As BOA Secretary from 1941-1966 George Giles took a keen personal interest in the Museum, often answering queries personally. From the late 1960s considerable research into the collections of spectacle frames was carried out by Mr Paul Fairbanks, a lecturer at what is now the City University. The Museum now holds his extensive files of notes and clippings on a variety of topics as diverse as safety glasses, plastic manufacturing materials, notions of cosmetic beauty and eskimo goggles. In the 1970s the BOA Museum loaned items to exhibitions in Glasgow and Bradford and for several years there was a showcase of BOA items at the Pilkington Glass Museum in St. Helens.
Due to the amalgamation of the BOA with the other founding bodies of the British College of Ophthalmic Opticians (Optometrists) in 1980, the BOA had already moved buildings to 10 Knaresborough Place, near Earls Court, in 1979. It seems that when negotiations were on-going to disband the BOA and form the British College, there was a proposal to call the collection of antiques the 'Sutcliffe Museum'. This phrase had already been used on occasions, for example when items from the collection were displayed at the International Optical Congress held in London in 1951.
For almost eleven years, however, the collection was largely undisplayed with the exception of the paintings. In 1984, at a meeting of the OAICC, Tom Collingridge, Secretary of the College, spoke of the desire for a new printed catalogue and labelling of the exhibits. He suggested that sponsorship to the tune of £10,000 might help but nothing came of this suggestion. Perhaps it was already becoming clear that an old-fashioned printed catalogue could turn into an expensive white elephant. In the meantime, useful work on the collection of prints was being carried out during the mid 1980s by students from the Camberwell School of Art. In 1988, the College published a set of sixteen colour postcards of choice items from the museum. The high demand for these was very satisfying.
In the Spring of 1990 an 'Honorary Curator', Mr. Hugh Orr, was appointed. Mr Orr was a long-standing member of the OAICC and an amateur historian of spectacle frames. Single-handedly he remounted a display with extensive captions. An official re-opening ceremony with forty guests was held on September 4th to mark the occasion. Several of the large instruments were exhibited having been repaired and cleaned by Richard Keeler. A subsidiary display, including both prints and objects, was prepared by Hugh Orr in 1993, to go in display cases built to his own specification, for the General Optical Council's building in Harley Street. This display was revamped in January 2002 but eventually removed in 2003 and the cases now form part of the display furniture in the Museum's Sutcliffe Room. Mr Orr continued to work at the College in a voluntary capacity, producing a Catalogue of the Current Display and beginning a hand-written listing of the collection. The general public could visit the museum for a guided tour provided by Mr. Orr on any week day by appointment between the hours of 10am and 4pm. Hugh Orr, by now in his nineties, retired in 1996. (The College mourned his passing, aged 97, in 2002 - only two and a half years short of achieving his ambition to become a genuine 'antique'). His Honorary Assistant Curator, Arthur Bennett, had died in 1994 having almost completed a total reorganisation of the lens collection.
During the early 1990s steps were initiated to conserve and restore the collection of oil paintings. The work was done by Mrs. Jennifer Ridd over several years, being completed in 1999. The restoration work won lavish praise from Mr. Nicholas Penny, Deputy Director of the National Gallery, who visited the College to give expert opinions on the various attributed artists.
|
The Museum's recent history began with the Documentation Project of 1998-9, one consequence of which was the compilation of the first full inventory of the collection since 1932. In October 1999, Neil Handley, the project assistant, was appointed as the museum's first ever professional curator.
Throughout the College's time at Craven Street individual objects have been made available, on application, for specialist researchers to study. In April 2001 the Council of the College declared its intention to redisplay the museum and open a public exhibition aimed at both the subject specialist and the general visitor. This decision was welcomed by the many groups and individuals who already contact the museum each year despite minimal publicity. As part of its thirtieth anniversary issue (April 2002) World of Interiors magazine listed the BOA Museum as one of the thirty 'very best' specialist subject collections in the world, and declared that the forthcoming redisplay was 'worth keeping an eye out for!' For various operational reasons a full refurbishment is still awaited but a small display was opened in November 2003 - the first regular, permanent display of BOA material available to the general public for over six years.
On 28th November 2003 the museum was registered as museum number 2069 in the museums national registration scheme, administered by Re:source, the Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries. Registration is the benchmark of professional standards in museums and the award recognised five years of hard work by a small but dedicated team. It was a good start to the new Millennium!
The displays were revised further during 2006-7 with the opening of the Giles Room (previously the Museum Study Room) and in January 2008 when a large new display case was installed on the first floor. In June 2006 the museum catalogue was placed online and from February 2007 the catalogue entries were accompanied by digital images of most objects.
Accounts of the museum's history from which most of this article was drawn, are to be found in an article by J.H. Sutcliffe in the 1932 catalogue and in the History of the British Optical Association 1895-1978, by Margaret Mitchell. Some of this information is repeated, more briefly, together with some updated information, in the History of The College of Optometrists, by Philip Cole and Martin Lynch (published 1999).
Now you can 'Meet the Curators' past and present