Mark Rowe comments on the still-rumbling affair of missing items from the British Museum, after publication this week of an ‘independent review’.
George Osborne, speaking at the annual dinner of the British Museum last month, deftly acknowledged who was attending for their high calibre: ‘business leaders, writers, journalists, scientists, civil servants, artists and creators’, and the Director General of the Security Service, MI5 (‘thank you to you and your colleagues in the police for keeping us all safe in troubling times’). Provocatively, the event was in Duveen Gallery, home of the Parthenon Marbles. Mr Osborne as chair of trustees and the Museum were being bold in the face of controversy – that the ‘Elgin marbles’ for most of their 2500 years have been in Athens, not London, and the Greek state wants them back. “When there is controversy because of mistakes we have made then we should own those mistakes,” Mr Osborne said. He told the distinguished audience:
That’s what we are doing when we told the world that many precious objects have been stolen from our stores, over probably several decades – and most likely by someone who worked here and we trusted.
I tell you, the people who feel the betrayal most keenly are the many hundreds of staff – who work so hard, and who in many cases have devoted their professional lives to this place.
We can’t pretend it didn’t happen, or it doesn’t matter, or that some years ago we weren’t warned. It was our duty to look after these objects and we failed in that duty.
That’s why we made news of the thefts public. It’s why we commissioned a far-reaching, independent review into what went wrong and how to fix it. It’s why we will publish its conclusions in the coming months. And it’s why I’ve apologised for what has happened.
I want sincerely to thank Sir Mark Jones, our Director. When I called Mark one Saturday in August, out of the blue, he was enjoying a comfortable life in semi-retirement in the New Town in Edinburgh.
I told him the Museum he loves, where he started his glittering career, was in trouble and needed him. And he didn’t hesitate. He stepped up to help us – and gave us the time we will now take to find the very best Director for the long term. That search is under way.
Under Mark’s leadership, we are now embarking on the huge task of not just documenting our whole collection – but doing so in a way that makes it more accessible, and gives it more global reach, than ever before.
The simple answer to a security breach would have been to restrict access to our treasures – the right answer is to open it up.
Next year we will put on an exhibition in which we display the stolen objects we have recovered rather than return to a storeman where they were never seen – we’ll tell the story about what happened to us, rather than leave it to others to tell.
It’s a classic, and brilliant, public relations tactic – turn a negative (a crime against you, that if you cover it up, it’s as if you are ashamed and you ‘failed’) into a positive (hold an exhibition about it, that means you tell the story your way, and it brings customers through the door, who might buy related souvenirs!).
Likewise under governance on its website, the Museum says it’s ‘committed to ensuring the Museum is run in an open and honest way’. The British Museum is a non-departmental public body (NDPB), operating at arm’s length from government, but accountable to parliament. It’s sponsored by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS). It’s also a charity. Tax-payers, and donors, then, would understandably take an interest in how the Museum looks after its assets. In the independent review that Mr Osborne spoke of, the Museum claims that it’s ‘limited in what it can say about the thefts themselves at this stage due to the ongoing police investigation’. To put it as politely as possible, this is cobblers: we can say anything about this or any case, within the law around libel the same as covers any affairs, until a person is charged with an offence, when proceedings become active.
As for how open, on-the-case and ‘owning’ the Museum was; in terms of the timeline, the review admits that the Museum ‘was alerted to suspicions of thefts in 2021 by Dr Ittai Grade’. In other words, the Museum didn’t notice its own stuff was going missing. Also noteworthy is that the review document left out the month of Dr Grade (a Danish dealer in art) raising the alert: February, reportedly.
The review goes on to admit that a Museum ‘investigation incorrectly concluded that there was no basis to the claims’. The next exact date we get is April 2022, when a ‘wider audit of the strongroom as well as the Greece and Rome Jewellery and Gem collection’ that ‘revealed further evidence of missing objects’. In December 2022 (that is, coming up to two years after the Museum was informed) ‘concerns arising from the audit were raised with senior management and the chair of the British Museum. The chair called in the police immediately [why the hurry, suddenly, after thefts that according to Mr Osborne were ‘over probably several decades’? still, better late than never!?], and they began an investigation. At their request nothing was said publicly at that point.’
In August 2023, ‘with the consent of the Metropolitan Police’, the British Museum announced the discovery of thefts; that is, two and a half years after initial report.
The report estimates (that is, the Museum cannot say for sure) the number of items ‘missing or stolen is around 1500’. Some 351 have been returned to the Museum, and ‘more than 300 further items have been identified’; in other words, most are presumed still out there. The risk arises from the sheer amount of stuff, an issue for other major museums; the theft, while embarrassing, is presumably only a tiny fraction of the millions of objects a major museum may hold. Hence the review states that ‘one of the most important responses to the thefts is the commitment to complete the documentation and digitisation of the collection within the next five years’, which reflects just how much of a task just photographing, labelling and logging every item is (and bear in mind new items enter the collection all the time).
The report quotes also from an independent review of the Museum collection security; by three impeccable public figures: Sir Nigel Boardman, author of reviews for UK Government of covid-19 procurement at the Cabinet Office and chair of trustees of the charity Help for Heroes; senior policewoman Lucy D’Orsi, British Transport Police chief constable; and Ian Karet, a deputy High Court judge. That will explain why their recommendations are so diplomatically put.
They amount to telling the Museum to do everything in terms of risk better: it should make a new risk register ‘with one that draws on best practice’; it should fix who actually does collection security (it should remote ‘potential areas of friction between curatorial staff and the Collections Care team’); it should monitor (a re-named audit committee should carry out ‘deep dives’) and it should audit more (‘to include more frequent and more extensive inventory checks’). Trustees should do what they’re there to do (they ‘should be proactive in setting their agenda and requiring the necessary information’) and, more vaguely but profoundly, the ‘tone from the top’ ought to set an example that the Museum has to take the protection of its assets seriously (the board ‘should actively consider the Museum’s culture and staff engagement’). The Museum has to acknowledge that staff might thieve or do other wrongs, and that the majority of law-abiding staff should have a way to report ‘concerns’ (by providing an ‘anonymous line’). Shortcomings are wider than asset protection (the Museum ‘should strengthen the HR department). In fact those at the top are behind the times in general (management should ‘should adopt a modern and inclusive approach’).
Three comments; or four if we remark on how striking it is that so little is said in the recommendations about actual physical security, such as locks, video cameras, access passes, sniffer dogs, physical searches of staff and their property leaving the site; the routine stuff of a warehouse.
Presumably the British Museum regards itself as a cut above a DC (distribution centre) when in truth in terms of risk of loss they are in principle the same: they have large amounts of stock, some portable and valuable and easy to sell on (online), and the risk rises if stock is on the move – at risk not only from theft, but ‘shrinkage’ – being dropped accidentally or accidentally-on-purpose so that the one dropping it can pay for it cheaply, or lost. If you don’t know what’s in stock, you have less hope of keeping track of your ‘shrink’.
A warehouse and the British Museum are equally at risk from the insider. Of all the perennials in security management, this is perhaps the most taboo. In retail loss prevention, it’s more comforting to assume that the threat comes from customers, and that your colleagues are as loyal to the employer as you are. In reality, the malicious insider especially one that learns the procedural or physical gaps in site security, can do more harm, for longer, than (in the case of the British Museum) the tourist oik whose chocolatey or ice creamy hands may spoil the artefacts.
And by taking so long to come to terms with the theft – the British Museum has shown that human and institutional nature is the same anywhere else. Whether someone raises a concern about a crime or safety or safeguarding; at a prison, hospital, a Christian denomination, a football or cricket club; in innumerable documented cases, far from the person being thanked, for going to the time and trouble of trying to do the institution a favour, they get treated as a problem.
Photo by Mark Rowe, British Museum main entrance, autumn dusk.
