September 2020

No, I don’t mean insect killer or Rentokil fluid put there by the curators. Though of course those may be there too. Woodworm in the Lord Mayor’s Chair, moths in the 18^th century sampler, beetles crunching that trendy piece of artwork made entirely from dried peas and lentils glued to a piece of cardboard, all need to be seen to. No, I mean poisonous, or otherwise hazardous, museum objects.

One day a member of the public brought in two World War II gas masks to a museum down south. Two staff members, who had not met these before, were about to try them on, when somebody (me actually) noticed and stopped them just in time. World War II gas masks usually contain asbestos, which is now recognised as a dangerous carcinogen. They either have to be sent away for decontamination by experts before you use them in your wartime handling sessions for schools, or they have to be sealed in airtight plastic with big red hazard warnings all over them and kept in the store.

But that is only the start. Do you remember the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland? This is thought to be a reference to the mercury poisoning suffered by makers of men’s hats in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, when mercurous nitrate was used in the process of making felt for hats. If your collection has any Victorian top hats in it, you need to be careful handling them.

I once worked in a museum that had a fine collection of old stuffed birds. Museum curators have been known to become ill from handling such specimens, as arsenic was once widely used in taxidermy.  Surgical gloves on, please.

And of course the collection may contain old watches with radium dials, or even geological samples which are mildly radioactive. Even the store itself may have radon leaking out of the walls at levels which are hazardous to humans. This I have also met.

There are more things to beware of in a museum store than falling off a stepladder because you have forgotten your ladder training, or hurting your back lifting boxes because you skipped your manual handling course. Still, look on the bright side. If you have a few boxes of Victorian matches, they may spontaneously combust and burn the whole store down, thus solving all the problems!

Health and safety at work is an emotive topic. As I filled out a risk assessment form for that most dangerous of museum activities, colouring-in for toddlers, I could understand why some people feel that Things Have Gone Too Far. Shortly afterwards we were doing an education session on the revolt by the Bryant and May’s match  girls, who, if you remember, were all dying in Victorian times of phosphorus poisoning contracted at work. I am personally happy to waste five minutes filling in a ridiculous form if that is the price of a society that values workers’ safety.

There is nothing like working on an archaeological site for making you appreciate the value of health and safety legislation. Having slashed my hands many times making replicas of flint knives, I have never felt any temptation to wear shorts or sandals on a site where the soil is full of flint. And I have personally fallen into a trench when someone left a slippery piece of plastic on the edge of it. I was lucky it was only three feet deep. One director I worked for in Greece suffered a fracture when a stone that had been carelessly left on the side of a deep trench fell onto her shoulder during a minor earth tremor. It could have been her head. Another colleague was buried up to his waist in sand during a trench collapse. He told me that you do not have to be completely buried to suffocate. If the earth is above the level of your diaphragm, you can breathe out but it becomes impossible to breathe in.

Earth-moving is a potentially hazardous exercise for anyone. I particularly remember one site I worked on in the early 1980s. We were working around a firm of developers, who had dug out a deep hole in the hillside to put in an underground car park. There was a large chunk of concrete the size of a wardrobe in the bottom of the hole and they needed to get it out. They slung a chain around the middle and attached the other end to the bucket of a JCB, and start to pull it up the steep side of the hole. It hadn’t got very far when the digger with its driver started to tilt and slide towards the edge.

After some frantic shouting, they stopped to think, with the slab of concrete hanging on its chain halfway up the side. By this time the archaeological team was lined up on the other side of the hole, watching the problem with professional interest. And then, before our astonished eyes, a man climbed down the slope, carrying a pneumatic drill, stood on the slab and began to cut it in half. Have you guessed? He was making the cut between the place where his feet were and the chain that was holding it up. And when he finished cutting, the bit he was standing on fell down into the bottom. Fortunately he managed to leap clear and cling onto the side of the hole, dropping the pneumatic drill, which by great good luck didn’t fall back onto him. The rest of the concrete was then light enough to be pulled out of the hole.

I have never before or since seen such a piece of mind-blowing stupidity.