THE SECOND EXTINCTION
Ross Clark finds the inhabitants of the
Natural History Museum falling prey to savage accountants
IT IS by now something of a tired cliché to compare the latterday, vulgar transforma- tions of old established institutions with the ethos of Disneyland. Unless of course, as in the case of the Natural History Museum, South Kensington, the director has just spent £30,000 on sending himself and 17 members of staff to the said Disneyland in Florida in order 'to study management techniques'. Worse, the director, a Dr Neil Chalmers, formerly of the Open Universi- ty, has just used £55,000 of the museum's scarce funds on commissioning a new logo — five broad brush-strokes in the form of a tree — from a Wally 011ins, who recently exposed his cultural base by telling an Evening Standard reporter that he feared his plans for a 'South Kensington campus' would fail to materialise because 'everyone here's too English and pissy'.
There are more extravagances I could reveal, but that will do, for the real case against Dr Chalmers concerns not rampant expenditure but the manner of his rude cuts. And of those there is an entire corporate planful. Palaeontology, the study of fossils, will be particularly badly hit. In all, 60 scientists are to be made redundant.
Dr Chalmers himself cannot be blamed for having to draw in the museum's many brittle horns: since the museum was trans- ferred from the Department of Education and Science to the Office of Arts and Libraries in 1987 there has been less government funding. However, the plan has offended the majority of the scientific staff, most of whom are involved not in the dressing up of dinosaur bones for public consumption but in the systematic classi- fication of the museum's many thousands of specimens for use in serious scientific investigation, and in conservation work aimed at salvaging many thousands of endangered species outside the place. According to the staff, Dr Chalmers has re-organised the museum's research into a small number of blue-riband projects, but has neglected the classification, or tax- onomy work. This has drawn protest from hundreds of scientists from other institu- tions who rely on the museum's collections for their work. David Attenborough met the director to complain last Friday, and the museum staff have just ensured the matter will be kicked about Parliament for years to come by soliciting the support of Tam Dalyell.
`Don't forget, fellas — we don't make the news, we only distort it.' Any manager of people would perhaps concede that it takes very little to inflame a union of miners or a chapel of pre- Wapping print workers, but at the same time I suspect it takes considerable talent to precipitate an uprising of plodding museum workers (my Sunday Times Good Careers Guide suggests they have the second lowest stress rating of any suffered by working people, a thumb-twiddling 2.8 out of ten). However, Dr Chalmers achieved just such an uprising on 23 April when he presented a copy of his 1990-95 corporate plan to each member of his unconsulted staff of 400 scientists. Of some proposals, such as the efforts to make the museum more environmentally aware, the staff approved; of others, such as the redundancy of 15 per cent of research scientists, they did not. Not all staff were present on St George's Day to receive their copies of the plan. One, Michael Day, was away in Strasbourg lecturing at an interna- tional conference on the imminent danger of extinction facing a number of species of bees and wasps. When he returned to his hotel he received a telephone call warning him that within a year his own job would be extinct.
When the consequences for other de- partments became clear the staff began to refer to the plan as 'The St George's Day Massacre', and have since clubbed together to form something called the Science Defence Committee. Last Friday they held a meeting in the lecture theatre at the museum.
As one may imagine, balding professors who have spent 30 years reconstructing dinosaur skeletons or labelling beetles according to the number of spots on their carapaces are unlikely to be the most rash or virulent campaigners. Many resembled schoolteachers. I had arranged to meet there a Dr Juliet Clutton-Brock, the sole, and now redundant, archaeozoologist em- ployed by the museum, who had told me she could be recognised by a conservative blue dress and a grey head of hair. I had to introduce myself to several such women before I found the right one.
The secretary of the Science Defence Committee, Richard Jefferies, a bespecta- cled palaeontologist with a pleasant, bumbling manner akin to that of Roy Jenkins, introduced the meeting and went on to compare the corporate plan to Stoppenbrink's starvation of Planaria alpi- na (1905), a somewhat cruel experiment in which one of the lowest of all beasts was deprived of food for nine months and allowed to shrink to a fraction of its normal size, losing its guts, most of its organs, glands and genitals along the way. 'But what always remained intact,' said Mr Jefferies, 'was the central nervous system, which in this instance is analagous to the management.' There followed applause and the kind of laughter one associates with shop talk amongst those who love their subject, as opposed to the smirk with which one imagines Wally Mins may have run to the bank after pocketing £55,000 for his contribution to the corporate logo industry.
But it seems there is worse still to come. One of Mr Jefferies' associates went on to explain that soon the museum's own ex- hibition design and production team (formed of experts well educated in the nature of old fossils and skeletons) will be disbanded and that all design will in future be contracted out to external practices, which know very little about the subject of bestial remains. The justification for this would appear to be a report that claimed contracting out would save a whacking 2 per cent of the exhibition budget. So, if the designer bones are to take over, what is to come? I can offer you a sneak preview. Last month I had the misfortune to be sent along to the museum for something called the 'Rainforest Fashion Show', organised by the Friends of the Earth in aid of various campaigns to halt the felling of Brazilian rainforests. To this purpose a catwalk was erected around the dinosaur in the main hall and prancing models in garish costumes were paraded with six inches of the poor beast's neck, illuminated by high-powered lamps and obscured by the smoke of various PR bimbos sent along to promote the event. Once the voluminous, bone-shaking rock music had been turned down the compere, a television 'personality' by the name of Helen Atkinson-Wood, revealed the true nature of the event. 'Tonight,' she said, 'is above all a great tribute to the generosity of the fashion world.' I can only hope that some natives of inner Brazil now club together and sponsor a grand William Gladstone tree-chop event in aid of saving the Natural History Museum.
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