Malcolm McBratney
The Times, 23/2/2013
Innovative museum designer who brought a new drama and excitement to the Natural History Museum
The Government Information Service is often seen as a self-contradictory grey wall of containment, preventing too information about government activity becoming public rather than facilitating its dissemination, and Malcolm McBratney, who has died aged 74, was an exemplar of how wrong that perception can be.
In a working life devoted to the enlargement of popular knowledge of the national patrimony, he helped transform the way the public understood, in particular natural history and later the built the heritage, through accessible exhibitions with through interpretation, as it became known, that no longer condescended.
A large man, standing 6ft 4ins, with an infectious sense of humour and an avuncular nature, he joined the civil service after leaving Rutherford Grammar School in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and his organisational skills were quickly recognised.
He worked in the Central Office of Information drafting ministerial responses for Parliament and promoting British products overseas, and the plans he drew up for the Queen Mother’s state funeral were to be put into practice in 2002 long after he had moved on. He was seconded abroad twice, once to Damascus and again in 1970 when he helped co-ordinate the British pavilion at the Osaka World Expo.
Until 1984 public relations for the South Kensington museums were provided by the GIS, and he had two significant spells at the Natural History Museum (NHM) at a time when it was establishing its independence from the British Museum, of which it had historically been a faculty.
In his first attachment, he became part of the “The New Exhibition Scheme”, led by Dr Roger Miles, the head of public services, whose brief was to break the academic tradition of presentation that often failed to recognise the need to develop a narrative that would be of interest to the non-academic visitor. Their new approach through interpretation led to the creation of the new Hall of Human Biology, followed by ecology, primates and eventually the complex but immediately popular dinosaur gallery. They became not only expositions of scholarship but were designed to be resources for teaching at all ages.
Gordon Rankmore had followed him to the NHM as his assistant. “Both of us had come from the Government Information Service and I was already aware of his considerable professional reputation within this circle,” he recalls. “His colleagues had a tremendous respect for him – personally for his thoughtfulness and support, as well as professionally for his knowledge of design and exhibition production and encouragement of more junior staff. I found all this to be true when I worked for him in the 1970s at the NHM. This period in museum development was extremely significant and paved the way to how museums present themselves today.”
In the early 1980s McBratney joined the recently created English Heritage (EH) where his role was to introduce the visitor interpretation methods he had pioneered at the NHM to the houses and monuments taken over by the new quango, a pivotal moment in the presentation of heritage.
He found that under the former tutelage of the Ministry of Works, there had been little if any explanation for visitors of the social, historical and architectural significance of the sites and properties EH now had responsibility for. With his team – which included the future director of the Museum of London, Jack Lohman, now chief executive of the Royal British Columbia Museum – he broadened appeal through such schemes as open air concerts at Kenwood House, and widened access and interpretation at Stonehenge. He was one of the organisers of the successful second world congress on heritage presentation and interpretation at Warwick in 1988. He introduced audio guides, graphic panels on sites and programmes of historical re-enactments, all of which served to increase attendance and appreciation.
That year, 1988, Neil Chalmers became director of the NHM and McBratney, by now having left the Government Information Service, returned to the museum to reorganise the exhibitions department and lead the management of the Earth Galleries, a redevelopment of the former Geology Museum, which was to become one of the first schemes to benefit from the new National Lottery and so becoming a benchmark for subsequent bids.
Under Chalmers, the NHM developed a consultancy role and McBratney led projects for international clients, including developing the Children’s Museum in Cairo and the ecology gallery in the Goulandris Natural History Museum in Athens. He also advised the Wellcome Trust on its projects in London, Dundee, Newcastle, Glasgow and Birmingham.
A life-long music lover, as a teenager he formed his own skiffle band, Mac and his merry Men, but was also an enthusiastic choirboy and a church goer all his life. Latterly, he was churchwarden at St Mary Magdalene Church in Melchbourne, Beds.
He leaves his wife, Joy, their children, Robert and Jane, and eight grandchildren.
Malcolm McBratney, museum exhibition designer, was born on March 26, 1938. He died of pancreatic cancer on February 5 2013, aged 74
