John Clark writes: Now the Museum has confirmed the full details (including the LAARC review and the proposed privatisation of MOLA) I no longer have to feel as if I’m breaking MoL confidence by putting info on Britarch and talking to journalists!
Interesting quote from the MoL spokesman:
>a new senior curator post has been created to cover pre-history and Roman history... >The museum has not had just one curator look after these two fields of history for >more than 20 years, but the spokesman said this “was not a return to the 1980s”.
Well, actually it’s a return to the 1940s. The post-War London Museum did indeed have one curator (Jean Macdonald, a prehistorian) looking after both prehistoric and Roman (and indeed Anglo-Saxon) collections – on the other hand its Director W F Grimes was the excavator of the Temple of Mithras, and its later partner the Guildhall Museum had an eminent Romanist, Ralph Merrifield, on its staff!
And when the Museum of London came into being in 1976 it had FOUR curators to care for the prehistoric and Roman collections: a Keeper, two Senior Assistant Keepers (one for prehistory, one for Roman) and a junior curator whose official title I’ve forgotten for the moment. Clearly the official spokesman doesn’t know much about MoL’s history. Perhaps that's a part of the problem
John Clark
Something is not right. This message is just to keep things from messing up down the road