Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Desert Island Discs
Presented by Michael Parkinson
Director of the British Museum, custodian of one of the world's richest collections of historical objects.
Eight records
The Choir of Westminster Abbey
the first choice has to remind me that the British Museum. So why not a piece of music Written for the British Museum written in seventeen sixty nine, within a few years of its foundation, by Mozart, who visited it as a boy of nine.
I think my next one is the sort of fun music which I rather enjoy. It's not very old, but it is a thing that I think people ought to do when they're young, is to sing and to make fun with music.
When I was a student in Sweden, a postgraduate student in Sweden, we used to have seminars which we all talked very seriously about things which we were interested in. And after them we used to have wine and cheese and drink fair amount and sing.
Well, my next one is uh person I listen to all the time, Fat Swallow. And because I'm not a very good archaeologist, I'm choosing.
The Heavens Are Telling (from The Creation)Favourite
The Choir of King's College, Cambridge
Well, the next one is one of my favourite pieces of all time from Haydn's creation, The Heavens Are Telling.
See, the Conquering Hero Comes! (from Judas Maccabaeus)
The Choir of King's College, Cambridge
Well, let's not be too downhearted. How about Handel, whom I always listen to? Julus Maccabeus, see the conquering hero comes.
Well, I like very much the music of the lesser composers of the eighteenth century, and I've chosen Richter's trumpet concerto in D.
Et Resurrexit (from Mass in B minor, BWV 232)
The Munich Bach Choir and Orchestra
Well, I'm almost too frightened to mention it because it's perhaps the greatest piece of music ever written. Bach's B minor Maas, and I think perhaps the climax, the X resurrects it.
The keepsakes
The book
Samuel Pepys
No doubt at all about that. Pepys's diary can go back to it all the time.
The luxury
a refrigerator with a lot of ice trays
because I would be able to make fruit juice, if nothing else, and before I got to alcohol, and I could then have ice in my drink.
In conversation
Presenter asks
Is it possible to estimate just how many objects the British Museum contains?
No, we try to guess all the time. And some people say eight million, some people say ten million, some people say twenty million. Anywhere between ten and twenty million. Give or take ten million.
Presenter asks
Was there any likelihood you were going to follow your father's profession?
I don't think I could have afforded to do that. It's a fairly poor background. A middle-class poor background in the thirties and forties is not altogether very funny with three children. I think that on the whole it was saved by the fact that my parents read a lot and there were always books in the house.
Presenter asks
Was there a precise moment when you knew what you wanted to do [for your career]?
I think I know where my interest in what I later became started. That was about nineteen forty four. My father moved to the Isle of Man, and I got very interested in the history of the Isle of Man. ... But then in 1944 we moved to the Isle of Man and I became conscious of some people called the Vikings and I was determined to find out more about these.
The recording
Timestamps play the recording from that turn
Speaker 1
Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen eighty six, and the presenter was Michael Parkinson.
Presenter
Our castaway today has been described as the custodian of the richest collection of historical objects in the world. He's the director of the British Museum, Sir David Wilson.
Presenter
So David
Presenter
Is it possible to estimate just how many objects the British Museum contains?
Sir David Wilson
Yeah.
Presenter
No, we try to guess all the time.
Sir David Wilson
And some people say eight million, some people say ten million, some people say twenty million. Anywhere between ten and twenty million. Give or take ten million. Well, that's not too bad. What about putting a price on it? Is that possible? No, just say billions of pounds. But the point is it's irreplaceable, so it's not worth while putting a price on it often.
Presenter
Well now for the purposes of this programme today, David, going from being custodian of all those priceless and countless objects, you're on a desert island. You have nothing there except your luxury object, which we'll ask you about later, and your eight records. So what would be the first choice of record? Well the first choice has to remind me that
Sir David Wilson
the British Museum. So why not a piece of music
Sir David Wilson
Written for the British Museum written in seventeen sixty nine, within a few years of its foundation, by Mozart, who visited it as a boy of nine.
Sir David Wilson
The music God Is Our Refuge motet.
Speaker 2
Praise God.
Presenter
Oh he is our
Presenter
Yeah.
Sir David Wilson
Sir David, whereabouts were you born? I was born, strangely enough, in Yorkshire, in a place called Dacre Banks in Nidderdale.
Presenter
What about your family? What kind of background did you come from?
Sir David Wilson
My father was a parson, a Methodist minister, so I travelled around a lot in the north of England and lived in Manchester and in Liverpool and Cheshire, but went to school in the south. I went to school in Bath and I went to University in Cambridge.
Presenter
Was there any likelihood you were going to follow your father's uh profession?
Sir David Wilson
I don't think I could have afforded to do that.
Presenter
It was a fairly poor background.
Sir David Wilson
It's a fairly poor background. A middle-class poor background in the thirties and forties is not altogether very funny with three children. I think that on the whole it was saved by the fact that my parents read a lot and there were always books in the house. My mother was a very good graduate from Manchester University in English and taught me a lot about literature. And we had a lot of music playing around the piano and that sort of thing, concerts in chapels and churches all over the place. One's forgotten how many
Sir David Wilson
Coral societies and things like that, there were in the north of England in those days. A lot of them have disappeared now.
Sir David Wilson
The north
Presenter
Oof.
Sir David Wilson
Indeed, and I hope to retire to the North, but I retire to the Isle of Man, where I have family connections. My father's still living over there, and my grandfather had a house over there, and I therefore will retire up there. I go to the North a lot. I think that, you know, North countrymen are rather different and often do want to go back. They try not to forget their roots, and we have roots there, and we ought to keep them.
Presenter
Going back to your musical influences, let's have a second choice of record.
Sir David Wilson
Well, I think my next one is the sort of fun music which I rather enjoy. It's not very old, but it is a thing that I think people ought to do when they're young, is to sing and to make fun with music. And this is Lucy Long. She's a girl who understands men, is the subject of my song. She's the mascot of their band.
Presenter
And her name is Lucilon. Twas thought she'd stay impartial, no special one prefer, For each would face court-martial for just a smile from her. Though the least said mended soonest, There's a rumour she'll decide on William Airbazoonest, and will be
Presenter
Tale of Lucy Long, sung there by Malcolm MacKeken. So David, was there a a precise moment when your career you can look back and say, then I knew what I wanted to do, my career was set in motion.
Sir David Wilson
I think I know where my interest in what I later became started.
Sir David Wilson
That was about nineteen forty four. My father moved to the Isle of Man, and I got very interested in the history of the Isle of Man. I was always interested in history. My mother had dragged me all over the north of England on bicycles, much to my pleasure, I may say, looking at churches and abbeys and things like that.
Sir David Wilson
But then in 1944 we moved to the Isle of Man and I became conscious of some people called the Vikings and I was determined to find out more about these. It was practically impossible to do it in England and I got very interested in archaeology at about that same time and started to look for teaching in archaeology and in Viking archaeology. There was no teaching in Viking archaeology in England, not in reality. I went to Cambridge and read archaeology and then went on to Sweden to become an archaeologist.
Presenter
What fascinated you about the Vikings? What particularly set the boyhood imagination afire?
Sir David Wilson
Strangely enough, it's not what you think, rape and pillage and all that sort of thing. I think it's something entirely different. And I've never thought of this before, but I think it was because they had a secret script. They had their runic alphabet, which I was trying to interpret, and I learnt the runic alphabet. And these were scratched on ornamented stones in the Isle of Man. And I still go and look at these and wonder at them. And one day I'm going to publish a corpus of them, but that's a long time to go yet.
Presenter
Now you mentioned the the rape and pillage. I mean that's the bad press that the Vikings get, isn't it? Are you telling me that they didn't deserve it?
Sir David Wilson
Oh, I think that they were pretty good pillagers and rapists in their day. But there were a lot of them around, I may say. It was a pretty tough part of uh history, that. If you look at what was going on in on the continent at the same time, that hero of Christendom, Charlemagne, was doing exactly the same thing to the poor people who lived in Germany. How sophisticated a society were they, though?
Sir David Wilson
I think that they were reasonably sophisticated. We think of them as unsophisticated because they hadn't got very much literature until much later on. I mean, the literature that everybody knows from Magnus Magnusson and other people like that is in fact a literature which was written down in the medieval period, in the period when the church had come to Iceland, for example. So it has an overlay of Christian tradition, Christian philosophy behind it. I think that they were actually a reasonably sophisticated people, living a fairly marginal existence. The country was not very nice at times, but they had quite a lot of extra cash available and could get around. And of course they wanted more cash, and that's why they went out. They were traders, and then they became raiders. Not a very uncommon thing even nowadays.
Presenter
They were great travellers too of course, who are the special significance of them.
Sir David Wilson
Oh, indeed. Fantastic.
Sir David Wilson
Yes, they went to Byzantium, they went to Rome, they went to Baghdad. I think one of the most moving things I know is a small Buddha figure found in Sweden which came all the way from Afghanistan. Now whether a Viking had actually been included, I don't know, but I bet he bought it somewhere in Russia or I think uh
Presenter
You also of course, apart from going to university in Sweden, you married a native too, didn't you? And that sort of consolidated, I suppose, you know. It's almost f fatal for any young man to go to Sweden.
Sir David Wilson
Yeah.
Presenter
Then let's have perhaps a third choice of music and perhaps a memory of that part of your life.
Sir David Wilson
When I was a student in Sweden, a postgraduate student in Sweden, we used to have seminars which we all talked very seriously about things which we were interested in. And after them we used to have wine and cheese and drink fair amount and sing. And this is a very old tradition in Sweden, so I'm going to choose a Swedish piece of music by a man called Karl Michael Bellman, who lived in the 18th century, and it's called Czerlek o Bacchusk, Love and Bacchus.
Speaker 2
Akbayaemskar, utimina dogar pus venos plifemricos pacos corporal, femton or flika o folurkal, herva diverden, hilst me behagar, ak vai ayenskar, utimina dagarpus venos plefemricos pacos corporal.
Presenter
So David After Universe
Sir David Wilson
See, what what happened to your career then?
Sir David Wilson
Well, I went first of all to be an assistant to my professor in Cambridge, but I soon realised that I didn't want to stay in Cambridge for the rest of my life and decided I'd move out. And the one job I really wanted came up. It was a fairly thin time for jobs in archaeology in the middle fifties. And I got a job in the British Museum as an assistant keeper looking after the Anglo-Saxon Viking and other collections of that particular period, the period between 400 and 1100, if you like.
Presenter
But at that moment in time do you ever foresee the point where one day you might become director of this great institution?
Sir David Wilson
No, I always thought I'd get out, which I did later on, and I didn't think I'd ever go back. I was of course enormously ambitious. I think everybody is at that age. I was very interested in what I was doing, and um I was very much more interested in what I thought was the quiet life of the university Don. So I set myself, you know, ten years to get out of the BM and back into a a university.
Presenter
Was it at this time that you founded the Society for Medieval Archaeology?
Sir David Wilson
Yes, three of us founded a society in, I think it was 1956 or 1957, which was a very bold thing to do. We published a journal of 200 odd pages, beautifully printed and everything else, on a capital of 250 pounds. And this is now the leading society in the world for this particular type of archaeology. What one ought to realize is that archaeology at that particular period was really very much a prehistoric archaeology. It was the pre-Roman and Roman stuff, the stuff that Sir Walter Wheeler was interested in. It was the period, you see, of animal, vegetable, mineral, and the early television programmes on archaeology. Medieval archaeology had hardly ever been thought of. And it was only when they started to build the new buildings in the centre of bomb-damaged towns that people started to investigate these in any great depth. There were a lot of Anglo-Saxon graves and that sort of thing that had been excavated, and one that had caught my imagination, particularly before the war. I didn't actually get onto it until during the war, was the great Sutton Hoograve, which is an Anglo-Saxon king. I suppose that's one of the real influences in my career. In what sense? In that, for the first time, I realized that there was an enormous technical ability in the sixth and seventh century in England, and that there was this beautiful art being produced. An art not to our taste nowadays, but enormous technical skill.
Presenter
Do you enjoy diggs? Do you get a sense of excitement out of it?
Sir David Wilson
I always say that, you know, it's a filthy habit, I gave it up when I was young. I'm not very good at excavation. I have done a lot of excavation when I was young. I heaved a sigh of relief when I gave up, I think about 1964, my last excavation, which was strangely enough on an 18th century site. I did a porcelain factory excavation in Longton Hall, which was also fairly interesting and fairly innovative, because it was one of the very first excavations on any industrial archaeological site.
Presenter
You have described yourself as being very much more an objects man. What exactly does that mean?
Sir David Wilson
Well, it is that I don't have to dig the damn things up. Everybody sends them into me and says, What is this? No, what I really do is to look at objects in my own period and interpret them, and interpret them not just saying that this is a seventh-century brooch. I will say, you know, this is the medium in which you built a seventh-century brooch, you made a seventh-century brooch, who did it, and all that sort of thing. I became, in fact, a synthesizer. I've written books which generally are synthetic of the period in which I'm
Sir David Wilson
Studying. But of course, to do that, you have to understand the basic material. And in my case, the basic material is often things like iron knives, silver brooches, gold buckles, you name it, that type of thing. What would be the most expensive?
Presenter
sighting a thing that you've looked at.
Presenter
One recently, let's say.
Sir David Wilson
I think that professionally the most interesting thing I ever saw in my own period, a series of objects which I later published, was a very great find from St Ninian's Isle in Shetland. And it was brought into the British Museum when I was still there in my first incarnation, and I came in and saw this stuff being unpacked in the research laboratory of the British Museum.
Sir David Wilson
Dirty bits of silver coming out. And then it was all cleaned up and it became marvellous. It was exciting. It was a breakthrough in our understanding of the Scottish history of the eighth century. And now you see it in all its glory as shining silver in the National Museum in Edinburgh. And how was that discovered? It was discovered on an excavation, one of the very few treasures that was discovered on excavation. Nowadays, everybody goes round with metal detectors digging up ancient sites, some of these being done very illegally and very nastily. But this was actually found on an excavation carried out by the University of Aberdeen.
Sir David Wilson
Very, very few archaeologists ever find buried treasure.
Sir David Wilson
The
Presenter
See?
Sir David Wilson
Yeah.
Presenter
Another choice of record.
Sir David Wilson
Yeah.
Presenter
Yeah.
Sir David Wilson
Well, my next one is uh person I listen to all the time, Fat Swallow. And because I'm not a very good archaeologist, I'm choosing.
Sir David Wilson
Your feet's too big.
Speaker 2
Same
Speaker 2
Up in Harlem at a table for two.
Speaker 2
There were four of us.
Presenter
Uh
Speaker 2
Me, y'all big feet and you.
Presenter
Uh
Presenter
From your ankle up?
Speaker 2
Uh
Presenter
Yeah.
Speaker 2
Yeah.
Presenter
I'll see.
Speaker 2
Uh
Presenter
Yeah.
Speaker 2
You show us when you
Presenter
Uh
Speaker 1
Uh
Presenter
From that down there's just too much feet. Yeah, it's your feet Wait.
Presenter
Don't launch a cousin, please do please.
Presenter
Can't use you'cause your feet's too big.
Presenter
I really hate you, cause your feet's too big. Our Desert Island guest today is the Director of the British Museum, Sir David Wilson.
Presenter
So David, let's move on now to your term of academic life. You're Professor of Medieval Archaeology at London University. Do you enjoy teaching?
Presenter
Yeah.
Sir David Wilson
Yeah.
Presenter
I did for a short
Sir David Wilson
short time. I didn't at the end of my period I was beginning to get rather tired of it and realized also that I was not quite as good a teacher as I thought I was when I went in.
Sir David Wilson
So yes, I enjoy a certain type of teaching. I enjoy postgraduate teaching. I enjoy seminars. I enjoy discussions and that type of thing. Uh the formal standing up in front of an audience and lecturing I don't altogether enjoy and I believe perhaps and I'm not very good at it. It's rather a sad discovery to make in middle life that actually. But I think it's one that one has to face up to. Some people are better lecturers than others just as some people are better broadcasters than that. Yeah.
Presenter
When you applied for the job at the British Museum as its director, did you imagine you might get it? No, quite frankly.
Sir David Wilson
Frankly, I didn't. I was at that time administrator in University College in London as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and I was actually thinking of going into administration of universities either as vice-chancellor or something like that. But this was a sort of God-given job for me if I could ever get it. And I didn't think for one moment that I would get it. I marched into my interview, and there were half the peerage of England sitting with their coats off, because it was a boiling July day, on the other side of the board table in what is now my drawing room, because I live in the British Museum. And I was the only candidate who took his coat off. I think that's probably the only reason I got the job. I can't think of any other one. There were ten people interviewed those two days.
Presenter
When you took charge, did it astound you, the amount of of treasure, the amount of object that there is in the British Museum? I mean, was the stuff that you'd never imagined before existed?
Sir David Wilson
Of course, one's always discovering new things that you never imagined before. When I got there, I had a fairly good idea, because of my previous incarnation, of what went on, and I am by nature a bit of a butterfly in my mind, and I do actually tend to go and pick on things all over the place and enquire into them. I think that the department that frightened me more than anything is the one that now gives me more pleasure than any, and that is the Department of Prints and Drawings. Because I'm not an art historian, art historians do tend to be a very exclusive group of people, to say the best of it. And I was rather worried because I was succeeding a very great art historian, John Per Penissy, and he knew these collections inside out. I didn't. But it is now probably the department which gives me greatest pleasure because I have helped to build up purchasing policies and things like that with them, worked with them very closely, and I enjoy their exhibitions and I enjoy the way they think.
Presenter
How much, though, of the treasure at the British Museum, how much of it is is concealed, how much is not displayed?
Sir David Wilson
Well, a lot of it is not displayed, obviously. For example, we have two million prints. Now, you can't display those. It's not desirable that you should display those. And we have, say, a hundred and fifty thousand drawings on paper. If you displayed those, the ink would fade, paper would crumble and all that sort of thing.
Sir David Wilson
So
Sir David Wilson
Some objects, like prints and drawings, like coins and medals, are great objects in themselves, need to be looked at occasionally and need to be seen by the public. Now the public can see them. We run a a system whereby people can go in and actually say, I want to see drawings by Whistler or whatever it may be.
Speaker 1
On the
Presenter
Uh
Speaker 1
Definitely.
Sir David Wilson
or coins of the Holy Roman Empire, and they can see them.
Sir David Wilson
But the museum is partly, of course, a display place, but partly an archive, and it is the archive element which is well worthwhile stressing. Nothing annoys me more when people trying to cut you down on money usually say most of your stuff buried in the basements. Why the hell don't you get them out and put them on display or sell them? But what we actually got in the basements is very much the background material, the scholarly material, which enables us to display and I believe we do display intelligently the collections which the public see above ground, so to speak.
Sir David Wilson
Another choice of records, David. Well, the next one is one of my favourite pieces of all time from Haydn's creation, The Heavens Are Telling.
Sir David Wilson
We've come at a time.
Speaker 2
Oh, this is a good idea.
Sir David Wilson
This is
Presenter
So David, what you were discussing about the purpose of a museum before that last record seemed to me to display a sort of balance, if you like, between showmanship and scholarship. How difficult is that to maintain, to work out? Impossible.
Sir David Wilson
I don't think anybody can do it. The stresses that are put on a a museum director of a big museum nowadays are so enormous that something has to go. I'm not by nature a showman, although some of my colleagues might say that I was. I do tend to work rather hard at getting a view across to the powers that be, and there are many of those that I have to deal with.
Sir David Wilson
I also have a very big international role to play because the British Museum is probably the greatest international museum in the world. That is its great role in the world. It's a universal museum. It was founded as such. And therefore I am always being asked to go to places or to deal with problems which are international. In a way, we're a sort of mini British Council, if you like, because all my staff are travelling all the time and we have a lot to do in that sort of way. Now I am very conscious that I have been trying very hard to keep up with my academic work while I've been in the museum. I have managed to write a few books while I've been there. But I think the time is really coming when I have to sit down and think very solidly about whether I am writing the right type of stuff. And I think that the answer is probably I have come to the end of my
Sir David Wilson
Elastic on my past reading, and I now have to start to read again. So I probably won't write very much more for the next four or five years until I retire.
Presenter
What other problems do you have though as director of the British Museum? Are they are they mainly financial?
Sir David Wilson
The three ones, money, money, and money. I mean, there is no other problem at the moment. And the government is asking us to raise money. We haven't got enough money to pay our people. I have large numbers of vacancies on my staff. I think that in a period of cutback, we have managed fairly well to deal with this with the help of generosity. I mean, for example, putting on an exhibition, we have an exhibition called Money On at the moment. And that has been helped because the Nationwide Building Society have given us most of the money that goes towards it. But you can't actually run a major public institution on that sort of basis. You can't actually get men or women through private gift. You can't have a warder with
Speaker 1
Neon
Sir David Wilson
Bird's Eye Fish Fingers written on the back of his uniform. I suppose you could, and I don't mind doing it. If Bird's Eye Fish Fingers will give me that sort of money, I will certainly put it on the back of their uniform. But people don't like doing it in that sort of way. And this is the great difficulty. We are asked always to put on bigger and better shows. We are asked to open more and more of the galleries to the public. And that means staff. And staff has got to be paid for. And 85% of our general running costs are, in fact, salaries.
Presenter
Well, then how do you project the future? Because it would seem to me in the present climate you're not going to get more money.
Sir David Wilson
With a certain amount of misery, I think, I hope that the government will come to the end of what is to me an iniquitous situation of providing us with less than the award which they give to their staff. For instance, this year we have had an award for pay of about six percent across the board for civil servants, and we as an institution only get three percent allowance for that. That is a very big thing when you're employing over a thousand people.
Sir David Wilson
Let's have another choice of bread. Cool.
Presenter
Yeah.
Sir David Wilson
Well, let's not be too downhearted. How about Handel, whom I always listen to? Julus Maccabeus, see the conquering hero comes.
Speaker 2
All who wants us wine to a dead
Presenter
Sir David, still on this question of just how you go about funding your job.
Presenter
How much more difficult is life made for you by the huge inflationary market there is now in art? I mean, you were talking there about the drawings that the British Museum possesses. Now, when a great collection comes up, how much are you limited in bidding against the the great art dealers?
Presenter
Yeah
Sir David Wilson
Very much. And this is one of the big philosophical problems of museums nowadays, whether you actually go for a a drawing which will cost you half your purchase grant, say three quarters of a million pounds, or whether you don't.
Presenter
There
Sir David Wilson
We've got a very good collection of Eldmasters in this country, in public collections, and the British Museum and the Royal Collection between them will beat anywhere in Europe, even Vienna. And I think that the time has now come to say write enough.
Sir David Wilson
What has happened in the past is that all big collections have been built up on very small budgets. So what you buy is the unfashionable. You don't buy anything at the top of the market. You must look down and see where you're going in the future. And one of our more successful plans in this sort of area has been the way in which we have been purchasing objects in the last few years to fill major gaps in our collections, basically in the modern collections. We've had exhibitions, for example, of American prints, of German prints, German Expressionist prints. When we started, we have very few of these. By very careful buying, we now have
Sir David Wilson
collections which will hold up against most of the g collections in the rest of the world, and have had some very, very sensitive and extraordinarily interesting exhibitions for the price of half a Rembrandt drawing.
Presenter
But the situation doesn't get any easier for you, does it?
Sir David Wilson
No, and of course it is very difficult to go always back to the main donors of money for this type of thing and say we've got this marvellous object come up. You know, please, please help us and they say yes we'll help you this once, but you know in six months' time you're going to come along again and say this object is the most marvellous thing you've seen since sliced bread was invented. Will you help us again? And we can't. This is the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the National Art Collections Fund, all very, very generous people. But they have very, very limited budgets indeed.
Presenter
Could you give me an illustration of the discrepancy between the kind of you you're now going to a major art sale with a budget. What what would be the greatest discrepancy that you've come across between what you were prepared to pay and what actually the collection went for?
Sir David Wilson
Yeah.
Sir David Wilson
Well, I mean the one that we are always being attacked for was the Chatsworth drawing sale a few years ago when seventy drawings sold uh in the sale rooms for something like twenty million pounds. We failed to buy them at five million pounds by a private deal and because our valuers thought that they were too expensive and I am after all accountable to Parliament. So we would be buying over the top.
Sir David Wilson
And the question was: take the risk or not? Well, we took the risk, we lost. We lost all the way along the line. I don't regret that one little bit.
Sir David Wilson
But there you are. That is in one year the rise in price from five million to twenty million, and that's three hundred percent, four hundred percent of whatever it is.
Presenter
Another choice of records then.
Sir David Wilson
Well, I like very much the music of the lesser composers of the eighteenth century, and I've chosen Richter's trumpet concerto in D.
Presenter
Yeah.
Presenter
So David, we've talked about the problems you have of keeping art treasures in this country, about the pressures, financial pressure from outside. What about the reverse of that? What about the vexed question of objects in the British Museum from overseas countries that perhaps want them returned? Let's say they are gay marbles, for example.
Sir David Wilson
It's a very fair question. It's one I'm always being asked, and I think that our answer is a very simple one. We are a universal museum, as I mentioned before. We show the cultures of the whole world to the whole world. And among the treasures we've got are things which other countries would very much like to have, some of which may be even very important to those countries.
Sir David Wilson
But if you start to take one thing away from the British Museum, it's not very long before you take another thing away and send it back to another country.
Sir David Wilson
And soon you will have no British Museum. Now that would be a greater tragedy, in my view.
Sir David Wilson
than the destruction of the whole of the Parthenon.
Sir David Wilson
We are an archive of the world. We are used in that way. We display the cultures of the world to the world. And in a period of international tension, in a period when all sorts of institutions like UNESCO are beginning to get more and more narrow and more and more nationalist, I think that the time has come when we should stay ahead.
Sir David Wilson
absolutely clear for this and stick out for internationalism. I'm a great internationalist. Final choice of records, David. Well, I'm almost too frightened to mention it because it's perhaps the greatest piece of music ever written. Bach's B minor Maas, and I think perhaps the climax, the X resurrects it.
Sir David Wilson
It's okay.
Presenter
Which is famous for brilliant scene
Presenter
So David, you're now on your desert island. You've now arrived.
Presenter
Would you be able to survive, do you think?
Sir David Wilson
If I got over the boredom at the beginning, I'm quite good with my hands. I ha I couldn't do any gardening though. I couldn't get any crops going. It'd be very, very difficult that, because I'd be digging up and looking at them and seeing whether they were coming on.
Presenter
What about the one record that you keep? Supposing some dreadful thing happened to the other seven, you were left with one record, which would it be?
Sir David Wilson
I daren't keep the Bach because it's too serious. So I think it'd have to be the Haydn creation. And what about the book?
Sir David Wilson
No doubt at all about that. Pepys's diary can go back to it all the time. And the luxury object? I've never been quite sure whether this desert island's hot or cold. Could you tell me?
Presenter
We'd assume it's hot.
Sir David Wilson
Let's say it's hot, in that case a refrigerator with a lot of ice trays, because I would be able to make fruit juice, if nothing else, and before I got to alcohol, and I could then have ice in my drink.
Presenter
Let's say it's hot.
Presenter
Sir Debbie Wilson, thank you very much indeed.
Speaker 1
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Presenter asks
What fascinated you about the Vikings?
Strangely enough, it's not what you think, rape and pillage and all that sort of thing. I think it's something entirely different. And I've never thought of this before, but I think it was because they had a secret script. They had their runic alphabet, which I was trying to interpret, and I learnt the runic alphabet.
Presenter asks
How much of the treasure at the British Museum is concealed?
Well, a lot of it is not displayed, obviously. For example, we have two million prints. Now, you can't display those. ... But the museum is partly, of course, a display place, but partly an archive, and it is the archive element which is well worthwhile stressing.
Presenter asks
What about the vexed question of objects in the British Museum from overseas countries that perhaps want them returned?
We are a universal museum ... We show the cultures of the whole world to the whole world. ... But if you start to take one thing away from the British Museum, it's not very long before you take another thing away and send it back to another country. And soon you will have no British Museum. Now that would be a greater tragedy, in my view, than the destruction of the whole of the Parthenon.
“I think that they were actually a reasonably sophisticated people, living a fairly marginal existence. The country was not very nice at times, but they had quite a lot of extra cash available and could get around. And of course they wanted more cash, and that's why they went out. They were traders, and then they became raiders. Not a very uncommon thing even nowadays.”
“I always say that, you know, it's a filthy habit, I gave it up when I was young. I'm not very good at excavation.”
“I marched into my interview, and there were half the peerage of England sitting with their coats off, because it was a boiling July day, on the other side of the board table in what is now my drawing room, because I live in the British Museum. And I was the only candidate who took his coat off. I think that's probably the only reason I got the job.”
“But if you start to take one thing away from the British Museum, it's not very long before you take another thing away and send it back to another country. And soon you will have no British Museum. Now that would be a greater tragedy, in my view, than the destruction of the whole of the Parthenon.”