The crisis at the British Museum

Visitors to the British Museum’s grand, neoclassical building in Bloomsbury, central London, were greeted by an unexpected face at the information desk last week: Dame Mary Beard, the classics scholar and professor. Beard, a trustee of the museum, had arrived to reassure staff in the wake of one of the biggest scandals to strike the institution in its 270-year history.

“I talked to one nice Australian visitor who joked, ‘I thought I’d just check that the whole place hadn’t been stolen,’” Beard says. It was a painful jest. The trustees held a meeting on Bank Holiday Monday after it emerged that 2,000 items had been taken from its huge collection, leading to the resignation of Hartwig Fischer, its director. The pieces include ancient semi-precious stones and gold jewellery.

The museum has dismissed one of its senior curators and police have launched an investigation. The alarm was first raised directly by Ittai Gradel, an antiquities expert and dealer, in 2021 after he came across some of the items for sale on eBay. But an initial investigation by senior staff at the museum did not find any missing.

The scandal throws a harsh light on the lack of security to stop internal theft by the museum’s curators, highly respected but modestly paid specialists who wield huge authority in their fiefs. The museum now believes that theft took place over two decades, with gems in a secure storeroom being torn from settings and computer records altered to suggest that some had gone missing in the 1930s.

The revelations come at a sensitive moment: the museum has been under pressure to return contested pieces to countries from which they came, including decorative bronzes seized from Benin, Nigeria by British forces in 1897. George Osborne, the former UK chancellor and chair of trustees, is negotiating with Greece’s government to loan some of the Parthenon Sculptures — also called the Elgin Marbles — taken from Athens in the early 19th century.

News of the thefts has amplified calls for more treasures to be repatriated. The Global Times, a state-run Chinese newspaper, called last week for the museum to return Chinese relics acquired by “dirty and sinful means”. Dan Hicks, professor of contemporary archaeology at Oxford university, says the museum’s claims to be a trustworthy custodian now ring hollow: “How on earth does an institution that made such a virtue of its ability to safeguard world heritage come back from the news that it has been stealing from itself?”

It also undermines the central purpose of the institution, founded in 1753 as one of the world’s first universal or encyclopedic museums, with the intent of representing a broad span of human knowledge. It was followed by the Louvre in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The museum started with a collection of books, coins and dried plants amassed by Sir Hans Sloane, a doctor who married an heiress to Jamaican slave plantations, and has been expanding ever since. Today, its collection of 8mn items is so big and disparate that one per cent is on public display and only about half is catalogued. The task of retrieving stolen items will be made much harder by the lack of documentation.

Christopher Marinello, founder of Art Recovery International, which reclaims stolen works, says that this is “completely unforgivable and malpractice. You can’t recover stuff that you can’t prove you owned in the first place.”

Beard describes the thefts as “a tragedy” and says the museum owes the public a full explanation, but is inhibited by the police investigation. “We hold things in trust for the nation and we have a duty to tell the nation what happened . . . the best you can say is that it will make us look even harder at what the museum should be.”

Troubles in storage

It took a long time to uncover the thefts. Gradel complained to a trustee last October of being ignored and Osborne asked Fischer to explain. By December, a full audit had found that pieces were missing and police were alerted. Fischer announced in July that he would retire next year, only to step down abruptly last month, apologising for having accused Gradel of withholding evidence.

There were already tensions between Osborne and Fischer, a distinguished German art historian appointed in 2015 when Sir Richard Lambert, former editor of the FT, was chair.

One trustee says Osborne was dissatisfied with Fischer’s leadership after his own appointment in 2021, and the thefts strained their relationship further. “Everything’s fine when a chair and director get on, but it’s poisonous when they don’t,” one former director remarks. Fischer declined to comment.

It did not help that Osborne publicly took the lead in negotiations with Kyriakos Mitsotakis, prime minister of Greece, over the Parthenon Sculptures. “I’m sure it’s fun to bargain with Mitsotakis, but it’s not the core job for a trustee chair,” says a senior trustee at another museum. Both the museum and Fischer say he was fully involved in the talks.

But the thefts started long before either Fischer or Osborne were in place, and reflect a wider challenge in policing internal affairs. Although most art thefts are committed by outsiders, such as the theft of €113mn of jewels from a Dresden museum in 2019, insider thefts are not unique to the British Museum. Anders Burius, a senior librarian at the National Library of Sweden, stole more than 50 rare books in the 1990s.

One problem is that curators need to handle many objects for research and those with privileged access can easily conceal small items: at the British Museum they are not searched upon leaving. It was too shocking for staff to believe ill of a curatorial colleague: Osborne has said “groupthink” was partly to blame.

Being trusted to research independently is a large part of the job appeal for curators, who are not highly rewarded: the average salary in UK museums is £38,500. “This is an underpaid profession that has not kept pace with university salaries. Trying to hire staff from the US is now a joke,” says one director.

Some museums have stricter rules about individuals not being alone in archives: the Tate galleries, for example, require staff to be supervised when handling drawings, mainly to avoid accidental damage. But the scale of the British Museum’s collection makes this harder: it has been struggling for decades to record exactly what it has.

When rare books were stolen from its library by a reader in 1971, it hired its first full-time security officer, along with temporary staff to catch up with a cataloguing backlog. In 1988, the National Audit Office found it had 5.5mn items — 2.5mn fewer than now — and warned of an “inexorable rise in the size of major collections” at museums.

Since then, the task has only grown. Many museums are mandated to take items from archeological digs or uncovered by projects such as HS2. “All museums face challenges with storage. They are piled high with boxes and boxes of stuff, much of it unopened and unrecorded,” says Lord Neil Mendoza, provost of Oriel College, Oxford, who led a government review of UK museums in 2017. One of them had a collection of vacuum cleaners in permanent storage, he recalls.

The British Museum has made progress. It has about 2mn online records covering almost 4.5mn items, including a 16th-century carved ivory hunting horn from Sierra Leone and 72 “eccentric flints”. This beats the Louvre, which has about 490,000 items on its own online database.

Stuff matters

But along with others, the British Museum has a Hotel California problem: new things can check in any time, but they can never leave.

Although much of what the British Museum stores is not of great financial value — even gems stolen from its vaults were offered for less than £100 each on eBay — there are legal restrictions on selling items held in trust and most curators are very reluctant to dispose of even minor objects: one report described it as a “taboo” in the profession.

Some US museums are more open to what is called “deaccessioning”: selling off items to curb clutter, update collections and raise money. “You cannot tell me that every piece of Roman glass must be in a museum,” says Marinello. “For God’s sake, give it to other museums or, if it has no value for display or research, sell it and fix the roof.”

One reason for their reluctance is that as scanning and dating technology evolves, more information can be gleaned from items that once looked worthless. “I know that it can look mad that we’ve got all of this stuff, and Marie Kondo would say get rid of it, but there is a logic there. It’s a conservative position, but not a foolish one,” Beard says.

The museum is gearing up to raise money for a rebuilding programme that could cost £1bn, and the thefts put it under further pressure. It is due to move many items to a new storage facility in Berkshire, and must prove again that it is a safe custodian. It has 4.5mn visitors annually, but since entry is free, it relies heavily on government funding, totalling £68mn last year.

Hicks says it should not retreat from holding a huge archive, but should catalogue it better and open it up to the public. He cites the British Library, formerly part of the British Museum, which has made 90 per cent of its collection of 160mn books accessible for study. “At least half the role of museums has to be making objects available to the public to weave their own stories,” he says.

The idea that museums should refocus on what they hold in archives does not convince everyone. “Custodianship is fundamental, but UK museums are world leaders in interpretation, conservation and exhibitions,” says Tristram Hunt, director of the Victoria and Albert Museum. “We would be crazy to allow this moment to distract from that.”

Meanwhile, the fact that pilfering at the British Museum could go unnoticed for so long raises an alarming question: how much is being stolen silently from others?

Marinello says museums are often reluctant to admit to staff theft because it puts off potential donors and undermines faith in the institution. “There are many crimes that we never know about. Someone needs to confront them all and ask, ‘What’s been taken from your place?’ ” he says.

In the song “A Foggy Day (in London Town)”, Ira Gershwin once wrote: “I viewed the morning with much alarm/the British Museum had lost its charm.” It may not be the only one missing some charms.