Good thread!
I think that part of the problem with trying to get young people (this makes me feel old) into museums is the word ‘museum’. In many people’s eyes, it conjours up an impression of a stuffy ‘library’ like building, a quiet atmosphere with artifacts hidden behind the glass. The worrying thing is that Hendon (as much as I personally enjoy it) almost fits this description perfectly!
In this age, where the Second World War is something that happens on a Playstation or X-box, a visit to a ‘museum’ just isn’t exciting enough. Bored kids dragged round by an enthused parent will resist on principle.
Unfortunately, a lot of important history isn’t actually very easy to display in a terribly exciting manner.
Interactive displays and videos are a good way of beating this, but I imagine that they’re expensive to create, maintain, and operate.
Obviously, if you have an active airfield as well, you go a long way to solving this problem, but, using Duxford as an example, if you visit on an airshow day viewing the museum itself is next to impossible due to the huge number of visitors.
Open cockpit days and ‘hands-on’ exhibits are another great idea, but however carefully this is done it is still not in the long term best interests of the exhibit. I guess if you have ‘spare’ aircraft, like the Jet Provost in Hendon, then this isn’t so much of problem.
Nostalgia, they say, is all in the past. This is more true than you would imagine. Take the preserved railway scene as an example. 20 years ago, all the steam loco’s were painted in the colours of pre-grouping pre 1948 railway companies (LNER,LMS,GWR etc) because visitors would remember seeing those colours in service so it would be nostalgic.
Having just visited a preserved railway, I was surprised to discover that all (without exception) of the steam locos there were in British Rail colours. This, I realised, is because many of todays visitors remember seeing steam locos in service in BR times. So nostalgia has moved forward in time. The pre-grouping times are now ‘history’ rather than nostalgia. The next phase of this is preserved diesel locos which is already happening, and this happened to me because a preserved diesel was there and I thought ‘oh yes, I remember those’, so the diesel was nostalgia for me (not that I prefer diesel to steam!).
The same, of course applies to aircraft. WW1 aircraft are history. WW2 aircraft are fast becoming history (how many of you Spitfire or Mustang fans out there actually remember them from the 40s? – and yes I know there are several, but I’m making a point!). They’re impressive aeroplanes, but they’re not nostalgia, they’re history. The current stage is classic jets like Hunters. These are nostalgia now. In 10 years time, the Hunter or Phantom will only be history and the Tornado and Jaguar will be nostalgia (if they aren’t already!).
So, to get to the point, museums can help themselves keeping up with the times. To get younger people interested, presenting items of recent history might help. This, of course, isn’t easy because anything recent is either still in use, still secret, or far too expensive to buy for a small museum.
I’m afraid that I don’t have any answers to the above, but to me, getting kids interested in history is very important to the future of museums and historic aviation as, to coin a phrase ‘history doesn’t have a future without help from the present’.
Hope this all makes sense!
Willow
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