MAGAZINE - Minisitenetwork.icom.museum/.../icomam/Magazine/issue14.pdf · The road to peace out of...

MAGAZINEISSUE 14 DECEMBER 2015

Conference XXVII 2015 11 1565 The Great Siege of Malta Exhibition 19 31Artefact disposal

A case study

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ICOM is the international organisation of museums and museum professionals which is committed to the conser-vation, continuation and communication to society of the world’s natural and cultural heritage, present and future, tangible and intangible. http://icom.museum/

The mission of ICOMAM, the International Committee of Museums and Collections of Arms and Military History is to develop a worldwide network within our field. We support each other and believe in international dialogue and cooperation.ICOMAM is composed of Institutions or staff of organi-sations in our field wishing to join a world wide network of scholars, specialists or enthusiasts. Example of fields are historic arms and armour, artillery, military uniforms and equipment, flags, fortifications, aircraft, military music, hunting collections, vehicles, ships etc. ACTIVITIES• CONFERENCES: Annual international conferences and major international conferences every three years. The location varies but the major ones take place at the location of the ICOM general conference. The conferenc-es include a mix of working sessions such as papers and discussions and museum visits. Proceedings are published.• TOURS: Conferences are normally followed by a post-conference tour where delegates have the opportu-nity to see more of the country and its museums and a chance to get to know each other better. Many new ideas, partnerships and joint exhibitions have resulted from such informal collaborations. It is very often that new ideas and great joint projects and exchange of exhibitions are being borne during the post tours.• AWARDS: ICOMAM supports young museum pro-fessionals to attend conferences. An award, the Justus Lipsius Prize, of 2000 euros is made every 3 years to a published scientific study in ICOMAM’s area of interest judged to be of the highest standard. • NEWSLETTERS: Publication and distribution to mem-bers of the Mohonk Courier and the ICOMAM newslet-ter every other month.• The ICOMAM MAGAZINE is published twice a year with articles in our field and up-to-date news. HOW TO JOIN USMembership of ICOMAM is free to all ICOM members. An application form to join ICOM, and the annual fee schedule, can be downloaded from www.icom.museum or sent to you by your national ICOM representative.

http://www.icomam.be/

© Individual authors, Institutions and ICOMAM, 2015Published by Basiliscoe Press in association with ICOMAMBasiliscoe Press, Hawthorne Cottage, Moorfield Road, LEEDS, LS12 3SE, [email protected] by Basiliscoe Press

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Welcome

It has been a sad year for our ICOMAM family. Following the death of our Polish colleague, Zdzislaw Zy-gulski early in the year, we have also lost our past Chair, Piet de Gryse, and towards the end of the year Sarah Barter Bailey, former librarian at the Royal Armouries in the Tower of London. We have appreciations of all three.On a happier note, our 2015 Con-ference in Poland was a real success. Having it in partnership with ICDAD was particularly rewarding - both groups learnt form the other and it was really good to hear a dele-gate say that they were surprised and delighted to find that we both worked in similar ways and that arms and armour was, in fact, surprisingly interesting! The next Magazine will be published in April 2016 and all contributions are very welcome

Kay Douglas SmithRuth Rhynas BrownEDITORS

ContentsNews

4 ICOMAM NewsEva Sofi Ernstell, Chair ICOMAM

5 ICOMAM Conference 2015, PolandBob Woosnam-Savage

11 ICOMAM/ICOM Congress 2016

14 The Piet de Gryse Memorial Bursaries

14 Piet de Gryse, 1957-2015Jan Piet Puype

16 Death of a towering scholar Zdzislaw Zygulski JrClaude Gaier

17 Sarah Barter BaileyBridget Clifford

Exhibitions

19 1565 The great Siege of Malta exhibitionRobert Cassar

22 Çanakkale/Gallipoli 1915-2015: The road to peace out of warChristoph Hatschek

23 The Power and the Story A new permanent exhibition at

the Army Museum in StockholmEva Sofi Ernstell

Publications

25 Gems of JaipurGuy M Wilson

Articles

27 A peregrinating rifle Kenneth L. Smith-Christmas

31 Artefact disposal: A case studyRolf Wirtgen

33 What about weapons in a re-newed Royal Armoury 2018?Ann Grönhammar

38 16th and 17th century cast-iron English guns in Polish collectionsRuth Rhynas Brown

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ICOMAM News

Dear ICOMAM colleagues and friends

Here is the new number of the magazine and I hope you enjoy reading it. Since the last edition we have

had our annual meeting, during the conference in Krakow, and I am happy to tell you that our family of museums is expanding. We are growing slowly and I hope that you all will tell your colleagues and museum partners about ICOMAM and that they ought to become members.

The conference in Krakow was an outstanding event. Our hosts, Michał Dziewulski and his team at the Nation-al Museum, made our life perfect for a couple of days and Emilia Jastrzębska and her team at the Army Museum in Warsaw arranged an outstanding post-Congress tour. ICOMAM sends their warmest thanks to the two insti-tutions and to all the people involved for their support and for their friendly and warm cooperation. There is a report by Bob Savage on page 5. This was the first time that we had a joint conference together with another International ICOM committee - ICDAD (International Committee for Museums and Collections of Decorative Arts and Designs). We all enjoyed meeting each other, discussing our respective subjects and finding that we had a great deal in common. Everyone, I think, agreed that joint conferences are a winning concept.

At the annual meeting a new treasurer, Janice Murray, the Director of the National Army Museum in London, was elected. Over the fall we have been learning how the financial structures of ICOM work and how to run the new internet banking system. We now keep our money at the HSBC bank in Paris, and ICOMAM is very grateful to Florian Courty of ICOM administration and finance for all his help.

This was the first conference for many of us without our friend Piet de Gryse and we miss him very much. He was a friendly, entusiastic and active colleague. In his memory ICOMAM has named a travel grant for young scholars after him. The purpose of this grant is to aid young museum professionals to be able to travel to our annual conferences - you can find deatils on page 14. Our next conference is in Milan in early July 2016, (more information on page 11).

In Milan there will be elections for a new board of ICOMAM. For those of you who cannot attend in person in Milan, it will be possible to vote by post and details

will be sent out in spring 2016. If you are interested in becoming a member of the Board, please think it over. Ask your director if you can go to the annual meetings and do some important international work for ICOMAM for the next 3 years. It will be exciting for you, but it also gives many useful connections for your museum. Do get in touch with the board if you are interested - the work of the board is challenging but also pleasant and very friendly.

For two weeks in late November we were busy working on writing a Comment letter to the European Parliament. New weapons legislation is being discussed as a result of the terror attack in Paris earlier this year. Of course ICOMAM supports strict rules and laws but we think that the regulations were written in too much of a rush. We have therefore tried to explain the necessity of exemptions for our members. We have also asked the parliament to define crucial words in the document, such as ‘museums’, ‘military weapons,’ ‘collectors’ and so on. If there are no definitions it could mean that even old weapons from the Napoleonic period must be deactivat-ed. We have sent our letter to more than 200 members of the European Parliament and hope that this will help. However, we have no idea if they will listen to museum professionals or not.

Due to the necessity of responding to the proposed Firearms Legislation and familiarising ourselves with the new banking situation our work with the new website has been delayed. I will not make any promises, but as soon as it is up and running you will get a Newsletter - in the meantime, the old site is still on-line until the new one is ready. You can also follow ICOMAM on Facebook for news and upcoming events.Best wishes

Eva-Sofi Ernstell, Chair ICOMAM

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The annual Conference of ICOMAM, 2015, was dif-ferent from preceding ones as it was the first time

in the history of ICOMAM that it was held jointly with another ICOM International Committee; ICDAD (The International Committee for Museums and Collections of Decorative Arts and Design). Some 15 ICDAD members took the opportunity to visit Poland with ICOMAM on this occasion, but fifty-seven other delegates from ICO-MAM, including partners, made up the total number of 72 participants from over 20 countries, ranging from Austria to Australia.

The conference was hosted by the National Museum in Krakow, the oldest (founded in 1879) and arguably largest national museum in Poland, holding over 11,000 objects. Held between 16 and 18 September it was or-ganised under the honorary patronage of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland. It was the first ICDAD meeting in Poland since 1993 and for ICOMAM since 1978 when IAMAM (as it then was) visited Warsaw for Congress VIII. The National Museum possesses one of the best and most extensive collections of arms and armour, and associated matériel, in Poland, including the permanent exhibition ‘Arms and uniforms in Poland’, which (containing some 2,000 pieces) opened in 1991. The selection of Krakow, the former capital of the

Kingdom of Poland was not accidental; this historic city holds some of the most interesting collections of arms and armour and uniforms in Poland. It is also arguably the cradle of modern Polish museums and museology.

The theme of the conference this year was ‘Ambas-sadors of Dialogue’ and discussed the role of diplomatic gifts, and the use of works of arts and crafts and other artefacts in intercultural exchange. Over the three days some 30 different lectures were delivered in 5 panels to some 61 attending delegates. The panels covered a number of different topics ranging from diplomatic gifts and museums, Europe and the East and the interpretation and exchange between cultures. The purpose of such gifts and their reception and effect was also examined, as well as the history of such pieces.

The lectures also included the chance to hear from the delegates about other museums’ case studies, plans, projects and activities. And, as ever, the conference provided a great opportunity to network with colleagues from museums of arms and armour from around the globe and for delegates at various stages of their careers to mix with their peers, whatever their position; always a good thing at such gatherings. It also allowed the chance to catch up with old acquaintances and contacts and make new ones.

Sunset over Wawel Royal Castle, Krakow

Report on Conference XXVII ICOMAM 2015

Bob Woosnam-SavageExecutive Board member

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The panels were held in the main galleries of the pres-tigious Sukiennice Gallery in the Cloth Hall. This contains an outstanding collection of late 18th and 19th century Pol-ish art and stands in the largest surviving medieval market square, 200 m (656 ft) by 200 m (656 ft), in Europe.

Once down to business it was fascinating to hear about the use and abuse of such gifts and how they could be interpreted. Common themes ran through a number of the papers, whether they were being looked at from an art or military point of view. Gifts were tailored to the message and purpose required and of course would often elicit, as a matter of courtesy, a reciprocal gift in return. These exchanges however have always been fraught with perhaps often unforeseen consequences. One finds that by accepting a gift one is both giving tacit acceptance and recognition of the position of the giver which can often place the recipient in a lesser, subservient, position. Today gift giving and receiving at all levels by or on behalf of the State is a much more bureaucratic process, to enable the prevention of corruption.

There is also the problem of what to do with gifts that often become deemed ‘unwanted’. Although part of State diplomacy, the storage of such items can become problematic and many gifts are inevitably given to museums,

as they are often seen as being the automatic and ‘ideal’ repository for such items. Such gifts, obviously, may not form part of a museums current acquisition policy, the result being that many museums end up holdings material that has no bearing to the avowed activities of the muse-um. Resources are then spent conserving and storing such pieces which, if one is honest, are very often no more than high-end ‘tourist tat’.

However it wasn’t - and isn’t - always material none of us would give house room to! Meissen porcelain was used as gifts from the 1720s and, given this year was the 200th anniversary of Waterloo, it was interesting to hear about the gift from the Empress of Austria of the famous Austrian dinner service to the Duke of Wellington in recognition of the battle in 1815, even though Meissen, as a diplomatic tool, was in decline by this time.

The range of gifts is also quite startling - from the fine porcelain mentioned above to a rather more robust tank! Alarmingly, and sadly, delegates also learnt that some museums, such as the Polish Army Museum in Warsaw, have seen pieces from existing collections removed to be given as reciprocal gifts. This was not just a Communist era, Eastern European, phenomenon; in the 1950s Glas-gow Museums, in Scotland, gifted the Queen Mother a rare Scottish two-handed sword to furnish her then newly restored Castle of Mey in Northern Scotland – a sad loss to the collections and people of Glasgow. Importantly, it is apparent that, as in the past, gifts can and do often reflect current international and national policies.

Of course Poland’s geopolitical position brought about much cultural exchange between Europe and the East and this was also represented in a number of papers such as that regarding the famous ‘Hussar’, or Hungarian, shield, which with its feather decoration (often painted, and pos-sibly using real feathers at some time, though none now are known to have survived) was associated with the Ot-tomans. In fact its origins were probably closer to home in Central Europe, in places like Serbia. However, as early

ICOMAM & ICDAD Conference: ‘Ambassadors of Dialogue’ held against the backdrop of fine 19th century Polish paintings. (Photo courtesy of National Museum)

The Gallery of Polish 19th-century Art in the Sukiennice (‘Cloth Hall’), Rynek Główny (‘Market Square’), Krakow

A paper by Henry Yallop (Royal Armouries, Leeds) Swords of Empire: The Frenchification of 19th century European Edged Weapons in the Sukiennice Gallery

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as 1553 it was being depicted in works such as ‘Customs and Fashions of the Turks’ by Pieter van Aelst the younger, as something exotic.

Materiel from Empire is usually seen as simply being evidence of Imperial power and excess; the acquisition and appropriation of material culture as part of the process of war. However recent research is showing that some pieces can open up new avenues of study and understanding. This was exemplified by two papers in particular. The first was about a gift to Lord Roberts during the 2nd Boer War in 1900 of a Maori weapon known as mere, made from pounamu, which was signifi-cant in a number of ways; firstly it was a gift from a native New Zealander who wished to be seen as member of the ‘British Empire’ and secondly that it had importance in itself having been a valuable Maori weapon owned by 18 generations and imbued with their power and history. This opens up the possibility of exciting links and col-laborative ventures. Another paper discussed what had been thought to be a trophy, a powder horn with burden strap, engraved with the date ‘1758’. The burden strap is Iroquois and appears not to have been looted or taken as a souvenir but purchased from a Native American as a re-sult of a military alliance. Other papers reminded one of the purpose of trophy taking such as the banners which, taken during the Great Northern War (1700-21) between Russia and her allies and the Swedish Empire, were used as propaganda tools as proof of military success.

Of course cultural exchange between nations also proved influential. One paper pointed out that it was the French who at one time provided the greatest model for swords, even for those of their erstwhile enemies. Many national model numbers or names adapted French patterns or were based upon them and Spanish models even copied their style of marking blade. Uniforms were also ‘Frenchified’, such as Zouave styles, which were seen in Britain and the US. Such influences are also seen else-

where; the mameluke sword worn by US Marine Corps officers since 1826 was allegedly the result of a raid on Derna (1805), Tripoli. However research has revealed that the Viceroy of Egypt had given this type of sword as gifts to Marine Corps officers before that particular battle. Adoption of this sword before 1825 is still uncertain but the mameluke sword, although not carried on campaign since the early 1900s, is still used on dress occasions.

The positive affects of certain types of gifts, within the museum world, was also touched upon as it was noted that the acceptance of gifts fosters goodwill between insti-tutions and private collectors, which can result in further donations. It was argued that private donations have now almost dried up owing to changes in such things as acqui-sitions policies and procedures have made such processes more complex. This in itself is true but it should also be expected as museums, particularly those who sign up to the principles of ICOM, would not wish to take any gifts that might contain illicit items or ones where there may be a question of restitution etc. Also with the apparent current obsession with money, many collectors, even well known recent ones, have sold their collections rather than philanthropically passing them on to a museum, as many great collectors of the past did.

Delegates were also reminded that some diplomatic gifts could also be of a more practical nature, such as the early 17th century cannon given to Malta and the Order of St. John – a cannon used for firing! And owing to the pas-sage of time gifts, just like many other objects, can become misattributed; a cannon in Lisbon was claimed to have come from Pope Gregory XV as a gift to Phillip II. This, however, on investigation, turned out to be incorrect. This cast iron cannon was a result of Riga writing to Queen Elizabeth I of England asking for armament, so this piece provided evidence of both trade and diplomacy

One of the final papers brought to light the amaz-ing turnaround of the permanent displays at the Kyoto National Museum, Japan where exhibits are rotated every 6 weeks. An apparent implication that Western curators may not work as hard as Eastern (Japanese) curators was met with some reserve particularly as the museum apparently does not deal with the public, as many Western institutions do, and the displays are of a minimalist style. And even the objects, traditionally stored in large stor-age boxes, are seemingly simply brought out and put on special shelves.

During the course of the conference, a reception at the National Museum gave delegates the opportunity to see the wonderful Ottomania exhibition. This temporary exhibition showed, through an exceptional collection of works of art and arms and armour, how Europe in the 16th century watched the rise of the Ottoman Empire with ambivalent feelings of both fascination and fear.

This was followed in the evening by a visit to the World famous and UNESCO World Heritage site, the 700 year old Wieliczka Salt Mine. A 60-minute guided

The National Museum main building where the ‘Ottomania’ exhibition was held and which Confer-ence delegates visited on 16 September

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tour around this magical and extraordinary place evoked Tolkienesque thoughts of the Mines of Moria and dwarves for many of the delegates. This was followed by the Wel-come Dinner 135 m (442 ft) below ground level in the Jan Haluszka I Chamber. This cavernous room was lit by rock salt crystal chandeliers.

Delegates also visited the excellent Muzeum Armii Krajowej (The Home Army Museum) which opened in 2000, and which told the story of the Polish resistance army first fighting the Nazi invasion only to find them-

selves attacked by their Soviet liberators. This tragic story was told with well displayed objects. Many enjoyed seeing the array of firearms on the first floor, just some of the 8,000 exhibits the museum holds, and taking out a tank with an anti-tank rifle, courtesy of a simulator! This was followed by a tour of Oskar Schindler’s Fac-tory Museum which opened in 2010. Here the story of ‘Krakow under Nazi Occupation 1939-45’ and how Schin-dler saved some 1,200 Jewish prisoners from Krakow by employing them in the plant was told. The story itself was the basis of Spielberg’s movie ‘Schindler’s List’ (1993). However, compared to the previous museum, there were hardly any real objects, and it was felt by many that although well worth visiting, to see how a museum might deal with ‘dark tourism’, it in fact, in some cases, felt more like a ‘dark ride’ experience (a comparison only con-firmed by a room with a wobbly floor which moved as one walked on it, apparently representing political instabil-ity.... or a fairground cakewalk!). It perhaps wasn’t helped by a particular guide who at one point seemed to confuse the real Oskar Schindler with the character portrayed by the actor Liam Neeson.

The Conference concluded with the ICOMAM Gen-eral Assembly, which was held at the National Museum, where it was formally announced that the next confer-ence will be held in Milan, Italy, between 3 and 9 July 2016 as part of the general triennial ICOM meeting with the overall theme, ‘Museums and Cultural Landscapes’ (See http://network.icom.museum/icom-milan-2016/ ). Two dear friends were also remembered this year as we lost both Piet de Gryse, from Belgium, and Zdzisław Zygulski Jr, from Poland, within the last year, both of whom had been past presidents of ICOMAM (and its predecessor IAMAM). After the assembly delegates were taken on a tour of the arms and armour and militaria held by the National Museum and into the reserve collections in store to see some of their choicest exhibits not on display.

The Chapel of St. Kinga, in the magical Wieliczka Salt Mine, 101 m (331 ft) below ground level

Muzeum Armii Krajowej (Home Army Museum) Wawel Royal Castle; the ‘Hen’s Claw’ wing

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The closing tour was to the immense and majestic Wawel Royal Castle complex and its series of museums, galleries and Cathedral. It also provided a chance to look at the castle’s Crown Treasury and Armoury which contained some very fine and interesting pieces, includ-ing the amazing 13th century coronation sword of Polish monarchs, Szczerbiec .

A final farewell cocktail reception was held at the Bishop Erasm Ciołek Palace, another branch of the National Museum. Following a tour of the fine medieval, renaissance and later art collection, which included fine 15th century triptychs from Krakow, this rounded off the proceedings before delegates returned to their respective countries. But not before many participated in a number of short Post-Congress Tours.

Some participants then travelled to Warsaw and the Muzeum Wojska Polskiego (Museum of the Polish Army), the largest military museum in Poland, which was estab-lished in 1920. The collection of arms and armour covers some 1000 years of history and contains a fine holding of medieval material and, of course, a superb collection of 17th century armour of the ‘Husaria’, the famous ‘winged’ cavalry of the Polish army. Armament from later centuries includes tanks and aircraft of the 20th century. Delegates were then taken to the newly opened muse-um of the Katyn Massacre and were given a tour of this superbly realised monument by the director, Mr Sławek Frątczak. Following this were tours of the Old and New Towns and the new Museum of the History of Polish Jews finishing up with a ride in a historical bus. The group was overwhelmed by the hospitality from the local organisers and specially Emilia Jastrzębska at the Army Museum.

Others took the chance to visit the Malopolska re-gion. This included a visit to the amazing wooden parish church of St. Michael the Archangel in Debno Podhalańsk-ie, built in 1490. This rare survivor became a UNESCO

World Heritage site in 2003 and still retains much of its polychromatic painted interior and a cross from 1380. This was followed by a sedate raft cruise down the river Dunajec gorge. The raft passed slowly down the river through majestic towering limestone gorges and forests of the Pieniny National Park. The tour closed with a visit to the medieval Niedzica Castle, which once guarded the Polish border with Hungary.

There was also the opportunity to visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, which be-came a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1978. Auschwitz is a name synonymous with the horrors of war and the Holocaust in particular. Although it began life in 1940 as a concentration camp for Polish political prisoners, by 1942

Muzeum Wojska Polskiego (‘Museum of the Polish Army’), Warsaw (Photo courtesy Royal Armouries)

Parish church of St. Michael the Archangel in Deb-no Podhalańskie,

Auschwitz-Birkenau

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it had became something more; a death camp, which by 1945 had claimed up to 1,500,000 people, the majority, 1,350,000, Jews. Even though one was surrounded by many other tourists it was impossible not to be moved by what happened here. For the present author the most poignant moment was walking along the unloading ramps of Auschwitz II, the very path where the victims had taken their final steps from getting off the trains to walk in a few minutes to their deaths in the gas chambers that waited at the end. To wander around this place, which is so familiar from history, was an incredibly evocative and emotional experience. It reminded one that on a battle-field site one may know that one is in the proximity of death; but here one knows for certain that one is quite literally walking in the footsteps of those that died. It made one also think about the perhaps rather fatuous ‘wobbly floor’ at the Oskar Schindler factory and also the purpose and use of many pieces we hold in our museums. Sometimes, however pacifistic we may wish to be, to go to war is seemingly justified and the lesser of two evils. And it is our museums that very often hold the matériel of such wars.To close on a brighter note it only remains to add that our Polish hosts, particularly Michał Dziewulski and Anna Sobesto, are to be thanked for giving us a wonderful

Dom Pod Lwem (The house under the lion) on Ulica Grodzka, Krakow. The carved lion dates from the 14th century

Group photograph of the ICOMAM & ICDAD delegates in the Chapel of St Kinga, in the magi-cal Wieliczka Salt Mine, 101 m (331 ft) below ground level (Photo courtesy of National Museum)

conference, providing a fascinating glimpse into the work they undertake and for giving us all a wonderful taste of Poland. As a result it will not be at all surprising to see many of the delegates coming back to sample more Polish hospitality. Na zdorowie!


Our conference in 2016 will be held in conjunction with the triennial ICOM Congress in Milan. The

theme for the overall event is Museum and Cultural Land-scapes building up a Cultural Heritage.Registration is now open and, until the end of January, there is an early-bird fee - go to: http://network.icom.museum/icom-milan-2016//

The Italian landscape is world famous and has been described and visited in all ages. The 18th century Grand

Tour became an essential destination for those seeking a synthesis of history and natural beauty. Who does not know the extraordinary range of landscapes that make up the Italian peninsula, extending from the Alps to the centre of the Mediterranean, with its hinterlands and its Rivieras? Who does not have in mind at least one of the numberless monuments encountered while travel-ling through Italy, a country offering a unique stratified palimpsest from antiquity to the Middle Ages, from the Renaissance to the Baroque, from the Neoclassical age to the present day?

Although endangered by urban and industrial devel-opment, many of Italy’s celebrated landscapes have been preserved and although they have changed they have not been deprived of their ancient charm. New landscapes have also emerged, and their modernity has already become a part of history, while the very idea of landscape has changed and has extended to increasingly new territo-ries appealing to the mind as well as to the eyes.

Inviting colleagues from all over the world to the 24th General Conference of ICOM, which will be held in Milan 3 to 9 July 2016, the Italian National Committee offers a theme dear to Italian museology: the relationship between museums and cultural landscapes. This is a central issue for Italy, but also a strategic perspective for museums

ICOMAM Congress and ICOM Triennial Conference 3-9 July 2016, Milan, Italy

Museums and cultural landscapes building up a cultural heritage

Milan Expo


around the world in the third millennium. This theme offers both an opportunity and a challenge for museums to revive their mission and strengthen their cultural and social role. ICOM Italy’s theme implies two essential questions.

First, to what extent should museums, especially those whose collections are linked to their locations, take the role of interpretation centre for the place and the community they belong to? Secondly, how can museums disseminate the knowl-edge of the cultural heritage both inside and outside their walls? We believe that museums should not only take all

responsibility for their collections, but also for the cultural heritage around them. Thanks to the skills of their profes-sionals, museums should become musei diffusi, extended museums and garrisons to protect the cultural heritage conserved outside their walls. Museums have responsibili-ties for the cultural landscape; they should become:

• custodians of knowledge through their collections, research and scientific activities• protagonists of new investigations on cultural herit-age and active institutions in the protection and con-servation of cultural goods both within and outside their walls• extended museums and interpretation centres of local heritage

• centres responsible for the education to cultural heritage and landscape• leaders in landscape protection, conservation and development, as well as for the urban and landscape planning and for the promotion of cultural tourism• custodians of the historical and cultural values of the landscape and promoters of sustainable development The schedule is full of lectures and interesting things

to do and ICOMAM has tried to schedule a programme so you can attend both the international ICOM sessions as well as those organised by ICOMAM. In the evenings we will have many joint social events and some spare time to discover the city of Milan. Every morning there will be two world-famous key-note speakers for all ICOM dele-gates and there will also be a special exhibition of ICOM’s 70th anniversary.

All this will take place in the Milan Expo, which is a huge conference centre where the expected 2000 delegates will spend their days. It is in this venue that the World Expo was held in 2015. The venue is situated a short way outside the centre of Milan but has easy access to the city centre with its own subway station. We have promises to have discount to La Scala, on the Night Watch and other ‘to do’ things that are available in Milan. All of us will have free underground tickets so we can easily go back and forth during the days. ICOMAM lectures are

The artillery Museum in Turin

The Royal Armoury in Turin The Museo Pietro Micca

A visit to the roof of the Duomo with its walkways is a must


scheduled from Monday - Wednesday and our preliminary program is looking like this:

Monday 4 July General Assembly and session 1; 14:00 – 18:00Tuesday 5 July Session 2; 11:00 – 13:00 and Session 3; 15:00 – 18:00,Wednesday 6 July Session 4; 11:30 – 13:00 and Ses-sion 5; 14:00 – 18:00

On Thursday 6 July - our preliminary plan is for a tour to Turin to see three very special museums - the Armeria Reale, the Museo dell’Artigliera and the Museo Pietro Micca.

The Royal Armoury in Turin with its magnificent gallery from the early 19th century presents collections of weapons and armours. The Museum was opened in 1837 and is still displayed in neo-gothic showcases with mounted figures on stuffed horses. In 2011 the loggia, which opens onto the main square, was restored and it was from these windows that Carlo Alberto declared the first war of independence from the Austrians.

The Artillery Museum was founded in 1843 when the king of Sardinia, Carlo Alberto, approved the project of General Vincenzo Morelli di Popolo, General Artillery Commander, making it is the oldest military museum in Italy. It was intended to provide a sort of side museum to the Royal Armoury. With the most important guns came some light arms and white weapons, models, engravings, paintings many of which recall the independence war. Artillery is the most artistic part of the collections but may be considered a small part of the existing artefacts. Many objects are from the Reign of Sardinia and date to the 18th century.

The Museo Pietro Micca and the Siege of Turin 1706, is in a two-floor building, one of which is underground. The building, realized in 1961 for the celebration of the centenary of the unification of Italy, stands in the place on which, during the siege operations, there were a French battery of two large pieces of ordnance which were used to pull down the walls of the Cittadella. A visit to the Pietro Micca Museum is a journey into the past, back to the days of the War of the Spanish Succession (beginning in the 18th century) when Turin was besieged for four months by the French Army. The town was saved by the so called ‘war of mines’ which was fought across a vast network of tunnels extending under and beyond the external defence works (some 14 km), No less than 9 km have been preserved and can still be visited today.

The call for papers is now open and abstracts should be sent by e-mail to the Secretary of ICOMAM, Mathieu Willemsen: [email protected]

We need to have the title of your paper and a max-imum of a half page of text on what issues your lecture will cover. The time limit for each paper will be 15 minutes. They will be presented in groups of 3 followed by 15 minutes of questions and discussions. Please send in your ideas by 15 January 2016 at the latest. We would like to have papers about your news and on up to date research work. We will also have some joint sessions, together with IC-MEMO (International Committee of Me-morial Museums in Remembrance of the Victims of Public Crimes) on the topic of dark tourism. We wish to have lectures about battlefields or similar areas that are turned into museums and/or tourist attractions or monuments. We welcome both good as well as bad examples. We also wish to have lectures about symbols and military details in architecture, city planning etc. Hope to see you all in Milan in July 2016


ICOMAM has decided to offer financial support to young museum professionals to attend the annual ICOMAM conference in memory of late past president Piet De Gryse.ICOMAM are offering three grants of 500 Euros each to support attendance at the 2016 ICOM/ICOMAM confer-ence in Milan between 3 and 9 July.Applicants should be under 35 and have not attended an ICOMAM conference before. They must be members of ICOMAM either as an individual or through an institution.The conference is part of triennial ICOM conference on the theme of ‘Museums and Cultural Landscapes’. Details of the conference can be found above and at: milano2016.icom.museumApplicationApplicants should submit a curriculum vitae with a covering letter stating why they would like to attend the

The Piet de Gryse Memorial Bursaries

conference and how they or their institution would bene-fit from attendance. Applications should be sent to :

Janice Murray ICOMAM Treasurer National Army Museum Royal Hospital Road LONDON SW3 4HTUK

The closing date for applications is 15 February 2016 Decisions will be made by the ICOMAM board on 28 February 2016The grant, which will be paid on submission of receipts can be used to cover travel , accommodation, subsistence and conference fees up to the total sum of 500 Euros.

Piet de Gryse1957-2015

Piet is dead and I am broken-hearted for many reasons.

Piet was my friend and colleague from 1981, although we met less frequently since 2005 when I retired as chief curator of the Dutch Army Museum. I met him for the first time after the appearance of my first book, Blanke Wapens (Edged Weapons) in 1981 when I visited the Royal Army Museum in Brussels, his working place. Piet was very happy, I remember him saying, that a book which had as its central theme his, and my, beloved subject, swords, had appeared in the Dutch language - for the first time ever I might add.

Piet and myself had already taken care of the Dutch-language version of the Glossarium Armorum during the 1990s, and later, in 2006, we finished the Lexicon of Hilted Weapons in four languages: Dutch-English-French-German which was published in that year by Waffen- und Kostümkunde. Indeed, this work could only be accom-plished by two dedicated sword experts, each with his own linguistic reach and with enough special knowledge in the other languages.

Piet was a staunch supporter of Flemish culture and its traditions, including a love for the language the Flem-ish call ‘Nederlands’ but which actually differs somewhat

from the ‘Nederlands’ spoken by the Dutch, for it is a language in its own right - and not a Dutch dialect.

On the subject of language I remember also some hi-larious moments, for instance one day when he and I went out in the centre of Brussels to have lunch. At the lunch room Piet consistently spoke Dutch to the personnel and the latter in turn consistently spoke back in French. They understood each other’s language perfectly, but that is not the point. It was the persistent attitude of all which astounded me. Afterwards, Piet explained: ‘It is typical.


health he chose to take the directorship together with his colleague Christine Van Everbroeck.

With his deteriorating health and the vicissitudes around the museum there were also some unsavoury situations. For example, Piet was reprimanded for using a ministry of defence automobile and chauffeur for his daily journey from and to his home near Antwerp. This matter was especially painful, not just because it was exposed in the press (no doubt on purpose), but because Piet, who had been doing the daily journey between Antwerp and Brussels on his motorcycle for years on end, could no longer do this anyway because of his health problems. And what adds insult to injury was the fact that Piet as interim director was fully qualified to use an official auto-mobile with chauffeur.

No doubt it all has had its effect on Piet’s well-being and his health, as can be observed by just looking at his photographs over the years. Finally, his heart, which had been a source of concern for the last five years, gave up and Piet died on 6 September 2015, on his 58th birthday.

We, of the community of military museums the world over will greatly miss Piet - his enthusiasm, knowledge, kindness and generosity above all else. In the name of all I offer my condolences to Hilde and the children.

Jan Piet Puype

Especially if you realize that Brussels is a Flemish city but it has almost completely become French.’

Piet’s love for the Flemish culture went so far that he indulged in taking part in old traditions, such as Flemish folk dances and the playing of the drum in the Flemish manner. At home I had an old military drum and when Piet saw it for the first time he made a few impressive rolls on the drum explaining that he had been a drummer in a Flemish folk band. Obviously, when the years pro-ceeded, it became less and less possible for him to indulge in these old traditions. His son, Maarten, was a boy scout and Piet proudly showed me pictures of him as a member of a boy scout group visiting Britain, during the Interna-tional Jamboree in 2007 when each scout in the group was officially presented to Prince Andrew of England.

Piet’s family, his wife Hilde, their three daughters and Maarten, was a happy one as I could see during the few times I visited their home at Aartselaar to the west of Antwerp.

Professionally, Piet had reached the lofty and respon-sible position of deputy director in the Brussels Army Museum. However, fulfilling this position turned out to be fraught with problems. There were not just the inter-nal, classic organizational problems which most larger museums have, not to forget dealing with many people in all kinds of work inevitably involving a number of frictions, but at Piet’s museum there was the extra problem that the director of the institution has to be, by tradition, a French speaking army person or scholar with a doctorate in history. This position used to revolve every six years between Flemish and Francophones. The last director was a Francophone whose mandate terminated in 2014 and it was not yet renewed. Piet was asked by the minis-try to act as director in the interim. Because of his poor

The members of the Justus Lipsius Commission at the Rijksmuseum on 24 September 2014 - from the left: Jan Piet Puype, Eveline Sint Nicholaas, Claude Gaier, Piet and Mathieu Willemsen


Born on August 18, 1921, Zdzislaw Zygulski Jr passed away on 14 May 2015. The son of a distinguished ger-

manist who taught in Lodz and Wroclaw, he was fortunate enough to survive the dramatic World War II period in his home country,. He acquired a doctorate degree in Art History and English Literature at the reputed Jagellon University in Cracow. A specialist in the history of art and world history in general, he was fluent in or at least con-versant with several foreign languages, which helped him considerably in the conduct of his career and researches. He joined the newly redeployed Czartoryski Collection Museum in 1949, of which he eventually became director for many years. He was also to teach at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow. Travelling the world, learning and lecturing along his routes, meeting people of all nations and creeds, especially during the difficult Cold War era, he became a foremost cultural ambassador of his country.

His vast culture embraced almost all aspects of human achievements, with the stress on antique arms and unifor-mology in Europe as well as the Middle- and Far-East.He pioneered in the comparative study of armaments in the Old World, a little-chartered subject when he first ventured to explore it. He gave Poland a decisive impulse in the study of hoplologia, rooted in a specific geographical area where East and West have always met and oftentimes clashed.

Zdzislaw Zygulski (or Itek, to use his familiar nick-name) became president of IAMAM (predecessor of to-day’s ICOMAM) from 1975 to 1981. As such, he was instrumental in organizing the 1978 IAMAM congress in a masterly way, literally opening up Poland to the inter-national scholarly world in this specialized field of knowl-edge. He attended innumerable conferences and meetings in various countries, including of course his own. A lot of people may still have in mind the brilliant key-note speech he deliverd during the general assembly of IAMAM in Brussels in 1996.

As a prolific author, he must be credited with well over 200 books, articles and reviews. Some of his major publications were illustrated with documentary drawings made by his talented spouse, Eva Zygulska (1924-97), a skilled artist and ceramist.

Zdzislaw Zygulski was altogether a convinced patriot and a personality of international stature. He will be re-membered as a high-ranking scholar, a keen proponent of trans-border dialogue, a convincing advocate of the study of arms and armour and, last but not least, a distinguished intellectual and an esteemed friend.

We shall not forget him. Claude Gaier Past-president and honorary member of the Board

Death of a towering scholarZdzislaw Zygulski Jr


Sarah Barter Bailey, former Royal Armouries Librarian, died in August this year, a few months short of her 80th

birthday. She joined the small staff of the Tower of Lon-don Armouries in the mid 1960s working with the library, archive and art collection until her retirement in 2000.

For almost 4 decades the Armouries Library was Sarah, and Sarah was the Library. It was through her ef-forts that the books and reference material was gathered together, housed in glass fronted book cases and the Reading Room created. Books alone do not a library make - it takes love, care and a lot of hard graft to create the environment which both encourages and supports work within it.

Sarah worked alongside the greats in the field - Black-more, Blair, Borg, Kennard and Norman to name but a few – and by her retirement had served under four Mas-ters of the Armouries. Her career at the Tower spanned a time of great change both for the organisation and for women in the workplace.

By the late 1970s, the Armouries was beginning to employ female curators, but overall the study of arms and armour remained something of a male enclave. Sarah and Blanche Ellis led the advance in working with the collections and conducting scholarly research within the field – Sarah as Librarian and Blanche as calligrapher and producer of labels at a time before the omnipresent rule of the computer. At a time when arms and armour women were in a minority, Sarah established a niche for herself. She turned the Armouries Library and its eclectic reference material from a useful bolt-on into part of the institution’s foundations supporting and enriching the

core collections. Sarah gathered this material together in one place and organised access to it.

Her own research was wide ranging and remains pertinent to this day. It led to a number of publica-tions - ranging from articles on Tower History, Office of Ordnance records and Armouries Booklets on Tower inscriptions to biographies of the modern Masters of the Armouries. She also turned her hand to editing - notably Whitelaw’s biographical dictionary of Scottish arms and armour makers - and of late the Journal of the Arms and Armour Society. Her chapters on the ground breaking history of the Tower ‘The Tower of London: It’s Buildings and Institutions’ published to celebrate the site’s novo centenary in 1978, are another highlight. Her work on Ordnance, including her contribution to Howard Black-more’s glorious Ordnance Catalogue produced many offshoots, not least the Armouries monograph ‘Prince Rupert’s patent guns’ – the product of some 30 years research finally published in 2000.

Sarah’s help was widely acknowledged formally and informally – but she was not a lady to shout about her knowledge – it was deep and omnivorous. Many students of arms and armour remain grateful for her suggestions as to fruitful lines of enquiry. The wisest learnt quickly she was an invaluable resource in herself, with a treasure trove of leads to pursue – often in the most unlikely plac-es. She was thinking ‘outside the box’ before the phrase was coined.

As well as the reference books and special collec-tions of early published material, Sarah also looked after archive material and pictures. While she may secretly have belonged to the camp who considers that the card index will never be bettered, Sarah moved with the times. The Armouries resisted the computer revolution valiantly, but in the 1980s succumbed. As the collection catalogue moved into the electronic age, Sarah mastered the intrica-cies of the STAR system, recognising the potential of the computer to store and process research.

The mid 1980s and 90s were a time of great change for the Tower Armouries - new staff, new responsibilities as the ties with the Department of Environment were cut and it became a Trustee Museum – no more the days of the blue van and the despatch of matters Bureaucratic to the ‘Department’ and no longer frontline civil servants. The relocation of the hunting collection material to a new home in the country morphed into relocating a major part of the collection to Sheffield and finally Leeds, while the artillery rather more quietly trundled down to Fort Nelson in Portsmouth. It cannot have been easy for Sarah as she approached retirement to take part in the disman-tling of her creation as the bulk of the Library moved north and what remained at the Tower moved from pillar to post.

Sarah Barter Bailey


There is still a Royal Armouries library at the Tower open to the public by prior appointment and although diminished in size, it remains the only such facility on site. Sarah remains a core part of it – there is still much of what she created saved in its modern incarnation, not least with use of wooden bookcases as kinder to the books. Researchers can still come across her handwritten notes in inventory entries, card indices and invaluable green boxes of annotated notes and photocopies. While we can no longer nip into her office to find her sur-rounded by piles of books and useful cuttings occasionally battling the computer with a quick game of Solitaire, her influence lingers. Sarah was never a typical Librarian – but none the worse for that, and there are many who will forever be in her debt for the help and advice she gave. To borrow and enlarge on Guy Wilson, former Master of the Armouries, words in his introduction to Prince Rupert’s Guns – ‘Thank you Sarah for reminding us what a fascinating subject arms and armour is - thank you for the part you have played in preserving and promoting these studies’.

Bridget CliffordKeeper of Tower Armouries


The exhibition, commemorating this most important event in Malta’s history, was organised by Heritage

Malta in collaboration with the Malta National Libraries. It was officially opened with a special ceremony under the patronage of the President of Malta on 4 September and closed on the 5 December 2015. The exhibition was set up in five of the larger halls of the President’s Palace State Rooms in Valletta and formed part of a series of activities that commemorated this event.

The Great Siege was a heroic defence that instilled courage in Malta and throughout Europe. Over and above this, the 1565 Siege marks the labourious birth of modern Malta. The Great Siege has been the subject over the centuries of an extensive corpus of artistic and literary works throughout Europe. As the 18th century historian better known as Voltaire dared claim, nothing in the world is better known than the Siege of Malta. The exhibition was divided into stages explaining the unfolding events that led to the Great Siege as well as its aftermath. Nevertheless, this exhibition in no way attempted at re-writing the history of the Siege, but highlighted new research, discoveries and artefacts that make the story of the Great Siege of Malta a more tangible experience than the triumphalism with which it has been told so far.

The first three rooms made use of spaces that had, until now, never been open to the public since they have always been used for official purposes. The first room was the private chapel of the Grandmaster while the second was once his bedroom. The third was a state room complete with frescoes describing the earlier history of the Order of St. John. The fourth hall used was the so-called Throne Room which is endowed with

a beautiful frescoed frieze of the eventful Great Siege by the Italian mannerist artist, Matteo Perez D’Aleccio painted only a few years after the actual siege. Apart from the numerous contemporary artifacts, this hall has been set up with a 360° audio visual presentation of the most important events related to the frescoed frieze. The fifth hall, the Dining Room, was set up with a walkthrough of the immediate aftermath of the Siege and the celebrations of victory in the years that followed and up to the present day.

The artefacts illustrating this exhibition were drawn mostly from local national collections, namely Heritage Malta with artefacts coming from the Palace Armoury and the Maritime and Fine Arts museums. Documents of the Order of St. John were borowed from the Nation-al Library and Notarial archives. However other items were loaned from smaller collections in Malta - St John’s Co-Cathedral Museum, Mdina Cathedral museum and the archive and Palazzo Falzon in Mdina. Loans from abroad constituted objects related to the Order of St. John. Such items came from the Order of St John’s Museum in London, the Royal Amouries in Leeds, Firepower Muse-um in Woolwich, the Kunsthistorisches in Vienna, Palazzo Venezia in Rome and the Kremlin Museums in Moscow. Unfortunately, attempts to bring artefacts from Turkey proved futile. The organizing committee of the exhibition had earmarked Ottoman weapons and armour as well as two bronze cannon that were used for the 1565 siege in

1565 The Great Siege of Malta exhibition

Robert CassarCurator, Palace Armoury, Heritage Malta


Malta. Other attempts which fell through were items from the Kunsthistorisches such as the Ascanio de la Corgna fighting armour that was used in the Grande Soccorso towards the end of the siege as well as a full armour of Charles V which were turned down due to conservation issues.

Purposely made for the exhibition were twelve man-nequins of soldiers from the siege wearing period armour from the Palace Armoury and equipped with replica clothing and pertinent accoutrements. This part of the project had been initiated by the late Michael Stroud and completed by his son John for the exhibition. The groups included infantry soldiers and officer, cavalry, cross-bowmen, swordsmen and harquebusiers. Another item purposely made for the exhibition was the model of the Carrack St Anne made by Heritage Malta model maker, Joe Abela based on a drawing and descriptions of this vessel which brought the Order of St. John from Rhodes to Malta.

Among the most prominent highlights on show were two very important documents from the archives of the Order of St John. The first was the Papal bull issued by Pope Pascal II on the 15 February 1113 and conferred to the founder, the Blessed Gerard, confirmation as an Order

recognized by the Holy See. The other was the deed of donation of the Island of Malta, Gozo and Tripoli to the Order of St John dated 23 March 1530. Two very notable helmets were also exhibited. The first, from the Palace Armoury collection, was a Rhodes-period Sallet dated to around 1510-20 while even more prestigious was the hel-met of Charles V loaned from the Kunsthistoriches collec-tion. From the Firepower Museum in Woolwich, a cannon of the minion range, dated 1551, of Augsburg manufacture was brought for this exhibition. The cannon is document-ed to have been taken from Malta in the 1820s and was recently rediscoved in the Woolwich museum reserve collection by Heritage Malta curators. From the Kremlin Museums, two pendant crosses were sourced. These two very important relics from the Order of St John once be-longed to Grandmaster l’Isle Adam and Grandmaster de Valette respectively. They were taken from Malta in 1798 and were given by members of the Order of St John to Tsar Paul III of Russia to obtain his protection.

Another highlight of the exhibition was the unification of a decorated cavalry half armour, also known as the ‘Lin-ear Fleur-de-Lys’ Armour, originally owned by a knight of the Order and most probably used during the Great Siege. Its pieces, as for several other suits, are divided between the Palace Armoury in Valletta and the Royal Armouries in Leeds. These were separated some time around the early half of the 19th century. Similarly outstanding, is a portrait


bust of de Valette made of silver and gilt bronze attributed to Leone Leoni which was presented to the Grandmaster himself as a gift of congratulations on his victory. The bust was loaned by the Museum of the Order of St John in London. Another relic from the 1565 siege which has only been recently discovered is a bronze bell that was rung to announce the victory of the siege. The bell, dated 1560, carries the coat of arms of the Order and those of Grandmaster de Valette and was originally hung on Fort St Angelo at the time of the siege.

For the exhibition a highly illustrated catalogue was published by Heritage Malta and the Malta Libraries. Also linked to the 450th anniversary celebration of the Great Siege of 1565, Heritage Malta in collaboration with Malta Libraries organized an international conference which took place on the 29 and 30 November in the newly opened Heritage Malta site, Fort St. Angelo in Birgu. The conference proved to be very fruitful with several local speakers as well as many others from Turkey and England. Aspects discussed were various and brought to light re-cent studies on the Great Siege. The papers have all been published in a two volume proceedings publication with the title Besieged – Malta 1565.


By 1915, the First World War raged in theatres from Mesopotamia to Western Europe and on the seas and

oceans around the world. The Ottoman Empire joined the war on the side of the Central Powers at the end of 1914. With the war’s main theatre, the Western Front, in stalemate, Allied strategists sought to improve their position by forcing the Ottoman Empire out of the war, taking pressure off the Russians and depriving Germany and Austria-Hungary of an important ally. To achieve this, the Allies planned a naval assault through the Çanakkale Straits/Dardanelles into the Sea of Marmara. Faced with the naval might of a combined French and British fleet standing off the Ottoman capital, Istanbul, Allied planners anticipated that the Ottoman leadership would surrender.

The Çanakkale naval battles began on 19 February 1915 with the bombardment of the fortifications at the entrance to the Straits by Allied naval forces. Expecting a quick, easy victory, the Allies made little progress against Ottoman minefields and shore-based mobile artillery which naval gunfire was unable to subdue. After a series of attempts to break through the Dardanelles, a final effort on 18 March 1915 ended in an Allied defeat and the loss of several dreadnoughts.

To help the fleet force a passage through the Darda-nelles the Allies landed infantry on the Gallipoli peninsula on 25 April 1915. Some 75,000 soldiers from the armies of the British Empire and France, including Australia and New Zealand landed on beaches at Ilyasbaba Burnu/Cape Helles, Kum Kale and Gaba Tepe. The campaign soon set-tled into stalemate; the Allies could not advance, and the Ottoman forces could not dislodge them. The opening phase of fighting ended with both sides exhausted and having suffered heavy casualties.

In August, the Allies attempted a breakout from Gaba Tepe and Cape Helles and conducted new landings at Suvla Bay. The offensive failed after heavy fighting and the stalemate resumed, this time with British forces also trapped at Suvla Bay. Both sides had suffered heavy casualties but there had been no progress at Gaba Tepe or Cape Helles. The campaign continued through autumn and into winter. The Allies, realizing that they would never succeed in the Dardanelles, planned a withdrawal. The Australians and New Zealanders (the ANZACs) left the peninsula in December and the British and French left the following January.

The campaign on Gallipoli and the naval battles of Feb-ruary and March 1915 resulted in some half million casual-ties and ensured that the Ottoman Empire would remain in the war. Gallipoli/Çanakkale continues to resonate in Australia, New Zealand and Turkey a century after the campaign ended. and has become a central part of each country’s national story.

In 2015, we commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Gallipoli campaign, known in Turkey as the Battle of Çanakkale, and remember the fallen who gave their lives in the service of their countries. This exhibition, which opened on 22 September 2015 in the Military History Museum in Vienna, brings together for the first time pho-tographs taken by soldiers from all three countries and represent a symbol of the friendship forged in Gallipoli.

Çanakkale/Gallipoli 1915-2015: The road to peace out of war 23 September 2105 - 10 January 2016


‘Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives…You are now lying in the soil of a friendly coun-try. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets where they lie side by side now here in this country of ours… you the mothers who sent their sons from faraway countries, wipe away your tears; your sons are lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives, they have become our sons as well.’Mustafa Kemal, Atatürk (1881-1938), 1934

All photographs © ÖBH/Hartl 2015

The Power and the Story is a new exhibition about what we choose to collect in museums and what sto-

ries we tell. Choosing what to tell is an exciting challenge and in this special dislpay we worked together with the Swedish Army Navy and Air Force Film Foundation. In the exhibition it is possible to find out the traces from histo-ry that are kept within their archive. In our chronological huge exhibition ‘War and peace’ that runs from the 16th century up to the present, we use the Army Museum collections to outline the development of Sweden during the last 500 years. The items selected are exchanged now and then and texts rewritten in order to present different interpretation. The Power and the Story serves as an introduction or an epilogue to the entire Army Museum.

The power and the story. A new permanent exhibition at the Army museum in Stockholm


A wall of history presents the most typical items of the museum, and the visitor can literally step right into history. The most typical items from our museum are definitely souvenirs of the elite. All our fantastic ob-jects, dating from different periods, have some things in common. Almost all the items have been used by men, or have been donated by men or by the Defence. If there are any personal connections, the people behind the items are officers, and hardly ever common soldiers. From 1960 there are some female donors, but the items they donate have been used by their husbands, who have been officers. The story that accompanies the donation is all about the husband´s actions, not the wife´s role or importance. It is not until the 1980s that the museum begins to receive items used by women.

There has hardly been any active collecting policy, but the museum has received incoming donations, and directors such as the ones on the photo have decided whether a particular item should be added to the collec-tions or not. Considering whose history to tell, collec-tions matters greatly. But what to choose to tell is just as important.

Defence has been the realm of the strong and healthy, and those deviating have played lesser parts, if any. People with various types of impairment, women, children, non-heterosexuals, well – the majority of the population were not active within the Army. But they were affected

by it, through war an peace, and the mission of the Army Museum in Stockholm, is to tell the story of the Defence and the part it has played within the development of society, that is, within the development of the entire pop-ulation. So it is an important question for the future, what we should collect and what stories we should tell. What if history began with you? If there were no things preserved, no stories about people who once lived. What would that be like?


Members of ICOMAM who attended the 2012 confer-ence in Oman will remember meeting Robert Elgood

and hearing his talk on a newly discovered sword of Sul-tan Sa’id bin Sultan al Bu Said of Muscat. Dr Elgood is one of the world’s leading scholars of Islamic and Indian arms and armour and is known and respected in East and West alike. The publication of a new book by him is an event to be anticipated with relish as he writes well and always has something new and interesting to say. His latest book is no exception. It is a catalogue of the arms and armour in the Maharaja Sawai Man Singh II Museum in the City Palace, Jaipur. This collection was given to the museum in 1959 by the Maharaja Sawai Man Singhji and came from the royal armoury. Many of the pieces were acquired in the later 19th century and for some full provenances and acquisition records survive. By examining both the arms and the records, and by researching the collecting criteria and activities of the Maharaja Madho Singh and his associ-ates, Dr Elgood has come to some startling and disturbing

conclusions that add up to the fact that many items of Indian arms and armour are not necessarily as old as they seem. Maharaja Madho Singh opened a museum in 1881 that was, in the mould of the early Victoria and Albert Museum, a museum to celebrate the current craft and manufacturing skills of the country and region. Dr Elgood lays out a compelling case that some of the Indian arms in the collection that we would normally date to earlier periods were, in fact, bought new in the late-19th century and that others, are earlier, plain pieces to which decora-tion has been added in the late-19th century. This makes this catalogue of very great importance as it should force all those responsible for collections of Indian arms and armour carefully to reassess their holdings. As Robert Elgood shows, this re-evaluation is necessary in even the best, most respected and most well-known of museums.

However, this is not just a book for curators with direct responsibility for Indian collections. For those of us with less responsibility and a more dilettante interest in the subject there is much to admire and enjoy in its pages. 186 fine objects are described, discussed and illustrated with excellent photographs. Dr Elgood’s text is a model of brevity. He makes his case clearly and concisely, and enlivens his discussions with fine stories, discursions into unexpected areas of knowledge and excellent pen por-traits of the main characters involved. Whether or not you are an aficionado of Middle Eastern and Indian arms you will find much to delight in these pages and will learn some unexpected things, whether it be why so many dec-orated Rajput arms are now set with later replaced jew-els, or how varied were the early sources of ivory. While many of pieces described were made in Rajput territories

Gems of JaipurArms and Armour at the Jaipur Court: The Royal Collection by Robert Elgood

Niyogi Books, New Delhi, 2015, 296 pages, numerous colour illustrations, £80/$130

Guy M Wilson

Mughal tulwar with silver and enamelled hilt


the collection encompasses all of India and extends to westwards to Persia and Europe, and eastwards to Japan.

In this volume you will find both beautiful and unusual things. The beauty comes in many forms. It can be found in the complex recurves of a Mughal helmet dating to around 1700, which is made in the form of a turban and decorated in gold with patterns found on textiles; on the wonderful chiselling on the grip of a 17th century katar from Deccan; in the fine silver and enamelled hilt of a 17th century Mughal tulwar, uniquely bearing silver marks; on the gilt and bejewelled head and butt of a 17th cen-tury imperial Mughal lance; on the painted hafts of four 19th century hunting lances made in Jaipur, the lacquered figure scenes on an earlier Jaipur shield which include one showing night hunting of deer with lamp and bow; and also in the fine craftsmanship and ingenuity shown by the craftsmen who in 1839 in Alwar made a European-style flintlock shotgun with a fine damascus twist barrel of externally serpentine form but internally with a straight bore.

And this last leads us to some of the more unusual things that the catalogue contains: a dagger with a hollow hilt containing all the implements required by a scribe; a tulwar within a tulwar; a combined mace, pistol, knife and crutch; and a curious and chilling arrow and bullet

extractor. In addition there are described here items of very great importance, including an ivory archer’s ring carved with what may be Christian figures which may well have belonged to Emperor Jahangir (ruled 1605-27). And finally there are some pieces that are either pub-lished for the very first time or for the first time shown to be so important. Chief amongst those must be the four-barrelled revolving pistol fired by a back-action lock mechanism with some characteristics of the later patilla miquelet. This pistol appears to date from about 1700 and the author argues that it was probably made in Goa. If this is correct it may help to shed light on how in the 16th century European guns influenced the development of Japanese firearms.

The catalogue is well-ordered with an excellent intro-duction that sets the scene and then ten chapters dealing with the different types of object in the collection. It is well referenced for those who wish to follow the details of the author’s reasonings and researches. All in all this is a book that is very well worth acquiring. However, do keep some money saved for Dr Elgood’s next volume, Ra-jput Arms and Armour: The Rathore Armoury at Mehrangarh Fort, Jodhpur, in which he promises to reveal more details of his recent researches into the history of Indian arms and armour.

Scribe’s dagger, Lucknow, late-18th or 19th century Ivory thumb ring believed to have belonged to Emperor Jahangir


As curators, many of us have often quietly asked this question

of the objects under our care in our museums’ collections: ‘Where have you been, and what have you seen?’ While this question would not be unreasonable for any curator to ask in any museum, the answer to this question, more often than not, would have greater impact and importance, were it to come from an object in a military museum. Far more often than is the case in any other type of museum, many of the objects in military museum collections have witnessed both the depths and the heights of the human experience. They have seen the savagery, horror, and misery of war, but have also seen the self-sacrifice that is so often made in defense of one’s family, country, and comrades, and the brav-ery that accompanies it.

While taking a break during a fiddle and guitar musical session in the study at my home a few months ago, one of my guests looked around at the assemblage of military memo-rabilia adorning the room, and asked the rhetorical question: ‘If these things could only talk, what kind of a tale would they have to tell?’ I was sitting next to a vintage rifle, so I pulled it out if its rack and said, ‘This one really has quite a history, and I can only imagine the stories that it could tell.’ Taking this as a cue, the others guest musicians asked me to tell the story of this well-travelled weapon that had been born in one country, fought for another coun-try, and then fought for two more countries, over a short span of only thirty years.

When Russia entered into World War I, its huge conscript army was already woefully short of service rifles. Its standard infantry shoulder

arm was the ‘Three-Line’ M1891 five shot, bolt-action rifle that was chambered for the 7.62mm rimmed cartridge. The ‘three-line’ designa-tion was a Russian term, meaning that the caliber of the bore was three-tenths of an inch in diameter, a ‘line’ representing one tenth of an inch—thus .30 caliber, or 7.62mm. A Russian army officer, Sergei Mosin, designed the rifle in 1891, but a Bel-gian inventor, Leon Nagant, claimed to have developed certain features, so, at least in the United States, this rifle is commonly referred to as a ‘Mosin-Nagant.’

By 1915, the Russians had more men in the lines than they had rifles, and they also had lost thousands of weapons in the defeats that they suffered at the hands of the German Army in 1914. The Czarist govern-ment turned to America, and let contracts with both the well-known

Remington Arms Company in New York, and a new firm called New Eng-land Westinghouse in Massachusetts, to make Mosin-Nagant rifles. Rem-ington was contracted to make 1.5 million rifles, while Westinghouse was to produce 1.8 million arms. Accord-ing to some published sources, only a total of about 750,00 thousand rifles had been produced by Remington prior to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, and nearly 470,00 of these had been shipped to Russia. However, the serial number range from extant verifiable weapons does not bear out these statistics, as the National Museum of the Marine Corps has a Remington rifle that was supplied by the Russians to the Nicaraguan insur-gents in the late 1920s, and it has a serial number in the 562,000 series. Westinghouse, alone, must have made more than 800,000 rifles, as at least two of them in my collection, 828084 and 803375, clearly made it to Russia, and were subsequently used by the Finns. These rifles were very well made, and had American walnut wooden stocks. The Russians stamped an acceptance mark on the wooden butt stock, and then issued them as fast as they could.

All the rifles made by New England Westinghouse were marked 1915, regardless of the actual date of their manufac-ture: 1915, 1916, or 1917

The Remington-made bolt is marked with the serial number 636122, but the numerals have been lined out

A Russian infantry rifle that has ‘seen the world’

A peregrinating rifleKenneth L Smith-ChristmasUS Marine Corps and US Army Museums, RetiredICOMAM Executive Board Member


With the collapse of the Ro-manov dynasty and Russia’s exit from World War I in 1917, the new Rus-sian government refused to pay for any more rifles, so all those rifles still in storage in the United States were purchased by the American govern-ment, marked, and issued for recruit training, as its army was expanding exponentially after entering the war earlier that year. Interestingly, the U.S. government also shipped 50,000 of these rifles to Vladivostock in 1917, to arm the Czech Legion, while supplying the small American expedi-tionary forces in both Murmansk and Archangel with Remington and West-inghouse Mosin-Nagants. After the war, most of the rifles still in Amer-ican armories were sold to civilians under the forerunner of today’s Civilian Marksmanship Program. Meanwhile, the Germans were

putting the Russian rifles that they had captured to good use. After marking the wooden butt stock with a ‘Deutsches Reich’ stamp, these rifles were issued to rear line troops, as ‘substitute standard’ weapons, and some were even fitted with an adapter on which an all-metal ‘ersatz’ knife-bladed bayonet could be mounted. The standard Russian bayonet was an epee-bladed socket bayonet. While the majority of the rifles were issued to prison camp guards, transportation units, and other similar rear area troops, the German Imperial Navy also received some of them. By 1916, the German forces had thousands of these rifles in its ranks, and even had enough to spare for one of the most curious episodes in World War I.

Irish nationalist separatists had been plotting to gain Ireland’s in-dependence from Great Britain for over a century prior to World War I. Although the British finally had offered a form of Home Rule to Ire-land prior to the beginning of World War I, it was put on hold for the duration of the war. A small group of revolutionaries gained control of the ‘Irish Volunteers’ (a group pledged to support Home Rule by force), and during Easter Week of 1916, the secret Irish Republican Brother-hood fomented a rebellion against the British government. While it fizzled across most of the country, it raged for a week in the capital city of Dublin, and reduced much of the center city to rubble. The success of the ‘Rising’ across Ireland depended on German support - namely arms, since the Irish Volunteers had just a few modern arms, and not many more obsolete military weapons and civilian shotguns. At the urging of the Irish revolutionaries (including the famed social reformer, Sir Roger Casement), the German government filled an old cargo ship, the Libau, with 20,000 of these captured (and ‘twice stamped’) Mosin-Nagant rifles, disguised the ship as a Norwegian freighter, and tried to land the guns on the west coast of Ireland a few days prior to the Easter Rising. However, due to a series of mishaps,

the British were able to seize the freighter, now known as the Aud. Its captain scuttled the ship as it was be-ing escorted into Cork Harbor, and all 20,000 rifles (as well as 10 Maxim machine guns and millions of rounds of ammunition) went to the bottom of the harbor, where they - except for a very few examples quickly recovered and now in museums - remain to this day.

By the time of the Armistice in November 1918, Germany had thou-sands of Mosin-Nagant rifles on hand (even discounting the rifles lost in Ireland.) Since the Treaty of Versailles only allowed for a small 100,000 man ‘Reichswehr’ army, the German gov-ernment had no need for these ex-cess captured foreign rifles, so it sold most of them to Finland in the early 1920s. Finland had finally gained its freedom from Russia during World War I, and needed arms to protect its new status as a republic. The Finns marked the rifles that had been purchased from Germany, and then issued to its new army, with an ‘SA’ (Suomi Armeija—Finnish Army) stamp on the breech of the weapon, as they also did the rifles that they had captured from the Russians during the Finnish Civil War in 1918. Those rifles acquired for the Finnish Civil Guard were stamped with a capital letter ‘S’ on either the butt stock or the barrel shank, and sometimes with the corresponding number of the Guard district. While most of the captured Mosin-Nagant rifles were Russian-made, some of them (like some of the German-supplied

The Czarist Russian acceptance stamp in the butt stock

The German Imperial own-ership stamp, applied after its capture from the Russians

The Finnish Civil Guard mark-ing, with the number of the corresponding district


arms) were the American imports from Remington and New England Westinghouse.

A few years later, Soviet Russia apparently supplied Mosin-Nagant rifles to the insurgents fighting with Augusto Sandino against the gov-ernment forces and the US Marines in Nicaragua. Buried deep in the diplomatic files at the U.S. National Archives in the Washington DC area is a Mosin-Nagant rifle that was cut in half and sent to Washington, via the diplomatic pouch, by the mili-tary attaché in Managua. He sent it back to prove Soviet complicity in the ongoing battle against the Sandinista rebels in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Another rifle, in the collection of the National Museum of the Marine Corps, validates this assertion, as it is one of the last Remington-made arms to reach Russia during World War I, and it has all the characteristics of a rifle that had been used by the Czar’s forces. US Marines captured this rifle during the Second Nicaraguan Campaign of 1927-34, and, very interestingly, it has a Star of David carved into its stock.

When the Winter War broke out between Finland and Soviet Russia in 1939, the Finns had been producing several models of their own version of the Mosin-Nagant, by modifying existing rifles. However, many of the original Civil Guard rifles were pressed into service with the army, and these were then marked with the ‘SA’ in a rectangular cartouche. While some of the captured and pur-

chased Finnish rifles were fitted with new two-piece birch wood stocks (characterized by a ‘three-finger’ splice), others retained their original configurations, with all of the mark-ings that could tell the rifle’s story. Finnish forces carried Mosin-Nagants of all types in the ‘Continuation War’ (the Finnish term for World War II) against Soviet Russia.

So, what tales would my rifle have to tell? It is marked with the New England Westinghouse name, as well as a Romanov Czarist eagle, on the breech. It has the Czarist accept-ance stamp, along with a Finnish Civil Guard marking, on one side of its walnut butt stock, and a German ‘Deutches Reich’ ownership stamp on the other side of the butt. On the side of the barrel shank, it has the Finnish Army ‘SA’ marking, and, finally, a ‘Century Arms St Albans VT’ marking near the muzzle of the barrel. However, it has a Reming-ton-made bolt (marked with an ‘R’ in a circle), with a crossed out serial number of ‘636122’ on it, again re-futing the claim that only a few more than 470,000 Remington-made rifles arrived in Russia.

The rifle could start out by de-scribing the city of Springfield, Massa-chusetts, where it was made in 1917, when America was either on the brink of war with Germany over the resumption of unrestricted subma-rine warfare and Mexican intrigues, or had just entered the war on the side of the Allies. Site of the first US arsenal founded in the 1790s, the city was also home to the well-known Smith & Wesson firearms company, while the Ames company, a long-time supplier of edged weapons to the US government, was located in a nearby town (and now a suburb), Chicopee Falls. The rifle could then tell of the harrowing sea voyage across the At-lantic, through the U-Boat blockade to one of Russia’s arctic ports, where it was unloaded for the armies of the Czar. It could then tell of the conversations between the soldiers huddled around a campfire on the Eastern Front, most likely some where between the Baltic coast and Galicia, while they discussed the

breakdown of the Russian Army and the political upheavals back home.

The next set of stories could be about guarding captured Rus-sian, French, or British prisoners of war, or perhaps the dreary duty of guarding supplies along a railway siding in Germany. The rifle may have seen service during the Ger-man Navy’s mutiny in late 1918, or could have been caught up in the fighting between the Spartacists and the Freikorps during the German civil war following the end of World War I. After arriving in Finland, it could tell about the life in a small Finnish village, while a Civil Guards-man owned it in the 1920s and 30s. The rifle could then tell of the brave resistance of the Finns when Soviet Russia invaded their country in the bitter cold of 1939, and also tell of long service during the ensuing fight-ing on the Finnish border with Russia from 1941 to 1944. Somewhere along the line, it could tell about the circumstances that led to its bolt be-ing replaced with one from another American-made rifle.

Finally, the rifle could tell of its voyage back to America in the 1990s, after the American Gun Control Act of 1968 was amended to allow the importation of ‘curio and relic’ historical arms once again into the country. The rifle ended up in northern Vermont, just a little more than two hundred miles away from

The ‘SA’ indicates Finnish Army use. The rifle was most likely refurbished during its service life in Finland

Other Finnish rifles have been reported with ‘kill notches’, as well as with initials carved into the stocks. Carving names on rifle stocks was also prevalent among the Boers during the Boer War, as well as with Con-federates during the American Civil War


its birthplace, before coming to a gun store in southern Virginia, and eventually, to my home. However, its most poignant, or disturbing, story would be about the four notches carved in its upper hand guard, rep-resenting four combat ‘kills’, some-time during its service life.

Conceivably, my rifle could be used to support the story line in any one of the following museum exhibits: ‘Russian Arms Design’; ‘Bel-gian Arms Design’; ‘Arms Manufactur-ing in the United States’; ‘Springfield, Massachusetts’; ‘American Support for the Allies During World War I’; ‘The U-Boat in World War I’; ‘Training the American Expeditionary Forces’; ‘The Russian Army in World War I’; ‘The German Army in World War I’; ‘Prisoners of War in World War I’; ‘The 1916 Irish Easter Rising’; ‘Rural Life in Finland, 1920-1939’; ‘The Banana Wars of Central Amer-ica and the Caribbean’; ‘The Winter War, 1939-1940’; ‘Finland in World War II’; and, finally, ‘Gun Control in the United States.’

Although artefacts cannot talk and cannot actually tell their stories, we, as curators, can figure out their stories, and use these objects as tan-gible touchstones to the past, in or-der to illustrate the drama of history. All too often, firearms are displayed in museums with labels that read like, ‘Standard Russian infantry rifle of

World War I, Caliber 7.62mm, Wood and Steel, Catalog Number 1983.6.1’, and shown only as an object in itself, with no interesting story or context. Moreover, especially in today’s polit-ical climate, firearms are sometimes treated as evil pariahs that are just barely tolerated in a museum exhibit. The military firearm is simply a tool - it can take lives through conquest, or it can protect people from invaders and save lives - but, in museums, it can help to tell the stories that will enable the museum visitor to better understand the times in which that gun saw history unfold.

The bolt knob has had the last four digits of the original serial number applied to it, perhaps by the American importer

PostscriptThis rifle was featured in a television show about the ‘Guns of 1914’ that aired last year in the United States. Still accurate, it hit a 12-inch diam-eter steel target at a range of 150 yards, on its first shot, when fired in front of the video camera from the off-hand position.

AcknowledgementsThe author would like to thank the staff of the National Museum of the Marine Corps for their assistance in the preparation of this article. All images courtesy of the author

The Aud’s captain recounted the efforts to land 20,000 of these rifles in Ireland, prior to the 1916 ‘Easter Rising’, in The Mystery of the Casement Ship


Managing a large museum or collection does not only include

the collection, preservation, exhibi-tion and investigation of objects. Un-fortunately, museums are sometimes forced to give up certain objects. This can be a painful process and the museum management cannot expect unreserved approval among its own staff and its visitors. Disposal may become necessary for a variety of possible reasons, such as:• Reorientation of the whole collec-tion or parts of it• Moving the collection to a new location • Limited space in the exhibition areas and depots• Adding a very important exhibit to the collection, resulting in the need to give up a less important one• An unexpected event

The need to decide on the transfer or disposal of objects does not arise in the case of small exhibits that do not require much storage space. The larger the exhibit, the more difficult will it be to adequately transfer and accommodate the ob-ject, especially when a decision must be made quickly because of a tight schedule or for other reasons.

The Wehrtechnische Studiensam-mlung - WTS (Scientific Collection of Defence Engineering Specimens) in Koblenz, Germany, was confront-ed with precisely this situation in the late summer of 2014. On a long terraced strip of land running parallel to the river Mosel we had set up two large exhibits of the collection. One was the Bodan engineer ferry, the other was the CL 33 class patrol boat ‘Magnum’. The terrace is sup-ported by a stone wall from the early 19th century. Directly underneath is the kindergarten of Luetzel, a district of the city of Koblenz. Structural

engineers then found out that the 10 metre high wall was not safe anymore; it threatened to fall down and crash onto the kindergarten, together with the exhibits with their total weight of 200 tonnes. In order to prevent harm to the children the kindergarten was evacuated immedi-ately. To restore the supporting wall, however, the two large exhibits had to be removed so as to allow the use of various construction machines.

Removing the 37 metre long and 8 metre wide engineer ferry proved the lesser problem. Due to the in-genious construction designed by the manufacturer, Bodan of Lake Con-stance, it was possible to disassemble the ferry into 12 separate floating pontoons, which were then removed by truck or railway. Since none of the original crew were available any more the disassembly did not take just two hours as described in the

manufacturer’s leaflet (which applies to the vessel floating on the water), but several days. The technicians and craftsmen of the WTS first of all had to study the technical manuals to familiarize themselves with the complicated bracketing mechanism that secures the individual pontoons to each other. Due to the dedication and improvising talent of this staff, the craft finally arrived at a safe loca-tion at another Bundeswehr site only one week later.

The patrol boat was much more difficult to remove. As a rule, objects designated for transfer are offered to other museums and collections and, in many cases, gratefully accept-ed. Immediately after learning of the necessary construction work we offered the craft to other museums. Unfortunately, we did not receive a positive response within the short time frame available.

Artefact disposal: A case studyRolf WirtgenChief Curator, Wehrtechnische Studiensammlung, Koblenz

The patrol boat on the river Rhine, still flying the American flag (Photograph courtesy Walter Elkins, USARMYGERMANY.COM)

Scrapping of the ‘Magnum’ started in September 2014, from the rear to the front


In addition, the boat was in quite a bad condition at that time. The naval association which had thankful-ly looked after it for 15 years was no longer active, due to the advanced age of its members. Since we had come to understand a long time before that the ‘Magnum’ would no longer fit into the future concept of the collection, we made a very painful decision. The boat had to be removed from the collection and scrapped.

This task was awarded to a professional salvaging company via the local site management agency. Within a period of two weeks, two craftsmen disassembled the ‘Mag-num’ into handy metal pieces with a welding cutter and took them away to a scrap yard.

The pictures show the sad final stages of the vessel, which was built by the Burmester Shipyard in Bremen in 1953 to the order of the US Navy. In 1958 the Rhine River En-gineers of the Bundeswehr took over the 27 metre long and 5 metre wide craft to secure landing operations. Around 1980 the boat was decom-missioned, and in 1984 it was handed over to the above-mentioned naval association. In 1994 the Scientific Collection of Defense Engineering Specimens accepted the boat into its collection and set it up in the outside exhibition area, where it stayed for exactly 20 years until being scrapped.

A craftsman using a welding cutter for his destructive work

Only a few hours more, then the work will be finished and the ‘Magnum’ will be deleted from the inventory list

The transportation of the Bodan ferry to another loca-tion started at the end of August 2014

Each of the 12 pontoons was loaded onto a truck and removed from the hazard area


What about weapons in a renewed Royal Armoury, 2018?Ann GrönhammarRoyal Armoury, Stockholm

In the near future the Royal Ar-moury in Stockholm will have a

new permanent exhibition, or maybe perhaps a renovated one. This renewal is planned to be ready in autumn 2018 when the museum will celebrate its 40th jubilee in the vaults of the Royal Palace and its 390th anniversary as a museum, Sweden’s oldest public museum.

Preparations for this started recently though I myself will unfor-tunately not be part of the team; my retirement is approaching and I will leave before it is completed, missing the thrilling moment of the reopening. However I will certainly follow the work from a distance with the greatest interest as this museum has been my work for more than 30 years. After some preliminary work, including an evaluation of the current exhibition and study tours to other museums to find out what trends are in vogue, a document has been signed by the General Director of the Museum as guidance for the working process.

Since 1978, little has changed in what we call the permanent exhi-bition, apart from Room E, one of our five galleries. This room was originally filled with firearms, as well as a workbench of a gun maker on display. This was found to be of less interest to visitors and, in 1993 was turned into a royal nursery, which means that we show cute dresses for small princes and princesses and examples of their toys instead of guns and pistols. Now I am curious about the new future exhibition of the Royal Armoury. Will there be a large proportion of weapons on display or will there be other items on show? What history can weapons tell? In this article I intend to look

at the future version of the perma-nent exhibition of the Swedish Royal Armoury and try to find out what my colleagues think of the prospect of showing more or less weaponry in the museum.

The proportion of weapons on display and the Director’s aims for the future exhibitionFirstly, what are the proportions to-day of exhibited weapons compared to other objects in the museum? Compared to all the exhibited arte-facts, the total of objects classified as weapons, including firearms, small swords, sabres and armours for horse and man, amounts to 27%. In 1978 that percentage, including the original Room E, was 41%, a figure that reflects more accurately the whole of the Royal Armoury’s collection in which some 44% are weapons-related.

Secondly, what are the intended numbers of weapons to be exhibited according to the Direction of the museum? The guiding document lists several goals, above all the general content and interior design - a new story should be told, a new history presented, new perspectives for edu-cation and interaction developed and gender issues explored. international-ism is also to be stressed, along with accessibility, public rooms, rooms for conversation and reflection; there

shall be lots of images and a clear graphic design. All of this shall be di-rected to the priority visitor groups, children, young adults and visitors from abroad. The text also states that we have, ‘A fantastic collection of items from the Swedish royal history, that, from an international point of view, are of an incomparable standard’. It is also important that, ‘the museum takes a role in society as an innovative and more attractive museum for people to visit’.

Finally the text contains one very specific goal concerning items of the collection on show. The Lecture hall, normally used for cultural activities in the evenings and generally closed in daytime, shall be opened all day and inside it the visitor should find weapons galore on display all over the stone walls. Furthermore, these weapons shall be on open display and not in showcases - an idea borrowed from the Tøjhusmuseet in Copenha-gen.

No other types of objects, or what to display where, is mentioned in the guiding document. The team that has to solve the question of what and how the new displays and stories will be organised will be free to make their own choices. What, then, about weapons in the displays of the Royal Armoury? What about the role of weapons in the history of Kings and Queens?

Weapons on display in Room C today and armours of the Vasa dy-nasty, Erik XIV, Johan III and Charles IX (CCBY-SA Göran Schmidt)


In the following I have turned to four of my younger colleagues, who in the end will realize the new permanent exhibition, opening in 2018. One of them is an Educator, two are Collection Curators, and the fourth is the Director of the Mu-seum. All of them, except one, will actively work on the project, partly in different groups, partly within the group concerned with the content and choice of objects. The colleague without any role in any of the groups directly tied to the project Royal Armoury’s new permanent exhi-bition of 2018 is a curator in the Department of Collections (common for three museums included in the national museum authority of LSH, Livrustkammaren, Skoklosters Castle and the Hallwyl Museum) specialises in weaponry, Gösta Sandell, and I will start my investigation with him.

The collection curator, Gösta Sandell Gösta firmly states ‘Weapons should be everywhere’. He gives several reasons for this. He can see that most weapons in the collection of the Royal Armoury are connected to hunting, a very royal activity and a significant aspect of their way of life. The collection reflects weapons for the hunt, rather than their use in war, he thinks. The oldest gun, owned by Gustav Vasa, an early example of a wheellock, was made for hunting, as was Queen Christina’s air gun, anoth-er very early example of its type. The hunt in royal life is important as it gives invited guests the opportunity of informal meetings with the King himself. It also gives them a chance to make themselves seen by the King as strong and skilful horsemen and marksmen, thereby demonstrating the noble art of self-control, impor-tant in a statesman. The collection of uniforms for courtiers are civilian dress while, of course, the King’s own uniforms are military. The King is always the commander, the one with the power in his hands. The significance of weapons as symbols of power is therefore paramount and vital to the image of a powerful man. In this respect elaborately decorated

weapons as diplomatic gifts from other heads of state become part of the story - their richness would reflect the giver’s status as well as his view of the receiver’s importance.

But what about the Queen and the female function related to weap-ons? Gösta takes this question as an opportunity to assert that weap-ons as symbols of power have too narrow a theoretical definition as ob-jects of male repression. He argues that they should be given a broader and more multifaceted interpretation as part of the political interplay of relationships, hierarchies, signs of distance etc. Undoubtedly, women at court took part in the hunt and used hunting weapons. Queen Christina received weapons as gifts as she had the same function as a King. Weap-ons in themselves are gender neutral objects but they are undoubtedly symbols of power, Gösta concludes. He adds however finally, that even the development of technology in weaponry is relevant and should be demonstrated in an intelligible way, as it should not be neglected that young boys, especially, need structure

and help in sorting the world into tangible categories.

The educator at the Royal Ar-moury, Jonas LindwallNext I turn to Jonas Lindwall, who is an experienced Educative Curator at the museum of the Royal Armoury/Livrustkammaren. He also immedi-ately stated a very positive general attitude to weapons by saying that they surely fascinate our visitors. He imagines that this attraction lays in the magic aura around certain kind of weapons such as swords and armours, not that they could be intended for lethal use. No, what we have to do is evoke people’s fantasy, leading the mind to King Arthurs sword, Excalibur, for instance, or other enchanted swords of fairy tale, according to Jonas. Also their pure physicality fascinates the visitors - the weight and construction of both white arms and armours is always something people ask questions about.

For surely they are symbols of princely power. The ability to handle weapons skilfully was important.

A diplomatic gift to Queen Christina from Cardinal Mazarin, 1639(CC BY-SA Göran Schmidt)

Flintlock gun of Queen Ulrica Eleonora the Younger and used by her for hunting partridges in the 1730s (CC BY-SA Matti Östling)


You might even ask what came first; the king’s ability to handle arms as a warrior, or the warrior that becomes a King? Note that from ancient times the kings were always buried with their sword – swords which often carried their own names.

Furthermore, weapons are part of our history, though our collec-tion shows more of excellence and artistic weaponry, and thereby tells a lot about cultural history. However weapons are inevitably part of power, even the foundation of power. The king has the monopoly of violence which is recognized by the public contract, negotiated with his subjects, or citizens. Certainly Swedish history is filled with aggression, seen not least in the era of the Great Power, or the Empire, during the reign of Gustavus Adolphus, who died in the Thirty Years war in 1632.

What then about gender and weapons? First of all, an object has no gender, Jonas states, and to think otherwise is to be trapped in our own modern times. You cannot automatically call things ‘male’ or ‘fe-male’, he thinks. The gender aspect

of artefacts is a complex matter, a difficult question. Jonas turns more energetically to the issue of how to show weapons in the future exhibi-tion. Weapons in an armoury ought to be shown at close quarters, Jonas states. Give the visitor a chance to understand that armour makers really had an excellent knowledge of the human body - how for example, the neck should be guarded in the best possible way. Armours should not only be shown standing upright, like a flower pot, but rather be put in positions of movement – a stretched arm, a bent leg, etc. Weapons should also be shown as examples of technology with ever more refine-ment through the centuries to give advantages in the fight. Jonas gives an example from the Tower of London, where an interactive station gives you the opportunity to select weap-ons for the best way to attack an armoured man from a certain period.

Not many Swedes today are familiar with firearms as they are closely controlled, in contrast to the situation half a century ago. Of course, many people still like to hunt including the present King. Royal hunting in the past could perhaps be compared to the actual hunt, Jonas speculates.

The curator of collections, Sofia NestorCurator Sofa Nestor is, like Gösta, attached to the Department of Col-lections. Her specialism is transport history, for example, horse tack and

coaches but also ceremonial props. She is also a member of the project group choosing topics and artefacts for the new permanent exhibition.

Sofia states from the start that it is important to present stories and people without forgetting weap-ons. We need to search for how to contextualize the whole weapon, not just show details such as the mark-ings or concentrate on construc-tion and fabrication, as was done in earlier times. Weapons have a lot to tell from the view of art history for instance, as many have decoration and lively scenes on them.

War booty should not be hidden but be put into a new structure that tells the whole story, Sofia continues. And, for sure, the museum’s own history shouldn’t be forgotten, as its beginning was as the armoury. A permanent exhibition ought to reflect this specific collection. It might be difficult to see the details of the weapons in our very big show cases, but nowadays there are new ways to solve the problem - make enlarged reproductions of the details for example. Sofia adds that weapons are not really her deepest interest. She can see from the catalogue that enormous attention has been focused on weapons in the past and they have very detailed descriptions.

Education curator Jonas Lind-wall in action with of school pupils, handling a replica of the sword of Gustav Vasa (© Livrustkammaren/Erik Lernestål)

Room A with Gustavus Adolphus´ horse from the Battle of Lützen, 1632, when the King was killed (CC BY-SA Erik Lernestål)

The smallsword carried by King Gustav IV Adolf at the moment he was dethroned in 1809 in a coup d´etat (BY-SA Göran Schmidt)


Sofia believes that it is time to search for new ways to make them relevant. Their context, the stories and events behind them, should be explained. Of course weaponry played its role in wars, but what is most evident in this museum is their role in the royal setting, in the king’s personal life, in ceremonial, in the making of a king’s status and in the visualization of his power.

Concerning war booty, Sofia Nestor has seen how important this aspect of power was, for instance when the Duke of Courland’s armoury was plundered in 1621. Among the weapon seized were those that could to be used at once and were handed out directly to the soldiers, while precious and decorat-ed ones were laid apart, to be taken to the King.

Weaponry has been a neglected part of the collection over the last decades, Sofia remarks, while more focus has been directed to the histo-ry of dress and fashion, as they seem to have a larger public attraction. In earlier periods, during the 1920 and 1930s, a lot of hunting weapons were received from Masters of the Royal Hunt and the idea was then that gaps in the series of models and chronol-ogy should be filled. Concerning the hunt, this is certainly a subject still of interest for many people, but what would be really eye catching would be more about weapons for the bal-let and jousting and to present their historical context, not just material descriptions.

Concerning the gender question Sofia says that, in general, objects have been put into two categories, male or female, but these references are sometimes given from a prejudi-cial point of view. It is important to see who used them. We know that some women took part in the hunt. The gender aspect must pick up the definition of the male concept, not only the female. Let us look upon what are the male characteristics and for instance scrutinize what is meant by kings as heroes, Sofia finally suggests.

The museum director, Malin GrundbergFinally I turned to the Director of the Royal Armoury, Dr Malin Grundberg. What does she think of the proportions of weapons on show in the museum of 2018 – more or less than today? She emphasizes that any discussion on the selection of artefacts is irrelevant - our starting point must be story telling. Most important is to choose the right moments in our history, for example, the coronation of Erik XIV in 1561, and select objects associated with them and present the whole within its historical context and meaning. Exactly what an object is, is of sec-ondary importance when we want to explain about a person or an historic event. For instance Queen Christina is underrepresented today in the exhibition. However, there are many objects belonging to her that ought to be on show. From her reign there are also a number of weapons pre-served which are important in her role as a sovereign, Malin says and continues: ‘weapons are important for sovereignty and the protection of the realm. Christina was taught how to ride and fight, such things that she had to know to be a ruler. In all this we have to give interpretations based on questions.’

Weapons captured as war booty, looted at Mitau (Jelgava) in 1621 (CC BY-SA Göran Schmidt)

Detail of a hunting hanger by Frantz Bourgeois given to Gus-tav III by the King of Naples in 1784 (CC BY-SA Matti Östling)

Hunting hanger given to Charles XI by the Court of Cassel in the 1670s (CC BY-SA Matti Östling)


Weaponry can certainly say something about the King and say different things depending on period. Malin imagines that the armoury of the Vasa dynasty, the earliest one, meant something different from what his weapon collection meant to Charles XV in the middle of the 19th century. She adds finally, that of course it is necessary to show weap-ons connected to specific dramatic moments such as the pistols that Anckarström used to shoot Gustav III. Hunting weapons are also impor-tant, not least those connected to Gustaf V. War booty as instrumental in weakening the enemy is also of interest to explain and exhibit.

A set of hunting knives that be-longed to King Gustaf V in the 1890s (CC BY-SA Matti Östling)

Malin regards gender as a most significant aspect and gives some examples of how to implement this with weapons. Weapons often carry female figures in the decoration, she points out, what do they tell? Queen Victoria of Baden, at the turn of the 19th/20th century broke the norms of society by wearing a military uniform. The construction of manhood by weapons is apparent, as is masculinity in the concept of a King.

Concerning knowledge of tech-nology and construction of weapons, the exhibition must not show this. Museum curators shall however offer their specialist services to people interested in such matters, and of course there are also possibilities to use digital presentations on such topics in the exhibition.

ConclusionIn many ways these interviews reveal a fairly unanimous view of the importance of weaponry in the story that will be told in the new exhibition of the Royal Armoury in 2018, expressed somewhat differ-ently according to each person’s main focus of interest. The question as such may have created a certain awareness of the topic, that not has been discussed before. The whole planning process of the project has just started and in the future there will be many occasions to debate and articulate different arguments. Certainly there will be quite a lot of weapons on display, probably in new ways, among all the other kinds of items in the Royal Armoury, such as royal ceremonial costumes, embroidered heraldry and pieces of jewellery. We shall see the result in autumn 2018.

The weapons used by the murderer of Gustav III, J J Anckarström, at the Opera in 1792 (CC BY-SA Erik Lernestål)


One of the many pleasures in attending ICOMAM meetings is

the chance to explore new collec-tions with their curators where you never know what you will find, tucked away in a store cupboard or on open display. The recent ICOMAM conference in Poland is no excep-tion, when I found several previously unrecognized but important early cast-iron guns from the Weald, two of which have very interesting mark-ings. There at least five Elizabethan and Stuart cast-iron pieces in Polish collections; two in Warsaw, and three more in Malbork, Gdansk and Ostroda.

The most important piece was in the collection of the Poland’s Military Museum in Warsaw, inventory num-ber 18377, a saker of seven feet long in good condition, with the mould-ings still crisp, although the cascable is missing. It has two bands in front of the trunnions and another behind. The date 1578 and the initials TI are engraved just in front of the touch-hole, making this piece the forth old-est dated English cast-iron gun to be identified; the others are a demi-cul-verin now in Lisbon engraved 1576 and II, cast for the city of Riga (Smith, forthcoming) and two dated 1577,

one from a shipwreck, possibly of Spanish origin, on Western Ledge Reef, Bermuda, and the other raised from the River Dart, Devon (Watts 1993: 115; http://www.xrsouthern.co.uk/steveclarkson/DartCannonS-ite24022012nofinance.pdf).

In the 1540s, founders in the Weald in the south of England, discovered how to successfully cast long muzzle-loading guns in iron. Be-tween 1546 and 1573 the cast-iron gun-founding industry grew from a single furnace to a business involving several works and founders, selling guns to private individuals in England and merchants and governments abroad. After the Queen’s founder, Ralph Hogg, complained in 1573 that guns were being exported without a licence and could fall into enemy hands, the Privy Council attempted to control the industry by forcing founders and landlords to deposit large bonds. Further regulations stressed that guns for export had to be surveyed and marked (Brown 2011).

Customers for cast-iron guns in Northern Europe included the King of Denmark, Count Edzard of east Friesland, the Margrave of Branden-burg, in exchange for masts, the Duke of Luneburg, the governor of Brest, Duke of Holstein and the City of Riga. In addition many other guns were exported to merchants in the Netherlands, who often sold them onwards (Brown 2012).

The initials TI have been found on several other English iron pieces; a 10 feet demi-culverin dated 1590 in Londonderry, an unpublished gun in the Royal Armouries collection at Fort Nelson, Portsmouth and a

recently identified piece in the Dutch town of Sluis with a double set of rings either side of the trunnions. Two others have been raised from wrecks sites; one from a 16th century shipwreck off Sciacca, Sicily and another the Mauritius, a Dutch VOC ship lost in 1609 (Scott et al 2008: 139-145; L’Hour et al 1989: 118).

These initials are usually identi-fied with Thomas Johnson, Queen Elizabeth’s gunfounder. John John-son, Thomas’s father, is said to have helped Peter Baude, one of Henry VIII’s bronze gunfounders, produce the first successful cast-iron cannons in the Weald, in Southern England. Thomas lived in the same Sussex parish as Ralph Hogge, the Queen’s gunfounder, for whom he worked and whom he succeeded as Queen’s gunfounder in 1585 (Teesdale 1991: 132). Johnson also produced guns

16th and 17th cen-tury cast-iron English guns in Polish collectionsRuth Rhynas BrownIndependent Scholar

The cannon in the Militray Museum in Warsaw, inventory number 18377

Marks on cannon 18377


for the merchant market and others; around 1595 he cast 42 iron pieces for the earl of Cumberland’s new ship of which one survives in Japan (Brown & Verhoeven 2008). Thomas worked with other founders and at a number of ironworks in the south of England; he died early in 1596 (Brown 2001). This gun is the earli-est surviving dated gun we have for Thomas Johnson.

The second gun, in the Polish Military Museum in Warsaw, is almost identical to the TI piece, but although it retains its cascable, it has its muzzle cut cleanly off turning it into a ‘cut’. It may have a large C or crescent moon engraved on the barrel. The third gun, at Marlbork, a former castle of the Teutonic Knights, is also very similar but is in much poorer condition - the details of the mouldings are much less sharp.

The last in this group, on display in the Maritime Museum in Gdansk, was discovered during work on the docks. Although it bears some gen-eral resemblance to the other guns, it exhibits a number of differences. The mouldings consist of a series of rings rather than flat bands and the cascable is also more squat rather than elongated. It probably dates to the later 16th or early 17th century, resembling the guns produced by Johnson’s partner John Philips and later the Browne family (see Brinck 2004 for a number of examples).

However we had one final surprise on our Polish expedition, an English 17th century gun, out-side Ostroda castle, another of the Teutonic knights’ fortifications. By the 17th century the castle was in the possession of the Dukes of Silesia and played a lively part in the Polish

Swedish wars. However it is more famous for its Napoleonic connec-tions; Bonaparte spent two months in Ostroda in 1807 following his defeat of Prussia.

The eight-foot saker has two bands of rings either side of the trunnions and GB engraved in front of the touch-hole; other numbers engraved along the chase and on the muzzle. The cascable is squat, not unlike the example at Gdansk. Stylis-tically this gun resembles a number of pieces cast by John Browne (Scott et al 2008). The initials GB are asso-ciated with George Browne, of the Browne gun-founding dynasty. Born in 1627, George was the youngest son of Martha and John Browne, the King’s Gunfounder, a position he inherited from his father, Thomas Browne. (Brown 2005; Brown 2006). After his eldest brother and father’s

The second cannon in the Military Museum in Warsaw

The cannon in Malbork

The cannon in Gdansk


deaths, George ran the family works with his brother-in-law, Thomas Foley in the 1650s as his nephew John was underage (Brown 1993 and 2000). When Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, George suc-cessfully petitioned for the return to his family of the title of Gunfounder to the King. He also supplied guns to other customers such as the East India Company.

A number of guns, both bronze and iron are associated with George Browne. These include a cast-iron culverin drake from the North Sea, dating from the 1650s now in the Royal Armouries collection (Wilson 1988); the bronze Punchinello gun in the Royal Armouries cast in 1669 (Blackmore 1976: 67) and the bronze guns from the Royal Yacht Mary, cast

The cannon outside the castle in Ostroda

in the 1660s, recovered off Anglesey in Wales (Davies & Mcbride 1973). A cast-iron cannon of 7 (inventory number: Jodhpur 1738) is the only iron gun I know of at present with George Browne’s initials. With-out the letters, this gun would be assigned to his father John Browne, earlier in the 17th century because of stylistic features.

I hope this short article has demonstrated the riches you can find on ICOMAM visits and encourages you to join us in Milan in 2016.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Jaraslaw God-lewski, Emilia Jastrzębska and their colleagues at the Military Museum of Poland, Warsaw who took us round their collections.

ReferencesBlackmore H L 1976 The Armouries

at the Tower of London, 1 Ordnance. London

Brinck N 2004 ‘Coats of arms on guns of the Dutch Admiralties’, Journal of the Ordnance Society 16: 43-56.

Brown R R 1993 ‘Notes on Wealden Furnaces- Board of Ordnance Records 1660-1700’, Wealden Iron Research Group Bulle-tin 13 (second series): 20-30.

Brown R R 2000 ‘Notes from the Office of the Ordnance: the 1650s’ Wealden Iron Research Group Bulletin 20 (second series): 39-55.

Brown R R 2001 ‘Extracts from the Debenture Books of the Office of Ordnance 1593-1610’, Wealden Iron Research Group Bulletin 21 (second series): 14–20.

The cannon in Ostroda

Brown R R 2005 ‘John Brown, gunfounder to the King Part 1’ Wealden Iron Research Group Bulle-tin 25 (second series): 38-61.

Brown R R 2006 ‘John Brown, gunfounder to the King Part 2.’ Wealden Iron Research Group Bulletin 26 (second Series)

Brown R R 2011 ‘”A jewel of great value”: English iron gunfounding and its rivals, 1550–1650’. In Ships and Guns: The Sea Ordnance in Venice and in Europe Between the 15th and the 17th Century ed C Beltrame & R G Ridella

Brown R R 2012 ‘Gunfounding in England in the 1590s’ Proceedings ICOMAM Conference 2009. Leeds

Brown R R & P J Verhoeven 2008 ‘The Dragon Gun of Karamatsu’ Journal of the Ordnance Society 20

Davies P N & P W J McBride 1973 ‘The Mary, Charles II’s yacht. International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 2.1: 59-74.

L’Hour M, L Long & E Reith 1989 Le Mauritius. Grenoble.

Scott B G, R R Brown, A G Lea-cock & C J Salter 2008 The Great Guns like Thunder. Derry.

Smith K forthcomingTeesdale E B 1991 Gunfounding

in the Weald in the 16th century, London.

Watts G P 1993 ‘The Western Ledge Reef wreck: a preliminary report on investigation of the re-mains of a 16th-century shipwreck in Bermuda’ International Journal of Nautical Archaeology

Wilson G M 1988 ‘The Common-wealth Gun’, International Journal of Nautical Archaeology, 17: 87-100.

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