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Features - The Oliver Brown Award
Elspeth King

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Elspeth KingElspeth King, Director of the Smith Art Gallery and Museum, Stirling, was presented with the Oliver Brown Award on 27 June 1998, in the Terraces Hotel, Stirling. Her acceptance speech delighted the large turn-out which included SNP National Convener Alex Salmond who proposed the Toast to the Scots Independent.

The following biographical article appeared in the June 1998 issue of the Scots Independent:-

The mother of Scottish cultural tourism was educated at Beath High School and the University of St. Andrews, where she graduated with a first-class honours in mediaeval history.

Her first paid employment was as a technician at Glasgow Art Gallery. Within a year, aged 25, she was appointed as Curator of the People's Palace, with responsibility for building up the social history collections for the city. Elspeth King devoted the next two decades of her career to transforming that provincial branch museum (the only plan for which until 1984 was demolition) into one of Scotland's top attractions - for the local populace, foreign tourists and the Media - with annual visitor figures soaring from tens of thousands to half a million by the 1990's.

The Palace won the British Museum of the Year award and the European Museum of the Year Award. As usual, Elspeth was not overmuch honoured in her own land but her international reputation was already well established - she was invited, for example, to be the keynote speaker at the Australian Museums Conference in 1988 in Sydney and again in 1991 in Adelaide.

In 1991 she moved to Dunfermline to develop Abbot House as a Heritage Centre and encourage cultural tourism in Scotland's ancient capital. The Director's task was to draw up business and fund-raising, education and marketing plans; research the history of the district from Pictish times; commission original works of art, models, film, soundtrack and publications; and train volunteers. Abbot House opened in 1995 as a magnificent historical and cultural showpiece, was extensively featured in the Press and television and, in the following year, won the Supreme Award for Regeneration and Design from the Royal Institute of Architects.

And so, four years ago, to the post she now holds, the directorship of the Smith Art Gallery and Museum, in Stirling. Along with its day-to-day management goes the development of the building as a major visitor attraction within the Stirling Initiative area, and the accessing of new funding sources. The Smith now has one of the most significant collections of Scottish antiquities, arts and science, and is a little-known and neglected educational resource.

The subject list of Elspeth King's publications is formidable: Scottish women's suffrage; the temperance movement; teetotal policemen; Glasgow's Barrows; popular culture in Glasgow; the Glasgow Weaver's Strike; Ken Currie's mural cycle showing 200 years of history; the story of tiles; the hidden history of Glasgow's women; "Brave Art" - contemporary art marking the 699th anniversary of Stirling Bridge; the "cream of the dross".. collecting Glasgow's past for the future; labour history in museums; collecting for cultural identity; Dunfermline's books; Saint Margaret of Scotland; and so forth.

In between, she lectures on a variety of curatorial and cultural topics... Scottish pottery and glass industries; theatre history; mediaeval religious beliefs; Scottish Labour history; the tobacco trade; temperance history; and the Scottish suffrage movement. In 1996 she ran a course at the University of Stirling on Scotland's material culture.