The Brutish Museums, page 20
The case of the Benin collections of ‘the Pitt Rivers Museum’ shows how misguided any faith in the rhetoric of cultural Schutzhaft (protection of artworks) must be, where a key part of the dispossession of Africa was and continues to throw its cultural heritage to the market. As so often with the enduring shattering effects of the sheer scale of the violence of 1897, a kind of double-vision develops; reversals occur, the order of time is shuffled, things blur into each other: museums and the market, past and present. Even the Pitt Rivers itself, it turns out, reproduced itself into two.
There were two Pitt Rivers Museums, of which only one survives as a collection today. The first began as a private collection of arms displayed in the owner’s various houses in London – expanding later from a museum of weapons into public displays of skulls, European prehistory, and ‘ethnology’ – ending up in Oxford. The second was a totally new collection built up on his private estate.
It is perhaps no mere coincidence that both museums were founded in 1884, the same year of the Berlin Conference. Both were made by the same man, Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers, born 4 April 1827 , who was 10 years old when Queen Victoria came to the throne on 20 June 1837, and died on 4 May 1900, just eight months before she did on 22 January 1901, and three years after the sacking of Benin City. Both were major centres for the acquisition of Benin loot. For convenience, a hyphen distinguishes one from the other. The first was a collection made between 1851 and 1882, and exhibited by General Augustus Henry Lane Fox in Bethnal Green and South Kensington before he inherited the title Pitt-Rivers and used the fortune that came with it to fund the costs of donating his collection to the University of Oxford for display in new specially built galleries, which opened in 1884. The 30,000 objects of the founding collection grew, under the curatorships of Edward Burnett Tylor and Henry Balfour to a quarter of a million objects by the outbreak of the Second World War. Today it holds 300,000 objects from around the world, and a similar number of colonial photographs. Then, as soon as his first collection was handed over, and with the financial resources now at his disposal, the newly re-named Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers began to create a second collection, ultimately of a similar size to his first, and to put this on display on his estate at Farnham, on the Wiltshire-Dorset borders in southern England.
Both Pitt Rivers collections were described by their founder as ‘typological museums’, where objects from times and places around the globe were taken from their different life-worlds and mixed together, reduced to form, juxtaposed in a kind of social evolutionary bricolage, to tell the story of the progress of gradual material form and western technological superiority.3 Before exploring what that means in the next chapter, let us introduce the creation, and the reduction, of the collections of Benin loot in the Pitt Rivers Museum/s. In the strange time sequences of Benin, it is the 1897 loot in the ‘second collection’ that began to form first.
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In 1919, Felix von Luschan described the importance of the Benin objects in the so-called ‘second collection’ made by General Pitt-Rivers – that is, the Pitt-Rivers Museum at Farnham:
I counted 280 exquisitely beautiful pieces in the British Museum. But General Pitt-Rivers, that outstanding genius of collecting, used his great resources to buy Benin antiquities among other things even during the final years of his life, and left behind a collection of 227 pieces which, according by his specific instruction, will not go to the museum that bears his name in Oxford, but must remain far off the beaten track at his estate at Rushmore near Salisbury.4
To take the ‘second Pitt Rivers collection’ first, since in this case it was formed first, the sources of 283 objects can be outlined, as summarised in Appendix 3 at the end of this book. The collection was formed in the final three years of Pitt-Rivers’s life. The first objects looted from Benin City to enter the collection appear to have been two bronze figures bought at Stevens Auction House on 25 May 1897.5 Pitt-Rivers acquired Benin loot at six further separate Stevens Auction Rooms’ sales between 4 April 1897 and 7 November 1899.6 But by far the most significant source, from which two-thirds (188 objects) were acquired, was the ethnological dealer William Downing Webster,7 as well as other dealers, including Webster’s partner Eva Cutter, George Fabian Lawrence, George R. Harding of the Charing Cross Road, and James Tregaskis of High Holborn. Pitt-Rivers also acquired seven plaques purchased from ‘Crown Agent of the Niger Coast Protectorate, Downing Street’ on 24 March 1898, and a further two from ‘the Crown Agents’ on 12 November 1898 for between £5 and £8, to a total of £58. He also purchased nine objects directly from an officer who served in the expedition: Major Norman Burrows (South Wales Borderers) of Mellor Hall (now in Greater Manchester), who was a District Commissioner with Niger Coast Protectorate between 1895 and 1899.8
Pitt-Rivers’s growing collection of Benin art was clearly a major focus of his interest and activity, despite ill health, in the final three years of his life. His catalogue Antique Works of Art from Benin Collected by Lieutenant-General Pitt Rivers 9 went to print in the same month as his death, and was published posthumously, and a hand-written catalogue with detailed watercolours was produced as well (Plate VII).10
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The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, meanwhile, currently holds at least 145 objects that were taken in the Benin Punitive Expedition of 1897, a collection formed between the receipt of a brass cylinder or powder flask from Henry Ling Roth in 1898 to the accession in 2012 of three reproduction casts of Benin bronzes (not included in the count-up here). These casts were made in the 1960s for Bernard Fagg – the younger brother of William Fagg (from 1938 Assistant Keeper and then (1969–74) Keeper in the Department of Ethnography at the British Museum) – the first Director of the Nigerian Department of Antiquities, a key figure in the 20th-century history of Nigerian museums, and later Curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum from 1963 to 1975.
Of these 145 objects (see Appendix 2), around 43 are on loan rather than owned by the museum, in addition to significant photographic, watercolour and manuscript materials. Ten of these are brass relief plaques, and the rest are a variety of brass, gilded brass, ivory, iron, wooden and coral objects. Further objects in the collections may have been looted in the Benin Expedition, but the supporting evidence is currently insufficient for these to be included in this number.
The largest body of material is 43 objects on long-term loan from the Dumas-Egerton Trust, collected by George Le Clerc Egerton. This material includes two carved ivory tusks, a ceremonial sword (eban), three more ceremonial swords (ada), one in a sheath of coral beadwork, a carved ivory ladle inlaid with brass, a carved ivory head with eyes inlaid with brass, a lidded ivory pedestal bowl, a brass relief plaque, a lidded brass vessel, the brass base of an altarpiece, eleven cast brass, gilded brass and carved ivory armlets, a cast brass altarpiece with figures of a Queen Mother with six female attendants, a wooden painted mask, a carved ivory fly-whisk handle, a side-blown ivory trumpet and a fragment of a second side-blown trumpet, four cone-shaped brass hip ornaments, a wooden bowl or lid, a carved wooden staff, a wooden weaving sword, and five perforated agate beads.11
Next largest is a body of 28 objects donated from the estate of Mary Kingsley through her brother (named after their uncle, the children’s author Charles Kingsley), in September 1900, after her death, in June 1900 aged 37, in Simon’s Town, during the Second Boer War. This donation comprised two brass plaques, an ivory leopard’s-head mask, an ivory door-bolt with an iron hinge, a brass fan with repoussé designs, a wooden casket in the shape of an animal head, a brass figure of a horse-rider broken from a staff, two carved cups of coconut-shell, a ceremonial brass helmet, two brass bells, nine brass, ivory and iron armlets, a small unidentified brass object, a brass casket embossed with animal heads and a human head with a suspending chain, a brass staff with the figure of a bird, and four brass masks depicting human, ram’s and crocodile’s heads.12
Of the remaining objects, 19 were purchased at Stevens Auction Rooms – ranging from brass plaques to seven brass miniatures of stone axes – and another 55 were built up through ad hoc purchases and donations between 1898 and 1988. A brass plaque, purchased by Thomas Francis Embury in 1907, was recorded as ‘hidden away from our soldiers after the capture of Benin on the punitive expedition of 1897 and brought to Lagos by a native trading woman from whom it was obtained by Mr Embury’.13 Six objects – four further brass plaques, an ivory staff mount in the form of an iyase (war captain) on horseback, and a brass staff of office – were donated in December 1908 by Henry Nilus Thompson, Conservator of Forests in Southern Nigeria.14
A carved wooden box looted by Special Service Officer Captain (later Lieutenant Colonel) Fred William Bainbridge Landon, then aged 36 years old – who had been educated at Magdalen College School, Oxford before going to Sandhurst, and served in the Benin expedition as Second in Command and Commissariat and Transport Officer of the Niger Coast Protectorate Force – was donated to the Museum in 1909.15 In 1917, George Chardin Denton – who had been Colonial Secretary of the Colony of Lagos from 1889 to 1900, and then Administrator (renamed in 1901 Governor) of the Gambia from 1900 to 1911 – gave a brass mask.16 Also in 1917, the novelist and diarist Beatrice Braithwaite Batty (1833–1933), donated two brass bells.17 In 1922, Percy Amaury Talbot (1877–1945), author of In the Shadow of the Bush, donated a Benin crossbow and a 16th-century Portuguese rapier, both possibly looted from Benin City.18 A carved wooden stool looted by Reginald Kerr Granville was donated by John Granville, grandson of the officer, in 1979.19 A carved wooden head was bought at Sotheby’s in 1970.20 The Pitt Rivers also has on long-term loan from the Ashmolean Museum three masks that formed part of a larger bequest of Gerald Roberts Reitlinger to the University of Oxford, recorded as ‘originally in the possession of Harold Moseley Douglas, appointed Governor of Benin City after the punitive expedition of 1897’ – which is a reference to Harold Mordley Douglas, a colonial officer.21 With the death of Harry Beasley and the dispersal of the contents of his Cranmore Ethnographical Museum, in 1941 the Pitt Rivers Museum received as donations three Benin bells.22
The Pitt Rivers also holds three watercolours made by George Le Clerc Egerton during the Benin Expedition, papers of Walker and Egerton, and a significant collection of photographs of the attack, some collected by Nevins.
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The ‘second collection’ in Farnham was not added to after Pitt-Rivers’s death and any possibility of his second collection joining the first was ruled out by the General himself, in the context of various differences and disputes between him and the University of Oxford. In a strange, but typical, gesture, connecting the two institutions, passing objects backwards from the ‘second’ to the ‘first’ collection, Pitt-Rivers arranged for the presentation of four objects from the Pitt-Rivers Museum to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford by his assistant Harold St. George Gray: one of the bronze ‘medalets’ used by General Pitt-Rivers for placing at the bottom of his excavations to record the date of its opening, a Romano-British bronze ear-cleaner found in the City of London, an old penknife ploughed up at Motcombe, North Dorset, in 1900 – and a string of coral beads looted from Benin City.23
This small act of de-accessioning and dispersal of the major collection of Benin loot made by Pitt-Rivers, with his immense resources and deep knowledge of the antiquarian and ethnographic markets, was by no means the last. The museum remained open during the 20th century, until the 1970s, as responsibility for it passed between family members. However, through the agency of the General’s fascist grandson – George Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers (1890–1966), who had written his eugenicist book Clash of Cultures and the Contact of Races while a student at Worcester College, Oxford,24 and then especially that of his partner Stella Lonsdale – a Nazi double agent during the War who had also been imprisoned by the British as a Nazi sympathiser under Defence Regulation 18B – the collection was gradually broken up and sold off. Our limited current understanding of the whereabouts of this lost collection of Benin loot is summarised in Appendix 4 below.
It has been suggested, although not to my knowledge in print, that it was George’s and Stella’s fascism which drove them actively to break up, scatter and enrich themselves through the sale of one of the most significant collections of tens of thousands of items of ‘non-western’ art, including the 283 looted objects. The damage done is hard to assess. Later owners who purchased the re-sold loot include the Smithsonian, the Met, the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, the Linden Museum in Stuttgart, and many private collections – although the current locations of most of the objects dispersed from Farnham is not known, or at least not accessible (see Appendix 4). Between 1965 and 1988, six of the 283 objects sold off from the ‘second’ Pitt-Rivers Museum were acquired by the Pitt Rivers in Oxford: a brass leopard-head mask, brass head, a brass figure, a brass vessel, and two wooden combs.25
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The General Handbook to the Pitt-Rivers Museum – the one in the countryside, with the hyphen between the ‘Pitt’ and the ‘Rivers’ for convenience – was published in 1929. In the preface, George Pitt-Rivers – grandson of the collection’s founder, anthropologist, and a fascist later imprisoned by the British state during the Second World War – reflected on ‘the crude and primitive arts of modern savages … those barbarian cultures to which we are in many ways closer in savagery than we are apt to suspect’.26 In 1898, a new gallery – Room IX – was added, designed to a large extent to allow proper space for the display of these objects from Benin.27 They were introduced by the sometime curator of the museum, Leonard Dudley Buxton, on the final pages of the Handbook as follows:
The antique works of art from Benin form one of the most interesting parts of the Museum and are exhibited just inside Room IX on either side of the doorway. The city of Benin lies near the mouth of the Niger on the Guinea Coast. It was first discovered by the Portuguese about the beginning of the fifteenth century or a little earlier. A Dutch writer at the beginning of the eighteenth century describes the city, and draws attention to the numerous works of art in brass, bronze and ivory, and also to the human sacrifices which took place there. In 1896 an expedition attempted to reach the ancient City of Benin, which by this time had fallen into ruins, owing, very largely, to the abolition of the slave trade. The expedition was ambushed and only two members escaped. Shortly after a punitive expedition was dispatched. The town was captured and found to be indeed the city of blood it was reputed to be. A large number of artworks were discovered and carried away. These are somewhat ghastly relics of a savage religion which recked little of human life. Savage art first seems uncouth to those of us who are accustomed to Western ideas, but the visitor who is interested will find it well worth his while to look at these specimens. If any reader of this guide is able to draw, I can strongly recommend an attempt to draw these objects. The photographs reproduced in this guide cannot do more than give a rather crude representation. Better still, if you can, try and model them in Plasticine or some other plastic material. You will find it an interesting but very difficult occupation.28
Nine decades on, re-reading the words with which Dudley Buxton closed his book, as we try to understand the Pitt Rivers Museum/s, to recognise the implications of how uncertain and unstable the western homes for these stolen objects were (as Igor Kopytoff described the condition of slavery) ‘re-individualised by acquiring new statuses’ in different situations while always remaining a ‘potential commodity’ with the ever-present potential to have an exchange-value realised by re-sale.29 There is the nagging sense that these two museums somehow themselves took on some of the physical qualities of some such ‘plastic material’, as the necrology, the curator’s knowledge formed through death, operates like the rubber and palm oil for which these things were taken, like memory slipping, multiplying, as if the museum were a device for the generation of double consciousness, making the act of taking the primary, originary moment, disruption of cultural pasts and presents, until the theft can be made visible, and action taken.
Time to ditch those predictable, linear ‘object life-histories’: seeing African art through the eyes of a Victorian imperial general was never going to be a one-way street. Time to give up chasing those spectral ‘relational entanglements’: this is not so much a contact zone as a shock zone, a space made not by giving but by taking, by subtraction not addition. We tilt our head to and squint at the page, at the illustrations, at the cabinets present and absent, as loss has doubled, multiplied; the colonial violence has been extended across time and space through the double agency of the institution and the market. The double-vision of the Pitt Rivers Museum/s – one still here gathered together piecemeal as circumstances made possible, one now totally dispersed to the market, around the world, and into unknown private collections – is reproduced for all Benin collections, as the regimes of the art market and the exhibitionary complexes of museums combined to generate an image of alterity, of the ‘primitive’ or the ‘tribal’, at a global scale across the 20th century – a process through which the violence of 1897 did not dissipate but grew. A provisional attempt to list the museums and collections around the world in which the loot taken from Benin City in 1897 is presented in Appendix 5.
The objects that came to Britain as loot and were purchased by museums for the display of ‘primitive’ or ‘tribal’ art of the defeated enemy were far from safe. Whole museums, like the Pitt-Rivers and the Cranmore Ethnographical Museum, were closed and their collections sold off. Objects given to the regimental museums and other military museums are poorly understood. And some objects were mislaid or damaged – as for instance with the burnt brass fragments of the Queen Mother bronze head that had been exchanged with the Field Museum in Chicago in 1899, but was one of the thousands of objects tragically destroyed in the fire that swept through Liverpool Museum after it was hit by a German incendiary bomb during the Blitz on the night of 3 May 1941.30 The following month, on 24 June, Hull Municipal Museum was also destroyed by fire during a bombing raid, a Benin plaque looted in 1897 was one of the objects salvaged from the wreckage.
