 Elspeth
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.
|
