Hello. My name's Francesca Hillier, I'm the British Museum's archivist.
Welcome to my corner
I'm the archivist of the British Museum and I cover everything from the remains of an incendiary device
that landed on the Museum during World War II, not strictly archival but in the archive just the same,
there's a brick from the old Museum, Montague House, also archived.
There are fire buckets from when the Museum had its own fire service and police service.
There's even a pebble that allegedly achieved the greatest ever flight of such an object
that was collected by Sydney Smith, a former keeper.
So, what kind of records does the Museum have? We have everything from the very first guide book from 1778
which is so massive I don't think you'd be walking around the Museum holding it.
We have a large collection of trustees' records, which is everything from minutes
to the trustees' meetings, letters to and from the trustees, letters from the Principal Librarian or the directors
letters from disgruntled members of staff, letters from disgruntled members of the public...
There's a huge amount of detail which covers the whole history of the whole Museum
right from 1753 and it continues today, we constantly collect more and more archive material
so we have a very, very clear record of the Museum and its history.
We get around 2,000 or so inquiries every year and some of the inquiries can be quite challenging.
One example of a very tricky inquiry was I was asked ‘when did the giraffes first
come to the Museum?’ Now you'd think if you come to the Museum today
that that's not a relevant question for today's British Museum
but in the 1800s we still had the natural history collections.
In 1835 we know there were giraffes in the Museum because they are painted
on the staircase of the old Museum which was called Montagu House.
So I knew they were here by 1835 but I had no idea when they might have come to the Museum.
I realised quite quickly that in 1835, the whole of the Museum's collections were listed as antiquities
and in the Antiquities department everything is indexed under 'A' for antiquity
in no order and there are pages and pages of 'A' for antiquity.
My first reference was in 1840, I already knew they were here in 1835, but I found them in 1840.
'Standing on the landing a male and female giraffe' and this was my first clue:
They weren't called giraffes in the 1830s initially
they were called camOleopards or camelOpards, I'm not sure which.
That seems to have come from a Roman interpretation
of ‘it looked a bit like a camel but it had leopard markings’
and that was my first clue looking for a 'camelopard' rather than a giraffe
in the indexes was going to help me find them. It took a lot of searching but
eventually I found a reference to them in 1817.
The committee reference from 12 April 1817 states that Mr Joseph Banks
read a letter from Mr Burchell, late of the Cape of Good Hope now residing in Fulham,
(why that's relevant I'm not sure)
requesting that the giraffes, the skins of the animals, be given to the Museum along with the skin of an antelope.
On 19 July 1817 the trustees ordered that Mr Burchell's quadrupeds be stuffed
according to the estimate of expense and then be placed in the collection.
This is likely the first evidence that most people had ever seen an animal like that
and for most people living in Britain in the 1800s it would have been quite shocking to see
such a very strange and unusual looking animal, and the purpose of the British Museum then as in now
was to show as much of world collections as it possibly could, and something like this
it's important, it's important that the giraffes were first in the British Museum even though they came in as skin.
If you want to know more about the natural history collections
there's a blog post on the British Museum's website which relates to that subject.
Anything to do with the history of the Museum and its building is also
covered on a separate blog. If there's anything else you'd like to know about
the history of Museum or its collections please feel free to contact me.
Please also subscribe to our YouTube channel if you'd like to know more.
Do you still need to tell people, do they not just know they've got to do it now?