Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
neers to the new Board of Education to demand that greater attention be
given to the development and accommodation of the Science Museum's
collections. The Science Museum was at long last separated from the
Victoria and Albert Museum in the same year, when the latter's building
was formally opened by King Edward VII. A Departmental Committee
was set up in March 1910 to advise on the future direction of the Science
Museum and to recommend what new buildings were required. It was
chaired by Sir Hugh Bell, a director of the steel firm Dorman Long and a
former Mayor of Middlesbrough. He was the son of the leading ironmas-
ter Sir Isaac Lowthian Bell and the father of the explorer and orientalist
Gertrude Bell. In a landmark report in 1911, the Bell Committee laid out
the future of the museum, proposing the construction of three wings (or
blocks) in turn, beginning with the East Block on Exhibition Road. Con-
struction began in 1913, but World War I intervened and the half-
finished building was taken over by the Civil Service for war use. The
East Block was finally opened by King George V in 1928, but the Cen-
tral Block was not finished until 1961. The West Block (now called the
Wellcome Wing) only saw the light of day in 2000, almost nine decades
since the publication of the Bell Report which had envisaged the comple-
tion of the central block in 1923 and the West Block as and when re-
quired a few years later!
The period between 1916 and 1925 was a dismal period for chemistry
in the Science Museum largely because of World War I. The museum
was closed to the general public in March 1916 and the chemistry gallery
was occupied by clerks from the War Office between 1917 and 1921.
The space vacated by the War Office was then taken over by the new
Imperial War Museum Library just over a year later (Board of Education
1924a/b). There was still some chemistry (and industrial chemistry) on
display, but space was very limited. Matters improved when the East
Block was fitted out in 1925 and 1926. Chemistry and industrial chemis-
try, which had been brought together in 1912, were on the third floor of
the new East Block, and the new gallery was opened to the public in
April 1926 (Board of Education 1926). This gallery - Gallery 66 in the
museum's internal numbering scheme - is now a mixture of offices and
simulators. In this period, the chemistry collections were curated by
Alexander Barclay, an Imperial College (Royal College of Science) edu-
