LEEDS CITY MUSEUM - its Natural History Collections

This paper covering the botanical collections held at the Leeds City Museum, is the third in a series of papers on the museums natural history collections, (Norris, 1993 & 1995). Although the Leeds City Museum has had a long tradition in the fields of Zoology, Entomology and Malacology, its collecting tradition in the field of Botany, and related subjects, was far less active. Some material entered the museum in the early years but by far the bulk of the botanical collections are of much more recent origin. COLLECTIONS LOST AND FOUND The museum holds a number of very early botanical collections some dating back over 200 years, and yet very little of the pre-war collections seem to have survived. The collections of John Atkinson, FJ.S.Foljambe (MP), Miss Purvis, Prof Rutherford and EH. Woods all appear to have been lost. The loss of these collections seems to have been as a result of the aftermath of the bombing of the museum in March 194 I. All the evidence suggests that the botanical collections were removed from the damaged building and placed in an outlying store. Some of this material eventually found its way to a cupboard at Farnley Hall, Old Farnley, Leeds which became the museums main outstare. The hall, now the headquarters of the Yorkshire and Humberside Museums Council, was at that period unheated, damp, the roof leaked and it was generally in a very poor condition. The inevitable happened, and the roof sprung a leak directly above the cupboard. When this was eventually noticed, as far as we can tell several years later, it was too late to salvage the collections. A lesson in not storing vulnerable material in places which are rarely visited by curatorial staff. Not all the botanical collections however, found their way into this cupboard as subsequent events proved. In the late 1950s Miss Kit Robb, one of Yorkshire's leading botanists at the time, undertook to work on what remained of the museums collections. Miss Robb did very little delving into the museums records, and the Keeper of Biology, Mr John Armitage had little interest in the subject, and even less time or inclination to look into the records. This resulted in collections being mis-attributed, causing ongoing problems for all concerned. The project behind Kit Robb's task was to check the identification of the plants and amalgamate the collections into one. This she did using the Flora of the British Isles by Clapham, Tu tin and Warburg (1952), as the order in which to store the collection. The amalgamation of collections without ftrst listing, or marking them, resulted in several small collections vanishing. Recent investigations into the collection has identified specific collections of material in which it is now no longer possible to identify how the collection entered the museum, for example; a small collection of plants by William West must Collections Management have entered the museum as part of some other co!Jection, this cannot now be identified specifically, although it probably came in as part of the William Kirby Collection in 1917/18. The main problem resulting from the m is-attribution of the collections relate to the entries in British Herbaria (Kent. 1957), This publication I ists Leeds Museum as housing the collections of R.B.Jowitt, J.F.Pickard, J.Woods and an unknown collector. Of these four entries only that for R.B.Jowitt appears to be correct. We have now been able to identify some 587 sheets as belonging to the collection of F.R.Benson-Jowitt. J.Woods appears to refer to the col lection of the Rev. William Wood ( 1745-1808). however the labels on the boxes in Kit Robbs, handwriting suggests that she attributed this collection to (? Dr Smith), another slight confusion to the story. The reference to the collection of J.F.Pickard is a total mystery. BOTANICAL COLLECTIONS The Leeds City Museum's botanical collections number in excess of 55,000 specimens. divided up as follows: 35,000 vascular plants; 4,000 mosses and liverworts; 7,000 lichens; 8,000 fungi and over I ,000 miscellaneous items such as microscope slides and marine algae. The museum also holds a large number of photographic slides of flowering plants and fungi.