The following fifteen persons were the first elected Trustees, under the Act of 1753:—The Duke of Argyle, the Earl of Northumberland, Lord Willoughby of Parham, Lord Charles Cavendish, the Honourable Philip Yorke, Sir George Lyttelton, Sir John Evelyn, James West, Nicholas Hardinge, William Sloane, William Sotheby, Charles Grey, the Reverend Dr. Thomas Birch, James Ward, and William Watson. |Records of British Museum, in MS. Addit., 6179.| The first meeting of the Trustees under the Act was held at the Cockpit, Whitehall, on the 17th of December, 1753.
The first ‘Principal Librarian’[[55]] was Dr. Gowin Knight, a member of the College of Physicians, and eminent, in his day, as a cultivator of experimental science. Some magnetic apparatus of his construction and gift was placed in the Museum soon after its opening, and attracted, in its day, much attention. He received the appointment after a keen competition with the more widely-known physician and botanist, Sir John Hill. The first three ‘Keepers of Departments’ were Dr. Matthew Maty, Dr. Charles Morton, and Mr. James Empson. Dr. Knight retained his post until 1772.
Maty and Morton succeeded in turn to the office of Principal Librarian, and their respective services will have a claim to notice hereafter. Empson had been the valued servant and friend of Sir Hans Sloane. He is the only officer whose name appears in Sloane’s Will. He had served him as Keeper of the Museum at Chelsea for many years.
There is, in one of the letters of Horace Walpole to Sir Horace Mann, an amusing account of an initiatory meeting of the original Trustees, held prior to their formal constitution by Parliament. It is marked by the writer’s usual superciliousness towards all hobbies, except the dilettante hobby which he himself was wont to ride so hard. ‘I employ my time chiefly, at present,’ he wrote to Mann, in February, 1753, ‘in the guardianship of embryos and cockle shells. Sir Hans Sloane valued his Museum at eighty thousand pounds, and so would anybody who loves hippopotamuses, sharks with one ear, and spiders as big as geese.... We are a charming wise set—all Philosophers, Botanists, Antiquarians, and Mathematicians—and adjourned our first meeting because Lord Macclesfield, our Chairman, was engaged in a party for finding out the Longitude.’
‘One of our number,’ continues Walpole, ‘is a Moravian, who signs himself “Henry XXVIII, Count de Reuss.” The Moravians have settled a colony at Chelsea, in Sir Hans’ neighbourhood, and I believe he intended to beg Count Henry the Twenty-Eighth’s skeleton for his Museum.’ This distinguished foreigner does not appear in the parliamentary list.
The Chairman of the preliminary meeting so airily described by Walpole, continued, under the definitive constitution of the Trust, to take a leading part in its administration. It appears to have been by Lord Macclesfield that the original ‘Statutes and Bye-laws’ of the Museum, or many of them, were drafted.’
The Regulations for Admission and Study.
In the form in which they were first issued, in 1759, these statutes directed that the Museum should ‘be kept open every day in the week, except Saturday and Sunday.’ |1759–1803.| For the greater part of the year the public hours were from nine o’clock in the morning until three o’clock in the afternoon. On certain days, in the summer months, the open hours were from four o’clock in the afternoon until eight—so as to meet the requirements of persons actively engaged in business during the early part of the day. But the publicity was hampered by a system of admission-tickets which had to be applied for on a day precedent to that of every intended visit. The application had first to be made, then registered; a second application had to follow, in order to receive the ticket; and the ticket could rarely be used at the time of receiving it. |MS. Addit., 6179, ff. 36, seqq.| So that, in practice, each visit to the Museum had commonly to be preceded by two visits to the ‘Porter’s Lodge.’
The visitors were admitted in parties, at the prescribed hours, and were conducted through the Museum by its officers according to a routine which, practically and usually, allowed to each group of visitors only one hour for the inspection of the whole. Special arrangements, however, were made for those who resorted to the Museum for purposes of study. |Statutes and Regulations, part ii, § 3.| To such, say the statutes, ‘a particular room is allotted, in which they may read or write without interruption during the time the Museum is kept open.’
MS. Addit., 6179, as above.