Making Histories in Transport Museums

Journal of Transport History, The, Mar 2004 by Forgan, Sophie

Colin Divall and Andrew Scott, Making Histories in Transport Museums, Leicester University Press, London and New York (2001), 231 pp., £60.00.

This volume is one of the Making Histories series, produced under the editorship of Gaynor Kavanagh, which focuses on museums first in terms of their product their collections and how they are displayed - and then in terms of process, exploring the nature of popular and individual engagement with museums. The authors have some problem in limiting their scope and defining what counts as a transport museum, but resolve it happily by concentrating on railways, with additional references to cars, buses and trams, and the odd aside on canals and shipping. Indeed, naval vessels and fisheries can hardly count as Other modes of public transport', and the decision works well, as it draws on the knowledge and experience of the authors' work with the National Railway Museum and its partner Institute of Railway Studies at York.

The result is a detailed and wideranging discussion of transport museums set within a framework of contemporary academic debate. The main purpose is not so much to celebrate the number and variety of transport museums as to explore how such museums might achieve a greater degree of critical reflection. The first chapter sketches the broad outlines of the emergence of railway museums in the twentieth century, and how different patterns of collecting developed in Britain, continental Europe and the United States. A clear summary of the main thrusts of current museological analysis is given. Do museums simply reflect the visitor's own personal and collective memories, or does the ordering of objects create types of narrative which perpetuate ideological bias? A clear account is given of the three principal types of display found in transport museums: the gloriously cluttered confusion of unsorted heaps of objects; the 'formalist' approach which relies on classifying objects by series or types and which tends to result in serried rows of vehicles; and finally the thematic approach, which groups objects, for example, according to the purposes for which they were used, but nevertheless still relies on the principles of traditional classification. There is an acute analysis of the way that engineering taxonomies which developed in different industries shaped early museum classification - locomotives were always classified by technical characteristics and operating capabilities, as opposed to cars, which were defined first and foremost by company brand.

The whiggism and technological utopianism of such displays is criticised as the authors move on to a discussion of how a deeper sense of historical context might be achieved. New types of display were explored from the 1980s onwards, partly as a reaction to declining visitor numbers, but also because many modern museum curators are trained professionals and think of the museum as an agent of social change. The tendency, however, even of new displays is to rely on an atmospheric ensemble of objects which inevitably paints a more or less harmonious picture of an untroubled past. The politics of exhibiting, the perils of corporate sponsorship, and ever-present financial constraints are responsible for this, but so is the nature of the material that transport museums have to work with. There are various suggestions for creating displays which challenge accepted notions, and move beyond putting ever longer 'books on the wall'. This leads to a discussion of changing approaches to object analysis, theories of material culture and ways in which visitors might be helped to decode their meanings.

A particularly interesting discussion of heritage transport as museums follows; it is not always appreciated that many such railways have legal museum status. Why do visitors like steam railways so much? Is it simply playing at being passengers on a journey to the past? The mythic structure of heritage railways is especially conservative, where journey and environment are envisaged as picturesque rural landscapes which may be aesthetically consumed without troubling the critical faculties. Suggestions are made as to how the experience might be made more questioning and the visitors disabused of some myths, but the authors admit that there are practical constraints and that this is a particularly 'challenging' area. They end on an optimistic note: a balance can be struck between providing ranks of gleaming vehicles for the tireless enthusiast to inspect in minute detail and something for the visitor wanting a good day out, providing a genuine analysis of social context and the possibility of different interpretations.

Making Histories provides a lucid exposition of current museological thought as applied to transport museums, and has an extensive bibliography. The authors draw on semiotic theory but pursue the analysis without dependence on jargon. They draw too on Foucauldian ideas of power and ideological bias, of the coercive nature of much museum display, but do not use it rigidly, recognising the ability of visitors to create their own interpretations. One strength of the study is its concern with visitors, and the admission that in many ways we know little about how and why visitors react to displays. This is important, as transport is an area where the 'enthusiast' plays an important role in supporting and even conserving collections. Most heritage railways are run by volunteers, who replicate forms of social organisation (in particular as far as gender is concerned - men on the footplate, women in the cafeteria) which perpetuate rather than challenge existing myths. The authors worry about visitors, as all good museum people should. They want to inform and educate the visitor, they want to provide exhibitions of their material which challenge and extend knowledge, they feel the visitor deserves the best that interpretation can provide. The danger, however, is that this may result in a desire to control the visitor experience more closely, rather than letting informal learning take its course. This has to be a response to the importance placed on visitor statistics as the crucial indicator of success, and of the contingencies of government funding, which demand measurable outputs for unmeasurable experiences. The democratic belief in interpretative diversity sits awkwardly both with the reality of government strictures on funding and with enthusiast involvement.