Steven Avery
Administrator
David Parker mentioned Beaverbrook Press
p. 161
Can place whole section for review
p. 161
Can place whole section for review
the 1933 reception of Sinaiticus in London - Beaverbrook Press - article by Elisabeth Kehoe
- Thread starter Steven Avery
- Start date
Steven Avery
Administrator
Elisabeth Kehoe
University of London School of Advanced Study - Institute of Historical Research, Senate House, Malet Street, London wc1e 7hu.
elisabeth.kehoe@sas.ac.uk
Unholy alliances: The British Museum and the acquisition of the Codex Sinaiticus, 1933
Journal of the History of Collections, Volume 32, Issue 1, March 2020, Pages 103–118,
https://academic.oup.com/jhc/article/32/1/103/5236559
PDF
https://watermark.silverchair.com/f...tcK8F1cyYjR8nXg-AMPfyuZp1nGNI1TdbCdtZyOH1k3VY
FOOTNOTE ON FORGERY
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Landing the fish
In August 1933 Frederic Kenyon, former director of the British Museum, eagerly encouraged his successor George Hill to buy a treasure coming to market. Kenyon, a palaeographer and biblical and classical scholar, had been informed that Maggs – the well-known London bookseller – would handle the sale by the cash-strapped Soviet Government of the Codex Sinaiticus, the oldest surviving Biblical text.1 Written in the mid-fourth century, at a time when there was not yet full agreement on which books should be included in the Bible, the selections included in this Greek text of the Old Testament, held for centuries by the monks of St Katherine’s Monastery in the Sinai, had been instrumental in directing later generations of Christian belief. Further, the manuscript had been annotated and extensively corrected by monks from the fourth to the twelfth centuries, providing critical evidence on the process by which the content, arrangement, and selection of the texts that form the Bible – and indeed frame contemporary Christian worship – had evolved over centuries.
The Codex was thus both a manuscript of historical importance, and a sacred text with immense significance for Christians and Jews. Bible history was not just about religious belief: archaeologists and historians relied on biblical texts and cultural objects to interpret – and validate – narratives of the Bible stories. As a piece of material culture, the Bible provided a primary lens through which the ancient world had been viewed and understood by schools of ‘Western Christendom’ thought. The field of ‘biblical scholarship’ gained momentum through the nineteenth century, when an increasing number of excavations of the ancient cities of Mesopotamia located in Egypt and modern-day Iraq generated substantive archaeological discoveries.
British scholars played a leading role in the field of Biblical archaeology and archaeologists such as Leonard Woolley – whose British-Museum funded2 excavations of the Sumerian city at Ur (in modern-day Iraq) from 1922 to 1934 were of seminal importance – were intent on using the Bible as a tool with which to cross-reference data.3 Digs throughout the ‘Holy Land’ during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provided scholars with large quantities of material, including cuneiform tablets and pottery, and these finds made their way to Western national cultural institutions, where ‘archaeology and museums’ were helping ‘develop national identity.’4 New schools of study were developed by archaeologists, linguists, anthropologists, historians, theologians and other specialists to decipher, understand and place into context these finds. Although the ‘Holy Land’ was a geographically small region, the ‘biblical vision of Jerusalem as the centre stage of divine history’ had been absorbed into British ‘cultural consciousness’.5
The British Museum6 was more than a collection of scientific, historical and cultural objects, books and manuscripts; it housed dozens of specialist researchers who were leaders in their fields. Teams of British Museum archaeologists, for example, led excavations to the sites of the Holy Land, returning with fine collections of manuscripts and biblical texts; the institution became a pre-eminent force in palaeography of Greek manuscripts. The appeal of the Codex was thus enormous, as the manuscript would be a perfect addition to the museum’s world-leading collection, with some of the world’s best scholars on hand to decipher and analyse the document.
The manuscripts collection had grown rapidly since its inception, with bequests and gifts of magnificent collections, including the Cracherode manuscripts in 1799 and the superb library of George III presented to the nation by George IV in 1823 – necessitating the construction of an additional building to house the collection. When the library of George II passed to the British Museum in 1757, the organization had been granted the Royal Library right to legal deposit (legislation dating from the Press Licensing Act of 1662). The addition of such a prize manuscript as the Codex to these collections would therefore be an outstanding acquisition, in line with the museum’s collecting tradition – but the economic context was most unpropitious.
The price – a massive £100,000 – was a problem, when a mere £7,000 remained in the museum’s modest acquisitions fund. Small appropriations budgets reluctantly agreed by the Treasury had been a feature of the museum’s history since its inception,7 but this was particularly unfortunate timing. Post-war instability through the nineteen-twenties had led to a global trauma in the banks and markets, culminating in the Great Depression of 1929 – and in 1931 Britain’s economy collapsed amid the Central European banking crisis. The Labour government led by Ramsay MacDonald had been ignominiously forced off the gold standard and into a controversial coalition with Conservatives and Liberals to form a National Government. Managing Britain’s relative economic decline – as evidenced by mass unemployment, stagnant exports as well as increasing competition from new and more efficient industrial rivals – was the priority for government, and expenditure was scrutinized through shades of political expediency. Paying £100,000 to a hugely unpopular Soviet regime was bound to cause controversy.
The second problem was that of provenance. The Codex had been controversially spirited away from St Katherine’s Monastery on Mt Sinai by the German scholar Constantin von Tischendorf. In 1859, he had convinced the monks to ‘lend’ him the Codex – and, loath to return it, he then ‘purchased’ the document on behalf of the Tsar in 1869 for a small sum and a few Imperial decorations.8 This issue of provenance placed the legality of any purchase of the Codex open to question9, but the Soviet Government was untroubled by such niceties, having been since the nineteen-twenties selling off Russia’s art treasures as well as valuables taken from wealthy families during the revolution. Lenin had initiated the confiscations of Russia’s privately held wealth, and the so-called bourgeois values as embodied by art treasures were publicly disparaged by the government, which extended its rhetoric to attacks on the state’s museum collections. Post 1921, the disasters of collectivization and the ferocious pace of industrialization soon left the government short of capital. Huge efforts were undertaken to raise cash, and as the value of Soviet currency decreased as a result of burgeoning state loans, the appeal of hard currency from abroad became irresistible.10 Between 1928 and 1933, under the aegis of the Commissariat of Foreign Trade, the Politburo authorized the secret sales of valuable, mainly European, art worth as much as $20 million (between £140 million and £160 million in today’s money) – most of it to a few American millionaires and to art museums in the USA.11
Since the British Museum held the nation’s most extensive collection of Greek palaeography, Hill had no hesitation in approaching his most influential Trustee, the formidable Cosmo Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury, for help. Lang was the not just the museum’s most important trustee, he was also unofficial head of the board12 and leader of the Church of England, the nation’s established church. Lang led a traditional board that included official, family and elected trustees, whose archaic structure had remained largely unchanged since the museum’s inception in 1753.13 The total number of trustees by the early twentieth century was a bulky fifty-one – and of these, a Standing Committee of twenty trustees met monthly as the executive body of the museum.
An archbishop with an unabashed appetite for associations with the nation’s élite and members of the royal family,14 Lang was in many ways the perfect candidate to champion the acquisition. Describing himself as ‘first subject of the Realm’, he had spoken of the ‘sad and great misfortune’ that should occur were he ever allow himself, ‘in spite of pressure on time, to be side-tracked into the purely ecclesiastical region’.15 Still smarting from the defeat inflicted by the House of Commons on the Church Assembly over the Revised Prayer Books of 1928 and 1929,16 he was eager to throw himself a new high-profile project – firmly believing that religion and politics should not be ‘kept separate’. A regular correspondent with government ministers and civil servants, he championed the established order,17 and approved of conservative, staid domestic virtues as espoused by the king and queen.18
The British Museum with its royal trustee, cabinet minister trustees and the Archbishop of Canterbury as head of its governing committee was the nexus in which the symbols of British tradition – Church, Parliament and Empire – met in displays of imperial prowess as exhibited by the extensive collections on view. Throughout the nineteenth century, the museum’s mission had broadened to embrace public education: legal expert Ana Vrodoljak has argued that British national collections had, by the late nineteenth century, become filled with ‘the cultural objects of colonized peoples from every corner of the globe’ – that the national museums were ‘vehicles for a distinctly imperial national identity’ and British possession of the ‘title deeds of the countries’ was a potent symbol of the empire’s ‘possession of these peoples, their territories and resources’.19
This role as a national educator permeated the institutional thinking, and Hill and Lang had no hesitation in making a direct approach to the Prime Minister, asserting that the purchase would ‘make the British Museum easily first in respect of Biblical texts’, not least since the Codex Alexandrinus20 was already at the museum, which would then, if successful, become the holder of two of the four early manuscripts of the Bible. The price would be a problem, Hill acknowledged, for the museum purchase fund had been ‘sadly depleted’.21 This was unsurprising, for the British Museum had never benefitted from any kind of financial master plan, and expensive acquisitions were relatively few. The institution had evolved from its inception as an idiosyncratic collection that reflected the tastes of its founder, the physician Sir Hans Sloane22, through years of organic and unplanned growth into a large, world class institution whose contents had been assembled with ‘scant regard for coherence of presentation or critical discourse’.23
Viewing appeal, and indeed any sort of popularity with the public had rarely, if ever, been a priority, despite the museum’s educational mission.24 These attitudes have changed over time – and certainly have not held true for many years – but the mindset within the museum during this period was firmly anchored in scholarship. Some trustees found this frustrating, as David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford (a longstanding and highly engaged trustee from 1923 to 1940) noted in his diary in 1935. At a trustee meeting with the museum’s director and senior staff, he had suggested the organization of a permanent display of the museum’s ‘Bible wealth in all its manifest branches’. To his dismay, he found the keepers ‘very hostile’ to the proposal, and Hill concluded that ‘popular as such an exhibition might be, care must be taken not to interfere with the “serious scholar”.’ Crawford lamented:
Further, there had never been an articulated coherent policy to govern the nation’s cultural institutions and nor had there been an expectation for the public to contribute to their costs other than through taxation. The fiasco of the admission fee attempt some ten years previously, in 1923, was evidence of the unpopularity of this idea (see below, note 10). The lack of a substantial purchase reserve was already a chronic problem for the museum26 - the paucity of government largesse was echoed by the stinginess of the museum’s trustees, who were not prepared to use their private means to contribute to national cultural institutions for public benefit.27 In the United States, by contrast, wealthy individuals were encouraged by tariff laws and other legislation to make art donations to public institutions through inviting vehicles to create tax savings.28 No such system existed in Britain, where there was not even a tax structure deliberately designed to protect and enhance national heritage, or the preservation of works of art.29
In continental Europe, also by contrast, acquisitions were made possible through taxpayer funds, administered by government. Following the model established by the Louvre, which in 1793 had been symbolically transformed from a private royal collection to a musée revolutionnaire – freely accessed and publicly funded - the public had a more overt stake in the nation’s collections, and the national institutions had at their disposal larger budgets systematically funded through the ministries of culture.30
Even had the trustees, as members of the cultivated and educated élite,31 been inclined to financial generosity, many were less and less able to do so, as the decline in landed revenues – a decrease already begun in the eighteen-seventies – continued through the interwar years. Cultural and social mores changed more slowly, however, and trustees of the large national cultural institutions continued to be recruited for the most part from the ranks of the social and cultural élite.32 And there is little evidence that they were prepared to shoulder more responsibility for the museum’s finances. On the contrary, Jordanna Bailkin has pointed out that as early as 1909 – when the Duke of Norfolk planned to sell his famous Holbein portrait of Christina of Milan – there were justified fears that certainly some members of Britain’s élite had selfish preoccupations when it came to art, and that in ‘terms of the protection of patrimony’, the nation had ‘no leading class’.33
Lang and Hill – who believed that that the Codex ‘would be perhaps the greatest acquisition of the Museum since the Elgin Marbles’34 – assured MacDonald that the ‘Trustees would be willing to promise that the government should be repaid by a lien upon the Grants to the Museum for purchases spread over a number of years to be arranged with the Trustees and by subscriptions from outside sources which they would endeavour to obtain’.35 By the summer of 1933, MacDonald was a weak Prime Minister, vilified by his own party (which expelled him), mistrusted by his political bedfellows – and the proposed acquisition may have been a welcome distraction. A collector himself, he responded positively, and wrote to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Neville Chamberlain, explaining that the prospective deal needed to be ‘kept very secret for the moment’ but it was ‘in every respect desirable’ that the Codex ‘should be held in this country by the British Museum’. 36
Hill, reassured by the legal opinion of trustee Lord Hansworth that no case for ownership would stand up in the British courts due to the Statute of Limitations,37 approached the few wealthy patrons he could think of for early large donations.38 Sir Charles Marston, the rich chairman of the Villiers Engineering Company, and a biblical archaeologist with many publications on the Bible was ‘very sympathetic’ but claimed that all his money was in America.39 Lord Wakefield, governing director of the oil firm C. C. Wakefield & Co. and a generous benefactor who had made a recent donation of £25,000 in 1932 to the Empire Research work of the Imperial Institute, said he could not help.40 J. Pierpont Morgan, the wealthy American banker who had previously helped the museum, and Lady Houston, another wealthy philanthropist (and suffragist) declined as well.41 The timing was, of course, unfavourable.
And the appeal to the religious community was not self-evident. One of the most important tenets of the Reformation had been the emphasis on the private relationship between man and God – a relationship that would deepen on reading one’s own bible. The British and Foreign Bible Society circulated a ‘staggering 86 million’ copies by the period 1880–1900.42 Yet although there was reverence for the Bible, this did not necessarily lead to an appreciation of the Bible as an ancient manuscript, with a value to scientists who might have scant concern for its ‘spiritual’ qualities.43 Those most likely to be persuaded of the importance of owning this expensive original would be the palaeographers, archaeologists and other scientists for whom the manuscript needed to be properly preserved and analysed.44 Hill lamented to Lang that of all his requests, only Lord Wakefield had given £1,000 and the Friends of the National Libraries £500. Targets positively disposed to the museum such as Sir Charles Marston and Sir Charles Hyde (proprietor of the Birmingham Post and other newspapers and a Knight of Justice of the Order of St John of Jerusalem) had refused to help.45
The purchase would thus require the government’s intervention, and it was a disappointment when despite MacDonald’s assurance, Treasury officials refused to promise Treasury Bills.46 J. H. Craig, Principal Assistant at the Treasury, also refused to guarantee a bank loan from a bank, pointing out that the Treasury had ‘no constitutional power to give an assurance of the sort indicated to Banks’.47 Lang, Kenyon and Hill were determined to push their case, however, and met with Chamberlain on 10 October. The chancellor softened the Treasury’s position, writing to place on record the agreements made, stating that due to the ‘fame and outstanding importance of the Manuscript and of the expert testimony which has been supplied to me of its value’, he felt ‘justified in agreeing to make such contribution from the Exchequer as will enable the Manuscript to be secured for the nation on the understanding that it can be purchased for a sum not exceeding £100,000’. He imposed some conditions: ‘every effort’ would be made to acquire the piece for as low a price as possible, and the museum trustees would contribute the balance of £7,000 from their purchase grant. Further, the trustees were to refrain as much as possible from making demands on public funds in respect of ‘other services’ at the museum.48 A public appeal would be necessary, ‘with a view to raising as large an amount as possible by voluntary subscriptions from the public’, and the museum should help with the cash flow problem, by doing their best to ‘secure from private sources a temporary advance of the cash required for the purchase so as to give ample time for the organization of, and the response to, the appeal to the public for subscriptions’.49
The standing committee was officially informed of the proposed acquisition at their meeting on 14 October, and the trustees ‘willingly accepted the conditions laid down’.50 It was not the habit of the Trustees to act quickly, however, and they merely appointed a sub-committee to manage the acquisition process.51 They were not overly concerned when Lang later had to inform the chancellor on 18 November that the trustees had failed to raise funds, having ‘made many efforts in that direction and the response was not such as to encourage us to hope that further efforts would be successful’.52 Once again, MacDonald stepped in to help by agreeing to waive the advance condition, on the understanding that the trustees would launch an appeal for subscriptions just after Christmas. Lang wrote jubilantly to Hill on 18 December to say that the welcome news brought ‘the landing of the great fish a little nearer’.53
Paying the price
MacDonald, astonishingly, went further in his efforts to secure the acquisition and misled the House of Commons on the matter. On 20 December, in response to a planted Private Notice Question posted by Lord Balniel, Conservative member for Lonsdale, Lancashire (and son of British Museum trustee Lord Crawford), he claimed that the trustees were preparing an appeal to the public to pay for the manuscript, and that the government had ‘undertaken to make a special contribution towards the purchase price, of £1 for every pound subscribed by the public’. He claimed: ‘In due course, Parliament will be asked to vote the share of the purchase price falling on the Exchequer’.54 John Tinker, Labour member for Leigh (and former a miners’ agent), was annoyed, and enquired on a point of order why the question could not have been put in the Order Paper ‘in order that we might have had the time to examine it?’55 When the fiery activist James Maxton, Independent Labour member for Bridgeton Division of Glasgow, asked whether there would be an opportunity to debate the proposed purchase before a vote, MacDonald lied to the Commons by saying yes.56 There would in fact be no such opportunity, since, unbeknown to the House, the purchase had been agreed two days previously.
MacDonald’s lack of candour was on record: he had already sent a letter to the standing committee, dated 28 December, stating that ‘authority had been given, in connexion with the purchase of Codex Sinaiticus, for the transfer of £93,000 from the Civil Contingencies Fund to the British Museum Vote.’57 When the Prime Minister was questioned on 1 February in parliament by Sir W. Davison, Conservative member for South Kensington, as to who had paid for the manuscript, he replied ‘Certainly not the Government.’58 A week later, Davison repeated his question and this time MacDonald professed that he was ‘glad to have the opportunity to correct and amplify’ his original response, which he had given ‘on the spur of the moment’. He explained that the purchase price had been taken from the ‘Purchase Fund of the British Museum’ but as only £7,000 had been available, the remaining sum ‘was temporarily advanced to it by the Treasury out of the Civil Contingencies Fund.’59
The Codex arrived in London on 26 December, Stalin having ‘personally approved its export by special decree’;60 it was taken the following day to the museum for authentication. On 28 December, a cheque for the full purchase price made out to Arcos Ltd, the Soviet Government’s trading company,61 was handed over in exchange for the authenticated manuscript, which was immediately put on display.62 It was hoped that visitors would be impressed by the manuscript and be moved to donate. Hill and Lang had considered the question of bringing in a professional fund-raiser and interviewed Stanley Pond, who had previously raised £30,000 for University College Hospital. Pond offered to raise £50,000 based on £1,000 for the costs of the appeal as well as £1,000 for him personally should he attain the target – and nothing should he fall short. Hill balked, telling Lang that ‘On general principle, I rather shrink from it.’63 Sir Herbert Samuelson had warned him against Pond, and ‘Lord Hanworth agrees that touts should be avoided.’64 (The doubts were understandable: Maundy Gregory, posing as a fundraiser, had recently been arrested for attempting to obtain money as an inducement to procuring honours.65)
MacDonald told Hill that he was ‘so glad that you have rejected the professional beggar’ – the use of whom, he felt, ‘would degrade the whole thing’.66 He had particular reason to be sensitive: soon after becoming Labour Prime Minister in 1923, MacDonald, the first Prime Minister without a private income, had made the unwise decision to accept the loan of a Daimler car and £40,000 from his old friend, Alexander Grant – chairman and chief executive of McVitie & Price biscuits, whose father had worked as a guard on the Highland Railway with MacDonald’s uncle.67
MacDonald’s passion for high culture – he collected antique furniture as well as rare books – had already caused alienation from Labour stalwarts. His decision in 1933 to so publicly champion the purchase of the Codex could only distance him further from the traditional Labour support of the working class. His appetite for acquisition had, however, been whetted by his successful campaign – along with Alexander Grant – to obtain Scottish artist Sir William Quiller Orchardson’s Voltaire for the Scottish National Gallery in 1925.68 MacDonald was so enthusiastic at the opportunity to acquire the Codex that he signed the appeal letter along with the trustees, which was circulated to the press on 21 December. This letter stressed that the Codex would ‘become one of the outstanding treasures of the nation, comparable in public appeal to such famous possessions as the Elgin Marbles, the Rosetta Stone, and the Codex Alexandrinus’. Moreover, the addition of the Codex Sinaiticus to the nation’s collections ‘would make the Museum more than ever the first Library and Museum in the World.’69
This determination to position the museum as the rightful home of the manuscript was greeted with enthusiasm by scholars and members of the museum community in Britain. The Museums Journal commented approvingly of the ‘welcome sign that, despite the manifold economic scares and distractions which surround them, our statesmen recognize that “man does not live by bread alone”’, adding that it must ‘not be forgotten’ that the museum was ‘no mere London institution but the national repository of archaeological and literary treasures’.70 To lend its support, The Times published an article by Kenyon, extolling the virtues of the Codex, explaining its ‘romantic’ origins and appeal for scholars.71
On the same day, however, the left-leaning Daily Herald (owned by the Trades Union Congress) pronounced indignantly that ‘This incredible Government’ wanted to spend £50,000 ‘for the sheer “swank” of owning a unique book’. This from a government that had exercised deep cuts in benefits, a government ‘which grudgingly watches over every penny spent in the welfare of the people’. Furthermore, the Codex was in no danger; there was ‘no question of “saving it” as it was quite safe.’ Nor was there ‘any gain in learning’ as ‘every library has faithful photostatic copies’. It was concluded that the proposed purchase was ‘the vulgarest ostentation of the vulgarest rich’.72 Battle immediately ensued, with the press divided between those who supported the purchase, such as The Times, the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail, and those who did not: Beaverbrook’s papers the Daily Express and the Sunday Express, and the Daily Herald.
Positive or negative, there was plenty of reaction. When the Observer published a positive article by H. D. Ziman, honorary secretary of the Friends of the National Libraries on 24 December,73 the Daily Mirror a few days later covered nearly the entire front page with a sensationalist story claiming that a ‘fragment of the £100,000 Bible’ was missing – a discovery made at the museum only after it had taken delivery of the manuscript.74 The Daily Mirror’s Special Correspondent declared excitedly that the Codex had had ‘a welcome worthy of a film star’, and the Daily Express reported that here had been a ‘rush to see the £100,000 Bible’ – while the Daily Mail featured a dramatic article on 28 December which headlined the question of whether ‘Infra-Ray’ (infra-red) techniques would reveal secrets, and also that 5,000 people had queued to see the manuscript.75
Lord Beaverbrook loathed MacDonald and the Labour Party and had a longstanding enmity for Stanley Baldwin, the Conservative Lord of the Council who was effectively running the country and who, it was well known, had been assured by MacDonald that the premiership would be his in a short period of time. Beaverbrook was so enraged at this forgone conclusion of Baldwin’s resumption of power that he was ‘all the more determined to bring the government down’.76 On the same day that the Times and the Daily Telegraph published the appeal letter, Beaverbrook’s Daily Express published a derisive and highly critical ‘Opinion’. After leading the column with a description of the death of a ten-year-old boy, the paper alleged: ‘this little boy had to drink dirty water because a great rich country holding the headship of a quarter of the world, does not provide its native-born citizens with clean water’. The ‘Opinion’ juxtaposed this comment with the purchase of the Codex, claiming that ‘£50,000 of public funds is expended to help the purchase (at a total cost of £100,000) of parchments of which facsimiles and other transcripts give all necessary information.’ Given the ‘niggardly economy enforced by Government policy on public servants and citizens of this country’, the acquisition was ‘a scandal’.77
The museum responded by encouraging visitors to contribute on the spot, and Hill pointed out to donor C. S. Gulbenkian, that 80 per cent of the visitors ‘drop money in the collecting box’.78 British Paramount News made a film of the Codex in the museum, including a short speech by Kenyon, who explained the origins and importance of the manuscript. The film was screened for three days in January at all cinemas showing British Paramount News.79 The British Broadcasting Corporation (bbc) included an announcement in a news bulletin, and in a scheduled a talk on the acquisition, as well as a second reference in their news bulletin of 2 January. Although Hill requested further coverage, the formidable director-general of the bbc, John Reith, explained that it would be ‘impossible for us to include an appeal in the periods devoted to the “Week’s Good Cause”; these were already booked up for many weeks ahead.’ He added that it would be ‘somewhat awkward for us to include a further talk on the subject as, apart from the News reference which you acknowledge, we provided for a special talk by Mr Desmond MacCarthy which we hoped might constitute our contribution to arousing interest and sympathy for the appeal, as well as a further reference in our News Bulletin last night – a very good one, I thought.’ He suggested that to do more would be ‘difficult for us to do without being unfair to others’.80 The corporation had a proud record of supporting charitable causes and through its broadcasts typically raised £115,000 per annum.81 There might have been personal animus in Reith’s decision; he had wished to be promoted to Chairman of the bbc in 1930, and MacDonald had given the position to someone else. Reith professed to the Lord Chancellor that he was ‘most disappointed’ and wrote in his diary that he was ‘feeling very disgusted with the pm’.82
The Morning Post donated a page free of charge,83 but the Daily Mail quoted a price of £900 for a full inside page advertisement.84 Despite the extensive coverage, however, large donations did not materialize in the first weeks and MacDonald nudged Lang with a letter on 9 January, in which he supposed that ‘preparations are being made for tapping the more wealthy people who are interested.’85 He told Lang that the Lord Mayor had agreed to organize a luncheon with ‘thirty or forty representative City men’ on condition that both MacDonald and Lang attend. This was an opportunity to be seized, he stressed, as he had ‘been warned to-day again that Beaverbrook is working up a very active agitation against the whole thing, and that if we do not clinch it now the chance may be missed.’86 Every opportunity, too, was taken within the museum itself: curator A. J. Collins wrote an article for the British Museum Quarterly, in which he extolled the sight of ‘an apparently unending stream of visitors waiting patiently to file past’ the manuscript – and reminded readers that a great sum was still required to acquire the Codex, and that every donation was needed.87
The trustees had not been of great help. Lord Hanworth, Master of the Rolls and a member of both the Standing Committee and the Codex sub-committee had been ‘very glad to add my signature when the letter goes to the Press’. He was, however, ‘sorry that it is not in my power to give a model “generous contribution” which would be an example to others!’88 Sir Arthur Evans, archaeologist and a trustee from 1914 to 1919, was ‘sorry you feel obliged to make special appeals’, and because of the ‘incidence of Supertax and Estate duties in death’, the museum would ‘have to rely to a much larger degree on the masses, & that is very difficult & requires lots of organization’. He could only offer £20, a contribution ‘not large but twice what I had originally intended to send.’89 Charles St John Hornby, director of W. H. Smith & Son publishers, who became a trustee in 1937, was ‘sorry I cannot give you a big contribution’ as he was ‘not so well off as I was, having practically retired from business and, like so many others lately’ had been ‘hard hit in this matter of Dividends’. Also, he pointed out, appeals were ‘becoming rather numerous these days’, and fell upon ‘the same very restricted class of people’.90 The wealthy 2nd Baron Walter Rothschild, a trustee since 1899 and member of the standing committee had other priorities. He regretted ‘extremely owing to ever increasing demands on my purse’, that he was ‘not in a position to subscribe toward the Codex, especially having regard to affairs in & due to Germany.’91
The museum had for many decades benefitted from the generosity and support of collectors and donors. But in this instance, Hill was discouraged by refusals: Lord Dysart, a wealthy landowner, wrote that ‘when the finances of the country are only lately removed from definite bankruptcy due in great measure to the expansion of the Civil Service since the end of a war that had drained its finances to the utmost’ he did ‘not feel justified in helping to raise a large sum for an object of the sort, however interesting historically or from a literary point of view.’92 Harry Sacher, of Marks & Spencer, was equally cool, writing: ‘In appropriate cases I should be ready to make a sympathetic response to an appeal on behalf of the National Collections. I do not, however, see anything which justifies the contemplated expenditure of £100,000 on the purchase of the Codex Sinaiticus.’93 B. Seebohm Rowntree, another rich businessman, refused to contribute.94
Lang was disappointed at the lack of generosity of the Oxford colleges, whilst acknowledging that he knew from experience ‘how reluctant Colleges are to give subscriptions outside the range of their own immediate responsibilities.’95 The Royal Family observed their habitual practice of making a small donation – preferring to lend support to such appeals by allowing their names to be used as endorsements.96 Lord Crawford, member of the standing committee, admitted in his diary on 10 February that the campaign had suffered from the negative Press: ‘Money coming in slowly – too slowly. A vast no. of tiny subscriptions, but big money hard to get. We have now got to work hard to counteract Beaverbrook’s anti Baldwin–Macdonald campaign: both of them so closely associated with the Museum that he is attacking our purchase scheme day after day.’97
It had been expected that the churches would be instrumental in funding the purchase. Annual church membership of Protestants had remained fairly steady since the turn of the century – and Roman Catholic membership was growing.98 Lang and Hill had assured Chamberlain that they would seek help from the ‘Christian Churches’,99 and were puzzled at the low amounts returned. Lang told Hill that the Bishop of Birmingham had in January ‘expressed his great surprise and thought that fifty years ago the response would be immediate and complete and that the present position showed a strange change in the mentality of the British people about the Bible.’100 Perhaps the English-language Bible resonated more persuasively with members of the public, whatever their awe at the ancient texts. Popular exhibitions held at the British Museum had celebrated the tercentenary of the authorized version of the ‘English Bible’ in 1911 and the ‘Books and manuscripts illustrating the history of the English printed Bible’ in 1925.101 In addition, insiders such as Crawford believed that the negative press and politicization of the purchase were responsible for a ‘certain nervousness on the part of Religious bodies to come forward with their modest subscriptions’.102
Beaverbrook’s papers escalated their attacks on the Codex and the museum, by all kinds of suggestions of incompetence and controversy. 103 The Express – with a huge circulation of 2 million104 – gleefully reported that the amounts collected were low and published letters from members of the public protesting the purchase.105 There were other attacks, and the Biblical scholar and trustee Montagu Rhodes James, one of the signatories of the appeal letter, was outraged, writing to Gwen MacBryde of the attack on the Codex by that ‘unspeakable Aldous Huxley’.106 James was dismayed at all the criticism: his biographer Michael Cox explained how James ‘disliked the fact that for some people the acquisition of the Codex had become a political matter: he told Eton boys in a sermon that ‘to a lamentably large extent, politics are sordid things, or at least mixed up with very sordid things’.107
The attacks exposed the powerful argument that the Codex was not a British masterpiece, being saved for the nation. The acquisitions of the Luttrell Psalter and the Bedford Book of Hours in 1929 were the only comparable purchases made by the museum in this period in terms of cost.108 The Psalter was bought from its owner for £31,500, and the Book of Hours purchased at auction for £33,000. In both cases, J. Pierpont Morgan had advanced the money, and lent the sums without interest for a year.109 Public and private subscriptions were raised during that year, with the National Art Collections Fund (nacf) contributing £7,500 toward the acquisition of the Psalter.110 Not only were these purchases funded without government intervention, they were self-evidently desirable for the British nation. The Psalter had been executed in 1340 for Sir Geoffrey Louterell of Lincolnshire and was prized for its drawings of English medieval life. The purchase of Bedford Book of Hours, written around 1414 for John, Duke of Bedford, third son of Henry IV, also represented the saving, as it were, for the nation of historical documentation of its past.
Equally damaging were rumours of the suspicion that Tischendorf had stolen the Codex. The scholar (and supporter) Canon Streeter of Queen’s College, Oxford, was concerned that the stories would affect people’s propensity to give, explaining that a friend had been ‘shown the Sinaiticus by one of the Museum Guides’, and had been ‘particularly impressed by his story that Tischendorf borrowed the ms and took it to Cairo promising to return it after making a copy, but that he only returned them the copy.’ Minns worried that it seemed ‘a pity’ that this version of events ‘should be told with an emphasis which leaves upon the mind of the ordinary visitor the notion that it is stolen property.’ He feared ‘if visitors get that notion, it will affect the amount they will put in the box’.111
Lang asked the Bishops of both Provinces, ‘to instruct their clergy to exert themselves in the cause.’112 This led in some cases to support from those with rather extreme views. A group called ‘Realities’, for example, promised funds, since the Codex included the ‘epistle of St Barnabas’, which had ‘undoubtedly been kept out of the Canon of the Scriptures by the devils, who hate that it should be known that the “Six Days” mean the 6,000 years which are coming to an end.’113 Overall, though, the bulk of the letters conserved in the British Library speak of national pride, scholarship and a concomitant sense of Christian responsibility. ‘I hope you will receive some large contributions towards the purchase of this treasure’, wrote E. Curwen, ‘but I must confess it would please me more to hear of 50,000 members of the British Empire subscribing £1 apiece, so that the purchase might be effected by the nation in a real sense.’114 A. J. Hubbard concurred, writing: ‘I shall be proud to send the little that I can afford towards the purchase of Codex Sinaiticus for the British Museum . . . The news about the Codex is the best that I have heard for years past. The British Empire will be honoured by becoming its custodian.’115 These sentiments were echoed by H. E. Proctor: ‘As a British subject, I am sure of the opinion that it was “the bounden duty” of the Trustees of the British Museum, to secure the famous ms of the Bible, for the race & language of Great Britain.’116
The attacks on the Codex continued in the House: on 12 February Sir William Davison, Conservative member for South Kensington, asked what guarantee the Government had that the £100,000 would be spent in England – to which the reply was ‘none’. Trade Unionist activist Will Thorne, Labour member for West Ham, Plaistow, asked in the same session whether the Prime Minister had ‘seen the latest information in the Press that the bible in question is a forgery?’117 MacDonald was concerned about the effects of all the negative views, as the amounts added up slowly. On 10 March, as the campaign was winding down, the trustees learned that the fund had only reached £37,632.118 Ten days later, MacDonald told Lang that he had ‘to take up a good deal of time attending lunches and doing other things to get people to subscribe to the Codex, and I would like to finish the job before turning my attention to anything else.’119 Two days later, he told the Archbishop that they ‘must get the £50,000; and then I shall have to consider about the remaining £50,000, as I still feel that the Churches ought to do much more than they have done. It may be necessary, but I really do not like to ask the Treasury for a penny for such a purpose as this.’120
On 14 April, the trustees learned that the fund had only increased by approximately £7,000 to a total of £44,590.121 Lang told MacDonald that he could not say that he was ‘disappointed by our having now secured the full £50,000 which the trustees pledged themselves to raise’, but shared the Prime Minister’s ‘doubt as to whether there is much chance of adding substantially to it’.122 At MacDonald’s insistence, though, the appeal continued ‘unofficially’ through the summer and ended in October, when the donations had ceased. In all, the public contributed through small donations over 50 per cent of the total amount of just over £53,000 raised by October.123
The cost of the Codex
MacDonald bore the brunt of political dissatisfaction at the purchase. An irate John Tinker demanded to know on 23 July whether the House would have the opportunity to discuss the Supplementary Estimate of approximately £41,000 used to buy the Codex124 (in the end, the amount contributed by the Exchequer was just under £40,000).125 A week later he angrily stated that, contrary to what had been promised, there was to be no debate, and that this was a disgrace. Further, he had seen the manuscript, and was not impressed. He was against the method by which the financing had been obtained, and the purpose to which the funds had been put: ‘Is it right at a time like the present, when there is such a call for economy and such a cry for people to be provided with the means of life, that the House of Commons should be allowed, without any public discussion at all, to grant such a sum of money for what I consider to be a useless piece of manuscript.’126
And Maxton, a militant socialist and leader of the breakaway Independent Labour Party since 1932 – with a longstanding quarrel with MacDonald – was outraged at the way the government had avoided a money vote, as promised, on the purchase. The House was not given the opportunity to express any views, and he himself had reservations about the purchase. He was particularly concerned at the ease and facility with which the money had been arranged – within a week.127 Maxton loathed such hankering by government for the ‘good old days’ of prosperity, days that in his view had been good ones for the élite, but never for the unemployed or those trapped by poverty. The highhanded decision to buy the Codex and the means of its purchase enraged him, in all its symbolism of the élitist patronage and power that was the product of an inherently unfair capitalist system.128
These concerns were given short shrift by the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, Duff Cooper, who addressed many of Tinker’s arguments about ‘hawking a religious manuscript’. He declared that the British Museum was a public institution and, most important, the principle or sentiment of refusing to buy a beautiful object rather than feed a child was absurd. The government, he proclaimed, ‘has to preserve a sense of proportion. It has to harden its heart and say that some things must be of greater importance than others.’ In a stirring conclusion – that rather accentuates a sense of missed opportunity to openly debate these issues – Cooper articulated the principle on which he felt the Codex had been acquired:
The episode undermined MacDonald’s fading career: ostracized by the Labour Party to which he had devoted his life after forming the National Government in 1931, he was irretrievably damaged by late 1932. Duff Cooper commented to his wife Diana that MacDonald had ‘just made the worst speech that I should think any Prime Minister has ever made in the House of Commons. Everyone is saying “It can’t go on”.’130 Conservatives disrespected him, and MacDonald had also lost the goodwill of much of the Labour party.131 Socialists such as Beatrice Webb were highly critical of his taste for high culture, commenting acerbically after a private meeting that he ‘was evidently absorbed in the social prestige’ of his position – and criticizing his appetite for the ‘agreeable relations he enjoyed with “the enemy’s camp”.’132
MacDonald tried to shrug off the whole business, but when the First Commissioner of Works, William Ormsby-Gore, approached him some months later to ask for government help in the acquisition of a celebrated collection of Chinese antiquities owned by the wealthy businessman George Eumorfopoulos, he replied that although the Codex experience had not been ‘so very bad’, it was an ‘experience which cannot be repeated in a hurry.’133 Chamberlain, however, sought with success to distance himself from the affair. A year later, in response to a question put by Geoffrey Mander (Liberal Member for Wolverhampton East) the Chancellor claimed that the criticism made by the Committee of Public Accounts of the action of the Treasury in advancing the sum of £93,000 for the purchase of the Codex would receive consideration, but did not ‘call for any action in this particular case’.134
It was a mixed result for the museum. On the one hand, they had the Codex. The trustees, however, were in no rush to repeat their bruising experience of public fundraising. When Gore later approached MacDonald officially, on behalf of the trustees about the Eumorfopoulos collection, he wrote: ‘Quite obviously, after the fiasco of the Codex, the Museum authorities realise that it would be quite impossible to come and ask the Government to help, nor do they think that an appeal to the public in these times would be successful.’135 Yet within the museum itself it did not take long for the acquisition to be seen a triumph, and the campaign ‘one of the most successful fund-raising tasks ever undertaken, up to then by a national museum.’136
The episode depicts some of the wider problems experienced by British national cultural institutions in the 1930s. As custodians of civil identity and national prestige, these museums and galleries were under pressure to adapt to the changing social, cultural and financial conditions within which they operated.137 The trustees of the British Museum found their role evolving from one of detached stewardship, to one where more active participation was required, including fundraising.138 There was a general sense that forfeiting a worldwide premier collector’s status was politically unacceptable, yet no debate took place on funding. This status – and desire for continued collecting and knowledge leadership – was not just predicated on objects, but on what they represented. As Susan Pearce has argued, ‘the motive behind collecting is that of display, which through its sheer impressiveness can convey legitimacy’.139 This ‘legitimacy’ was arguably unselfconscious, as clearly the museum authorities did not critically examine their desire to buy the Codex, and it was the size of the investment – and the means of getting it – that forced MacDonald, Hill, Lang and the Board to face uncomfortable and unwelcome questions.140
Lang somewhat complacently professed that they had done rather well, telling MacDonald that, under ‘all the circumstances of the situation’, he thought it ‘creditable to British people that they have subscribed as much as they have done.’ He was ‘most grateful for the sympathy and help of the Treasury’ despite personally believing ‘that it is only right that such a nation as ours should be willing to contribute out of its national funds for the acquisition of great works of literature and art’.141 One could argue that Lang was presumptuous in assuming that the Church would be a compliant vehicle and he discovered, after the initial disappointing response, that he had to work much harder within the religious community than he had planned – and even had to appeal to evangelists and religious practitioners well outside of his own ‘establishment’ constituency.
The museum strove to take the high ground by emphasizing the ‘archaeological’ interest,142 but the involvement of the government politicized the purchase. The acquisition provoked questions, too, that were not new: as early as 1833 the Radical member of parliament for Oldham, William Cobbett, had argued against funding the museum at all, declaring that the £16,000 requested from Parliament would be better spent on ‘starving weavers’. (He was particularly incensed at the £1,000 set aside for ‘cases of dead insects’).143 That there were legitimate questions to be answered explains why MacDonald was eager to rush the purchase through, avoiding scrutiny by Parliament.
The story was far from over. The long, extraordinary life of the Codex continued its multinational trajectory. Soon after its triumphant arrival in London, it became known that – possibly due to an oversight – some sections of pages of the Codex had remained behind in the Soviet Union, where they are now held at the National Library of Russia. Then, in 1975, an unexpected discovery was made in a recess of a wall at the Monastery of St Catherine on Mount Sinai. Among a large quantity of manuscript leaves were twelve complete pages of the Codex Sinaiticus, which are still held at the monastery.144 A further forty-three leaves are held by the University of Leipzig: Tischendorf was, according to his account, given the pages in 1844 as a gift from the monks on his visit to the monastery; he in turn presented them to his patron (and funder), King Frederick Augustus II of Saxony. The leaves were deposited at the University of Leipzig, under the title Codex Friderico-Augustanus. These fragments were published in 1846, and remain in Leipzig.
There are thus four holders of the Codex and in March 2005 a partnership agreement was drawn up between the four institutions, to collaborate on agreeing a satisfactory explanation of the origins and present-day holding of the manuscript leaves, and to work together – along with other groups and leading experts – on the conservation, photography, transcription and then publication of the Codex. Using hyperspectral imaging techniques, a high-quality copy of the manuscript was made, and launched online to wide acclaim in 2009.145
It is ultimately this international collaboration that has truly opened up the historical document to generations of scholars and enthusiasts worldwide. Arguments that access to the original manuscript was essential for in depth study were proved correct early on at the British Museum, when newer techniques were used to expose amendments and edits and again some eight decades later, when more advanced technology enabled further textual discoveries to be made. Scholars are still publishing their findings today, on the text, its interpretation and its context, using this online document and very high quality published copies.146
It is clearly impossible to say whether the acquisition of the Codex by the museum in 1937 was as beneficial to the institution – or indeed to the nation – as Hill, Lang and others may have believed. What is certain, however, is that the determination of all four holders of the manuscript – across four nations – to diligently conserve and share this treasure, has led to a rich and deep area of study of past centuries with, furthermore, continuing impact on present day beliefs and world views.
Footnotes
1
Lambeth Palace Library (lpl), Cosmo Lang Papers (lp), 117 ff 179–80 Hill to Lang 2 August 1933.
2
Woolley’s excavations were co-funded by the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania.
3
See D. Gange and M. Ledger-Lomas, Cities of God: The Bible and archaeology in nineteenth-century Britain (Cambridge, 2013); in particular, ‘The empire of archaeology: institutions and audiences’, pp. 18–24.
4
H. Swain, An Introduction to Museum Archaeology (Cambridge, 2007), p. 24.
5
P. Davies, ‘The ancient world’, in The Blackwell Companion to the Bible and Culture, ed. J.F.A. Sawyer (Oxford, 2012), p. 11. One consequence of this overlap of scholarship and Christian worship was a distancing of many biblical scholars from devout Christians, whose interest in the Bible remained that of reinforcing the tenets of their faith. According to J. W. Rogerson, the gap ‘between biblical scholarship as a specialized discipline and the relationship to the bible of ordinary churchgoers has led to great distress and misunderstanding. This gap (that still remains largely unbridged) provided further ammunition to those who continued to fight for the Bible as a source of scientific knowledge (including history). Only in comparatively recent times (from the late 1960s) has it been finally recognized that biblical studies belongs fundamentally to the area of moral and aesthetic concerns’. J. W. Rogerson, ‘The modern world’, in The Blackwell Companion to Bible and Culture, p. 105.
6
At this time, the British Library was an integral part of the British Museum – and indeed, the literary and manuscript collections had from the institution’s origin been a leading department. In 1972, the British Library Act was passed in Parliament and the new Library was formed the following year, comprising: the library departments of the British Museum (including the National Reference Library of Science and Invention), as well as the contents of the National Central Library, and the National Lending Library for Science and Technology.
7
See E. Kehoe, ‘The British Museum: The Cultural Politics of a National Institution, 1906–1939’, Ph.D. dissertation, University of London (2002), for a discussion of pressures on the museum’s finances, pp. 72–4, a study of the admission fee proposals, and debate on the issues of improving public access generally, pp. 153–7.
8
The balance of probability leans toward unscrupulous actions by Tischendorf, whose own extant letters suggest that he was aware of the dubious nature of the ‘acquisition’. See Tischendorf’s original material in J. Bentley, Secrets of Mt Sinai (New York, 1986). This interpretation, however, continues to be disputed by some – and most scholars are careful in their discussion: see D. C. Parker, Codex Sinaiticus: The story of the world’s oldest Bible (London, 2010), chapter 10, ‘Beyond the monastery’, pp. 151–5 and, notably, the carefully-worded history of the Codex on the International Working Group website: www.codexsinaiticus.org in the ‘History’ section (accessed most recently 24 October 2018). New data in the Russian archives has also contributed to the discussion: see A. Zakharova, ‘The history of the acquisition of the Sinai Bible by the Russian government in the context of recent findings in Russian archives’, Montfaucon. Etudes de paleographie, de codicologie et de diplomatique (Moscow and St Petersburg, 2007), pp. 209–66; translated, revised and published online, and as part of the November 2009 international exhibition Manuscripts in Modern Information Environment, held in St Petersburg. See http://nlr.ru/eng/exib/CodexSinaiticus/zah/ (accessed most recently 24 October 2018.)
9
There has been extensive debate and research into the question of the origins and subsequent ownership of the manuscript. Some scholars question whether the Codex was even produced at the monastery – and these and other discussions on origins and interpretation continue to this day. See, among others, S. McKendrick, D. Parker, A. Myshrall and C. O’Hogan, Codex Sinaiticus: New perspectives on the ancient biblical manuscript (London, 2015). This book was produced as one output of a project begun in 2005, which united the four institutions that hold parts of the Codex: The British Library (347 leaves), the National Library of Russia (parts of six leaves), St Catherine’s Monastery (at least eighteen leaves – discovered by chance in 1975) and University of Leipzig (forty-three leaves left there by Tischendorf in 1845/6). See www.codexsinaiticus.org (see note 8)
10
See E. H. Carr, The Russian Revolution from Lenin to Stalin (1917–1929) with a new introduction by R. W. Davies (Basingstoke, 2004), for an account of the nep and its consequences. See also R. Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevist Regime (New York, 1995, 1994 edn), in particular pp. 389–98, 410–23, 433–6.
11
These transactions were conducted in secret because of the legal challenges feared by both the seller and the purchasers from those émigré Russian families who claimed ownership of the pieces, and because the Politburo sought to hide the sales from the Russian population. (A further reason for discretion was on the American side: the United States government had not officially recognized the Soviet regime and did not wish to be seen trading with the enemy.) See R. C. Williams, Russian Art and American Money: 1900–1940 (Cambridge, ma, 1980). Also Treasures Into Tractors: The selling of Russia’s cultural heritage, 1918–1938, ed. A. Odom and W. R. Salmond (Washington, dc, 2009)
12
The role played by the archbishop in the governance of the British Museum has been overlooked in studies of the institution. Lang was, significantly, actively involved in other arenas: a keen participant in the House of Lords, Honorary Chaplain to the Royal Family, Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and Honorary Fellow of Magdalen and Balliol Colleges as well as a member of many committees.
13
To administer the museum, a board of trustees had been formed at the institution’s inception, in 1753; it included as official trustees eighteen high officials of church and state, as well as the president of the Royal Society, and the president of the Royal College of Physicians. Also on the board were two representatives each of the three families whose donations formed the collections (Sloane, Cotton and Harley), and fifteen further persons to be elected for life by the family and official trustees.
14
Lang had a lukewarm relationship with Edward VII, and an affectionate one with George V and Queen Mary, through which he ‘bolstered’ his strong links with the Royal Family. R. Beaken, Cosmo Lang: Archbishop in war and crisis (London, 2012), pp. 68–73.
15
Ibid., p. 61.
16
Ibid., pp. 178–81.
17
Ibid., p. 63.
18
Lang disapproved of their eldest son, the Prince of Wales, whom he later famously publicly criticized after the Abdication scandal. MP and social figure Henry ‘Chips’ Channon described Lang in 1936 as ‘the most conspicuous rat of all’. ‘Chips’: The diaries of Sir Henry Channon, ed. R. Rhodes James (London, 1999, 1967 edn), p. 101.
19
A. Vrodoljak, International Law, Museums & return of cultural objects (Cambridge, 2006), p 71. See Part One, chapter 2, ‘International Law, international exhibitions in the late nineteenth century’, pp. 46–71.
20
This fifth-century manuscript had been sent as a gift in 1628 from Cyril Lucar, Patriarch of Constantinople to Charles I, through the auspices of Sir Thomas Roe, the English Ambassador. It became part of the Royal Library, which, with its 12,000 volumes of printed books and manuscripts, was donated by King George II to the British Museum trustees in 1757. E. Miller, That Noble Cabinet (Ohio, 1974), pp. 55–7.
21
lpl/lp 117 ff 179–80 Hill to Lang, 2 August 1933.
22
See M. Caygill, The Story of the British Museum (London, 1996, 1981 edn) and Miller, op. cit. (note 20).
23
This contrasts with the Louvre and other French museums established after the Revolution. See Jean-Louis Deotte, ‘Rome, the archetypal museum, and the Louvre, the negation of division’, in Grasping the World: The idea of the museum, ed. D. Preziosi and C. Farago (Aldershot, 2004), p. 61.
24
One could even argue that popularity with the public was frowned upon, as many specialists have claimed: see for example J. C. Robinson, ‘On the Museum of Art: an address’. Scholars such as A. Coombes and others point out that the main point of display has been for the public to be exposed to, and educated about, ‘national’ collections that support the current ‘national’ economic, cultural and social values of, for example, British imperialism: A. Coombes, ‘Museums and the formation of national and cultural identities’, in Museum Studies: An anthology of contexts, ed. B. Messias Carbonell (Oxford, 2004), pp. 225–30, 231–46. See, too, other interpretations and models: J. Bailkin’s examination of gender and politics, ‘Picturing feminism, selling liberalism: the case of the disappearing Holbein’, Museum Studies: An anthology of contexts, pp. 260–72. Other approaches include a critique of power based on Foucauldian and ideological perspectives, as studied by A. Whitcomb in Re-Imagining the Museum: Beyond the mausoleum (Abingdon, 2003).
25
Crawford Diaries, 13 April 1935, vol. xlix (privately held by Lord Crawford). After a career as a Conservative politician, Crawford turned his considerable energies and expertise as an art connoisseur to the art world, and played a leading role in a number of national arts institutions.
26
British Museum Archive (bma), ce3: the Standing Committee (sc) minutes make frequent reference to denied requests for funding.
27
See C. Duncan, ‘From the princely gallery to the public art museum: the Louvre Museum and the National Gallery, London’, in Representing the Nation: a Reader – Histories, heritage and museums, ed. D. Boswell and J. Evans (London and New York, 1999) pp. 304–31.
28
Gifts of works of art were deductible from the owner’s pre-tax income in the amount of what was considered fair market value of the gift at the time of donation, regardless of what the donor had paid for it, and the donor was not taxed on capital gain. In the case of significant capital gain, calculations show that the donor was better off making the donation and deducting its higher value from his taxable revenue. See K. E. Meyer, The Art Museum: Power, money, ethics. A twentieth century fund report (New York, 1979), p. 35.
29
Attempts to tax the wealthy in Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were centred on estate duties, and rather than implement tax deductibility for gifts to the nation, the Treasury put in place a system of exemptions from tax of items of national and scientific interest, which laid the foundations for the subsequent death duty exemptions for works of art. See P. Mandler, ‘Art, death and taxes: the taxation of works of art in Britain’, Historical Research 74 no. 185 (2001), pp 271–98.
30
See Duncan, op. cit. (note 27), pp. 304–32.
31
See A. Geddes Poole, Stewards of the Nation’s Art: Contested cultural authority 1890–1939 (Toronto, 2010).
32
See D. Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (London and Basingstoke, 1992, 1990 edn) and R. McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England 1918–1951 (Oxford, 1998); pp. 1–43. As Cannadine (p. 573) has pointed out, the loss of financial dominance did not immediately translate into a loss of élite social and cultural status: after the 1880s many of these aristocrats joined the ranks of the ‘great and the good’.
33
J. Bailkin, The Culture of Property: The crisis of liberalism in modern Britain (Chicago, 2004), p. 143. See, too, the conclusion (pp. 205–213) for a discussion of how to identify and protect works of art deemed to be of ‘national interest’, as well as of the ‘institutional representation of political difference’ and differing ‘nationalist views of Britishness’ within museums (p. 208).
34
British Library, Additional Manuscripts (bl Add. ms) 68923 ff 3–6, Lang to MacDonald, 7 August 1933.
35
bl Add. ms 68923 ff 3–6, Lang to MacDonald 7 August 1933.
36
The National Archives (na), prem/5/107 9 Aug 1933 MacDonald to Chamberlain.
37
See W. Frame, ‘The British Museum purchase of Codex Sinaiticus’, in Codex Sinaiticus, op. cit. (note 9), p. 206, for more on the internal discussions about the legality of the proposed exchange. Frame, Head of Modern Archives and Manuscripts at the British Library, has written an interesting and detailed account of the purchase, based primarily on the museum’s perspective of the acquisition itself.
38
bl Add ms 68923 f 32 Lang to Hill 21 September 1933.
39
lpl/lp 117 f 197 Hill to Lang 21 September 1933.
40
lpl/lp 117 f 198 Hill to Lang 24 September 1933.
41
bl Add ms 68923 ff 37–8 Hill to Marston, (?) September 1933.
42
Gange and Ledger-Lomas, op. cit. (note 3), p. 15.
43
Sociologist P. Bourdieu has studied the implications of such ‘cultural capital’ as exemplified by an appreciation of material manifestations of high culture. See his seminal study, Distinction: A social critique of the judgment of taste, trans. R. Nice (Boston, 1984, 1979 edn), pp. 272–3.
44
See Whitcomb, op. cit. (note 24) for an explanation and discussion of the ‘iconic value’ of the original object. Aura, authenticity, an association with ritual and the lack of reproduction all reflect the importance of the original – and Whitcomb furthers these arguments (from Walter Benjamin) by pinpointing the evolution of museum practice that ‘privileges the original as more important, more precionineteenth-centuryus [sic], than a copy’ (p. 106).
45
lpl/lp 117 f 233 Hill to Lang 20 December 1933; he does not offer an explanation.
46
lpl/lp 117 f 197 Hill to Lang 21 September 1933.
47
bl Add ms 68923 f 34 Craig to Hill 22 September 1933.
48
At this time, he was referring to costs both at the British Museum at the Bloomsbury site, and the British Museum of Natural History in Kensington.
49
lpl/lp 117 ff 209-210 Chamberlain to Lang 11 October 1933.
50
lpl/lp 117 f 211 Lang to Chamberlain 14 Oct ober 1933.
51
bm ce3 sc Minutes 14 October 1933.
52
lpl/lp 117 f 224 Lang to Chamberlain 18 November 1933.
53
lpl/lp 117 f 226 Lang to Hill 18 December 1933.
54
284 House of Commons Debates (hereafter h.c. Debs.), 5s, 20 December 1933, cols 1325–6.
55
284 h.c. Debs., 5s, 20 December 1933, col. 1326.
56
284 h.c. Debs., 5s, 20 December 1933.
57
bm ce3 sc Minutes 13 January 1934.
58
285 h.c. Debs., 5s, 1 February 1934 col. 538.
59
285 h.c. Debs., 5s, 8 February 1934 col 1291.
60
P. K. Grimsted, ‘Books for tractors? Interwar dispersal and sales of Russian Imperial Palace books’, in Treasures into Tractors, op. cit. (note 11), p. 316. I agree that this excellent chapter adds significantly to the ‘very small literature on the postrevolutionary [sic] sales of confiscated art, manuscripts and religious objects’ of the pre-Soviet regime (S. N. Smith, Review, in Russian Review 69 no. 1 (2010), pp. 165–7).
61
D. Parker provides an excellent account of the transfer and arrival of the Codex to Britain in his chapter ‘Codex Sinaiticus comes to town’, in Codex Sinaiticus, op. cit. (note 9), pp. 158–60. Parker writes that he used researches by W. Frame as the principal basis for this chapter.
62
bl Add. ms 68932 f 10; Daily Mirror 28 December 1933.
63
lpl/lp 125 f 2 Hill to Lang 3 January 1934.
64
lpl/lp 125 f 7 Hill to Lang 5 January 1934.
65
T. Cullen, Maundy Gregory: Purveyor of honours (London, 1974), p. 159.
66
na, prem/5/107 MacDonald to Hill 12 January 1934.
67
Grant was trying to help MacDonald manage his health and focus on his responsibilities of state free of financial anxiety, but the gesture backfired badly when MacDonald put Grant forward for a baronetcy a short while later. Although Grant was a generous public-spirited philanthropist (donations included, among others, large gifts to found the National Library of Scotland and to support a new science campus at the University of Edinburgh), it was an embarrassing episode – which the Daily Mail uncovered – and it became a well-publicized scandal, much to MacDonald’s mortification and the anger of his Labour colleagues, who were ‘most cross’ (see G. R. Searle, Corruption in British Politics 1895–1930 (Oxford, 1987), ‘Appendix ii: Ramsay MacDonald’s Daimler’, pp. 430–32) on the debacle. The imbroglio followed the honours scandal of 1922 (where under Liberal Prime Minister David Lloyd George accusations were made that honours were exchanged for campaign contributions).
68
D. Marquand, Ramsay MacDonald: A biography (London, 1997), p. 402.
69
lpl/lp 117 f 229 Draft Appeal (?) December 1933.
70
Museums Journal 33 (1933–4), p. 382.
71
The Times 21 December 1933.
72
bl Add. ms 68932; Daily Herald 21 December 1933.
73
bl Add. ms f 5; Observer 24 December 1933.
74
bl Add. ms 68932 f 10; Daily Mirror 28 December 1933.
75
bl Add. ms ff 9–12; Daily Mirror 28 December 1933; Daily Express 28 December 1933; Daily Mail 28 December 1933.
76
S. Koss, The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain, vol. ii:The twentieth century (London, 1984), p. 536.
77
bl Add. ms 68932 f 13 Daily Express 29 December 1933.
78
bl Add. ms 68925 Hill to Gulbenkian 5 January 1934.
79
bl Add. ms 68923 f 102 Hill to Slee 4 January 1934.
80
bl Add. ms 68923 f 123 Reith to Hill 3 January 1934.
81
A. Briggs, Thebbc: The first fifty years (Oxford and New York, 1985), p. 116.
82
The Reith Diaries, ed. C. Stuart (London, 1975), p. 152.
83
bl Add. ms 68923 ff 282–3 Hill to Pickford 13 February 1934.
84
bl Add. ms 68923 f 234 Fothergill to Hill 20 January 1934.
85
lpl/lp 125 f 10 MacDonald to Lang 9 January 1934.
86
lpl/lp 125 f 14 MacDonald to Lang 15 January 1934.
87
A. J. Collins, in British Museum Quarterly 8 no. 3 (1934), pp. 89–92, at p. 89,
88
bl Add. ms 68923 f 57 Hanworth to Hill 19 December 1933.
89
bl Add. ms 68923 f 116 Evans to Hill 3 January 1933 [sic].
90
bl Add. ms 68923 f 118 Hornby to Hill 3 January 1934.
91
bl Add. ms 68923 f 129 Rothschild to Hill 5 January 1934. Rothschild was an active Zionist and worked to formulate the draft declaration for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
92
bl Add. ms 68923 f 445 Wilfrid Praeger, for Lord Dysart, to Hill 2 March 1934.
93
bl Add. ms 68923 f 161 Sacher to Hill 10 January 1934.
94
bl Add. ms 68923 f 259 Stuart to Dr Collinge, Yorkshire Museum 23 January 1934.
95
lpl/lp 125 Lang to Hill 23 January 1934.
96
bl Add. ms 68923 f 125 Ponsonby to Hill 4 January 1934.
97
Crawford Diaries, 10 February 1934 vol. xlviii (privately held by Lord Crawford).
98
‘Annual Church Membership in Britain 1900–1970’, www.brin.ac.uk/figures (most recently accessed 13 October 2018)
99
lpl/lp 117 ff 209–210 Chamberlain to Lang 11 October 1933.
100
lpl/lp 125 ff 54–5 Lang to Hill 23 January 1934.
101
Department of Printed Books and Department of Manuscripts, British Museum.
102
lpl/lp 125 ff 63–4 Crawford to Hill (copied to Lang) 29 January 1934.
103
Articles were published in the Daily Express on 2 and 3 January 1934.
104
It became, in 1934, the first daily newspaper to top 2 million in sales. O. Newman and A. Foster, The Value of a Pound: Prices and incomes in Britain 1900–1993 (Hampshire, 1995), p. 76.
105
Letters were published in the Daily Express on 2, 5, and 15 January 1934
106
King’s College, Cambridge, Montagu Rhodes James Archive, e 17/5 February 1934.
107
M. Cox, M. R. James: An informal portrait (Oxford, 1983), p. 224.
108
Other acquisitions made by the museum were for much smaller amounts, usually funded by the Appropriations Grant.
109
‘The Luttrell Psalter and the Bedford Book of Hours’, British Museum Quarterly 4 (1929–30), p. 63.
110
Art Treasures for the Nation: Fifty years of the National Art Collections Fund (London, 1953), pp. 19–38.
111
bl Add. ms 68923 f 397 Streeter to Hill 15 February 1934.
112
bm ce3 sc Minutes 10 February 1934.
113
bl Add. ms 68923 f 248 ‘Realities’ c/o Morning Post to Hill 22 January 1934.
114
bl Add. ms 68924 f 111: Letters vol. 1: Curwen to Hill 1 January 1934.
115
bl Add. ms 68924 f 14: Letters vol. 1: Hubbard to Hill 22 December 1933.
116
bl Add. ms 68924 f 131: Letters vol. 1: Proctor to Hill 30 December 1933.
117
285 h.c. Debs., 5s, 12 February 1934, col. 1584.
118
bm ce3 sc Minutes 10 Mar 1934.
119
lpl/lp 125 f 127 MacDonald to Lang 20 March 1934.
120
lpl/lp 125 f 128 MacDonald to Lang 22 March 1934.
121
bm c4 sc Minutes 14 April 1934.
122
lpl/lp 125 f 158 Lang to MacDonald 12 April 1934.
123
Cited calculations are derived from figures obtained from the bm ce3 sc Minutes: 13 January, 10 February, 10 March, 14 April, 12 May, 9 June, 14 July, 13 October 1934.
124
292 h.c. Debs., 5s. 23 July 1934 cols 1533–4.
125
na prem/107 Minutes of General Meetings of 12 May and 8 December 1934.
126
292 h.c. Debs., 5s. 31 July 1934 cols 2543–4.
127
292 h.c. Debs., 5s. 31 July 1934, cols 2545–6.
128
See G. Brown, Maxton (Edinburgh, 1986) for more on Maxton’s views of MacDonald and against capitalism and the ‘good old days’; in particular p. 253.
129
292 h.c. Debs., 5s. 31 July 1934, col. 2553.
130
J. Charmley, Duff Cooper: The authorised biography (London, 1986), p. 71.
131
By September 1933 MacDonald himself acknowledged how much the situation was taking out of him, writing after a Labour by-election meeting: ‘I am oppressed by the feeling that I am not with my own people & that those who should be with me are against me’. Marquand, op. cit. (note 68), p. 685.
132
Webb Diaries (1924–1932), pp. 117–8, cited by Marquand, op. cit. (note 68), pp. 403–4.
133
na prem5/122 MacDonald to Gore, 2 October 1934.
134
304 h.c. Debs., 5s. 26 July 1935, col. 2180.
135
na prem5/122 Gore to MacDonald 19 October 1934.
136
Miller, op. cit. (note 20), p. 332. This was the first published account of the history of museum as an institution from the ‘formation of the great founding collections’ (p. 17) to the present day [1972], written by Assistant Keeper and archivist of the Department of Printed Books.
137
See I. Karp, ‘On civil society and social identity’, Museums and Communities: The politics of public culture, ed. I. Karp, C. Mullen Kreamer, and S. D. Lane (Washington, dc, 1992), pp. 1–15.
138
See, for example, J. Conlin, The Nation’s Mantelpiece: A history of the National Gallery (London, 2006).
139
Susan Pearce, On Collecting: An investigation into collecting in the European tradition (London, 1995), p. 105.
140
There have been many discussions about the role national museums and galleries play in inculcating and reinforcing power structures within society; what is evidenced from this example of the purchase of the Codex reinforces the more nuanced understanding of the museum as ‘a complex, contradictory site’ – one that ‘is not always amenable to a reading based on a notion of power relations’. Whitcomb, op. cit. (note 24), p. 26.
141
lpl/lp 125 ff 182–3 Lang to MacDonald 9 June 1934.
142
See C. Paine, ‘Religion in London’s museums’, in Godly Things: Museums. Objects and religion, ed. C. Paine (Leicester, 2000), pp. 151–70.
143
Caygill, op. cit. (note 22), p. 25.
144
See T. C. Skeat, ‘The last chapter in the history of the Codex Sinaiticus,’ Novum Testamentum 42, fasc. 4 (2000), pp. 313–15
145
See www.codexsinaiticus.org; accessed as note 8.
146
See, for example, Z. J. Cole, ‘An unseen problem with Milne and Skeat’s dictation theory of Codex Sinaiticus’, Journal of Biblical Literature 135 no. 1 (2016), pp. 103–7.
© The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
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Unholy alliances: The British Museum and the acquisition of the Codex Sinaiticus, 1933
Journal of the History of Collections, Volume 32, Issue 1, March 2020, Pages 103–118,
https://academic.oup.com/jhc/article/32/1/103/5236559
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FOOTNOTE ON FORGERY
===========================================================
Landing the fish
In August 1933 Frederic Kenyon, former director of the British Museum, eagerly encouraged his successor George Hill to buy a treasure coming to market. Kenyon, a palaeographer and biblical and classical scholar, had been informed that Maggs – the well-known London bookseller – would handle the sale by the cash-strapped Soviet Government of the Codex Sinaiticus, the oldest surviving Biblical text.1 Written in the mid-fourth century, at a time when there was not yet full agreement on which books should be included in the Bible, the selections included in this Greek text of the Old Testament, held for centuries by the monks of St Katherine’s Monastery in the Sinai, had been instrumental in directing later generations of Christian belief. Further, the manuscript had been annotated and extensively corrected by monks from the fourth to the twelfth centuries, providing critical evidence on the process by which the content, arrangement, and selection of the texts that form the Bible – and indeed frame contemporary Christian worship – had evolved over centuries.
The Codex was thus both a manuscript of historical importance, and a sacred text with immense significance for Christians and Jews. Bible history was not just about religious belief: archaeologists and historians relied on biblical texts and cultural objects to interpret – and validate – narratives of the Bible stories. As a piece of material culture, the Bible provided a primary lens through which the ancient world had been viewed and understood by schools of ‘Western Christendom’ thought. The field of ‘biblical scholarship’ gained momentum through the nineteenth century, when an increasing number of excavations of the ancient cities of Mesopotamia located in Egypt and modern-day Iraq generated substantive archaeological discoveries.
British scholars played a leading role in the field of Biblical archaeology and archaeologists such as Leonard Woolley – whose British-Museum funded2 excavations of the Sumerian city at Ur (in modern-day Iraq) from 1922 to 1934 were of seminal importance – were intent on using the Bible as a tool with which to cross-reference data.3 Digs throughout the ‘Holy Land’ during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provided scholars with large quantities of material, including cuneiform tablets and pottery, and these finds made their way to Western national cultural institutions, where ‘archaeology and museums’ were helping ‘develop national identity.’4 New schools of study were developed by archaeologists, linguists, anthropologists, historians, theologians and other specialists to decipher, understand and place into context these finds. Although the ‘Holy Land’ was a geographically small region, the ‘biblical vision of Jerusalem as the centre stage of divine history’ had been absorbed into British ‘cultural consciousness’.5
The British Museum6 was more than a collection of scientific, historical and cultural objects, books and manuscripts; it housed dozens of specialist researchers who were leaders in their fields. Teams of British Museum archaeologists, for example, led excavations to the sites of the Holy Land, returning with fine collections of manuscripts and biblical texts; the institution became a pre-eminent force in palaeography of Greek manuscripts. The appeal of the Codex was thus enormous, as the manuscript would be a perfect addition to the museum’s world-leading collection, with some of the world’s best scholars on hand to decipher and analyse the document.
The manuscripts collection had grown rapidly since its inception, with bequests and gifts of magnificent collections, including the Cracherode manuscripts in 1799 and the superb library of George III presented to the nation by George IV in 1823 – necessitating the construction of an additional building to house the collection. When the library of George II passed to the British Museum in 1757, the organization had been granted the Royal Library right to legal deposit (legislation dating from the Press Licensing Act of 1662). The addition of such a prize manuscript as the Codex to these collections would therefore be an outstanding acquisition, in line with the museum’s collecting tradition – but the economic context was most unpropitious.
The price – a massive £100,000 – was a problem, when a mere £7,000 remained in the museum’s modest acquisitions fund. Small appropriations budgets reluctantly agreed by the Treasury had been a feature of the museum’s history since its inception,7 but this was particularly unfortunate timing. Post-war instability through the nineteen-twenties had led to a global trauma in the banks and markets, culminating in the Great Depression of 1929 – and in 1931 Britain’s economy collapsed amid the Central European banking crisis. The Labour government led by Ramsay MacDonald had been ignominiously forced off the gold standard and into a controversial coalition with Conservatives and Liberals to form a National Government. Managing Britain’s relative economic decline – as evidenced by mass unemployment, stagnant exports as well as increasing competition from new and more efficient industrial rivals – was the priority for government, and expenditure was scrutinized through shades of political expediency. Paying £100,000 to a hugely unpopular Soviet regime was bound to cause controversy.
The second problem was that of provenance. The Codex had been controversially spirited away from St Katherine’s Monastery on Mt Sinai by the German scholar Constantin von Tischendorf. In 1859, he had convinced the monks to ‘lend’ him the Codex – and, loath to return it, he then ‘purchased’ the document on behalf of the Tsar in 1869 for a small sum and a few Imperial decorations.8 This issue of provenance placed the legality of any purchase of the Codex open to question9, but the Soviet Government was untroubled by such niceties, having been since the nineteen-twenties selling off Russia’s art treasures as well as valuables taken from wealthy families during the revolution. Lenin had initiated the confiscations of Russia’s privately held wealth, and the so-called bourgeois values as embodied by art treasures were publicly disparaged by the government, which extended its rhetoric to attacks on the state’s museum collections. Post 1921, the disasters of collectivization and the ferocious pace of industrialization soon left the government short of capital. Huge efforts were undertaken to raise cash, and as the value of Soviet currency decreased as a result of burgeoning state loans, the appeal of hard currency from abroad became irresistible.10 Between 1928 and 1933, under the aegis of the Commissariat of Foreign Trade, the Politburo authorized the secret sales of valuable, mainly European, art worth as much as $20 million (between £140 million and £160 million in today’s money) – most of it to a few American millionaires and to art museums in the USA.11
Since the British Museum held the nation’s most extensive collection of Greek palaeography, Hill had no hesitation in approaching his most influential Trustee, the formidable Cosmo Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury, for help. Lang was the not just the museum’s most important trustee, he was also unofficial head of the board12 and leader of the Church of England, the nation’s established church. Lang led a traditional board that included official, family and elected trustees, whose archaic structure had remained largely unchanged since the museum’s inception in 1753.13 The total number of trustees by the early twentieth century was a bulky fifty-one – and of these, a Standing Committee of twenty trustees met monthly as the executive body of the museum.
An archbishop with an unabashed appetite for associations with the nation’s élite and members of the royal family,14 Lang was in many ways the perfect candidate to champion the acquisition. Describing himself as ‘first subject of the Realm’, he had spoken of the ‘sad and great misfortune’ that should occur were he ever allow himself, ‘in spite of pressure on time, to be side-tracked into the purely ecclesiastical region’.15 Still smarting from the defeat inflicted by the House of Commons on the Church Assembly over the Revised Prayer Books of 1928 and 1929,16 he was eager to throw himself a new high-profile project – firmly believing that religion and politics should not be ‘kept separate’. A regular correspondent with government ministers and civil servants, he championed the established order,17 and approved of conservative, staid domestic virtues as espoused by the king and queen.18
The British Museum with its royal trustee, cabinet minister trustees and the Archbishop of Canterbury as head of its governing committee was the nexus in which the symbols of British tradition – Church, Parliament and Empire – met in displays of imperial prowess as exhibited by the extensive collections on view. Throughout the nineteenth century, the museum’s mission had broadened to embrace public education: legal expert Ana Vrodoljak has argued that British national collections had, by the late nineteenth century, become filled with ‘the cultural objects of colonized peoples from every corner of the globe’ – that the national museums were ‘vehicles for a distinctly imperial national identity’ and British possession of the ‘title deeds of the countries’ was a potent symbol of the empire’s ‘possession of these peoples, their territories and resources’.19
This role as a national educator permeated the institutional thinking, and Hill and Lang had no hesitation in making a direct approach to the Prime Minister, asserting that the purchase would ‘make the British Museum easily first in respect of Biblical texts’, not least since the Codex Alexandrinus20 was already at the museum, which would then, if successful, become the holder of two of the four early manuscripts of the Bible. The price would be a problem, Hill acknowledged, for the museum purchase fund had been ‘sadly depleted’.21 This was unsurprising, for the British Museum had never benefitted from any kind of financial master plan, and expensive acquisitions were relatively few. The institution had evolved from its inception as an idiosyncratic collection that reflected the tastes of its founder, the physician Sir Hans Sloane22, through years of organic and unplanned growth into a large, world class institution whose contents had been assembled with ‘scant regard for coherence of presentation or critical discourse’.23
Viewing appeal, and indeed any sort of popularity with the public had rarely, if ever, been a priority, despite the museum’s educational mission.24 These attitudes have changed over time – and certainly have not held true for many years – but the mindset within the museum during this period was firmly anchored in scholarship. Some trustees found this frustrating, as David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford (a longstanding and highly engaged trustee from 1923 to 1940) noted in his diary in 1935. At a trustee meeting with the museum’s director and senior staff, he had suggested the organization of a permanent display of the museum’s ‘Bible wealth in all its manifest branches’. To his dismay, he found the keepers ‘very hostile’ to the proposal, and Hill concluded that ‘popular as such an exhibition might be, care must be taken not to interfere with the “serious scholar”.’ Crawford lamented:
Further, there had never been an articulated coherent policy to govern the nation’s cultural institutions and nor had there been an expectation for the public to contribute to their costs other than through taxation. The fiasco of the admission fee attempt some ten years previously, in 1923, was evidence of the unpopularity of this idea (see below, note 10). The lack of a substantial purchase reserve was already a chronic problem for the museum26 - the paucity of government largesse was echoed by the stinginess of the museum’s trustees, who were not prepared to use their private means to contribute to national cultural institutions for public benefit.27 In the United States, by contrast, wealthy individuals were encouraged by tariff laws and other legislation to make art donations to public institutions through inviting vehicles to create tax savings.28 No such system existed in Britain, where there was not even a tax structure deliberately designed to protect and enhance national heritage, or the preservation of works of art.29
In continental Europe, also by contrast, acquisitions were made possible through taxpayer funds, administered by government. Following the model established by the Louvre, which in 1793 had been symbolically transformed from a private royal collection to a musée revolutionnaire – freely accessed and publicly funded - the public had a more overt stake in the nation’s collections, and the national institutions had at their disposal larger budgets systematically funded through the ministries of culture.30
Even had the trustees, as members of the cultivated and educated élite,31 been inclined to financial generosity, many were less and less able to do so, as the decline in landed revenues – a decrease already begun in the eighteen-seventies – continued through the interwar years. Cultural and social mores changed more slowly, however, and trustees of the large national cultural institutions continued to be recruited for the most part from the ranks of the social and cultural élite.32 And there is little evidence that they were prepared to shoulder more responsibility for the museum’s finances. On the contrary, Jordanna Bailkin has pointed out that as early as 1909 – when the Duke of Norfolk planned to sell his famous Holbein portrait of Christina of Milan – there were justified fears that certainly some members of Britain’s élite had selfish preoccupations when it came to art, and that in ‘terms of the protection of patrimony’, the nation had ‘no leading class’.33
Lang and Hill – who believed that that the Codex ‘would be perhaps the greatest acquisition of the Museum since the Elgin Marbles’34 – assured MacDonald that the ‘Trustees would be willing to promise that the government should be repaid by a lien upon the Grants to the Museum for purchases spread over a number of years to be arranged with the Trustees and by subscriptions from outside sources which they would endeavour to obtain’.35 By the summer of 1933, MacDonald was a weak Prime Minister, vilified by his own party (which expelled him), mistrusted by his political bedfellows – and the proposed acquisition may have been a welcome distraction. A collector himself, he responded positively, and wrote to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Neville Chamberlain, explaining that the prospective deal needed to be ‘kept very secret for the moment’ but it was ‘in every respect desirable’ that the Codex ‘should be held in this country by the British Museum’. 36
Hill, reassured by the legal opinion of trustee Lord Hansworth that no case for ownership would stand up in the British courts due to the Statute of Limitations,37 approached the few wealthy patrons he could think of for early large donations.38 Sir Charles Marston, the rich chairman of the Villiers Engineering Company, and a biblical archaeologist with many publications on the Bible was ‘very sympathetic’ but claimed that all his money was in America.39 Lord Wakefield, governing director of the oil firm C. C. Wakefield & Co. and a generous benefactor who had made a recent donation of £25,000 in 1932 to the Empire Research work of the Imperial Institute, said he could not help.40 J. Pierpont Morgan, the wealthy American banker who had previously helped the museum, and Lady Houston, another wealthy philanthropist (and suffragist) declined as well.41 The timing was, of course, unfavourable.
And the appeal to the religious community was not self-evident. One of the most important tenets of the Reformation had been the emphasis on the private relationship between man and God – a relationship that would deepen on reading one’s own bible. The British and Foreign Bible Society circulated a ‘staggering 86 million’ copies by the period 1880–1900.42 Yet although there was reverence for the Bible, this did not necessarily lead to an appreciation of the Bible as an ancient manuscript, with a value to scientists who might have scant concern for its ‘spiritual’ qualities.43 Those most likely to be persuaded of the importance of owning this expensive original would be the palaeographers, archaeologists and other scientists for whom the manuscript needed to be properly preserved and analysed.44 Hill lamented to Lang that of all his requests, only Lord Wakefield had given £1,000 and the Friends of the National Libraries £500. Targets positively disposed to the museum such as Sir Charles Marston and Sir Charles Hyde (proprietor of the Birmingham Post and other newspapers and a Knight of Justice of the Order of St John of Jerusalem) had refused to help.45
The purchase would thus require the government’s intervention, and it was a disappointment when despite MacDonald’s assurance, Treasury officials refused to promise Treasury Bills.46 J. H. Craig, Principal Assistant at the Treasury, also refused to guarantee a bank loan from a bank, pointing out that the Treasury had ‘no constitutional power to give an assurance of the sort indicated to Banks’.47 Lang, Kenyon and Hill were determined to push their case, however, and met with Chamberlain on 10 October. The chancellor softened the Treasury’s position, writing to place on record the agreements made, stating that due to the ‘fame and outstanding importance of the Manuscript and of the expert testimony which has been supplied to me of its value’, he felt ‘justified in agreeing to make such contribution from the Exchequer as will enable the Manuscript to be secured for the nation on the understanding that it can be purchased for a sum not exceeding £100,000’. He imposed some conditions: ‘every effort’ would be made to acquire the piece for as low a price as possible, and the museum trustees would contribute the balance of £7,000 from their purchase grant. Further, the trustees were to refrain as much as possible from making demands on public funds in respect of ‘other services’ at the museum.48 A public appeal would be necessary, ‘with a view to raising as large an amount as possible by voluntary subscriptions from the public’, and the museum should help with the cash flow problem, by doing their best to ‘secure from private sources a temporary advance of the cash required for the purchase so as to give ample time for the organization of, and the response to, the appeal to the public for subscriptions’.49
The standing committee was officially informed of the proposed acquisition at their meeting on 14 October, and the trustees ‘willingly accepted the conditions laid down’.50 It was not the habit of the Trustees to act quickly, however, and they merely appointed a sub-committee to manage the acquisition process.51 They were not overly concerned when Lang later had to inform the chancellor on 18 November that the trustees had failed to raise funds, having ‘made many efforts in that direction and the response was not such as to encourage us to hope that further efforts would be successful’.52 Once again, MacDonald stepped in to help by agreeing to waive the advance condition, on the understanding that the trustees would launch an appeal for subscriptions just after Christmas. Lang wrote jubilantly to Hill on 18 December to say that the welcome news brought ‘the landing of the great fish a little nearer’.53
Paying the price
MacDonald, astonishingly, went further in his efforts to secure the acquisition and misled the House of Commons on the matter. On 20 December, in response to a planted Private Notice Question posted by Lord Balniel, Conservative member for Lonsdale, Lancashire (and son of British Museum trustee Lord Crawford), he claimed that the trustees were preparing an appeal to the public to pay for the manuscript, and that the government had ‘undertaken to make a special contribution towards the purchase price, of £1 for every pound subscribed by the public’. He claimed: ‘In due course, Parliament will be asked to vote the share of the purchase price falling on the Exchequer’.54 John Tinker, Labour member for Leigh (and former a miners’ agent), was annoyed, and enquired on a point of order why the question could not have been put in the Order Paper ‘in order that we might have had the time to examine it?’55 When the fiery activist James Maxton, Independent Labour member for Bridgeton Division of Glasgow, asked whether there would be an opportunity to debate the proposed purchase before a vote, MacDonald lied to the Commons by saying yes.56 There would in fact be no such opportunity, since, unbeknown to the House, the purchase had been agreed two days previously.
MacDonald’s lack of candour was on record: he had already sent a letter to the standing committee, dated 28 December, stating that ‘authority had been given, in connexion with the purchase of Codex Sinaiticus, for the transfer of £93,000 from the Civil Contingencies Fund to the British Museum Vote.’57 When the Prime Minister was questioned on 1 February in parliament by Sir W. Davison, Conservative member for South Kensington, as to who had paid for the manuscript, he replied ‘Certainly not the Government.’58 A week later, Davison repeated his question and this time MacDonald professed that he was ‘glad to have the opportunity to correct and amplify’ his original response, which he had given ‘on the spur of the moment’. He explained that the purchase price had been taken from the ‘Purchase Fund of the British Museum’ but as only £7,000 had been available, the remaining sum ‘was temporarily advanced to it by the Treasury out of the Civil Contingencies Fund.’59
The Codex arrived in London on 26 December, Stalin having ‘personally approved its export by special decree’;60 it was taken the following day to the museum for authentication. On 28 December, a cheque for the full purchase price made out to Arcos Ltd, the Soviet Government’s trading company,61 was handed over in exchange for the authenticated manuscript, which was immediately put on display.62 It was hoped that visitors would be impressed by the manuscript and be moved to donate. Hill and Lang had considered the question of bringing in a professional fund-raiser and interviewed Stanley Pond, who had previously raised £30,000 for University College Hospital. Pond offered to raise £50,000 based on £1,000 for the costs of the appeal as well as £1,000 for him personally should he attain the target – and nothing should he fall short. Hill balked, telling Lang that ‘On general principle, I rather shrink from it.’63 Sir Herbert Samuelson had warned him against Pond, and ‘Lord Hanworth agrees that touts should be avoided.’64 (The doubts were understandable: Maundy Gregory, posing as a fundraiser, had recently been arrested for attempting to obtain money as an inducement to procuring honours.65)
MacDonald told Hill that he was ‘so glad that you have rejected the professional beggar’ – the use of whom, he felt, ‘would degrade the whole thing’.66 He had particular reason to be sensitive: soon after becoming Labour Prime Minister in 1923, MacDonald, the first Prime Minister without a private income, had made the unwise decision to accept the loan of a Daimler car and £40,000 from his old friend, Alexander Grant – chairman and chief executive of McVitie & Price biscuits, whose father had worked as a guard on the Highland Railway with MacDonald’s uncle.67
MacDonald’s passion for high culture – he collected antique furniture as well as rare books – had already caused alienation from Labour stalwarts. His decision in 1933 to so publicly champion the purchase of the Codex could only distance him further from the traditional Labour support of the working class. His appetite for acquisition had, however, been whetted by his successful campaign – along with Alexander Grant – to obtain Scottish artist Sir William Quiller Orchardson’s Voltaire for the Scottish National Gallery in 1925.68 MacDonald was so enthusiastic at the opportunity to acquire the Codex that he signed the appeal letter along with the trustees, which was circulated to the press on 21 December. This letter stressed that the Codex would ‘become one of the outstanding treasures of the nation, comparable in public appeal to such famous possessions as the Elgin Marbles, the Rosetta Stone, and the Codex Alexandrinus’. Moreover, the addition of the Codex Sinaiticus to the nation’s collections ‘would make the Museum more than ever the first Library and Museum in the World.’69
This determination to position the museum as the rightful home of the manuscript was greeted with enthusiasm by scholars and members of the museum community in Britain. The Museums Journal commented approvingly of the ‘welcome sign that, despite the manifold economic scares and distractions which surround them, our statesmen recognize that “man does not live by bread alone”’, adding that it must ‘not be forgotten’ that the museum was ‘no mere London institution but the national repository of archaeological and literary treasures’.70 To lend its support, The Times published an article by Kenyon, extolling the virtues of the Codex, explaining its ‘romantic’ origins and appeal for scholars.71
On the same day, however, the left-leaning Daily Herald (owned by the Trades Union Congress) pronounced indignantly that ‘This incredible Government’ wanted to spend £50,000 ‘for the sheer “swank” of owning a unique book’. This from a government that had exercised deep cuts in benefits, a government ‘which grudgingly watches over every penny spent in the welfare of the people’. Furthermore, the Codex was in no danger; there was ‘no question of “saving it” as it was quite safe.’ Nor was there ‘any gain in learning’ as ‘every library has faithful photostatic copies’. It was concluded that the proposed purchase was ‘the vulgarest ostentation of the vulgarest rich’.72 Battle immediately ensued, with the press divided between those who supported the purchase, such as The Times, the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail, and those who did not: Beaverbrook’s papers the Daily Express and the Sunday Express, and the Daily Herald.
Positive or negative, there was plenty of reaction. When the Observer published a positive article by H. D. Ziman, honorary secretary of the Friends of the National Libraries on 24 December,73 the Daily Mirror a few days later covered nearly the entire front page with a sensationalist story claiming that a ‘fragment of the £100,000 Bible’ was missing – a discovery made at the museum only after it had taken delivery of the manuscript.74 The Daily Mirror’s Special Correspondent declared excitedly that the Codex had had ‘a welcome worthy of a film star’, and the Daily Express reported that here had been a ‘rush to see the £100,000 Bible’ – while the Daily Mail featured a dramatic article on 28 December which headlined the question of whether ‘Infra-Ray’ (infra-red) techniques would reveal secrets, and also that 5,000 people had queued to see the manuscript.75
Lord Beaverbrook loathed MacDonald and the Labour Party and had a longstanding enmity for Stanley Baldwin, the Conservative Lord of the Council who was effectively running the country and who, it was well known, had been assured by MacDonald that the premiership would be his in a short period of time. Beaverbrook was so enraged at this forgone conclusion of Baldwin’s resumption of power that he was ‘all the more determined to bring the government down’.76 On the same day that the Times and the Daily Telegraph published the appeal letter, Beaverbrook’s Daily Express published a derisive and highly critical ‘Opinion’. After leading the column with a description of the death of a ten-year-old boy, the paper alleged: ‘this little boy had to drink dirty water because a great rich country holding the headship of a quarter of the world, does not provide its native-born citizens with clean water’. The ‘Opinion’ juxtaposed this comment with the purchase of the Codex, claiming that ‘£50,000 of public funds is expended to help the purchase (at a total cost of £100,000) of parchments of which facsimiles and other transcripts give all necessary information.’ Given the ‘niggardly economy enforced by Government policy on public servants and citizens of this country’, the acquisition was ‘a scandal’.77
The museum responded by encouraging visitors to contribute on the spot, and Hill pointed out to donor C. S. Gulbenkian, that 80 per cent of the visitors ‘drop money in the collecting box’.78 British Paramount News made a film of the Codex in the museum, including a short speech by Kenyon, who explained the origins and importance of the manuscript. The film was screened for three days in January at all cinemas showing British Paramount News.79 The British Broadcasting Corporation (bbc) included an announcement in a news bulletin, and in a scheduled a talk on the acquisition, as well as a second reference in their news bulletin of 2 January. Although Hill requested further coverage, the formidable director-general of the bbc, John Reith, explained that it would be ‘impossible for us to include an appeal in the periods devoted to the “Week’s Good Cause”; these were already booked up for many weeks ahead.’ He added that it would be ‘somewhat awkward for us to include a further talk on the subject as, apart from the News reference which you acknowledge, we provided for a special talk by Mr Desmond MacCarthy which we hoped might constitute our contribution to arousing interest and sympathy for the appeal, as well as a further reference in our News Bulletin last night – a very good one, I thought.’ He suggested that to do more would be ‘difficult for us to do without being unfair to others’.80 The corporation had a proud record of supporting charitable causes and through its broadcasts typically raised £115,000 per annum.81 There might have been personal animus in Reith’s decision; he had wished to be promoted to Chairman of the bbc in 1930, and MacDonald had given the position to someone else. Reith professed to the Lord Chancellor that he was ‘most disappointed’ and wrote in his diary that he was ‘feeling very disgusted with the pm’.82
The Morning Post donated a page free of charge,83 but the Daily Mail quoted a price of £900 for a full inside page advertisement.84 Despite the extensive coverage, however, large donations did not materialize in the first weeks and MacDonald nudged Lang with a letter on 9 January, in which he supposed that ‘preparations are being made for tapping the more wealthy people who are interested.’85 He told Lang that the Lord Mayor had agreed to organize a luncheon with ‘thirty or forty representative City men’ on condition that both MacDonald and Lang attend. This was an opportunity to be seized, he stressed, as he had ‘been warned to-day again that Beaverbrook is working up a very active agitation against the whole thing, and that if we do not clinch it now the chance may be missed.’86 Every opportunity, too, was taken within the museum itself: curator A. J. Collins wrote an article for the British Museum Quarterly, in which he extolled the sight of ‘an apparently unending stream of visitors waiting patiently to file past’ the manuscript – and reminded readers that a great sum was still required to acquire the Codex, and that every donation was needed.87
The trustees had not been of great help. Lord Hanworth, Master of the Rolls and a member of both the Standing Committee and the Codex sub-committee had been ‘very glad to add my signature when the letter goes to the Press’. He was, however, ‘sorry that it is not in my power to give a model “generous contribution” which would be an example to others!’88 Sir Arthur Evans, archaeologist and a trustee from 1914 to 1919, was ‘sorry you feel obliged to make special appeals’, and because of the ‘incidence of Supertax and Estate duties in death’, the museum would ‘have to rely to a much larger degree on the masses, & that is very difficult & requires lots of organization’. He could only offer £20, a contribution ‘not large but twice what I had originally intended to send.’89 Charles St John Hornby, director of W. H. Smith & Son publishers, who became a trustee in 1937, was ‘sorry I cannot give you a big contribution’ as he was ‘not so well off as I was, having practically retired from business and, like so many others lately’ had been ‘hard hit in this matter of Dividends’. Also, he pointed out, appeals were ‘becoming rather numerous these days’, and fell upon ‘the same very restricted class of people’.90 The wealthy 2nd Baron Walter Rothschild, a trustee since 1899 and member of the standing committee had other priorities. He regretted ‘extremely owing to ever increasing demands on my purse’, that he was ‘not in a position to subscribe toward the Codex, especially having regard to affairs in & due to Germany.’91
The museum had for many decades benefitted from the generosity and support of collectors and donors. But in this instance, Hill was discouraged by refusals: Lord Dysart, a wealthy landowner, wrote that ‘when the finances of the country are only lately removed from definite bankruptcy due in great measure to the expansion of the Civil Service since the end of a war that had drained its finances to the utmost’ he did ‘not feel justified in helping to raise a large sum for an object of the sort, however interesting historically or from a literary point of view.’92 Harry Sacher, of Marks & Spencer, was equally cool, writing: ‘In appropriate cases I should be ready to make a sympathetic response to an appeal on behalf of the National Collections. I do not, however, see anything which justifies the contemplated expenditure of £100,000 on the purchase of the Codex Sinaiticus.’93 B. Seebohm Rowntree, another rich businessman, refused to contribute.94
Lang was disappointed at the lack of generosity of the Oxford colleges, whilst acknowledging that he knew from experience ‘how reluctant Colleges are to give subscriptions outside the range of their own immediate responsibilities.’95 The Royal Family observed their habitual practice of making a small donation – preferring to lend support to such appeals by allowing their names to be used as endorsements.96 Lord Crawford, member of the standing committee, admitted in his diary on 10 February that the campaign had suffered from the negative Press: ‘Money coming in slowly – too slowly. A vast no. of tiny subscriptions, but big money hard to get. We have now got to work hard to counteract Beaverbrook’s anti Baldwin–Macdonald campaign: both of them so closely associated with the Museum that he is attacking our purchase scheme day after day.’97
It had been expected that the churches would be instrumental in funding the purchase. Annual church membership of Protestants had remained fairly steady since the turn of the century – and Roman Catholic membership was growing.98 Lang and Hill had assured Chamberlain that they would seek help from the ‘Christian Churches’,99 and were puzzled at the low amounts returned. Lang told Hill that the Bishop of Birmingham had in January ‘expressed his great surprise and thought that fifty years ago the response would be immediate and complete and that the present position showed a strange change in the mentality of the British people about the Bible.’100 Perhaps the English-language Bible resonated more persuasively with members of the public, whatever their awe at the ancient texts. Popular exhibitions held at the British Museum had celebrated the tercentenary of the authorized version of the ‘English Bible’ in 1911 and the ‘Books and manuscripts illustrating the history of the English printed Bible’ in 1925.101 In addition, insiders such as Crawford believed that the negative press and politicization of the purchase were responsible for a ‘certain nervousness on the part of Religious bodies to come forward with their modest subscriptions’.102
Beaverbrook’s papers escalated their attacks on the Codex and the museum, by all kinds of suggestions of incompetence and controversy. 103 The Express – with a huge circulation of 2 million104 – gleefully reported that the amounts collected were low and published letters from members of the public protesting the purchase.105 There were other attacks, and the Biblical scholar and trustee Montagu Rhodes James, one of the signatories of the appeal letter, was outraged, writing to Gwen MacBryde of the attack on the Codex by that ‘unspeakable Aldous Huxley’.106 James was dismayed at all the criticism: his biographer Michael Cox explained how James ‘disliked the fact that for some people the acquisition of the Codex had become a political matter: he told Eton boys in a sermon that ‘to a lamentably large extent, politics are sordid things, or at least mixed up with very sordid things’.107
The attacks exposed the powerful argument that the Codex was not a British masterpiece, being saved for the nation. The acquisitions of the Luttrell Psalter and the Bedford Book of Hours in 1929 were the only comparable purchases made by the museum in this period in terms of cost.108 The Psalter was bought from its owner for £31,500, and the Book of Hours purchased at auction for £33,000. In both cases, J. Pierpont Morgan had advanced the money, and lent the sums without interest for a year.109 Public and private subscriptions were raised during that year, with the National Art Collections Fund (nacf) contributing £7,500 toward the acquisition of the Psalter.110 Not only were these purchases funded without government intervention, they were self-evidently desirable for the British nation. The Psalter had been executed in 1340 for Sir Geoffrey Louterell of Lincolnshire and was prized for its drawings of English medieval life. The purchase of Bedford Book of Hours, written around 1414 for John, Duke of Bedford, third son of Henry IV, also represented the saving, as it were, for the nation of historical documentation of its past.
Equally damaging were rumours of the suspicion that Tischendorf had stolen the Codex. The scholar (and supporter) Canon Streeter of Queen’s College, Oxford, was concerned that the stories would affect people’s propensity to give, explaining that a friend had been ‘shown the Sinaiticus by one of the Museum Guides’, and had been ‘particularly impressed by his story that Tischendorf borrowed the ms and took it to Cairo promising to return it after making a copy, but that he only returned them the copy.’ Minns worried that it seemed ‘a pity’ that this version of events ‘should be told with an emphasis which leaves upon the mind of the ordinary visitor the notion that it is stolen property.’ He feared ‘if visitors get that notion, it will affect the amount they will put in the box’.111
Lang asked the Bishops of both Provinces, ‘to instruct their clergy to exert themselves in the cause.’112 This led in some cases to support from those with rather extreme views. A group called ‘Realities’, for example, promised funds, since the Codex included the ‘epistle of St Barnabas’, which had ‘undoubtedly been kept out of the Canon of the Scriptures by the devils, who hate that it should be known that the “Six Days” mean the 6,000 years which are coming to an end.’113 Overall, though, the bulk of the letters conserved in the British Library speak of national pride, scholarship and a concomitant sense of Christian responsibility. ‘I hope you will receive some large contributions towards the purchase of this treasure’, wrote E. Curwen, ‘but I must confess it would please me more to hear of 50,000 members of the British Empire subscribing £1 apiece, so that the purchase might be effected by the nation in a real sense.’114 A. J. Hubbard concurred, writing: ‘I shall be proud to send the little that I can afford towards the purchase of Codex Sinaiticus for the British Museum . . . The news about the Codex is the best that I have heard for years past. The British Empire will be honoured by becoming its custodian.’115 These sentiments were echoed by H. E. Proctor: ‘As a British subject, I am sure of the opinion that it was “the bounden duty” of the Trustees of the British Museum, to secure the famous ms of the Bible, for the race & language of Great Britain.’116
The attacks on the Codex continued in the House: on 12 February Sir William Davison, Conservative member for South Kensington, asked what guarantee the Government had that the £100,000 would be spent in England – to which the reply was ‘none’. Trade Unionist activist Will Thorne, Labour member for West Ham, Plaistow, asked in the same session whether the Prime Minister had ‘seen the latest information in the Press that the bible in question is a forgery?’117 MacDonald was concerned about the effects of all the negative views, as the amounts added up slowly. On 10 March, as the campaign was winding down, the trustees learned that the fund had only reached £37,632.118 Ten days later, MacDonald told Lang that he had ‘to take up a good deal of time attending lunches and doing other things to get people to subscribe to the Codex, and I would like to finish the job before turning my attention to anything else.’119 Two days later, he told the Archbishop that they ‘must get the £50,000; and then I shall have to consider about the remaining £50,000, as I still feel that the Churches ought to do much more than they have done. It may be necessary, but I really do not like to ask the Treasury for a penny for such a purpose as this.’120
On 14 April, the trustees learned that the fund had only increased by approximately £7,000 to a total of £44,590.121 Lang told MacDonald that he could not say that he was ‘disappointed by our having now secured the full £50,000 which the trustees pledged themselves to raise’, but shared the Prime Minister’s ‘doubt as to whether there is much chance of adding substantially to it’.122 At MacDonald’s insistence, though, the appeal continued ‘unofficially’ through the summer and ended in October, when the donations had ceased. In all, the public contributed through small donations over 50 per cent of the total amount of just over £53,000 raised by October.123
The cost of the Codex
MacDonald bore the brunt of political dissatisfaction at the purchase. An irate John Tinker demanded to know on 23 July whether the House would have the opportunity to discuss the Supplementary Estimate of approximately £41,000 used to buy the Codex124 (in the end, the amount contributed by the Exchequer was just under £40,000).125 A week later he angrily stated that, contrary to what had been promised, there was to be no debate, and that this was a disgrace. Further, he had seen the manuscript, and was not impressed. He was against the method by which the financing had been obtained, and the purpose to which the funds had been put: ‘Is it right at a time like the present, when there is such a call for economy and such a cry for people to be provided with the means of life, that the House of Commons should be allowed, without any public discussion at all, to grant such a sum of money for what I consider to be a useless piece of manuscript.’126
And Maxton, a militant socialist and leader of the breakaway Independent Labour Party since 1932 – with a longstanding quarrel with MacDonald – was outraged at the way the government had avoided a money vote, as promised, on the purchase. The House was not given the opportunity to express any views, and he himself had reservations about the purchase. He was particularly concerned at the ease and facility with which the money had been arranged – within a week.127 Maxton loathed such hankering by government for the ‘good old days’ of prosperity, days that in his view had been good ones for the élite, but never for the unemployed or those trapped by poverty. The highhanded decision to buy the Codex and the means of its purchase enraged him, in all its symbolism of the élitist patronage and power that was the product of an inherently unfair capitalist system.128
These concerns were given short shrift by the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, Duff Cooper, who addressed many of Tinker’s arguments about ‘hawking a religious manuscript’. He declared that the British Museum was a public institution and, most important, the principle or sentiment of refusing to buy a beautiful object rather than feed a child was absurd. The government, he proclaimed, ‘has to preserve a sense of proportion. It has to harden its heart and say that some things must be of greater importance than others.’ In a stirring conclusion – that rather accentuates a sense of missed opportunity to openly debate these issues – Cooper articulated the principle on which he felt the Codex had been acquired:
The episode undermined MacDonald’s fading career: ostracized by the Labour Party to which he had devoted his life after forming the National Government in 1931, he was irretrievably damaged by late 1932. Duff Cooper commented to his wife Diana that MacDonald had ‘just made the worst speech that I should think any Prime Minister has ever made in the House of Commons. Everyone is saying “It can’t go on”.’130 Conservatives disrespected him, and MacDonald had also lost the goodwill of much of the Labour party.131 Socialists such as Beatrice Webb were highly critical of his taste for high culture, commenting acerbically after a private meeting that he ‘was evidently absorbed in the social prestige’ of his position – and criticizing his appetite for the ‘agreeable relations he enjoyed with “the enemy’s camp”.’132
MacDonald tried to shrug off the whole business, but when the First Commissioner of Works, William Ormsby-Gore, approached him some months later to ask for government help in the acquisition of a celebrated collection of Chinese antiquities owned by the wealthy businessman George Eumorfopoulos, he replied that although the Codex experience had not been ‘so very bad’, it was an ‘experience which cannot be repeated in a hurry.’133 Chamberlain, however, sought with success to distance himself from the affair. A year later, in response to a question put by Geoffrey Mander (Liberal Member for Wolverhampton East) the Chancellor claimed that the criticism made by the Committee of Public Accounts of the action of the Treasury in advancing the sum of £93,000 for the purchase of the Codex would receive consideration, but did not ‘call for any action in this particular case’.134
It was a mixed result for the museum. On the one hand, they had the Codex. The trustees, however, were in no rush to repeat their bruising experience of public fundraising. When Gore later approached MacDonald officially, on behalf of the trustees about the Eumorfopoulos collection, he wrote: ‘Quite obviously, after the fiasco of the Codex, the Museum authorities realise that it would be quite impossible to come and ask the Government to help, nor do they think that an appeal to the public in these times would be successful.’135 Yet within the museum itself it did not take long for the acquisition to be seen a triumph, and the campaign ‘one of the most successful fund-raising tasks ever undertaken, up to then by a national museum.’136
The episode depicts some of the wider problems experienced by British national cultural institutions in the 1930s. As custodians of civil identity and national prestige, these museums and galleries were under pressure to adapt to the changing social, cultural and financial conditions within which they operated.137 The trustees of the British Museum found their role evolving from one of detached stewardship, to one where more active participation was required, including fundraising.138 There was a general sense that forfeiting a worldwide premier collector’s status was politically unacceptable, yet no debate took place on funding. This status – and desire for continued collecting and knowledge leadership – was not just predicated on objects, but on what they represented. As Susan Pearce has argued, ‘the motive behind collecting is that of display, which through its sheer impressiveness can convey legitimacy’.139 This ‘legitimacy’ was arguably unselfconscious, as clearly the museum authorities did not critically examine their desire to buy the Codex, and it was the size of the investment – and the means of getting it – that forced MacDonald, Hill, Lang and the Board to face uncomfortable and unwelcome questions.140
Lang somewhat complacently professed that they had done rather well, telling MacDonald that, under ‘all the circumstances of the situation’, he thought it ‘creditable to British people that they have subscribed as much as they have done.’ He was ‘most grateful for the sympathy and help of the Treasury’ despite personally believing ‘that it is only right that such a nation as ours should be willing to contribute out of its national funds for the acquisition of great works of literature and art’.141 One could argue that Lang was presumptuous in assuming that the Church would be a compliant vehicle and he discovered, after the initial disappointing response, that he had to work much harder within the religious community than he had planned – and even had to appeal to evangelists and religious practitioners well outside of his own ‘establishment’ constituency.
The museum strove to take the high ground by emphasizing the ‘archaeological’ interest,142 but the involvement of the government politicized the purchase. The acquisition provoked questions, too, that were not new: as early as 1833 the Radical member of parliament for Oldham, William Cobbett, had argued against funding the museum at all, declaring that the £16,000 requested from Parliament would be better spent on ‘starving weavers’. (He was particularly incensed at the £1,000 set aside for ‘cases of dead insects’).143 That there were legitimate questions to be answered explains why MacDonald was eager to rush the purchase through, avoiding scrutiny by Parliament.
The story was far from over. The long, extraordinary life of the Codex continued its multinational trajectory. Soon after its triumphant arrival in London, it became known that – possibly due to an oversight – some sections of pages of the Codex had remained behind in the Soviet Union, where they are now held at the National Library of Russia. Then, in 1975, an unexpected discovery was made in a recess of a wall at the Monastery of St Catherine on Mount Sinai. Among a large quantity of manuscript leaves were twelve complete pages of the Codex Sinaiticus, which are still held at the monastery.144 A further forty-three leaves are held by the University of Leipzig: Tischendorf was, according to his account, given the pages in 1844 as a gift from the monks on his visit to the monastery; he in turn presented them to his patron (and funder), King Frederick Augustus II of Saxony. The leaves were deposited at the University of Leipzig, under the title Codex Friderico-Augustanus. These fragments were published in 1846, and remain in Leipzig.
There are thus four holders of the Codex and in March 2005 a partnership agreement was drawn up between the four institutions, to collaborate on agreeing a satisfactory explanation of the origins and present-day holding of the manuscript leaves, and to work together – along with other groups and leading experts – on the conservation, photography, transcription and then publication of the Codex. Using hyperspectral imaging techniques, a high-quality copy of the manuscript was made, and launched online to wide acclaim in 2009.145
It is ultimately this international collaboration that has truly opened up the historical document to generations of scholars and enthusiasts worldwide. Arguments that access to the original manuscript was essential for in depth study were proved correct early on at the British Museum, when newer techniques were used to expose amendments and edits and again some eight decades later, when more advanced technology enabled further textual discoveries to be made. Scholars are still publishing their findings today, on the text, its interpretation and its context, using this online document and very high quality published copies.146
It is clearly impossible to say whether the acquisition of the Codex by the museum in 1937 was as beneficial to the institution – or indeed to the nation – as Hill, Lang and others may have believed. What is certain, however, is that the determination of all four holders of the manuscript – across four nations – to diligently conserve and share this treasure, has led to a rich and deep area of study of past centuries with, furthermore, continuing impact on present day beliefs and world views.
Footnotes
1
Lambeth Palace Library (lpl), Cosmo Lang Papers (lp), 117 ff 179–80 Hill to Lang 2 August 1933.
2
Woolley’s excavations were co-funded by the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania.
3
See D. Gange and M. Ledger-Lomas, Cities of God: The Bible and archaeology in nineteenth-century Britain (Cambridge, 2013); in particular, ‘The empire of archaeology: institutions and audiences’, pp. 18–24.
4
H. Swain, An Introduction to Museum Archaeology (Cambridge, 2007), p. 24.
5
P. Davies, ‘The ancient world’, in The Blackwell Companion to the Bible and Culture, ed. J.F.A. Sawyer (Oxford, 2012), p. 11. One consequence of this overlap of scholarship and Christian worship was a distancing of many biblical scholars from devout Christians, whose interest in the Bible remained that of reinforcing the tenets of their faith. According to J. W. Rogerson, the gap ‘between biblical scholarship as a specialized discipline and the relationship to the bible of ordinary churchgoers has led to great distress and misunderstanding. This gap (that still remains largely unbridged) provided further ammunition to those who continued to fight for the Bible as a source of scientific knowledge (including history). Only in comparatively recent times (from the late 1960s) has it been finally recognized that biblical studies belongs fundamentally to the area of moral and aesthetic concerns’. J. W. Rogerson, ‘The modern world’, in The Blackwell Companion to Bible and Culture, p. 105.
6
At this time, the British Library was an integral part of the British Museum – and indeed, the literary and manuscript collections had from the institution’s origin been a leading department. In 1972, the British Library Act was passed in Parliament and the new Library was formed the following year, comprising: the library departments of the British Museum (including the National Reference Library of Science and Invention), as well as the contents of the National Central Library, and the National Lending Library for Science and Technology.
7
See E. Kehoe, ‘The British Museum: The Cultural Politics of a National Institution, 1906–1939’, Ph.D. dissertation, University of London (2002), for a discussion of pressures on the museum’s finances, pp. 72–4, a study of the admission fee proposals, and debate on the issues of improving public access generally, pp. 153–7.
8
The balance of probability leans toward unscrupulous actions by Tischendorf, whose own extant letters suggest that he was aware of the dubious nature of the ‘acquisition’. See Tischendorf’s original material in J. Bentley, Secrets of Mt Sinai (New York, 1986). This interpretation, however, continues to be disputed by some – and most scholars are careful in their discussion: see D. C. Parker, Codex Sinaiticus: The story of the world’s oldest Bible (London, 2010), chapter 10, ‘Beyond the monastery’, pp. 151–5 and, notably, the carefully-worded history of the Codex on the International Working Group website: www.codexsinaiticus.org in the ‘History’ section (accessed most recently 24 October 2018). New data in the Russian archives has also contributed to the discussion: see A. Zakharova, ‘The history of the acquisition of the Sinai Bible by the Russian government in the context of recent findings in Russian archives’, Montfaucon. Etudes de paleographie, de codicologie et de diplomatique (Moscow and St Petersburg, 2007), pp. 209–66; translated, revised and published online, and as part of the November 2009 international exhibition Manuscripts in Modern Information Environment, held in St Petersburg. See http://nlr.ru/eng/exib/CodexSinaiticus/zah/ (accessed most recently 24 October 2018.)
9
There has been extensive debate and research into the question of the origins and subsequent ownership of the manuscript. Some scholars question whether the Codex was even produced at the monastery – and these and other discussions on origins and interpretation continue to this day. See, among others, S. McKendrick, D. Parker, A. Myshrall and C. O’Hogan, Codex Sinaiticus: New perspectives on the ancient biblical manuscript (London, 2015). This book was produced as one output of a project begun in 2005, which united the four institutions that hold parts of the Codex: The British Library (347 leaves), the National Library of Russia (parts of six leaves), St Catherine’s Monastery (at least eighteen leaves – discovered by chance in 1975) and University of Leipzig (forty-three leaves left there by Tischendorf in 1845/6). See www.codexsinaiticus.org (see note 8)
10
See E. H. Carr, The Russian Revolution from Lenin to Stalin (1917–1929) with a new introduction by R. W. Davies (Basingstoke, 2004), for an account of the nep and its consequences. See also R. Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevist Regime (New York, 1995, 1994 edn), in particular pp. 389–98, 410–23, 433–6.
11
These transactions were conducted in secret because of the legal challenges feared by both the seller and the purchasers from those émigré Russian families who claimed ownership of the pieces, and because the Politburo sought to hide the sales from the Russian population. (A further reason for discretion was on the American side: the United States government had not officially recognized the Soviet regime and did not wish to be seen trading with the enemy.) See R. C. Williams, Russian Art and American Money: 1900–1940 (Cambridge, ma, 1980). Also Treasures Into Tractors: The selling of Russia’s cultural heritage, 1918–1938, ed. A. Odom and W. R. Salmond (Washington, dc, 2009)
12
The role played by the archbishop in the governance of the British Museum has been overlooked in studies of the institution. Lang was, significantly, actively involved in other arenas: a keen participant in the House of Lords, Honorary Chaplain to the Royal Family, Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and Honorary Fellow of Magdalen and Balliol Colleges as well as a member of many committees.
13
To administer the museum, a board of trustees had been formed at the institution’s inception, in 1753; it included as official trustees eighteen high officials of church and state, as well as the president of the Royal Society, and the president of the Royal College of Physicians. Also on the board were two representatives each of the three families whose donations formed the collections (Sloane, Cotton and Harley), and fifteen further persons to be elected for life by the family and official trustees.
14
Lang had a lukewarm relationship with Edward VII, and an affectionate one with George V and Queen Mary, through which he ‘bolstered’ his strong links with the Royal Family. R. Beaken, Cosmo Lang: Archbishop in war and crisis (London, 2012), pp. 68–73.
15
Ibid., p. 61.
16
Ibid., pp. 178–81.
17
Ibid., p. 63.
18
Lang disapproved of their eldest son, the Prince of Wales, whom he later famously publicly criticized after the Abdication scandal. MP and social figure Henry ‘Chips’ Channon described Lang in 1936 as ‘the most conspicuous rat of all’. ‘Chips’: The diaries of Sir Henry Channon, ed. R. Rhodes James (London, 1999, 1967 edn), p. 101.
19
A. Vrodoljak, International Law, Museums & return of cultural objects (Cambridge, 2006), p 71. See Part One, chapter 2, ‘International Law, international exhibitions in the late nineteenth century’, pp. 46–71.
20
This fifth-century manuscript had been sent as a gift in 1628 from Cyril Lucar, Patriarch of Constantinople to Charles I, through the auspices of Sir Thomas Roe, the English Ambassador. It became part of the Royal Library, which, with its 12,000 volumes of printed books and manuscripts, was donated by King George II to the British Museum trustees in 1757. E. Miller, That Noble Cabinet (Ohio, 1974), pp. 55–7.
21
lpl/lp 117 ff 179–80 Hill to Lang, 2 August 1933.
22
See M. Caygill, The Story of the British Museum (London, 1996, 1981 edn) and Miller, op. cit. (note 20).
23
This contrasts with the Louvre and other French museums established after the Revolution. See Jean-Louis Deotte, ‘Rome, the archetypal museum, and the Louvre, the negation of division’, in Grasping the World: The idea of the museum, ed. D. Preziosi and C. Farago (Aldershot, 2004), p. 61.
24
One could even argue that popularity with the public was frowned upon, as many specialists have claimed: see for example J. C. Robinson, ‘On the Museum of Art: an address’. Scholars such as A. Coombes and others point out that the main point of display has been for the public to be exposed to, and educated about, ‘national’ collections that support the current ‘national’ economic, cultural and social values of, for example, British imperialism: A. Coombes, ‘Museums and the formation of national and cultural identities’, in Museum Studies: An anthology of contexts, ed. B. Messias Carbonell (Oxford, 2004), pp. 225–30, 231–46. See, too, other interpretations and models: J. Bailkin’s examination of gender and politics, ‘Picturing feminism, selling liberalism: the case of the disappearing Holbein’, Museum Studies: An anthology of contexts, pp. 260–72. Other approaches include a critique of power based on Foucauldian and ideological perspectives, as studied by A. Whitcomb in Re-Imagining the Museum: Beyond the mausoleum (Abingdon, 2003).
25
Crawford Diaries, 13 April 1935, vol. xlix (privately held by Lord Crawford). After a career as a Conservative politician, Crawford turned his considerable energies and expertise as an art connoisseur to the art world, and played a leading role in a number of national arts institutions.
26
British Museum Archive (bma), ce3: the Standing Committee (sc) minutes make frequent reference to denied requests for funding.
27
See C. Duncan, ‘From the princely gallery to the public art museum: the Louvre Museum and the National Gallery, London’, in Representing the Nation: a Reader – Histories, heritage and museums, ed. D. Boswell and J. Evans (London and New York, 1999) pp. 304–31.
28
Gifts of works of art were deductible from the owner’s pre-tax income in the amount of what was considered fair market value of the gift at the time of donation, regardless of what the donor had paid for it, and the donor was not taxed on capital gain. In the case of significant capital gain, calculations show that the donor was better off making the donation and deducting its higher value from his taxable revenue. See K. E. Meyer, The Art Museum: Power, money, ethics. A twentieth century fund report (New York, 1979), p. 35.
29
Attempts to tax the wealthy in Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were centred on estate duties, and rather than implement tax deductibility for gifts to the nation, the Treasury put in place a system of exemptions from tax of items of national and scientific interest, which laid the foundations for the subsequent death duty exemptions for works of art. See P. Mandler, ‘Art, death and taxes: the taxation of works of art in Britain’, Historical Research 74 no. 185 (2001), pp 271–98.
30
See Duncan, op. cit. (note 27), pp. 304–32.
31
See A. Geddes Poole, Stewards of the Nation’s Art: Contested cultural authority 1890–1939 (Toronto, 2010).
32
See D. Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (London and Basingstoke, 1992, 1990 edn) and R. McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England 1918–1951 (Oxford, 1998); pp. 1–43. As Cannadine (p. 573) has pointed out, the loss of financial dominance did not immediately translate into a loss of élite social and cultural status: after the 1880s many of these aristocrats joined the ranks of the ‘great and the good’.
33
J. Bailkin, The Culture of Property: The crisis of liberalism in modern Britain (Chicago, 2004), p. 143. See, too, the conclusion (pp. 205–213) for a discussion of how to identify and protect works of art deemed to be of ‘national interest’, as well as of the ‘institutional representation of political difference’ and differing ‘nationalist views of Britishness’ within museums (p. 208).
34
British Library, Additional Manuscripts (bl Add. ms) 68923 ff 3–6, Lang to MacDonald, 7 August 1933.
35
bl Add. ms 68923 ff 3–6, Lang to MacDonald 7 August 1933.
36
The National Archives (na), prem/5/107 9 Aug 1933 MacDonald to Chamberlain.
37
See W. Frame, ‘The British Museum purchase of Codex Sinaiticus’, in Codex Sinaiticus, op. cit. (note 9), p. 206, for more on the internal discussions about the legality of the proposed exchange. Frame, Head of Modern Archives and Manuscripts at the British Library, has written an interesting and detailed account of the purchase, based primarily on the museum’s perspective of the acquisition itself.
38
bl Add ms 68923 f 32 Lang to Hill 21 September 1933.
39
lpl/lp 117 f 197 Hill to Lang 21 September 1933.
40
lpl/lp 117 f 198 Hill to Lang 24 September 1933.
41
bl Add ms 68923 ff 37–8 Hill to Marston, (?) September 1933.
42
Gange and Ledger-Lomas, op. cit. (note 3), p. 15.
43
Sociologist P. Bourdieu has studied the implications of such ‘cultural capital’ as exemplified by an appreciation of material manifestations of high culture. See his seminal study, Distinction: A social critique of the judgment of taste, trans. R. Nice (Boston, 1984, 1979 edn), pp. 272–3.
44
See Whitcomb, op. cit. (note 24) for an explanation and discussion of the ‘iconic value’ of the original object. Aura, authenticity, an association with ritual and the lack of reproduction all reflect the importance of the original – and Whitcomb furthers these arguments (from Walter Benjamin) by pinpointing the evolution of museum practice that ‘privileges the original as more important, more precionineteenth-centuryus [sic], than a copy’ (p. 106).
45
lpl/lp 117 f 233 Hill to Lang 20 December 1933; he does not offer an explanation.
46
lpl/lp 117 f 197 Hill to Lang 21 September 1933.
47
bl Add ms 68923 f 34 Craig to Hill 22 September 1933.
48
At this time, he was referring to costs both at the British Museum at the Bloomsbury site, and the British Museum of Natural History in Kensington.
49
lpl/lp 117 ff 209-210 Chamberlain to Lang 11 October 1933.
50
lpl/lp 117 f 211 Lang to Chamberlain 14 Oct ober 1933.
51
bm ce3 sc Minutes 14 October 1933.
52
lpl/lp 117 f 224 Lang to Chamberlain 18 November 1933.
53
lpl/lp 117 f 226 Lang to Hill 18 December 1933.
54
284 House of Commons Debates (hereafter h.c. Debs.), 5s, 20 December 1933, cols 1325–6.
55
284 h.c. Debs., 5s, 20 December 1933, col. 1326.
56
284 h.c. Debs., 5s, 20 December 1933.
57
bm ce3 sc Minutes 13 January 1934.
58
285 h.c. Debs., 5s, 1 February 1934 col. 538.
59
285 h.c. Debs., 5s, 8 February 1934 col 1291.
60
P. K. Grimsted, ‘Books for tractors? Interwar dispersal and sales of Russian Imperial Palace books’, in Treasures into Tractors, op. cit. (note 11), p. 316. I agree that this excellent chapter adds significantly to the ‘very small literature on the postrevolutionary [sic] sales of confiscated art, manuscripts and religious objects’ of the pre-Soviet regime (S. N. Smith, Review, in Russian Review 69 no. 1 (2010), pp. 165–7).
61
D. Parker provides an excellent account of the transfer and arrival of the Codex to Britain in his chapter ‘Codex Sinaiticus comes to town’, in Codex Sinaiticus, op. cit. (note 9), pp. 158–60. Parker writes that he used researches by W. Frame as the principal basis for this chapter.
62
bl Add. ms 68932 f 10; Daily Mirror 28 December 1933.
63
lpl/lp 125 f 2 Hill to Lang 3 January 1934.
64
lpl/lp 125 f 7 Hill to Lang 5 January 1934.
65
T. Cullen, Maundy Gregory: Purveyor of honours (London, 1974), p. 159.
66
na, prem/5/107 MacDonald to Hill 12 January 1934.
67
Grant was trying to help MacDonald manage his health and focus on his responsibilities of state free of financial anxiety, but the gesture backfired badly when MacDonald put Grant forward for a baronetcy a short while later. Although Grant was a generous public-spirited philanthropist (donations included, among others, large gifts to found the National Library of Scotland and to support a new science campus at the University of Edinburgh), it was an embarrassing episode – which the Daily Mail uncovered – and it became a well-publicized scandal, much to MacDonald’s mortification and the anger of his Labour colleagues, who were ‘most cross’ (see G. R. Searle, Corruption in British Politics 1895–1930 (Oxford, 1987), ‘Appendix ii: Ramsay MacDonald’s Daimler’, pp. 430–32) on the debacle. The imbroglio followed the honours scandal of 1922 (where under Liberal Prime Minister David Lloyd George accusations were made that honours were exchanged for campaign contributions).
68
D. Marquand, Ramsay MacDonald: A biography (London, 1997), p. 402.
69
lpl/lp 117 f 229 Draft Appeal (?) December 1933.
70
Museums Journal 33 (1933–4), p. 382.
71
The Times 21 December 1933.
72
bl Add. ms 68932; Daily Herald 21 December 1933.
73
bl Add. ms f 5; Observer 24 December 1933.
74
bl Add. ms 68932 f 10; Daily Mirror 28 December 1933.
75
bl Add. ms ff 9–12; Daily Mirror 28 December 1933; Daily Express 28 December 1933; Daily Mail 28 December 1933.
76
S. Koss, The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain, vol. ii:The twentieth century (London, 1984), p. 536.
77
bl Add. ms 68932 f 13 Daily Express 29 December 1933.
78
bl Add. ms 68925 Hill to Gulbenkian 5 January 1934.
79
bl Add. ms 68923 f 102 Hill to Slee 4 January 1934.
80
bl Add. ms 68923 f 123 Reith to Hill 3 January 1934.
81
A. Briggs, Thebbc: The first fifty years (Oxford and New York, 1985), p. 116.
82
The Reith Diaries, ed. C. Stuart (London, 1975), p. 152.
83
bl Add. ms 68923 ff 282–3 Hill to Pickford 13 February 1934.
84
bl Add. ms 68923 f 234 Fothergill to Hill 20 January 1934.
85
lpl/lp 125 f 10 MacDonald to Lang 9 January 1934.
86
lpl/lp 125 f 14 MacDonald to Lang 15 January 1934.
87
A. J. Collins, in British Museum Quarterly 8 no. 3 (1934), pp. 89–92, at p. 89,
88
bl Add. ms 68923 f 57 Hanworth to Hill 19 December 1933.
89
bl Add. ms 68923 f 116 Evans to Hill 3 January 1933 [sic].
90
bl Add. ms 68923 f 118 Hornby to Hill 3 January 1934.
91
bl Add. ms 68923 f 129 Rothschild to Hill 5 January 1934. Rothschild was an active Zionist and worked to formulate the draft declaration for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
92
bl Add. ms 68923 f 445 Wilfrid Praeger, for Lord Dysart, to Hill 2 March 1934.
93
bl Add. ms 68923 f 161 Sacher to Hill 10 January 1934.
94
bl Add. ms 68923 f 259 Stuart to Dr Collinge, Yorkshire Museum 23 January 1934.
95
lpl/lp 125 Lang to Hill 23 January 1934.
96
bl Add. ms 68923 f 125 Ponsonby to Hill 4 January 1934.
97
Crawford Diaries, 10 February 1934 vol. xlviii (privately held by Lord Crawford).
98
‘Annual Church Membership in Britain 1900–1970’, www.brin.ac.uk/figures (most recently accessed 13 October 2018)
99
lpl/lp 117 ff 209–210 Chamberlain to Lang 11 October 1933.
100
lpl/lp 125 ff 54–5 Lang to Hill 23 January 1934.
101
Department of Printed Books and Department of Manuscripts, British Museum.
102
lpl/lp 125 ff 63–4 Crawford to Hill (copied to Lang) 29 January 1934.
103
Articles were published in the Daily Express on 2 and 3 January 1934.
104
It became, in 1934, the first daily newspaper to top 2 million in sales. O. Newman and A. Foster, The Value of a Pound: Prices and incomes in Britain 1900–1993 (Hampshire, 1995), p. 76.
105
Letters were published in the Daily Express on 2, 5, and 15 January 1934
106
King’s College, Cambridge, Montagu Rhodes James Archive, e 17/5 February 1934.
107
M. Cox, M. R. James: An informal portrait (Oxford, 1983), p. 224.
108
Other acquisitions made by the museum were for much smaller amounts, usually funded by the Appropriations Grant.
109
‘The Luttrell Psalter and the Bedford Book of Hours’, British Museum Quarterly 4 (1929–30), p. 63.
110
Art Treasures for the Nation: Fifty years of the National Art Collections Fund (London, 1953), pp. 19–38.
111
bl Add. ms 68923 f 397 Streeter to Hill 15 February 1934.
112
bm ce3 sc Minutes 10 February 1934.
113
bl Add. ms 68923 f 248 ‘Realities’ c/o Morning Post to Hill 22 January 1934.
114
bl Add. ms 68924 f 111: Letters vol. 1: Curwen to Hill 1 January 1934.
115
bl Add. ms 68924 f 14: Letters vol. 1: Hubbard to Hill 22 December 1933.
116
bl Add. ms 68924 f 131: Letters vol. 1: Proctor to Hill 30 December 1933.
117
285 h.c. Debs., 5s, 12 February 1934, col. 1584.
118
bm ce3 sc Minutes 10 Mar 1934.
119
lpl/lp 125 f 127 MacDonald to Lang 20 March 1934.
120
lpl/lp 125 f 128 MacDonald to Lang 22 March 1934.
121
bm c4 sc Minutes 14 April 1934.
122
lpl/lp 125 f 158 Lang to MacDonald 12 April 1934.
123
Cited calculations are derived from figures obtained from the bm ce3 sc Minutes: 13 January, 10 February, 10 March, 14 April, 12 May, 9 June, 14 July, 13 October 1934.
124
292 h.c. Debs., 5s. 23 July 1934 cols 1533–4.
125
na prem/107 Minutes of General Meetings of 12 May and 8 December 1934.
126
292 h.c. Debs., 5s. 31 July 1934 cols 2543–4.
127
292 h.c. Debs., 5s. 31 July 1934, cols 2545–6.
128
See G. Brown, Maxton (Edinburgh, 1986) for more on Maxton’s views of MacDonald and against capitalism and the ‘good old days’; in particular p. 253.
129
292 h.c. Debs., 5s. 31 July 1934, col. 2553.
130
J. Charmley, Duff Cooper: The authorised biography (London, 1986), p. 71.
131
By September 1933 MacDonald himself acknowledged how much the situation was taking out of him, writing after a Labour by-election meeting: ‘I am oppressed by the feeling that I am not with my own people & that those who should be with me are against me’. Marquand, op. cit. (note 68), p. 685.
132
Webb Diaries (1924–1932), pp. 117–8, cited by Marquand, op. cit. (note 68), pp. 403–4.
133
na prem5/122 MacDonald to Gore, 2 October 1934.
134
304 h.c. Debs., 5s. 26 July 1935, col. 2180.
135
na prem5/122 Gore to MacDonald 19 October 1934.
136
Miller, op. cit. (note 20), p. 332. This was the first published account of the history of museum as an institution from the ‘formation of the great founding collections’ (p. 17) to the present day [1972], written by Assistant Keeper and archivist of the Department of Printed Books.
137
See I. Karp, ‘On civil society and social identity’, Museums and Communities: The politics of public culture, ed. I. Karp, C. Mullen Kreamer, and S. D. Lane (Washington, dc, 1992), pp. 1–15.
138
See, for example, J. Conlin, The Nation’s Mantelpiece: A history of the National Gallery (London, 2006).
139
Susan Pearce, On Collecting: An investigation into collecting in the European tradition (London, 1995), p. 105.
140
There have been many discussions about the role national museums and galleries play in inculcating and reinforcing power structures within society; what is evidenced from this example of the purchase of the Codex reinforces the more nuanced understanding of the museum as ‘a complex, contradictory site’ – one that ‘is not always amenable to a reading based on a notion of power relations’. Whitcomb, op. cit. (note 24), p. 26.
141
lpl/lp 125 ff 182–3 Lang to MacDonald 9 June 1934.
142
See C. Paine, ‘Religion in London’s museums’, in Godly Things: Museums. Objects and religion, ed. C. Paine (Leicester, 2000), pp. 151–70.
143
Caygill, op. cit. (note 22), p. 25.
144
See T. C. Skeat, ‘The last chapter in the history of the Codex Sinaiticus,’ Novum Testamentum 42, fasc. 4 (2000), pp. 313–15
145
See www.codexsinaiticus.org; accessed as note 8.
146
See, for example, Z. J. Cole, ‘An unseen problem with Milne and Skeat’s dictation theory of Codex Sinaiticus’, Journal of Biblical Literature 135 no. 1 (2016), pp. 103–7.
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Doug Kutilek
https://www.facebook.com/groups/KJVOdiscussion/posts/5425504600903330/
While we can also go over the meager palaeographic specifics from Kenyon, he had staked his reputation with the British Museum on the purchase of the red herring, so he surely was not going to point out the problems like the phenomenally good condition.
"In August 1933 Frederic Kenyon, former director of the British Museum, eagerly encouraged his successor George Hill to buy a treasure coming to market. ... Kenyon and Hill were determined to push their case ... To lend its support, The Times published an article by Kenyon, extolling the virtues of the Codex, explaining its ‘romantic’ origins and appeal for scholars. ... British Paramount News made a film of the Codex in the museum, including a short speech by Kenyon"
Far, far, far, from a disinterested scholar.
This is from:
Unholy alliances: The British Museum and the acquisition of the Codex Sinaiticus, 1933
Journal of the History of Collections, Volume 32, Issue 1, March 2020, Pages 103–118,
Elisabeth Kehoe
https://academic.oup.com/jhc/article/32/1/103/5236559
We frequently run into a Library and Textual Criticism cabal distorting history.
Doug Kutilek
https://www.facebook.com/groups/KJVOdiscussion/posts/5425504600903330/
While we can also go over the meager palaeographic specifics from Kenyon, he had staked his reputation with the British Museum on the purchase of the red herring, so he surely was not going to point out the problems like the phenomenally good condition.
"In August 1933 Frederic Kenyon, former director of the British Museum, eagerly encouraged his successor George Hill to buy a treasure coming to market. ... Kenyon and Hill were determined to push their case ... To lend its support, The Times published an article by Kenyon, extolling the virtues of the Codex, explaining its ‘romantic’ origins and appeal for scholars. ... British Paramount News made a film of the Codex in the museum, including a short speech by Kenyon"
Far, far, far, from a disinterested scholar.
This is from:
Unholy alliances: The British Museum and the acquisition of the Codex Sinaiticus, 1933
Journal of the History of Collections, Volume 32, Issue 1, March 2020, Pages 103–118,
Elisabeth Kehoe
https://academic.oup.com/jhc/article/32/1/103/5236559
We frequently run into a Library and Textual Criticism cabal distorting history.
Steven Avery
Administrator
=====
Parliamentary Debates
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