§ Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.— [Mr. Harper.]
§ 3.5 a.m.
§ Mr. John Fraser (Norwood)I will make my remarks as short as possible, because I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Clapham (Mrs. McKay) wishes to catch your eye, Mr. Speaker. I do not think anyone will quarrel with the conclusion contained in Cmnd. 3439 on Railways that the Railways Board should cease to bear the cost of running the Clapham Transport Museum and that responsibility for it should pass to the Department of Education and Science. What comes as a bombshell is the recommendation that this fine and newly-established centre should be put under the hammer, that its London Transport exhibits—its trams, buses and other museum pieces—should be dispersed to no particular place, where it would be difficult for enthusiasts to gain access.
I was even more shocked to find, when my right hon. Friend was asked about consultations with the Greater London Council and the London boroughs, to whom the proposal is a matter of concern, that she did not think that any useful purpose would be served by a discussion with the interested authorities. I urge my right hon. Friend to reverse the decision, which appears to be pronounced in the White Paper, to remove the museum from London and to disperse an irreplaceable collection of what I am assured is the finest and largest collection of public transport relics not only in this country but in the world. There are sound reasons for my hon. Friend's reversing this decision.
1308 First, the statistics about support of the museum are misleading. The museum has been open only for a short time. It was opened in its present form on 29th May, 1963, a small section having been opened in 1961. Attendance figures have risen steadily since its opening, and there is strong evidence to suggest that support for the Museum will increase in the future. In 1967 attendance figures had risen to 164,000, and we find that in 1966 admission charges totalled £16,109 as compared with £17,255 in 1967.
In 1966 the total revenue of the museum—including sales of literature, admission charges, refreshments, and so on—amounted to £23,549. By 1967 this figure had risen to £33,537—a rise of 40 per cent. in a year. On open days attendances reached almost 7,000, bringing for one open day admission figures of £1,000 to £1,500. Any judgment of the support and financial income of the museum must take account of the rising support for it, as well as its rising income.
It has been open for only five years and has met with great success. It commends itself to about two million transport enthusiasts throughout the country, not all of whom are schoolboys, and it has become more and more closely associated with schools and institutions in the neighbourhood and with scholarships and education. The factor of increasing support alone make a nonsense of the projected savings mentioned in the White Paper.
The catchment area of the museum is much greater than is normally the case. The financial information may be wrongly interpreted. The costs of the museum include payment of salaried staff, but this staff does not serve just the museum; it also serves the museums at Swindon and York, together with the whole of the historical aspects of the British Railways Board. To assess the costs it is necessary to remember that some of the money must be allocated in respect of the work done by the salaried staff for other institutions and for the Board in general.
On the financial side, the attendance and security staff is supplied by the London Transport Executive, and it is no reflection on the attendance and security men that they are mainly unfit London Transport employees who are 1309 paid bonus payments for their attendance at the museum—payments similar to those made for men who continue to drive buses for London Transport. If the museum is taken over by the Department of Education and Science, there will be considerable saving by employing regular museum staff who would not he subject to the same sort of bonuses paid to, for example, a disabled bus driver employed in the museum.
The total deficit last year was some-Thing over £47,000. But if one takes from that savings on staffing costs to the Department of Education and Science of £10,000 a year, savings in costs attributable to other work of £5,000, and projections of future income of a further £10,000, the deficit is likely to go down ID about £20,000. This amounts to a figure of less than a halfpenny per person per year in the Greater London area, or an infinitesimal part of a penny rate in London as a whole. It is surely worth while to consult with the G.L.C. and the London Boroughs and other interested bodies with a view to giving them the choice of retaining this valuable asset in London.
Those are the financial reasons, but we cannot talk of art, science and design in terms of pounds, shillings and pence. The museum is a valuable social asset which adds variety and interest to suburban London. It is a focus for historical and artistic and scientific teaching in South London schools and the whole of South London. It helps the study of British social history, enables communications inventions to come alive, and gives public transport a show place which heightens interest in our public transport system and endows it with that romanticism and fascination with which it is richly endowed.
It is quite a centre for art. Posters, paintings, sings and relics provide a living guide to industrial design and reflect a way of life of the nation. Whether the exhibit be the fastest locomotive on earth—the Mallard—or whether it be the carriages which Huskisson first set off in 1834, or pictures of some steel monsters steaming through the night with mail or passengers, or a London tram, it portrays many of the aspects of everyday life and a memory of the craftmanship and invention of our people over the years. It would be a great pity if this museum 1310 should die so soon after its birth, and I hope the Minister will not sacrifice what is a unique collection in the world.
§ 3.13 a.m.
§ Mrs. Margaret McKay (Clapham)I think it is very sad that in this period when heart transplants are being utilised for miraculously saving human life, there should now be a bureaucratic proposal to cut out the heart of the living community of Clapham.
I should like to say something about the effect on Clapham if the museum is closed. Clapham is a divided constituency. It has no Town Hall, no Civic centre and no central cultural, educational or social institution. Our only central feature is this Transport Museum which has been conceded to be a centre of historic, cultural, and educational value.
The figures given by my hon. Friend the Member for Norwood (Mr. John Fraser) about attendances do not tell all the story in relation to the museum. The parties of schoolchildren who attend do not simply move in and out. They really stay, and I have brought with me for the Minister to see the really long set of papers the children have to study before they visit the museum and on which they write essays afterwards.
My hon. Friend has stated how important this is as an art centre and I want to emphasise that art students from all over London go to work in the museum. If the museum was closed it would be a deprivation to art students. Furthermore, the museum is an invisible export. There are foreign visitors from all over the world who visit the museum and maintain contact with the museum. We feel that it is important to our export drive to maintain the museum.
Returning to the effect of the closure of the museum on Clapham itself, with rising 200,000 visitors a year to the museum, it will be a very serious loss to our community, to our shopkeepers and our restaurants, if the museum is closed, and we shall feel it very severely.
I understand from correspondence with the Ministry of Transport that there are two main objections to the preservation of the museum, but they do not stand up. The first is that it is difficult to move railway trains into and out of the museum. But it is not normal to move 1311 trains in and out every day of the week. I appreciate that it is not policy to have live museums and move exhibits from museum to museum, but railway trains are another matter. In any case, this is not a railway museum but a general transport museum and road transport figures large. These exhibits are easily moved indeed, I rode to Brighton recently in an old bus with another Member and the Mayor and Corporation, and thousands of Clapham people turned out to cheer their exhibit because the museum is so popular.
The other objection is that this assists the policy of dispersal of services from London to the North, but York already has a museum, and I can see no social gain in robbing London and its eight million people and visitors from all over the country to enlarge an existing museum at York. Being a Lancastrian, I might have felt a little softer towards this if the suggested site had been Blackpool. But I do not want the museum moved.
This is not an attraction like a Bingo hall which can be closed and put up elsewhere without social loss, but an historic, cultural and educational centre, whose removal would be a genuine loss to Clapham. I appreciate that this could he charged for some time on the Department of Education and Science and I sympathise, particularly because the Department is allowed only £5 million a year to support museums, but I think that the retention of our museum would be an issue on which to fight for more finance of this kind. It proves that this sum leaves no leeway for such contingencies as the preservation of a museum suddenly handed from one Department to another.
In the interests of Clapham, its residents and its shopkeepers, and because of the affection which all of us who have lived in Clapham for so long have for the Museum, we appeal for the preservation of the Clapham Transport Museum.
§ 3.23 a.m.
§ The Minister of State, Department of Education and Science (Miss Jennie Lee)My hon. Friends the Members for Norwood (Mr. John Fraser) and Clapham (Mrs. McKay) have put an 1312 eloquent case for the preservation of the Clapham Transport Museum. It has been there for only a little more than five years. Its attendances have been growing and it is a centre of local interest and pride. My hon. Friends' case would be unanswerable if the only consideration were the welfare of Clapham, and I am sure that if, in the future, this attractive museum has to be closed, there will be a good deal of natural sadness and resentment. One small comfort which I can give is that there is not the least likelihood of the museum being closed in the immediate future.
However, the problem as presented to the Government is not just a Clapham or a local problem but a national one. There is growing interest in industrial archaeology. We now have a vast number of industrial relics and, quite properly, in looking at the rail and road transport of our fathers and grandfathers, we should make proper provision for its care, both for the future and in our own interests.
Because of these considerations, a distinguished team was established to look into the whole future of industrial archaeology and the preservation of transport objects. This team unanimously agreed that, although for some years the Clapham Transport Museum would no doubt continue, it could hold out no hope for it in the long-term. I must take into account the fact that the recommendations of this distinguished team have been supported by the Standing Commission on Museums and Galleries, the Railways Board, the present Curator of the Clapham Museum and the Director of the Science Museum. Unfortunately for my hon. Friends who represent Clapham, the entire weight of expert opinion is against the long-term preservation of Clapham as a centre in this respect.
One of the reasons given by the team is that there is no direct access to a railhead, with the result that the acquisition of new exhibits and the removal of unwanted ones is expensive. A year or two ago it cost £1,700 to get one exhibit, a locomotive, into the Clapham Museum. In addition to the expense and difficulty of exhibits going to and from the museum, the internal movement of locomotives and other exhibits is expensive and difficult, due to the internal setup of the museum.
1313 There is another consideration. Outside London there is growing resentment that when we are planning not just local museums but great national ones, so much of our most valued national furniture is concentrated in or around London. It is Government policy not only to encourage regional development but to meet this mood throughout the country—for obvious historical reasons London has the National Gallery, the British Museum, the Tate and so many fabulous museums—and to say that if we are making long-term plans for another national museum, we should carefully consider if there is not a situation outside London whose claims would he stronger than any London claim.
The recommendation was that the new museum should be provided at York. The fact that York is a great centre outside London was one consideration but, it addition, the team considered that the new museum should be run as a branch of the Science Museum, that the Science Museum should select from the existing collections at Clapham and York the objects which it thought worth preserving, and that the new museum should be maintained by the Ministry of Public Building and Works. This would be the first branch of an English national institution to be established outside London, arid it is considered that York, which is closely connected with early railway history and which is a great tourist centre, would be a suitable place.
There is also the consideration that the new museum would provide a living and continuously developing display. It would have the most highly skilled maintenance of important objects—although obviously, if the choice had fallen to Clapham, there would be expert assistance from the Science Museum. But the advantage of York is that exhibits could be brought right to the museum.
As I say, the point of comfort that I can give to my hon. Friends is that we have two considerations, the short-term and the long-term. In the short-term I hope that Clapham Museum will continue and flourish. I hope it will continue to attract more visitors and be a source of pride and pleasure locally.
Everything that my hon. Friends have said tonight will be carefully recorded and carefully considered. This is not 1314 something about which we have to come to a hasty or ill-considered decision, but we have to look at the vast expense involved. In the two years, 1965–66 and 1966–67, there was a loss of £133,000 on the Clapham Museum. I take the point made by my hon. Friends that in time this loss will probably be reduced, but if there is to be national expenditure as distinct from local museums maintained from local resources—and I am sure there will be a great proliferation of these in future—all expert opinion is on the side of having an outpost of the Science Museum situated in York. Some other place may be considered, but York is at present the centre.
Museums of the future must not be static. It must be possible, whether we are dealing with locomotives, paintings, or sculpture, for us to see that as good quality goes outside London as there is inside and to make provision for exchanges. Alas, Clapham is not the favourite because it is not convenient to the railway. It is not the favourite because families in Clapham have the possibility of going to the Science Museum.
Attendance at the Science Museum in 1967 was almost 2 million. Attendance at Clapham Museum was 156,000. I am glad that all museum attendances are going up, but when we are looking at the long-term possibilities it would be wrong for me to hold out hope that there can be a reversal of the present trend of thought, which is that York should be the great outpost of the Science Museum. Nevertheless, I hope that my hon. Friends will recognise that this decision has not been come to lightly. We do not want to take away anything from Clapham which can be avoided, but the final outcome must be a national decision made in broad national terms.
I hope that our friends in Clapham realise that children and families growing up in and around London have through the Science Museum and all our other museums very much greater opportunities than the majority of families living in more distant parts of the country.
§ Question put and agreed to.
§ Adjourned accordingly at twenty-eight minutes past Three o'clock a.m.