Prizewinning museum hit by pension debts

Simon Tait
The Times, 4/2/2012

“This museum is extraordinary for so many reasons, and we were all but unanimous in our decision,” Lord Puttnam said as he presented the £100,000 Art Fund Prize for 2009. “The Wedgwood Museum brilliantly highlights the marriage of art, design, manufacturing and commerce; a marriage that resonates more today than at possibly any time in the intervening years. In every respect it fully meets our criteria of what a 21st century museum should aspire to be”. It beat the Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow, Orleans House Gallery in Twickenham and Ruthin Craft Centre in North Wales, to the prize.

From that high less than three years ago, the Wedgwood Museum is facing closure and its world renowned collections – including the extraordinary replica of the classical Portland Vase Josiah Wedgwood himself made – sold piecemeal to the highest bidders.

Disaster looms through no fault of the museum but because of a loophole in the pensions legislation that makes it responsible for the pension debts of what was once, and is no longer its parent company. The High Court has ruled that the collections, worth an estimated £18m, can be sold to help meet the £134m pension liability of Waterford Wedgwood Potteries which had collapsed a few months before the museum’s win.

“As things stand the museum assets are to be used, wrongly, to plug a pension shortfall which is not its liability,” said a member of family, Simon Wedgwood. “There is a body called the pension protection fund which would normally fill this gap, but they have noticed that due to this badly drafted legislation they may try to get another party to pay, even though it seems scarcely credible that a special 50 year old, bona fide, museum trust should be entrapped in this way.”

This week sees questions being laid in the House of Lords calling for the government to intervene, and last week Stephen Deuchar, director of the Art Fund, wrote to The Times: The government should not pesume that the public will come to the rescue and raise the money needed to save the collections. The Attorney General must surely appeal the court’s decision; common sense must prevail”. The decision has even been condemned by UNESCO which rated the museum one of Britain’s top 20 cultural assets.

The museum can trace its history back to 1784 and Josiah himself, the founder of the ceramics company and Charles Darwin’s grandfather, who wrote to a friend in 1784: “I have often wish’d I had saved a single specimen of all the new articles I have made, & would now give twenty times the original value for such a collection. For ten years past I have omitted doing this, because I did not begin it ten years sooner. I am now, from thinking, and talking a little more upon this subject … resolv’d to make a beginning”.

Examples were collected, but it was not until 1906 that a formal museum collection was put together and the museum remained open at the Wedgewood Etruria works until production moved to Barlaston and a special Long Gallery was opened in 1952. It was succeeded in 1975 by a visitor centre, which included museum galleries, and in the early 60s the museum trust was set up deliberately to separate the collections from the company.

In September 1999 Wedgwood decided to refurbish their visitor attraction, closing the historical galleries and the trust launching a fundraising campaign to build a new Wedgwood Museum with its extensive display area and major new research facilities. At an eventual cost of £10.5m, (with £5.86 million from the Heritage Lottery Fund and significant contributions from Wedgwood and other donors) it opened in October 2008 after nine years of planning and development.

Designed by Hulme Upright Manning with interiors by Ivor Heal, the new museum presented an encyclopaedia of the development of fine English china. It includes manuscripts, documentation, correspondence, factory equipment – which had been on loan to Keele University 13 miles away because there as no space to house them with the collections until now – trials and original models as well as fine art and, of course, ceramics. There is no other collection with the diversity and depth this one has, nor one that is able to give a continuous historical narrative the Wedgwood can.

Pride of place goes to Josiah’s copy of the famous Roman cameo glass Portland vase in the British Museum. Made from black jasper with white reliefs, it took the first Wedgwood three years of experiment and trial before the first perfect copy was achieved in 1789, still considered one of the finest achievements of the potter’s art.

The Art Fund winnings were to go towards a new £2m exhibition gallery that would allow the museum’s director, Gaye Blake Roberts. and her team to mount much more extensive special exhibitions from their collections, as well as shows that would incorporate the work of non-Wedgewood artists such as Susie Cooper and Clarice Cliff, and to bring loan exhibitions to Stoke-on-Trent.

But calamity intervened. Even though ownership of the museum’s collections had been transferred to the independent trust, the pensions law was not as impermeable as had been thought, and the result could be calamitous for the museum and charity world.

Badly hit by the financial crisis of 2008, Waterford Wedgwood went into administration in 2009 and was immediately sold to a New York based private equity firm, KPS, which was able to avoid the liabilities of the former company, including the pension fund deficit.

There appeared to be nothing to connect the museum until it transpired that five members of its staff were among the 7,000 members of the company pension scheme, which implicated the collections as an asset and liable for the whole deficit, even though the company and the museum are legally separate. Consequently, the museum was put into administration in 2010, and in December the High Court ruled that the collections could be sold to help meet the debt.

“It is,” said two more of Josiah’s descendents, Alison and Tom Wedgwood, in an open letter to a local paper, “the worst possible outcome, a grave day for British history, a sad testimony of Britain’s resolve to neglect, and not cherish, its internationally significant cultural, scientific, social and industrial treasures”.

But all hope is not yet lost. Bob Young of the administrators Begbies Traynor have said they will try to raise funds to keep the collection, worth £18m, at the museum. “We have already held discussions with the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Victoria and Albert Museum, certain members of the Wedgwood family and other potential benefactors about raising funds,” he said. “We will spend the next few months in intensive discussions with potential benefactors and the museum trustees to try to come up with a proposal that is acceptable to creditors”.

It is understood that at least one Midlands millionaire has offered to help keep the collection together as a public resource, and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport has also entered discussions.