Left tcithe nation
Sir: Sir John Summerson is quite right (Letters, 11 August) to observe that Sir John Soane intended his house and collec- tion to become a national museum, but there is surely an important distinction to be made betweeen the 'nation' and the 'state'. Very often, as the National Trust demonstrates, the nation is best served by organisations which are independent of the state, acting within the constraints of Eng- lish law, while the state itself may not be the best guardian of what has been left to us. The state cannot always be trusted, especially today when museums can suffer from the arbitrary parsimony of govern- ments and the destructive inflexibility of bureaucracies. The present parlous condition of the Victoria and Albert Museum — until recently administered, as the Soane Museum sadly now is, by the Department of Education and Science — is proof of this.
We must all be grateful that, when the Trustees had the wisdom to choose Sir John Summerson as Curator in 1945, the Soane Museum was still independent and admin- istered under the 1833 Act, for had he been appointed under the new dispensa- tion, he would have been obliged to retire as long ago as 1969. When we think of all he has written and achieved since and what lustre he has given to the unique institution in Lincoln's Inn Fields,and when we re- member how his predecessor as Curator, A. T. Bolton, died in harness at the age of 80 having completed the final volume of the Transactions of the Wren Society, the rigid rules of the civil service seem particu- larly absurd and irrelevant to the wonder- ful peculiarity of Soane's bequest — to our nation.
Gavin Stamp I Saint Chad's Street,
Argyle Square, King's Cross, London WC1
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