Museum Education in Times of Crisis - Children and Museums in the Second World War

EPOCH
2 days ago
7 min read

Megan Schlanker | University of Lincoln

In the late 1930s, the staff of the Geffrye Museum in Shoreditch, East London, were witnessing a rise in children visiting the museum. A new layout and new rules allowing unaccompanied children to explore the museum, changes enacted by curator Marjorie Quennell, had resulted in an overwhelming number of child visitors. In response, London County Council seconded two teachers to the museum to help cope with demand, one in January 1938, and another in 1939. However, the outbreak of the Second World War and the evacuation of many of London’s children put a stop to this growing audience, at least temporarily.

In her 1950 book Museum Adventure, Molly Harrison, the second teacher to be assigned to the Geffrye, noted that children who had initially been evacuated ‘gradually trickled back to the museum’ early in 1940. At around the same time, Marjorie Quennell’s ill health and eventual emigration to the USA led to Harrison’s appointment as acting curator. Harrison’s own reflections on working with children at the Geffrye reveal the challenges of delivering museum activities for children in wartime. Not only was the museum understaffed, under-resourced, and dealing with the circumstances and aftermath of the Blitz, but the children now making up the core of the museum’s visitors were disengaged, distracted, and struggling to understand the meaning of the exhibits on display. Harrison decided that an active museum programme, including hands-on, practical, and crafts-based activities was the way forward for these children to engage with the museum in their leisure time.

A black and white photograph of Molly Harrison, a woman in her early 40s with pale skin and dark hair wearing a black jacket, white ruffled blouse and grey skirt. She sits looking to the left of the photograph. Some papers and a pair of round glasses are in the foreground of the image in the bottom left corner. — Mrs. Molly Harrison, 24 May 1951. (National Portrait Gallery, London, Creative Commons).

During wartime, lectures and guided tours lessened in frequency or were removed from the museum’s programming entirely. Children had already been drawing in the galleries, but at this point worksheets were developed with illustrations made by staff, with dedicated spaces for drawing. The children were also provided with envelopes to store their drawings in. Children visiting the museum were encouraged to find out information for themselves, filling in the gaps in their knowledge and on their worksheets, enabling them to become active in seeking answers, rather than passively consuming the museum displays.

By offering modelling materials, painting equipment, and opportunities for arts and crafts activities, the team at the Geffrye shaped a museum approach that was creative and child centred. In Museum Adventure (1950), Harrison describes a particular issue observed at the museum during wartime - ‘sometimes [the children] painted and modelled in grimly contemporary vein - tube shelters, air raids, tanks in the desert, funerals.’ While children were not restricted from using museum resources in this way, they were initially encouraged to focus on the museum’s theme - the history of the home. However, Harrison commented, ‘it was not long before [the children’s] obvious need to paint freely whatever they wished’ was prioritised over a historical focus. The Geffrye staff worked to prioritise the needs of their audience through the challenging wartime circumstances. The museum not only represented an educational space for its child visitors, but also a space of social value, making a difference to the wellbeing of its visitors, in spite of challenges of space, staffing issues, and limited money and equipment.

The Geffrye is a notable example of a museum which stayed open during the Second World War, which was not the case for all. The Science Museum, well known in the 1930s for its Children’s Gallery, remained closed throughout the period of wartime, reopening in 1946. Others did remain open: Leicester and Glasgow Museums, among others, were open to visitors. Equally, the Geffrye was also not the only museum that associated its provision for children with social welfare. Audrie Fitzjohn, the Organiser of the Leicester Museums Schools Service during the war, described evacuees and refugee children as ‘welcome visitors’ to the museums in a 1941 Bulletin for the museum and art gallery. The Leicester Museums School Service was founded in 1924 and included a loans service to schools, which started in 1931. Leicester Museums’ provision for children expanded during the war - the loans service continued despite transport restrictions, and activities for schools and children visiting independently were developed further.

Unlike the provision at Leicester and the Geffrye, the educational offer made by Glasgow Museums officially began during wartime, with a trial period beginning in 1941, and was presented in a 1951 report on this ‘Educational Experiment’ as beneficial both to the children as interested museum users, and to local schools dealing with staff shortages and operating part-time classes. Samuel Thompson, the first Education Officer at Glasgow Museums, was a strong advocate of visual methods of teaching, and particularly highlighted the value of these methods for disabled children. In the early days of his secondment to Glasgow Museums, Thompson visited several English museums with existing education departments, although unfortunately he did not record which he visited in his report on the Educational Experiment. The examples of the Geffrye, the Science Museum, Glasgow, and Leicester show that museums responded to wartime in different ways – ranging from closure to an expansion of existing educational activities, to the introduction of a new education service.

A colour photograph of a faded taxidermy giraffe from the neck up, taken from below. In the background of the image, several taxidermy dioramas featuring birds and mammals sit in shelves in glass cases. — 'George' (now known as 'Geoffrey') the giraffe was moved from Leicester's New Walk Museum to Wollaton Hall, Nottingham in 1969. (Credit: Author, 2025).

During this period, the lines between education and leisure for children in museum settings increasingly overlapped. Records of school trips in the late 1930s typically referenced the fun had by the children on their museum visits, despite these trips being part of their formal education. Museum clubs for children pushed this overlap between leisure and education further, and a youth club was founded at Leicester Museum and Art Gallery during the Second World War. Fitzjohn observed that museum youth clubs were filling somewhat of a gap in the market as typical youth groups were struggling to find adult leaders during the early years of the war. These Children’s Clubs were considered to be a significant achievement, described with pride by Museum Director Trevor Thomas in 1944. By this point, youth-led clubs had been established for art and science, and the children had adopted the museum’s taxidermy giraffe as an unofficial mascot.

While the Geffrye and Leicester Museums appear to have predominantly focused on independent child visitors as an audience, meaning children visiting outside of a family or school group, Glasgow distinctly focused on schools. The development of a museum classroom in the basement Museum and Art Gallery at Kelvingrove highlights the liminal space between education and leisure represented by museum activities for children. The space mimicked a formal classroom in many regards, but incorporated artefacts and elements of visual learning rooted in museum practice. Glasgow’s new museum education service had strong connections with local schools, and Thompson described Glasgow’s teachers as a great help in developing the service. Later, the schools focus of Glasgow Museums expanded further to cater for young people on weekends and other leisure time visits, and by the end of the war, Saturday classes were being held in nature study, painting, film appreciation, and puppetry.

Arts-based activities for children were therefore established at the Geffrye, Glasgow Museums, and Leicester Museums and Art Gallery during wartime. At Glasgow, an annual art competition for children, initially launched in 1904, was reinvigorated in 1941 after entries dropped to only 76 drawings in 1939. The changes made to the structure of the competition in 1941, including dedicated space for 300 children to draw in the gallery at a time, weekday visits for school groups, and encouragement of creative as well as representational responses, led to 2368 entries being submitted in 1941, rising to 5303 entries in 1944. This annual art competition was designed with the intention that children would be encouraged to develop their artistic skills, while also inspiring interest in the museum and gallery collections. As Harrison observed at the Geffrye, creative outputs were seen as providing a restorative experience for children. Art teacher Jean Irwin, who ran the Saturday morning art class for children shortly after the war, commented that children who had dealt with the disruption and distress of wartime benefitted from the emotional outlet that creative work provided. This relates to a wider development of ideas during the Second World War and in the immediate post-war period, seeing art as emotionally and pedagogically beneficial.

Far from being a period of stasis for museum education and activities for children, the case studies of the Geffrye Museum, Leicester Museums and Art Gallery, and Glasgow Museums reveal that the war was in fact a period of development, with the pressures of wartime life often directly stimulating this development. These three museums emphasised the social and welfare value that museums could provide to child visitors and explored the role that museums could play in relieving the strain on local schools. Museum staff noted the difficulties that children faced during the war, with Molly Harrison describing children as at ‘a loose end’. The initiatives described by Molly Harrison, Audrie Fitzjohn, and Samuel Thompson focus on leisure and education together, not in isolation from each other. In the years following the Second World War, these accommodations for children continued and expanded. More museums began to offer Museum Education Services, including Amgueddfa Cymru (National Museum Wales) in 1949, and the Natural History Museum launched its own Children’s Centre in 1948. The Science Museum reopened the doors of its famous Children’s Gallery in 1946. In this post-war period, Glasgow Museums’ Saturday morning provision expanded, and Leicester gained further attention for its loan service in the 1970s, as well as collaborating with the University of Leicester’s Museum Studies programmes. Molly Harrison became known internationally for her work in museum education, and the Geffrye Museum’s educational legacy continues in its new iteration as the Museum of the Home.

These wartime services, while certainly not the start of provision for children in museums, represent a significant step forward. Such services lay the ground for the museum education services experienced by many children and young people in the UK, as well as facilities for lifetime learning. Glasgow Museums’ art competition, founded in 1904 and reinvigorated during the Second World War, continues to this day, and the Geffrye Museum’s guided worksheets, innovative for the time, have become a staple of museum education activities. Wartime had many effects on lifestyle and culture, but for museum education and activities for children it was far from a period of hiatus.