The National Museum of the Royal Navy: 100 Years of by Campbell McMurray
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National Museum of the Royal Navy (NMRN) formally me inro existence only two years ago in September 2009, nging into a single administration four formerly auto nomous British naval collections: the Royal Naval Museum; the RN Submarine Museum; the Fleet Air Arm Museum; and the Royal Marines Museum, in close partnership with HMS Victory, Nelson's flagship at the Barde of Trafalgar. Its launch, celebrated with much fanfare and the rare firing of a full broadside from HMS Victory, represents a renewed and determined effort by the Royal Navy to engage a broad audience in its history and become the unified voice for naval heritage in Great Britain. This new organization is embarking on a multi-million-dollar development program to create a series of new exhibitions devoted to the history of the Royal Naval Service and its people in the 20'h and 21" centuries, driven by the principle that both the navy and the people of Great Britain have much to gain from a proper understanding of the courage, professionalism, resources, and achievements of those who came before us. The origins of this undertaking are to be found at the close of the nineteenth century, when the first faltering steps were taken to create a Naval and Dockyard Museum in Portsmouth. That this ambition succeeded is owed principally to the strenuous efforrs of one man, Mr. Mark Edwin Pescott Frost, secretary to successive port admirals in Portsmouth Dockyard, from 1899 to 1921. The genesis of Frost's successful efforts is to be found in a surviving undated memo where he wrote, "Soon after taking up the appointment of Secretary to the Admiral Superintendent in November 1899, I formed the resolution to establish a museum in the Dockyard as soon as practicable." The first step in this direction, Frost goes on to say, came when the port admiral, "at my suggestion Mark Edwin Pescott Frost ordered all departments to send
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in a list of articles of interest and to earmark them for the purpose." When a building to house the museum became available in the old Dockyard ropery building in 1905, Frost wrote, " ... the admiral offered it to me for the Museum and I readily accepted." Described as "an aesthete with unbounded enthusiasm," Portsmouth-born M. E. P. Frost was undoubtedly an impressive and determined individual, highly capable and a well-regarded administrator by all accounts. This scholarly and reflective senior civil servant also seems to have possessed enviable powers of advocacy and persuasion. An individual of his unabashed antiquarian instincts could hardly fail to see that in his own time, the demise of Nelson's old sailing navy was well advanced. Indeed, at that same moment, the first all-big-gun, steam-turbine-driven battleship, HMS Dreadnought, was being built in the Porrsmouth Dockyard, virtually within view of his office window. Ir had to have emphasized to him the imperative need to do everything possible to preserve at least something of the material culture of the age of the sailing warship.
HMS Dreadnought, 1906
Over the next five years or so, mainly on his own time but with occasional Dockyard assistance, Frost, as honorary curator, brought together, organized, and classified a huge volume of materials in preparation for opening the new museum. He acquired more than forty figureheads, numerous half-models, ship relics, and other artifacts from the many small-scale wars and minor campaigns that the Royal Navy had fought in the nineteenth century, as well as weapons, carvings, trophies, prints, maps and charrs, manuscripts, dockyard plans, ships' furniture, and, it is said, a fragment of HMS Victorys fore topsail from Trafalgar. They were researched, their provenance was established, and exhibits were created for them. While this effort was underway, King George V and Queen Mary paid a visit and gave their enthusiastic approval, the start of what would be a continuing interest by the King and his consort, who personally contributed items from time to time and never missed the opportunity to visit when in Portsmouth. Portsmouth's Naval and Dockyard Museum officially opened a century ago in June 1911 , thus beginning the interpretation of
SEA HISTORY 136,AUTUMN 201 1