Written by Cindy Howells, GCG Committee Member and Palaeontology Curator at Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales.
I started this blog series in 2021 intending to work quickly through the majority of GCG’s industrious history leading up to our 50th anniversary in 2024. As always, time has slipped away and this momentous event is now almost upon us. To pick up where I left off in the last instalment; In the Beginning – The Geological Curators Group Story, by ten years after its inception, GCG had a membership of very nearly 400, including institutional subscribers as well as many overseas members. This article now takes us up to the start of the 21st century, leaving the most recent history to come next!chai
By the early/mid 1980’s, the group had settled into a format of holding three or four seminar-style meetings each year, which usually included a second day in the field, visiting local exposures or smaller nearby museums. Many of these meetings were very well attended, with meetings on ‘Conservation of Geological Materials’ (in the BM(NH)), and ‘Geotourism’ (in Belfast) each attracting around 100 delegates. However, I do also recall an initiative to try to visit more remotely located museums such as Whitby, Camborne and Cromer.
In December 1985, I attended my first ever GCG meeting, the Dudley AGM, and was immediately hooked on this amazingly friendly group. After that I tried to get to as many meetings as I could, although that obviously depended on the vagaries of our museum funding, and the generosity of my boss at the time. At the Manchester AGM in 1986, Mick Stanley was elected as the fifth Chair, supported by Geoff Tresise as Secretary, Tom Sharpe as Treasurer and Peter Crowther as Editor, amongst other valuable committee members. It’s always difficult to decide how best to make mention of the many committee members who have played roles, both major and minor, over the years. In this blog I have included photos of the Chairs who took us through these decades and into the 21st century, but I certainly don’t want to ignore the rest of the committee without whom GCG wouldn’t have flourished, or even survived.
Committee
Committee minutes were always carefully recorded by Minutes Secretaries Di Smith and then John Crossling, leaving us with essential records of what was discussed and who was going to do it! Early Secretary Geoff Tresise was later replaced by Simon Knell and then by Mandy Edwards, who did sterling work on all our correspondence, including much of the organisation concerned with GCG seminars, as we didn’t have a dedicated Programme Secretary until 1997.
From 1987 we instigated a Public Relations Officer on committee, to assist with raising the public profile of the Group. This role was filled first by Hugh Torrens and then Phil Doughty (both ex-Chairs), but after a few years it was decided the post was not really achieving what had been intended, so in 1994 it was changed to a role assisting with devising and coordinating our meetings. This was initially titled Publicity Officer and filled by Colin Reid, but was retitled once again in 1997, when Steve McLean was elected as Programme Secretary – a role he enthusiastically carried out for a further nine years.
Treasurer and Membership were initially packaged together into one post, and without the aid of computers or spreadsheets, was very capably managed in turn by John Cooper, Tom Sharpe and then Andy Newman. By the end of the 20th century, subscriptions had gradually risen from £5 in the mid 1980s to £10, and remained at this price for many years. We also had our highest ever membership levels during the 1990s, even topping 500 at one point, although I suspect that non-payers might not have been weeded out quite so assiduously as now. Subscription income was mainly aimed towards covering the production and postage costs for the journal, together with necessary expenses for committee meetings. Conferences and workshops were costed to bring in enough of a small profit to buffer against the inevitable occasional loss! Steadily and surely the amount in our bank account did increase, and through careful planning we have never been at risk of going into the red.
Perhaps one of the most ill-defined roles on committee was that of Recorder. It was a post that did different things at different times, but was mostly concerned with watching, monitoring and responding to curatorial or collections issues. Recorders over this period were Alan Howell, Don Steward, Mike Taylor, John Nudds and John Faithfull, each managing aspects of the role in their own unique way. For example, Don Steward and Mike Taylor developed the CING (Collections Information Network. Geology) database, detailing over 580 collections. Some of the results of this were published in sections within our journal (vols. 4 and 5). When John Nudds took over the role, he was handed extensive early-computer print-outs from this project, and says that prompted him to find an easier way to deal with this sort of data. In 1994 he published the Directory of British Geological Museums, the vastly informative pre-internet guide to UK collections, museums and their details. John Faithfull of course invented our very first web-pages!
I must also mention all those who have had positions as ordinary committee members. It strikes me that we often had a committee of no more than 10 or a dozen people, and yet managed to achieve so much.
Publications
Our beloved journal, the Geological Curator, achieved ever more milestones. Previous Editor Tim Pettigrew had reformatted it into a two-column layout in Vol.4, issue 1, and his replacement Peter Crowther arranged for the professional-looking glossy cover on Vol.4, issue 2, which we maintain to the present day. Popular features such as ‘Lost and Found’, Letters to the Editor, Book and Gallery Reviews, and ‘Notes and News’ were complemented by varying numbers of papers, some resulting from themed meetings. Back issues from the journal are indeed still very much to be valued with the amount of historical and collections-based information they contain. However, the incredible pressures of trying to produce three typed issues a year along with the difficulties that Peter was undergoing in Bristol Museum at the time, caused increasing amounts of slippage so that the second issue for 1988 wasn’t published until August 1990. After this, the introduction of word-processing sped up production a little. In 1995, Patrick Wyse Jackson took over as Editor, giving the journal a more professional feel by introducing abstracts and other minor formatting tweaks, and also established a twice-yearly publishing regime to bring it back on schedule.
However, in order to keep the membership better informed about forthcoming meetings, exhibitions, awards, publications, committee news, etc., it was decided in 1990 to start an informal thrice-yearly newsletter. This was developed and edited by Tom Sharpe, in conjunction with Monica Price, and from the first issue, had the somewhat tongue-in-cheek title of Coprolite – Droppings from the Geological Curators’ Group. This 16-24 page newsletter immediately became an invaluable way of circulating the sort of information that nowadays goes onto social media. One very useful regular feature was ‘Musical Curators’, with details of who had taken up what job in which museum, or who had retired or been promoted. Looking back on this column today, it’s a wonderful record of just how many geological jobs there were available!
Back issues of Coprolite should be essential reading for anyone wanting to find out ‘what happened when’, as all of our meetings were advertised here well in advance, and then written up as reports afterwards. There is certainly an amazing amount of our history written within the pages of Coprolite – and it’s all scanned and available from our website.
Meetings
These ‘middle years’ were certainly the high point as far as meetings were concerned. For several years we ran five-day Natural Science curation courses in Sheffield, in conjunction with BCG (the Biological Curators’ Group), which were designed to assist those undergoing the Museums’ Diploma. Eventually this course was subsumed within the Leicester Museum Studies Course, but retained the GCG link for a while.
In 1994, we celebrated our 20th anniversary with a special meeting in Northampton. Fifty members of GCG gathered for this meeting, and many stayed for an anniversary dinner where they were entertained by Hugh Torrens speaking in his classic witty style. The meeting’s theme was Reviewing Geology in Museums over the past decades and discussing priorities for the future. I feel that this is a topic that we should regularly revisit, particularly today with more and more museums undergoing serious cuts. In order to improve, we need to be aware of how things used to be, whether good or bad, and to learn from past mistakes.
A meeting in Brighton in 1994 dealt with the issue of Orphan Collections – and again bringing this up to the present day, I wonder whether there are now more ‘orphan’ collections than those which do have curatorial care! A peripatetic curator scheme run through four different Area Museum Services had been initiated in 1984 to try to help with this problem, but sadly by 1995, none of these posts still existed. Again, maybe this is something that GCG could help to revive. A major conference in Manchester 1995 looked at the ‘Value and Valuation of Natural Science Collections’. This was held over several days, and had a true international flavour, with 135 delegates representing 31 countries, and many invited speakers from abroad. It led to a Special Publication, edited by John Nudds and Charles Pettitt, and published by the Geological Society in 1997. It also resulted in the agreement of an International Accord calling on governments to recognise the scientific, financial and cultural value of Natural Science collections, and support museums as these collections are so often undervalued compared with art or humanity collections. The full accord was published in Coprolite no.17, p. 15 and should maybe be revisited, looking at the present lack of support for museums generally!
In 1997, GCG held the first in a series of overseas study tours – initially proposed by Chair John Cooper in 1991. The advent of the new Eurostar meant that Brussels was easily accessible for a day trip, and 19 GCG members enjoyed the chance to be shown around an overseas museum and compare notes with curators there. The following years saw further trips to Leiden, Paris, Munich, Berlin, Prague and even New York. The necessity of travel costs and overnight stays for these meant that numbers were fewer than for meetings based in the UK, but those who did attend felt that this overseas networking was extremely valuable, and many useful contacts were established.
Looking back at this phase in GCG’s history it strikes me that we held many well-attended meetings, often jointly with other organisations, thus bringing in other interested parties. Our membership levels were high and a survey in 1993 indicated that at least 65% of members attended at least one meeting each year. The advent of affordable computerisation was changing museum curation in a positive way and enabling quicker and easier communications. The list of meeting themes would certainly bear revisiting to see what progress might have been made – or not!
In 1999 GCG celebrated our 25th anniversary with a meeting at Leicester, held on the actual date of 17th May. The meeting report was published in Coprolite No.30. The theme of the day looked back on successful initiatives, and progress that had been made, but concluded that collections were no more secure than they had been, and that GCG would need to adapt and change to meet the challenges that were still to come. The day ended with a dinner at the Belmont Hotel, where a toast was raised to the next 25 years of GCG!
Other initiatives
It was in 1991 that the Group gained our logo showing the letters GCG engraved on a polished section of faulted Honister slate. The logo was designed by Nigel Cunningham, of Brighton, but of course no damage was caused to the original rock specimen which remains un-engraved!
Faulted volcanic ash from Moss Rigg Quarry, Tilberthwaite, Lancashire – R.3101/65 from the Daniel Hack Collection, 1929, Booth Museum, Brighton.
In 1991, GCG initiated our now famous, silver Brighton Medal. This is awarded every three years – details of which can be found here: The A G Brighton Medal for services to curation. This was named after Albert (Bertie) Brighton (1900-1988) of the Sedwick Museum, who over his career, was responsible for documenting some 375,000 specimens at an average rate of over 10,000 a year, and bringing order to a vast collection of previously uncurated specimens.
The initial funding for this was raised by subscription, and I’m pleased to say that we still have some of those funds put aside to strike future issues of the medal. Also in 1991, we ran a Geological Collector of the Year award, jointly with the Geologists’ Association, and the winner, Simon Carpenter, was presented with a trophy.
From its earliest days, GCG was heavily involved in promoting proper geological site conservation and documentation of records, and the initial National Scheme for Geological Site Documentation (NSGSD) was a sub-committee of ours. GCG members such as Roy Clements, John Cooper, Mick Stanley and others were all very involved. The present RIGS scheme overlaps with this early initiative, but a 1995 GCG conference discussing the past, present and future of site documentation, decided that it was a subject that was still very relevant to museum curators – how many of us are still involved with any local site documentation schemes?
In 1996, GCG leapt into the modern world, with its first web pages, designed by John Faithfull, GCG’s Recorder, and it seems that by then many curators were starting to correspond by email! A seminar in Liverpool dealt with the whole new subject of computerised databases, and what this meant for the future.
It was possibly the heyday of geological curation. At the end of the 20th century, UK museums seem to have had a fairly plentiful number of specialist curators, conservators and lab technicians, and there was support and funding available. GCG’s meetings were well attended, with themes looking at collections, curation, exhibitions, education, geotourism, and much else, but there was still an underlying disquiet that can be read within meeting reports. Since then of course, geology in museums seems to have been on a steady decline, leading to our present state with more and more museums under threat, closing or shedding themselves of curators. In my next blog I’ll focus on the 21st century and see what GCG managed to achieve before being caught up in the whole sorry mess that we are currently suffering.
Please take time to read my article on the first 33 years of GCG and also my previous blog In the Beginning – The Geological Curators Group Story.
Cindy Howells
Twitter/X @Palaeofossil
Geological Curators' Group Blog 
Thanks Cindy, th