Museums

The University of Cambridge website proclaims with justifiable pride ‘the country’s highest concentration of internationally important collections outside London.’ The eight University museums are all free.

Fitzwilliam Museum

… the finest small museum in Europe.

Director, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

In 1764 Irish aristocrat Richard Fitzwilliam (1745–1816) had his portrait painted by Joseph Wright of Derby (1734–1797) as a parting gift to his tutor at Trinity Hall. It now hangs in the majestic entrance hall of the museum which bears his name. As Viscount Fitzwilliam, FRS, MP, this most generous of benefactors lived mostly in Ireland but never lost a deep affection for the university; at his death he bequeathed it 144 paintings and substantial collections of books and manuscripts ‘for the purpose of promoting the Increase of Learning and other great Objects of that Noble Foundation’. He also left the income from £100,000 in South Sea Annuities to build ‘a good substantial Museum Repository’ in which his bequest could be housed and displayed. It was a munificent gift and deuced inconvenient.

As an interim measure the Fitzwilliam treasures were stuffed into the old Perse Grammar School in Free School Lane. It took until 1837 for a suitable museum site to be secured and building to begin. Work stopped in 1845 when architect George Basevi (1794–1845), summoned to Ely cathedral to advise on restoration, fell from the scaffolding and was killed instantly. Building was eventually resumed under C R Cockerell (1788–1863), architect of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, and finally completed in 1874 by E M Barry (1830–1880). The total cost was £115,000.

By 1847 the Fitzwilliam collections began moving into the still unfinished building. The public were first admitted in 1848. Believing that ‘the exhibition of nude figures in a public gallery is always a matter of some embarrassment’, in 1856 the autocratic Master of Trinity, William Whewell, invoking his authority as Vice-Chancellor, ordered the reorganisation of the entire art collection according to his personal directions, without consulting either the staff or the trustees.

The Director of the Fitzwilliam from 1893 to 1908 was Montague Rhodes James, FBA, OM (1862–1936), now best remembered for his classic ghost stories. James taught himself Amharic as a schoolboy, learnt Greek working on excavations on Paphos and also knew French, Italian, German, Danish, Swedish, Latin, Hebrew, Coptic and Syriac. An indefatigable cyclist, he claimed to have visited all but two of the cathedrals in France and used his expert knowledge of medieval art to correct the reordering of the stained-glass windows of King’s College Chapel during their restoration in the 1890s. James was, however, pre-eminent as a palaeographer, responsible for cataloguing the manuscripts of Eton, Lambeth Palace, Westminster Abbey, Manchester’s John Rylands Library, Aberdeen University Library, Cambridge University Library and the libraries of every single college in Cambridge. (Professor C N L Brooke notes caustically – ‘James was in his own way a genuine scholar: his catalogues are full of learning … if he had troubled to proof-read them they might have been accurate too.’) All of which may explain why apart from (inevitably) cataloguing its manuscripts, James was to leave less of a mark on the Fitzwilliam than his ebullient successor.

According to the Dictionary of National Biography, it was Sir Sydney Carlyle Cockerell (1867–1962) who ‘transformed a dreary and ill-hung provincial gallery into one which set a new standard of excellence which was to influence museums all over the world’. The son of a London coal merchant, Cockerell was not a Cambridge, or even a university, man. As Director (1908–37) one of his first achievements was to found the Friends of the Fitzwilliam in 1909, the oldest museum society in England, attracting not only potential supporters and donors but also a cadre of willing female volunteers. A ‘scrounger of genius’, Cockerell not only continued the enlargement of the collections but also presided over the opening of the Marlay (1922) and Courtauld (1931) galleries. Cockerell’s disregarded son – ‘no better than a garage hand’ – invented the hovercraft.

Cockerell’s successor, Louis Clarke (1881–1960), 14th child of another coal merchant, had a private income which enabled him to excavate in Central America, Ethiopia and Hungary. As wartime director (1937–46) of the Fitzwilliam it was Clarke’s thankless task to arrange the dispersal of its treasures, ingeniously filling the void with some 40 temporary exhibitions, including many of the 2,700 works of art which he personally donated to the collections.

The post-war museum became the first in the country to appoint a full-time Head of Education to its permanent academic staff and has developed programmes for schools, families, hospital patients and children with special needs, as well as ‘Fitzkits’; e-guides and the web-based Pharos facility for visitors wanting to explore on their own.

Highlight exhibits include the seven ton lid of the sarcophagus of Pharaoh Rameses III (1184–53 BC), presented by the scholar-strongman Belzoni (1778–1823) in 1823, a Ming dynasty green jade buffalo from the Winter Palace, a first edition of Paradise Lost, the first draft of Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale, a Wedgwood copy of the Portland Vase which once belonged to Darwin, letters by Tennyson, Housman and Brooke, Constable’s Hampstead Heath and Monet’s Le Printemps, watercolours by Turner, a unique collection of Japanese fans, and another of 1,500 Japanese prints and drawings by such masters as Utamaro, Hiroshige and Hokusai. There is also the best collection of medieval coins in Europe, bequeathed by Professor Philip Grierson of Caius who ‘made a modest inheritance and the income of a university professor work quite outside the rules of economics’ to accumulate a collection worth £10,000,000.

In 1996 the annual number of visitors to ‘The Fitz’ passed 300,000. A new glazed courtyard was opened in 2004. Six miles outside the city, the Hamilton Kerr Institute, a department of the Museum, is dedicated to research and training in conservation and curatorial skills.

Open Tuesday to Saturday 10–5, Sundays and Bank Holidays 12–5.

www.fitzmuseum.ac.uk

Whipple Museum of the History of Science

Established in 1944 and now housed in the former Perse Grammar School in Free School Lane, the core collection of this museum was created by Robert Stuart, manager and secretary of the Cambridge Scientific Instrument Company at 27. The company, founded by Charles Darwin’s son, Horace, produced the world’s first seismographs. Exhibits range from astrolabes to computers and include exquisite miniature ivory sundials, one of Charles Darwin’s own microscopes, a walking stick which was also a telescope (and not much use as either apparently) and 78 rpm records of Ernest Rutherford lecturing in 1931.

Open Monday to Friday 12:30–4:30.

www.hps.cam.ac.uk/whipple/

Kettle’s Yard

… a unique phenomenon not to be missed.

Tim Rawle, Cambridge Architecture

In 1957 Harold Stanley ‘Jim’ Ede (1895–1990), whose career as a curator and collector embraced the Fitzwilliam, the Tate and Tangier, began to transform ‘four little deserted slum houses with an alleyway running between them’ into Kettle’s Yard, a unique amalgam of house, gallery and museum. Sir Leslie Martin designed a gallery extension in 1970 to accommodate the ‘Exhibits’, which were originally Ede’s personal possessions and include works by artists both British (Alfred Wallis, Ben Nicholson, Bernard Leach, Barbara Hepworth) and Continental (Joan Miró, Constantin Brancusi, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska) – plus a spiral of 87 carefully arranged pebbles and a great many plants, fossils, shells, rugs and books – but no labels. According to one critic, Ede had rather a blind spot where abstract art was concerned, which may be an encouragement to many visitors wondering if this assemblage is worth a 20 minute trek from the city centre. Kettle’s Yard and its contents were given to the University in 1966. The house is also used as a venue for lunchtime student music concerts and a chamber music series.

Open Tuesday to Sunday and Bank Holiday Mondays: House 2–5, Gallery 11:30–5.

www.kettlesyard.co.uk

Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology

John Disney (1779–1857), a Midlands lawyer and collector, endowed the Disney Professorship of Archaeology in 1851, but the first full-time professor was not appointed until 1927. Since the establishment in 1930 of the Laurence Professorship of Classical Archaeology, the Disney Chair has been held by pre-historians. Dorothy Garrod (Professor 1939–1952) was Cambridge’s first female professor in any discipline. Archaeologists today work in the Department of Archaeology, the Cambridge Archaeological Unit, the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies, the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Faculties of Classics and Continuing Education. Part of the Downing Street complex, the museum was originally created by Baron Anatole Von Hugel (1852–1925), who had lived in Fiji in 1875–7. Exhibits range from local Cambridgeshire antiquities to Pacific items collected by Captain Cook, Balinese masks, a totem pole from British Columbia, a Maori war canoe and an Inuit parka made from walrus skin. The Museum underwent a major refurbishment in 2011–2.

Open Tuesday to Saturday 10:30–4:30.

www.maa.cam.ac.uk

Museum of Zoology

Also part of the Downing Street complex, this family-orientated museum houses a collection of more than a million shells, fossils, birds and mammals, including the skeletons of a Giant Ground Sloth and a Finback Whale, and the famous Galapagos finches collected by Darwin.

Open Monday to Friday 10–4:45, Saturdays 11–4.

www.museum.zoo.cam.ac.uk

The Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences

Opened in 1904 and refurbished in 2002, the third Downing Street museum chronicles five hundred million years of life on earth. Highlights include a hippopotamus, 125,000 years old, found at Barrington in Cambridgeshire, and a fossil of the largest spider ever found – 36 cm across. The core collection of fossils was assembled by Prof Adam Sedgwick (1785–1873) and is complemented by what is claimed to be the oldest intact geological collection in the world, created by Dr John Woodward (1665–1728).

Open Monday to Friday 10–1 and 2–5, Saturday 10–4.

www.sedgwickmuseum.org

Museum of Classical Archaeology

Located since 1982 on the top floor of the Faculty of Classics building on Sidgwick Avenue, this collection of 600-plus plaster casts reproduces most of the best-known sculptures of ancient Greece and Rome. The Museum was originally created by Basil Champneys, architect of Newnham College, in Little St Mary’s Lane.

Open Monday to Friday 10–5, Saturday 10–1.

www.classics.cam.ac.uk

The Scott Polar Research Institute

Founded in 1920 as the national memorial to Antarctic explorer Captain Robert Falcon Scott (1868–1912), this museum moved to its Lensfield Road site in 1934 and underwent a major refurbishment in 2011–2. The museum collections include expeditionary equipment, items illustrating the arts and crafts of Arctic peoples and exhibitions relating to wildlife and the progress of scientific research.

Open Tuesday to Saturday, 10–4.

www.spri.cam.ac.uk

Museum of Technology

Located off the Newmarket Road in the former Cheddar’s Lane Pumping Station, this museum has been created by industrial archaeology enthusiasts and features engines, pumps, boilers, computers and a collection relating to the printing industry.

Open Easter to October on Sundays 2–5; November to Easter on the first Sunday of the month.

www.museumoftechnology.com

Cambridge and County Folk Museum

Founded in 1936, restored in 2005 and housed in the former White Horse Inn at 2–3 Castle Street, this museum consists of nine room settings illustrating the social history of the locality since 1700 through such themes as Childhood, Arts and Artisans, Fens and Folklore.

Open Tuesday to Saturday 10:30–5, Sunday 2–5.