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Guiding in the British Museum is part of the Blue
Badge training course, along with the Tower of
London, St Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey.
We start by going on a tour with one of our tutors to
see how it’s done. After that we have to prepare a 10
minutes talk on one of the artefacts on our curriculum
– terrifying! The next stage is going to the museum in
our tutor groups and being told to go to an object and,
without preparation, saying what we can about it.
Twice as terrifying. As for the exams…on mine I had
to talk about Ginger, the Egyptian body that predates
the mummies, and I had a group of primary school
children ooing and aahing and eeuurrgghhhing by the
side of me as I explained the mummification process.
At least they were an appreciative audience.
I went on to do a further intensive one week course
after I qualified so that I could become of the
Museum’s own guides, doing their highlights tours
and working with corporate groups who have special
evening openings of the temporary exhibitions. When
my children were still at primary school I did an MA
with the Education Department of the museum in
Museum and Gallery Education. Everyone else on
the course were teachers and by mid afternoon each
day they were exhausted – no stamina! Being a Blue
Badge guide makes you tough! My children and I all
used to do our homework together.
When my children were at Primary school they were
Young Friends of the British Museum, which meant
that we went on SLEEPOVERS! On the Viking
themed sleepover we watched a Viking reenactment
society staging a fight in the forecourt in the dark and
sparks literally flew from their swords – thrilling
stuff! The Viking women showed us how they slept
in tents kept warm by fox fur. The next morning they
told us about getting the fright of their lives when a
fox came into their tent in the middle of the
Bloomsbury night. My son was very worried about
sleeping in the same building as the mummies and
other assorted corpses so we always slept in the
Sculpture Gallery in between the Assyrian human
headed winged beasts who kept evil spirits at bay,
just to be on the safe side. It’s a strange experience
nestling into your sleeping bag on a stone floor
cheek by jowl with total strangers. On one visit
I shortsightedly peered at the woman next to me
and wondered for a while where I knew her from
before I realised that it was Sandi Toksvig.
The British Museum can seem very overwhelming
but our job is to tell the story of a tiny little fraction of
human civilisation and make it manageable. The
museum is a great deal more accessible than it used
to be, especially with the opening of the Great Court
in 2000. Before the British Library moved out in
1997 you used to see the likes of Harold Pinter
disappearing through a corridor to go to the Readers’
Room, which was only accessible to a select few.
Today the Readers’ Room houses the temporary
exhibitions such as Pompeii and Herculaneum and
somehow there is a feeling that it’s there for all of us,
not just the academic elite. Mind you, it’s not just me
who felt this way. Bertrand Russell had a recurring
nightmare that the library staff were going through
the books in alphabetical order and throwing out the
ones that nobody read. Whenever it came to the letter
R he woke up…
The real pleasure of guiding in the museum though is
the interaction with your visitors. Once when I was
talking about Mrs. Pretty who owned Sutton Hoo and
the fact that her nephew was a water diviner and was
convinced that there was something of importance
buried under the mounds there, one chap said ‘yes,
it’s true, I’m a water diviner’ and he whipped out his
dowsing stick and showed us how it worked (no
sniggering at the back, that’s not a euphemism!) I
also like to talk about Basil Brown, the archaeologist
in charge of the excavations who was said to know
the local soil so well he could tell whose land it came
from. One day a woman told us that she knew him
when she was little and that he always wore a suit,
even when digging and that he didn’t say much!
Telling The Very Big Story of The History of Civilisation
A Guide’s Eye View of Life at the British Museum