Author: Frances Larson
Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2009
Price: £18.99 (hardback)
Isbn: 9780199554461

Along with a superb library and galleries that house some of the world’s most innovative medical science exhibitions, the Wellcome Trust – with its elegant modern atria and aura of well-heeled sophistication – houses a small museum dedicated to its founder, the pharmaceuticals entrepreneur Sir Henry Wellcome.

Henry Wellcome arrived in the UK in the 1880s intending to revolutionise the pharmaceuticals market. Burroughs Wellcome, the company he founded with a fellow American, rapidly became the country’s leading drug manufact­urer. Along with slick American production and marketing, Wellcome brought something else to the UK: a taste for collecting.

He had clearly been an avid collector from an early age; but as his fortune grew, so did his collecting. He originally intended opening a medical museum, which, to a certain extent, he did; but his ambitions expanded. In the end, he sought to create a grand museum of everything. His collecting ran away with him.

He employed ever more staff whose sole job was to collect on his behalf; he rented warehouses to which crates of material flowed daily and were often left unopened on arrival; and he sent agents out across the world. Documentation, storage and display did not keep pace with his mania. Things piled up.

When Sir Henry died in 1936, there was such an array of weapons alone that a sale of 6,200 at Sotheby’s barely dented the invent­ory. Even after the Ministry of Supply removed six tons of ‘junk’, there was still a stunning quantity of arms from sources ranging from the Home Guard to the Tower of London. An unsuspecting purchaser of a collection of European and Asian arms and armour sold by tender in 1945 found himself the owner of a giant warehouse full of them, all in hideous disarray. Then there were books, ethnographic items, med­ical materials, netsuke, artworks and more… and more. Attempts at a museum were never more than half-hearted: once he had something, he lost interest – what he didn’t have was more exciting.

Collecting may have wrecked his marriage, yet he took little pleasure in it. He seems to have been a more sophisticated version of a shopaholic. In more modest circumstances, he might have ended his days in a semi-detached packed with unopened M&S bags, navigable only by the narrowest passages through the kipple. It took curators more than 40 years to weed out the junk and impose order on the collection, parts of which were in the Science Museum’s Wellcome Gallery and are now in the Wellcome building.

For all his hunger for exotica, Wellcome comes across as distant and unlikeable, consumed by obsessions for business and coll­ecting, and prickly about being a man of trade who aspired to matters seen more as the preserve of academics. I get the impression he thought his great museum would be his legacy, rather than the behemoth the Wellcome Trust has become. It would have been fascinating to see the museum he envisaged – but we have many museums and only one Wellcome Trust.

Frances Larson brings this whole unlikely tale to life. She has explored the confused by-ways of Wellcome’s world, tried to understand what drove him and gives the reader a sense of the scale of his efforts. Her approach is canny: by viewing Wellcome through the lens of his collection, she has created an imaginative biography that explores issues far beyond those merely of manic acquisition. It almost certainly gives us a far more entertaining view of Sir Henry Wellcome than a conventional biography could have managed and, in so doing, she has thrown well-deserved light onto one of Britain’s greatest, but least known, collectors.

Wellcome deserves to be placed alongside Sir John Soane and Augustus Pitt Rivers, and seen as their successor – as well as, perhaps, the last colossus of that golden age of gentleman collect­ors who passed with World War II.

A fascinating book and one for the shelves of anyone interested in science, collecting – or just a plain good read.