Voices of the Royal Pavilion & Museums Episode 2 Transcript [PDF]

Voices of the Royal Pavilion & Museums podcast Episode 2: The Keeper and the Boss TRANSCRIPT Narrator: From Brighton on the English south coast, these are the voices of the Royal Pavilion & Museums with Dr. Sophie Frost. Sophie: Hello, I'm Sophie and I've spent the past nine months wandering the corridors of the Royal Pavilion & Museums in Brighton and Hove, otherwise known as RPM, uncovering the stories of the museum people who keep Brighton's historic buildings and collections relevant, vibrant and accessible for the world we're living in. In this week's episode I speak with two individuals who you could describe as the forebears of Royal Pavilion & Museums in its current form. Between them Janita Bagshaw and David Beevers have over 70 years of experience working for the organization in a variety of roles. They offer a huge amount of insight into the waves of change to have taken place across the service, providing both a macro and a micro perspective of how museums in recent times have travelled through a seemingly never-ending cycle of cuts and restructures, as well as cultural and curatorial shifts. Thank you very much Janita and David for joining me. Would it be possible just to start out by introducing yourselves and talking through your role? Janita: Yes, I'm Janita and my role currently is Head of Royal Pavilion & Museums, which basically covers the whole service for manager of it all, but I have been here a long time and worked in many different roles and I started as Education Officer. I've been very lucky in terms of the different roles that I've had and actually just a thought that crossed my mind was when I started it was called the Royal Pavilion Art Gallery & Museums. Hove [Museum] wasn't part of it. People think that cuts of something that is really this last ten years but money has been an issue most of my working life and then we had unification of Brighton and Hove and that's when Hove Museum became part of the portfolio. David: Like Janita I've had several different roles in this institution. For many years I was Keeper of Preston Manor and then in the early 2000s I became Keeper of Fine Art and then from 2007 I've been Keeper of the Royal Pavilion, so I’ve had three different roles in this institution. Sophie: Gosh, to go from Preston Manor to the Royal Pavilion, they’re two very different entities, I guess. David: In a way but when I was Keeper of Preston Manor I've always been interested in furniture and silver and so I kind of was the furniture expert here so though I was based out at Preston Manor, I used to take special groups around the Royal Pavilion and be particularly interested in the contents of the building, so I've always been really just as interested in the Pavilion as I was in Preston Manor, so it was not too difficult a leap to go from Preston Manor to the Royal Pavilion via the Fine Art collection because much of the Fine Art collection in fact consists of pictures of the Royal Pavilion. It was all in some ways linked. It would have been a much more violent change say if I'd had to be say a natural scientist or geologist because I wouldn't have any of those skills and wouldn’t have known what I was doing, but all three jobs I've had have been in some ways related to each other. Sophie: Roughly how many decades are we talking about here - of your time here? David: I’ve been here only 40 years. Sophie: 40 years, so you've seen - I guess what I'm trying to get at is you must have seen an awful lot. David: Well, I think one of the biggest changes is that when I started here, I was appointed by John Morley who was a Chief Officer. The Director was a Chief Officer and reported directly to the Chief Executive. Now the head of the service is not a Chief Officer, it’s a second tier – Janita: Fourth. David: Fourth tier. Sophie: You might have to explain this Officers thing. Janita: Well, the first tier is the Chief Executive. Sophie: Right. Janita: Second tier are the Executive Directors and then in some cases they have Assistant Directors reporting to them and then it's the next slot in terms of looking at who you report to so, you know, mine is considered a fourth tier because of that whereas it would have been, if you use the same approach, that would have been a second tier Officer, but it's not unusual, it's not just here, talk to colleagues everywhere where, you know - and given that we were a Borough Council when we both started, me a bit later than David, it wasn't as big you know now with being a unitary of course it is and therefore the council needs to have people that are, you know, trying to get the whole range of services to work. The other thing that I remember about it is, you know, we had been as I said Royal Pavilion Art Gallery & Museums. We had seen various changes in, you know, where we sat within Brighton Corporation but when this became a unitary authority, the libraries which were run by East Sussex in effect came over to Brighton and Hove and that meant our colleague who was then Director, Head of Service, the role gets called different things, also managed libraries. David: She became Head of Libraries, didn’t she. Janita: Yeah. Sophie: Right. Janita: Well, the library was where in effect the foyer area of the Dome is so that was that and there had been a thing on the cards for years, we need a new library. There was a car park where Jubilee Library is now and then eventually, because there was a lot of I think ideas coming up for it, that went that went ahead and that sort of coincided with us doing a major redevelopment of Brighton Museum, but also Brighton Dome, Brighton Festival as they became having changes, entrance hall moving for the museum and going back in history, along with the museum in effect starting in the Pavilion, the nearest thing to a library started in the Pavilion as well. They sort of had quite a nice interesting connection really. Sophie: I didn't know that that's really interesting. David: Brighton Museum was founded here in the Pavilion in 1861. It didn’t move over to the site it's on now until 1873 when those buildings were purpose-built for the new museum. Janita: But it is sometimes, you know, the pendulum swings back and forth but cuts and savings, David will remember as well, when our person that was here actually quite a long time as well think you'd started roughly at the same time as her? David: I started in 1979. Janita: When Jessica Rutherford – David: She was Keeper of Decorative Art, then became Principal Keeper of the Royal Pavilion before becoming Head of Service. Janita: Certainly I can remember because I was part of those with management responsibilities when she was here. You know, what are we going to come up with for cuts? There were staff who might either leave and jobs weren't replaced but we even went through some fairly ghastly things about closing certain buildings, but that never happened. Although it actually having mentioned the Grange that that was in fact, gosh I can't remember when it must have been but that was early 90s or late 80s. Speaker 1: The Grange was a strange old building really. I used to be called keeper of Preston Manor and Keeper of Rottingdean Grange, and the people at Rottingdean Grange always hated that title, ‘it’s not Rottingdean Grange, it's the Grange of Rottingdean’. This is slightly typically and the Grange of Rottingdean or Rottingdean Grange was consisted of a lending library on the ground floor and a set of rooms up above which were partly used the temporary exhibitions and partly had a display of toys in, some of the toys, we have big toy collection, were displayed there. There was also a Kipling Room dedicated to Rudyard Kipling, he used to live in Rottingdean and the Rottingdean Preservation Society used to run the Kipling Room. So there were lots of people involved with the Grange. What I most remember there is the extraordinary title that was given to, there was more women then, they used to invigilate in the exhibition galleries and they were called Exhibition Hostesses. Sophie: Wow. David: Isn’t that an extraordinary title. Sophie: Yes, that is. And they were happy with that title? David: No one ever protested, it was always though thought to be rather funny. Nobody took offense to it but now it seems a most extraordinary title. Sophie: That's really interesting. Janita: That's sort of just rung another bell with me when we talked about a bit of how titles have changed certainly, you know, I think they were stewards weren't they? That is I can't remember all the other names we now call them Visitor Services Officers. David: Warders. Janita: Warders, yes. Sophie: Warders? David: Yes, as if they were in a prison. Museums and prisons are often seen as slightly similar institutions.

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