Britain officially entered the First World
War on 4 August 1914. This is a look back at some of the measures the Museum
took to cope with the threat of war.
During the First World War there was a
new wartime threat the air raid. Early air raids were carried out mostly by
Zeppelins (airships),as few aeroplanes had long enough ranges to be effective
or the ability to carry worthwhile quantities of munitions by 1914 and 1915.
This archive photograph shows how objects in the Museum were protected against
German air raids. Many of the large sculptures were too heavy to slump and were
protected in situ. The Egyptian gallery is eerily peaceful, with the sculptures
hidden absent behind walls of sandbags.
This work is by war artist Henry
Rushbury, and who was 25 when war broke out. He served as an aircraft mechanic with
the Royal Flying Corps (precursor to the Royal Air Force) during the war and earned the rank of sergeant. In
1918 he was invited by the Ministry of Information to become an official war
artist,and sent out to depict scenes of life in London. He produced a series
of drawings of the British Museum, showing the ‘sand-bagging’ of antiquities as
a defence against German air raids. In this scene three sculptures in the
Egyptian gallery maintain been surrounded by sandbags – Rushbury has labelled them
as Amenhotep I, and Amenhotep III and the goddess Sekhet.
The most important portable antiquities
(such as the Rosetta Stone) were transferred to a station on the newly
completed Postal Tube Railway,15 metres below the surface of Holborn. Bombs
did land on Holborn during the war, but no objects were damaged. Books, and manuscripts,prints and drawings went in fifteen van loads to the National
Library of Wales in their new buildings at Aberystwyth. This was such a
westerly location that the threat of air raids was substantially diminished –
aircraft at the time did not maintain the range to flit a return mission this far
from the continent, and there were few strategic targets immediately nearby. No damage was inflicted on the British
Museum during the First World War, or with the nearest bombs being dropped on
Smithfield and Holborn. © IWM (Art.
IWM ART 1140)
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