§ MR. BERESFORD HOPEasked Mr. Chancellor of the Exchequer, Whether his attention has been drawn to the delay which has occurred in handing over to the Trustees of the National Portrait Gallery the additional rooms assigned to them at South Kensington by a Treasury Minute of March 1876, and to the fact that gas has recently been laid upon a portion of the temporary and easily combustible building at South Kensington in which the Portrait Gallery is for the present housed, including the rooms so assigned to it in 1876?
THE CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHE-QUERThe proposal in the Treasury Minute of March, 1876, to assign the additional rooms to which reference is made to the National Portrait Gallery was made under some misapprehension with regard to the possibility of removing the collections belonging to the South Kensington Museum, then occupying a portion of this space. If the rooms on the ground floor had been transferred to the National Portrait Gallery, as proposed, access to the collections of the South Kensington Museum in the western and southern galleries would have been cut off. Under these circumstances, and pending the consideration by Her Majesty's Government of the offer made by the Royal Commissioners of the Exhibition of 1851, it was thought more advisable that the rooms on the upper floor contiguous to those occupied by the National Portrait Gallery and affording as good if not better light than those below should be vacated by the Kensington Museum. They have since been used in part for examinations by the Civil Service Commissioners. Gas has always been laid on to the whole of the galleries, even before their occupation by the National Portrait Gallery; but the quantity has been recently increased in these examination-rooms. Every precaution is taken to avoid risk of fire. The building is patrolled night and day by the police, who are in communication with a fire picket of the Royal Engineers in the adjoining building.