Obituaries of Shirley Bury
Shirley Bury (1925–99) specialised in the study of 19th-century jewellery. She joined the Victoria & Albert Museum in 1947, in the Circulation Department. In 1962 she became an Assistant Keeper in the National Art Library, but moved to the Department of Metalwork in 1968, becoming Deputy Keeper in 1972 and Keeper in 1982.
From The Times, 10 April 1999
Shirley Bury, Keeper of the Metalwork Department at the Victoria and Albert Museum, 1982-85, died on March 25 aged 74. She was born on February 27, 1925.
Shirley Bury will be remembered both as a museum administrator and as a jewellery scholar, particularly for her voluminous study of jewellery of the 19th century. She was also one of the leading contributors to the hefty survey of the Crown Jewels published last year by The Stationery Office.
She was born Shirley Joan Watkin, in Colliers Wood, Surrey and read fine art at Reading University. There she met the painter Morley Bury, a former prisoner of war, whom she married in 1947.
The following year, after a short spell as a teacher, she joined the V&A, initially in the 'Circulation' Department, which organised touring shows. She was to remain with the museum until her retirement, and during that time she witnessed - and promoted - a great flourishing of interest in the Victorian period which was her specialism. In 1952 she helped to organise the travelling exhibition 'Victorian and Edwardian Decorative Arts'. Tastes were changing, Betjeman was doing his stuff, and in 1958 the Victorian Society was founded, with Bury as a member. A few years later, the appreciation of Victorian art and artefacts had advanced sufficiently for the museum to establish galleries dedicated to the period.
But the Victoria and Albert's collections are classified principally by medium and materials, and Bury was drawn particularly to precious metals and jewels. In 1967, at Goldsmiths' Hall in the City of London, she and the former Goldsmiths' art director Graham Hughes organised an exhibition of Victorian church plate. Four years later an exhibition of Victorian Church Art at the V&A brought together many neglected or forgotten items from churches and cathedrals. In 1972 Bury published a monograph on Victorian Electroplate, and in 1975 she wrote the catalogue for the V&A's exhibition of wares from Liberty over the previous century.
She had become an Assistant Keeper in the museum's library in 1962, but moved to the Metalwork Department in 1968, becoming Deputy Keeper in 1972. Something of a radical among curators, she had campaigned against automatic appointments from within, favouring open competition; but when Bury's own turn came with the retirement of Claude Blair, Roy Strong was keen to appoint a woman and wanted to ensure that she enjoyed the full pension. She was appointed Keeper for three years in 1982.
Her research - published in Connoisseur. The Burlington Magazine, Apollo and the V&A Yearbook - benefited from her familiarity with the museum's jewellery collection during the many years when it was not publicly displayed. She was notably helpful to some visitors, such as Suzy Menkes when she was writing her book 'The Royal Jewels', but did not always welcome independent scholars into what she saw as her patch.
In the early 1980s she re-arranged the collection and produced a new summary catalogue. As a gemmologist, however, she did not have quite the discriminating eye of her predecessors. The finest pieces were not always given most prominence and some jewels were displayed on unbecomingly cheap materials.
As Keeper, she also enjoyed the opportunity to commission new works from modern jewellers in Britain and Europe.
After her retirement, the Antique Collectors Club published the useful compendium that was the culmination of her Victorian research, 'Jewellery 1789-1910: The International Era' (1991). Delighting in the stories behind the jewels, it occupies two gossipy volumes, but the material is not especially well structured, and despite its title and a good section on Napoleonic jewellery, the survey is mainly restricted to English pieces.
Bury's last years were devoted largely to the magnificent official inventory of 'The Crown Jewels', edited by Claude Blair. Eight authors in all took 15 years to detail the 22,599 precious stories and items of court regalia belonging to the Royal Family, but a large part of one of the two volumes was Bury's work. The inventory spans a thousand years of history, during which the Crown Jewels collection has ebbed and flowed with the fortunes of the monarchs. In the Middle Ages, the jewels often accompanied kings on the way to battle, both to prevent theft and so as to be pawned to pay the army. Later, gems were sold and hired back for state occasions, and Bury explained how for centuries the stories in some royal crowns were not what they purported to be but paste replicas. She was able to trace in detail the modifications made and the gems that were used at different times.
Much of this work had to be done at the Tower of London during the two weeks of the year when the Jewel House is closed for cleaning - and then under guard because the pieces are too valuable to insure.
Shirley Bury was given the freedom of the City of London in 1972 and served on the British Hallmarking Council from 1974 to 1985.
She is survived by her husband and their son.
Reproduced with kind permission of The Times
©Times Newspapers Limited
From The Independent, 8 April 1999
It is the heaviest printed book I have ever held. It weighs in at 321bs, fills 1,380 pages, is quarter-bound in red goatskin by Cedric Chivers, set in Caslon, designed by Guy Miles Warren, edited by Shirley Bury's great friend Claude Blair, half of it written by Bury herself, and published by the Stationery Office at £1,000 per copy.
Bury spent the last eight years of her life concentrating on this great task, often slaying up till five in the morning, such was her obsession with the obscure, fascinating details of royal anatomy and royal meanness.
'The Crown Jewels' (1998) is the first catalogue of this fabulous collection in nearly a thousand years of history and legend. Bury checked every source she used - there was never anything second-hand or derivative in her scholarly writings - so characteristically, she wrote too much and took too long. Like many scholars, she could not always see the wood for the trees, but her trees were so dense and interesting that her editors usually gave up in despair and allowed her a few dozen more pages than had been offered.
Here, she spices her accounts of the coronation ceremonies. Charles II showed what she pithily calls his 'nicely judged balance of conciliation and reward' when he created six new earls and six barons. We meet Pepys in Westminster Abbey getting 'up into a great scaffold' from which he noted scarlet everywhere. 'All the officers of all kinds, so much as the very fiddlers, in red vests'.
Bury tells of how the royal goldsmith, Robert Vyner, was bankrupted by the King, who never paid properly for his extravagant new regalia, but as a royal servant he was immune from arrest for debt. We wonder with Bury what really happened to the earlier royal regalia when it was 'destroyed' under the Republic of Oliver Cromwell. Much later, King William IV, unlike Charles II, wanted to economise for his coronation, so existing furniture was reused with an artistic result defined by Bury as 'florid eclecticism'.
She successfully negotiates the minefield of who owned who in the period of the Regency, with the eminent goldsmith merchants Paul Storr, Rundell Bridge and Rundell, Hunt and Roskell, all of them making money as well as or better than they made gold. Much later again, we meet King George V who complained of the discomfort of his crown, but nevertheless insisted on wearing it more often than his predecessors. For our own Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, Bury turns to Pepys's successor as gossip extraordinary: Chips Channon wrote, 'I could have watched it for ever.' That is how Bury's friends felt about her.
She usually wrote very formal prose, but in this exceptional book she let her hair down and revealed often concealed insights into human nature. Her achievement has not received due credit.
'All researchers have their occasional moments of illumination when a single additional fact begins to make sense of a body of information patiently amassed over a long period.' So she wrote in the 1983 'Album of the Victoria and Albert Museum', to which institution she devoted her whole working life - night and day - from 1948 to 1972. These words may not be so pithy as Pepys, but they might serve as Bury's epilogue. The academic windfall was a Victorian silver tea set of 1851 by Joseph Angell just acquired by the V&A, long known in documents, but only now, thanks to Shirley Bury, properly evaluated.
Bury was born in 1925, read Fine Art at Reading University, and soon afterwards joined the Circulation Department of the Victoria and Albert Museum (which was responsible for travelling exhibitions). In 1960 she completed an MA on the silver trade up to the Industrial Revolution, and the next year became senior research assistant and Assistant Keeper in the library the year after that.
I first worked with her in the 1961 international artists' jewellery exhibition which I organised at Goldsmiths' Hall. I sensed that her heart did not lie in modern art, despite her love for her eminent modern painter husband, Morley Bury. But she always wanted to help, and was eager to learn too. She taught me about the precursors of 20th-century design, like Pugin and Henry Cole.
She loved Pugin at a time when almost everyone else thought him trivial: in the 1969 V&A Yearbook, she records his hatred of half-pearls, and his generally hysterical attitudes about ornamental detail. Bury discovered that he had written about a tiny part of a tiny brooch: 'I wonder you defend the Brooch, I think the half-pearls execrable. I won't have it, it is too horrid ... it is a regular Houndsditch affair' (Houndsditch being the workplace for many cheap merchants, then as now).
In 1967, Bury organised 'Copy or Creation' with me at Goldsmiths' Hall, investigating the nature of Victorian church treasures, and I realised what an able sleuth she was, she discovered how everything copied something else, but that these copies were so full of doctrinal passion that they were creations in their own right. The following year she moved to the metalwork department, becoming Deputy Keeper in 1972.
She began to use words of such sophistication that I read her with a new awe. For instance, she called Ramsden and Carr, the British silversmiths of the 1920s, 'those able epigones'. But by 1985 she was using everyday language again, perhaps because, now promoted to Keeper, she had to master the arts of communication. In an elegant V&A booklet on jewels, she dragged in Congreve's agreeable Tattle from Love for Love, flourishing his 'letters, lockets, pictures and rings' as proof of his sexual conquests.
Bury now preferred jewels to silver, and realised that jewels, though they are art, are also human nature: in another V&A booklet on rings, she records a Roman peacock of the first century AD who wore six rings on each of his hands, night and day.
Bury's most beautiful monument may be the superb jewellery gallery at the V&A, with her fine guide through the centuries. Her most complete achievement is perhaps her big two-volume book 'Jewellery 1789-1910', published in 1991, after she found a new self-discipline, and bravely reduced her initial 27 chapters to a more digestible 17, and jettisoned some 80,000 words.
Her best-kept secret was her love of her family, which she organised from its centre like Ruth and Naomi in the Bible. A friend once likened her to Dorothea in George Eliot's Middlemarch, always an influence for good, always showing confidence and faith in everyone. There are very few historians of metalwork and they nearly all know each other. Shirley Bury, with her accuracy and her generosity, was an example to them all.
Shirley Joan Watkin, art historian: born London 27 February 1925; Deputy Keeper, Department of Metalwork, Victoria and Albert Museum 1972-82, Keeper 1982-85; married 1947 Morley Bury (one son); died London 25 March 1999.
Reproduced with kind permission of The Independent
© Independent Newspapers (UK) Limited
From The V&A News, June 1999
Shirley was in the Metalwork Department from 1968 until her retirement, for most of the time a gentle, assuaging presence supporting the more turbulent and impetuous Claude Blair, while he was Keeper from 1972-82. Latterly, Shirley was so completely identified with the ethos of the Department that it was possible to forget - though she never did - that it took her some time to get there and that her formative years were spent in the Circulation Department.
Born in 1925, she joined the V&A in 1948, more or less straight from university (Reading University, Fine Art Department); she had been a teacher in a Kilburn secondary modern school for the few months that were needed to convince her that this was not her vocation. The V&A provided her with the setting for her entire working life. Such long tenure is getting increasingly infrequent nowadays. It worked well for Shirley because she was able to start in a new grade, Research Assistant, which had just been instituted in museums to bridge the gap between the senior cadre of Keepers and Assistant Keepers and the lower ranks of Museum Assistants, who tended to he boys straight out of school. Shirley found herself on an extending ladder which enabled her to rise eventually to a Keepership. She came in at a time when prospects for women were also improving - in the Civil Service generally, and in the museum through the sympathetic support of Trenchard Cox, Director 1956-66. If women of today find tolerable prospects and conditions in the V&A, they should thank Shirley and her contemporaries (not forgetting the indomitable Natalie Rothstein) for paving the way.
The Circulation Department - where Shirley started her museum life, was responsible for the programme of travelling exhibitions which the V&A then sustained, was the only department where the contemporary was studied, and was then thriving under the leadership of a dynamic Keeper, Peter Floud. Shirley was particularly associated with two other women who joined Circulation just before her: the vehement, surging Elizabeth Aslin and the smart and vivacious Barbara Morris. These three were known sometimes as the 'Three Graces'. Shirley was a small, quick figure, hurrying because usually slightly late. Early photographs show her hair as dark and curly, but it soon became silver, worn first in a chignon, and then in the closely cut bob which must people will remember as characteristic of her. She spoke softly (slightly sibilantly) and precisely, addressed one as 'm'dear', and when making a special point lowered her eyelids, slightly fluttering, to cover her eyes. This may make her sound a bit odd, but she wasn't. She saw right through pretension and had a keen eye for absurdity; she had great strength of purpose and the courage not to flinch (and acid test) before the wrath of John Pope-Hennessy, Director 1967-73.
Shirley and the rest of the Circ staff, under the leadership of Floud (who died in 1960 before his full potential was realised), put the nineteenth century on the V&A's map. This was a corporate curatorial movement of mind such as happens only once or twice in a century. (The Spiral seems set to be the equivalent for the present generation.) The exhibition 'Victorian and Edwardian Decorative Arts' in 1952, and the establishment of the Victorian Primary Galleries in 1964-6 were the critical events. Shirley (promoted to an Assistant Keepership in the Library, 1962-8 and then transferring to Metalwork) was bold enough to arrange a reprise of this enterprise in 1971 with the exhibition 'Victorian Church Art'. This was a project on which I worked and where, as an amateur bookman on the Library staff, I was inducted by Shirley (and John Physick, co-leader of the project) into such knowledge as I have about museum skills.
Life was rather less dominated by professionalised division of labour in those days. We went scouting round the country for exhibits and brought them back in cars that were probably insured for museum work. (I remember inadvertently driving my father's car and its cargo of church art into the back of another automobile in Swiss Cottage.) Many potential exhibits needed freshening up before display, and we did much of this ourselves, since there were not enough conservators to go round. Gallons of a magic potion (mostly linseed oil) were applied by amateur fingers to wooden objects. Shirley's husband, Morley, presided over a bath full of domestic detergent which did wonders for a Butterfield brass lectern that had acquired a century's tarnish.
Incidentally, it has always struck me as odd that spouses of staff do not seem to appear very much in the V&A. In Shirley's case, it was always obvious that she and Morley were very close and relied greatly on each other's support. In later years, he often came (because he had a more flexible timetable than she, being a painter and occasional art school teacher) to take her home by car and as one left by the Secretariat entrance at about 6 pm one would often see him chatting to the warder in the box, until Shirley came bustling out with an armful of papers.
Shirley's frequent involvement in exhibitions must not obscure her achievements as a departmental curator. She was progressively minded and understood how the museum must change, but she revelled in the functions of a curator in a material department - applying her knowledge of silver and jewellery to acquisition, patronage of the contemporary through commissions, scholarly cataloguing, and opinions, within the museum; and outside the museum to networking through the Goldsmiths' Company (of which she was a Liveryman), the Society of Antiquaries (of which she was a Fellow), societies such as the Victorian Society (which she joined at its inception in 1958) and the Society of Jewellery Historians, and informally at her dining table in the big house in Prince Arthur Road, Hampstead, which comfortably accommodated many Victorian and Edwardian artefacts.
We should remember Shirley also for what she did for the institution. Proto-feminist (perhaps crypto-feminist because you couldn't make too much noise in those times, and, anyway, Shirley worked by quiet persistence rather than direct assault), she modestly advanced the cause of women. She tactfully animated the staff associations she belonged to, and eventually acquired a sort of sanctification, alongside Terence Hodgkinson and Michael Kauffmann, as the conscience of the museum. I have received varied kindnesses from many colleagues in my time at the museum, but I think of Shirley, more than any of them, as embodying the spirit of the V&A.
In retirement, she produced the big book on 'Jewellery 1790-1910', which she had never had time to produce during working life, and contributed substantially to a monumental collaborative work on the Crown Jewels, published last year. She could have written much more if she had not died suddenly after a stroke on 25 March.
