewek, Kernow Goth movement began in 1920 and combined a desire to create a contemporary Cornish Celtic identity and heritage, including reviving Kernewek, with a desire to save material culture that supported a divergent national narrative to distinguish Cornishness from Englishness—and specifically the imperial and hierarchical British version of Englishness. ²⁵ The Old Cornwall movement also resulted in several museums being established across Cornwall, many of which remain governed by their branch of the Old Cornwall Society today. In the case of Helston, the museum was made possible with the assistance of Helston Borough Council. A detailed look at the people who constituted both Helston Old Cornwall Society and the Borough Council suggest the closeness of the relationship between the two, with some spanning both organizations. The museum’s files retained two copies of the keynote speech given by J. Percival Rogers at the museum’s opening on 19 September 1949 which stated a clear intention to focus on collecting from the local area:

I should like to say a word or two about the kind of things we want. This is a local museum for Helston and the surrounding district, so, as far as possible, and with some exceptions, we want local things. I mean we do not {specially} want such things as stuffed owls from Siberia, or skulls from New Guinea, or the teeth of sharks from Labrador. We want local things from Helston and (roughly speaking) the Kerrier Rural District. Such things as ancient agricultural implements, old coins, pictures and photographs of old and interesting things.

Mr. J. Percival Rogers speech, museum opening, September 19, 1949 (Museum of Cornish Life).

The first catalog dates from November 1937 to 1949 and was started when the museum was temporarily housed in the former Corn Exchange (today’s Guildhall, the seat of Helston Town Council). The first curator of the collection was William “Bill” Dalton. By day he curated and documented the nascent collection, by evening he was the landlord of the Beehive pub opposite the museum. Mr Dalton, as he is still affectionately known, was curator from 1937 to 1970. There is a tribute to him at the junction of the original museum and its 1983 extension into the town’s former Meat Market. The interplay between local museum and local pub intrigues me and while browsing the catalog I could imagine that many potential donations came to the museum after a chat at the bar with Bill Dalton. One of the early registers even included notes for a speech Dalton made at a pub association meeting in the 1960s. Many of the objects documented in this catalog were agricultural and speak to the concern of the time regarding the huge changes in agriculture, the region’s most economically important occupation. The catalog documents ox shoes or cues (like horse shoes) from working oxen at Trewothack, St Anthony-in-Meneage (011), and a particularly compelling description of a moor-stone (granite) grain mortar (013) outlined below—I also noted that the three-figure hand-written accession numbers in the museum’s first register suggested that the museum never intended to have more than a thousand objects. However, by the second register, the museum had accumulated a few thousand items.

While many entries are quite business-like, containing the name and address of the donor, the date, and a very simple description, some provide a bit of history and the entry for the moor-stone above gives insights into the continued use of Kernewek, the Cornish language in farming. The pillas referred to is the Cornish word for the particular species of naked oat (avena nuda) that used to grow well in Cornwall but had disappeared by the time the object was documented. Interestingly the catalog documents that this donation came from another Helston pub with medieval origins, the Blue Anchor, that is still open at the time of writing (2023).

013. Moor-stone grain mortar known in Cornwall as a “pillas traft” in which the extinct grain “pillas” or “naked oats” was pounded with a stone pestle to make “gerty milk.”

(Museum of Cornish Life Register 1, 1937–1949).

A welcome result of sharing my historical catalog research publicly, and in particular about this object, was informing and then collaborating with Harriett Gendall’s doctoral research at Kew Gardens into the history and reintroduction of the Cornish oat to local farms. ²⁶

As well as being documents that attest to the museum’s history, and that of its original purpose and attitudes, the early catalogs are the only memory we have of some long-lost items such as the pillas traft, and those taken by theft, such as those documented in the second museum catalog in 1963 and 1965. These robberies involved over one hundred items including eighteenth and nineteenth-century pistols, revolvers, coins and watches. Thefts also blighted Camborne Museum with a major theft of silver objects in 1976. ²⁷

Bill Dalton was a meticulous documenter and the first two manuscript registers are treasure troves of history about objects and the museum itself. By the mid-1970s, following the departure of Dalton, the museum’s documentation becomes murky and inconsistent. The late 1970s saw the first signs of museum professionalization when the collections of both Helston Borough Museum and Camborne Museum were inventoried anew as they were both brought under the governance of newly-formed Kerrier District Council. This major re-cataloging was done partly under the auspices of a dedicated museum officer, Gaynor Cole (later the museum studies academic Gaynor Kavanagh) from neighboring Penwith District Council. The District Council took advantage of the then UK Government’s Manpower Services Commission job creation scheme which essentially funded informal traineeships and had identifed museum cataloging as a fundable activity for the unemployed to gain new skills. The museum recruited and trained catalogers and others to help with the refurbishment of displays.

The new catalog, or inventory, was quite basic and provides just enough information to physically identify the corresponding object. The accompanying index cards, however, did include illustrations for the first time, or in some instances, black and white photographs. The only other change from the former registers was the addition of classification, as discussed above. While registers were important documents that held the histories of the collections, they were not easy to use to find out new information or make connections between objects, particularly those which came from the same donor—this was much easier to read from the older registers. While the index cards led to objects being more discoverable, I did not get the sense that they were routinely made available to the public and researchers. While many of these new records included information from the former manuscript catalogs, no reference at all was made to historic accession numbers so matching old and new records remains a painstaking chore. Rather, even though some new research was conducted, the main object of this re-cataloging was really a renumbering and object marking exercise of the type that many museums across the country were undertaking at the same time. The museum had also adopted a new style of accession numbers, using a leading year and then a running number sequence in each major category of collection, for example, the suffix “G” was used for geological specimens, “A” for archaeology, “E” for ethnography, and “F” for folk. ²⁸ In spite of the seeming professionalization of this work, the language of these records had not changed, and it had a limited effect on furthering the knowledge the museum held about these objects and their people.

Another happy result of sharing my catalog-based historical research publicly online was making contact with one of those former Manpower scheme catalogers, Matt Howell. I interviewed him in April 2022. He recalled, “It was quite satisfying work though—we worked in a loft area right behind and above the cider press. We’d collect objects from the floor (or storage in the meat market building), do whatever research we could, assign catalogue numbers and enter them on an index card, along with a description and measurement, and a freehand drawing on the back. We’d spray the drawing with a fixative and then write the catalog [sic] number on the object in ink and varnish over it.” ²⁹

By 1980, Kerrier District Council employed its first museum officer, Martin Matthews, and the museum changed its name to Helston Folk Museum. Matthews was based in Helston but also had responsibility for the much smaller Camborne Museum which was situated above the town’s public library. Under his leadership over more than two decades the museum’s collection expanded many times over and largely stayed true to the museum’s original aims to collect local. Matthews reflected to me that as a former carpet fitter from the neighboring town of Porthleven, he was not the obvious choice to run the two museums but he had a friendship with the Chair of the district council and Matthews’ enthusiasm for local history proved irresistible. ³⁰ During his tenure the museum physically expanded and was redisplayed twice, once by 1983 and a second time by 2000. As we reached the point of talking about the end of his career at the museum, which culminated the reconstruction of a Victorian classroom directly from one that was being disposed of from a convent school in Penryn, Matthews was viscerally affected by this memory. For many in the town Martin Matthews was the museum and the museum was Martin Matthews. Always a helping hand when needed, I have found this former curator to be a useful font of oral history. However, none of his knowledge ever entered the catalogs. While documentation continued in the 1980s and 1990s, and computerised cataloging was adopted in the early 2000s, the quality of the documentation became basic and in many cases became disconnected from information that may have been provided by the donor or known by the curator. Identification and provenance were seldom corroborated. These are the legacies we continue to deal with today.

This was also an era when the museum purchased new acquisitions, particularly to amplify set-piece displays such as the nostalgic “girls” and “boys” toyshops that became a major subject of my curatorial research. These purchases tended to be generic and without specific provenance to a Cornish person, place, event or activity. They were intended to swell a display. Their documentation was merely to account for the objects and did not include any histories. By 2002 the Martin Matthews era had ended and the museum adopted a looser curatorial approach to collecting and documentation. The types of objects collected were entirely reactive, from donations that came off the streets from members of the community, or even by post, from those with family connections to the area. However, many of these had no story or Cornish provenance documented about them, so their significance was simply that were old and had belonged to someone who once had a connection to Cornwall. This is particularly evident with the collecting of costume. The focus of the mid-2000s to 2010s was much more on generating activity in the museum, particularly for children. The notion of a separate educational handling collection was taking shape. However, documentation suffered. The catalog illustrates this as the mixing of handling, collection and even loaned objects in the accessioning process is clear to see. The descriptions are brief and there is very little to read into in terms of curatorial attitude. It was as if the museum really had forgotten why and for whom it was collecting.

Where Next for Catalog-Centered Historical Research?

Delving into the early registers and ad hoc archives of the museum continues to teach me things, and prompts me to ask new questions. Taking this long view of catalog-centered research clearly shows to what extent museum collections have always been evolving and changing, rather than static and immovable. As once everyday words for things have become obscured the museum’s catalogs retain their memories. Similarly, the cultural attitudes of the catalogers—these anonymous curatorial influencers—emerge from the language they use as those words belong to them as much as the people who created or donated the objects to the museum. The notion of permanency is also very clearly a myth when it comes to museums like the Museum of Cornish Life and Camborne Museum. As our lives have moved into the digital sphere more and more, and generations have been born into a hybrid world, so collecting and cataloging only physical artefacts is not going to accurately reflect the ordinary folk of today. If the museum is to stay true to its original purpose and not surrender itself to nostalgia and anemoia, this is something we should consider more seriously than the eternal quest to digitise physical collections and their often-inadequate records.

Before I took this approach there was no coherent history of the museum or its collections. What few fragments were known and repeated were so vague as to become almost mythological. Documentation was being conducted in an uncritical way and far too much faith was placed in what information was easy to access, that is, had been transferred to the Modes object database. It was important to involve the whole team in this process of discovery and critique, particularly to challenge the idea that museum procedures are somehow immutable. Making the historic catalogs easier to access through digitization has also enabled critical research to be undertaken on specific areas of the collection such as farming or costume—both areas in which the museum is engaging in preparatory work for contemporary collecting (including digital collecting). Perhaps most importantly this work is preparing the museum to confidently and ethically undertake a much-needed review and rationalization process. This is particularly pertinent for dealing with the stored collections of Camborne Museum which would otherwise have remained orphaned in the roof of the museum. This work has created a genealogy for the museum that the museum’s team of staff and volunteers, its trustees and its supporters can feel part of, and grow an affinity for. Catalog-centered research nourishes the soul of a museum and can help bring a new sense of continuity and purpose to the institution, helping all concerned to make sound, informed decisions about its future. This research project demonstrates that museum catalogers are also historical chroniclers and therefore integral to the museum’s story. A shift from cataloging as museum procedure to history writing may persuade more people to take an engaged approach to cataloging historical and contemporary collections, and critically, persuade stakeholders and funders to make meaningful documentation a long-term organizational and sector priority. By engaging more with catalogs as historical sources we can more effectively understand what terminology, language, and classification change means in the context of our museums and in the sector more broadly.