Letters
Sir John Soane
Sir: I feel obliged to comment on the Note provocatively headed 'Soane betrayed' in your issue of 21 July. The Soane Museum, you say, is 'not what it was' because (a) it has been 'nationalised' and (b) the restric- tion of the appointment of the curator to professional architects has been removed.
Now, the Soane was, from the start, a 'national' museum and its founder took great pride in the fact. When, in 1837, he bequeathed it to the nation with a generous endowment he did so under no mere deed of trust but under an Act of Parliament which, not without difficulty, he obtained. After the last war, when the income from the Trust Funds became insufficient for the maintenance of the Museum, the state very properly took full responsibility for main- taining Soane's gift. The 1833 Act re- mained in force till 1969 and was only then superseded by a Scheme under the Char- ities Act, drawn on the lines of the old Act but enabling the Trustees to occupy and restore Soane's earlier house next door and add it to the Museum. The Scheme also removed the restriction on the professional status of the curator. The recent appoint- ment of an experienced scholar with exper- tise in furniture and interior decoration will seem to many, as it does to me, an entirely beneficial result of the raising of the restriction and very far from being a 'betrayal' of the founder's intention.
John Summerson Sir John Soane's Museum, 13 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London WC2
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