Grisly collection in British Museum

Press, 6 July 1983, Page 13

Grisly collection in British Museum

Preserved heads of Maoris, like the one withdrawn from last month’s sale at Sotheby’s, are kept in several museum collections in Britain. They are a grim reminder of a gruesome trade. Curators aware of the growing international sensitivities surrounding such objects, rarely, if ever, exhibit them.

The British Museum’s department of mankind has its seven preserved heads stored in two large boxes in a top security storehouse in the London suburb of Hoxton.

People wishing to see them must have a legitimate reason for doing so and must make an appointment in advance. An anthropologist is in charge of showing the heads to visitors.

A New Zealander, Graham Leach, who has’the job at present, says the heads are normally shown only to historians, anthropologists, and other students.

In the years he has worked for the British Museum he cannot recall anyone asking to see the heads. He feels ambivalent about

them himself and does not like having to handle them. The British Museum’s heads, like that belonging to the Marquis of Tavistock, have almost no known history. Sotheby’s said the head belonging to the Marquis had a label attached reading “A chiefs head of the Notteebow Tribe, East Cape, New Zealand.” The information identifying the British Museum’s heads is even more sketchy. One was acquired through an exchange by the British Museum with the Sheffield Museum and had orginally been given by Mr A. W. Franks in 1882. Another was bought from the Devizes Archaeological Museum in south Wiltshire in 1926. A third was given by a Miss Bacot of Bournemouth in 1913, and was said to have been handed on by Lord Erskine to the donor’s greatgrandfather. The other four heads are not documented. All seven were acquired by the British Museum before 1925.

Mr Peter Gathercole, who was head of the anthropology depart-

ment at Otago University from 1958 to 1968, and is now deputy dean of Darwin College, Cambridge, says that most of the heads in British museums had originated at the beginning of the nineteenth century. One of the major collections had been put together by Major General Horatio Robley in the second half of the century. This collection, of 30 heads, had been offered to the New Zealand Government around the turn of the century but a price could not be settled and the collection went to the Natural History Museum in New York. Trading in heads had gone on because Europeans had been fascinated with the idea. "There was a nineteenth century European notion that Maoris were savages,” Mr Gathercole says. “I find it very distasteful and have great sympathy with the Maoris over their feelings.”

He believes there are between 150 and 200 known preserved heads in the world. The biggest collections outside New Zealand and Australia are in North America.