Page 74 - The Secret Museum

outside the museum. It is decorated with objects from the Tradescants’ collection.

Legend has it that if you dance around it 12 times as Big Ben strikes, a ghost will
appear. On the tomb is a poem probably written by John Aubrey describing the
Tradescants, who:

… Liv’d till they had travelled Orb and Nature through,
As by their choice Collections may appear,
Of what is rare in land, in sea, in air,

Whilst they (as Homer’s Iliad in a nut)
A world of wonders in one closet shut…

Their ‘world of wonders’ passed eventually, and controversially, into the hands
of Elias Ashmole, who gave it to the University of Oxford. The Tradescant Ark was
opened as the Ashmolean Museum, in Broad Street, Oxford, in 1683. It was the first
purpose-built public museum in the world.

There were three floors in the museum. The Ark collection was on display on the
top floor, along with other natural history artefacts. The ground floor was used for
lectures and teaching, and the basement was a laboratory. All the original signs

above the doorways on each floor are there, explaining what each room was used
for.
Today, The Ark and the Ashmolean Museum have moved across the city of

Oxford, and the original Ashmolean building has been taken over by the Museum of
the History of Science. When they renovated the building in 1999, they lifted the
floorboards on the first floor. Beneath them were all kinds of treasures from the
original museum.

When the first discovery was made, the current museum curators joined the
builders in digging up these secrets. They felt like ‘floorboard archaeologists’, sifting
through dust rather than the earth. They pulled out all kinds of simple things, most of
them dating from the eighteenth century, rather than from the very beginning of the

museum in 1683.

The ephemera they pulled out of the dust includes: the label from the key that
belonged to Dr Plot, keeper of the museum; a letter from J. Chapman, who worked
there; labels from portraits; a lizard; a book cover; the remains of a posy of flowers;
and an unopened letter -which they aren’t going to open. I’m not sure how they can
resist. I liked a small house, cut out of paper, made by someone daydreaming while at
the museum, and a sketch of ‘Edward’, a keeper of the museum, with a little flower
drawn beneath him.

There are things which whoever dropped them must have been upset to lose – a

ring; a penknife and a child’s tooth with a hole drilled through it which had probably
been tied on to a string as a keepsake. Perhaps the child’s father or mother wore it
and crawled around on the floor of the museum looking for it when it fell off the