Black Museum
Encyclopedia
Scotland Yard
Scotland Yard is a metonym for the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police Service of London, UK. It derives from the location of the original Metropolitan Police headquarters at 4 Whitehall Place, which had a rear entrance on a street called Great Scotland Yard. The Scotland Yard entrance became...
is a famed collection of criminal
Crime
Crime is the breach of rules or laws for which some governing authority can ultimately prescribe a conviction...
memorabilia kept at the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police
Metropolitan police
Metropolitan Police is a generic title for the municipal police force for a major metropolitan area, and it may be part of the official title of the force...
in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
, England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
. The museum came into existence sometime in 1874, although unofficially. It was housed at Scotland Yard, and grew from the collection of prisoners' property gathered under the authority of the Prisoners Property Act of 1869. The act was intended to help the police
Police
The police is a personification of the state designated to put in practice the enforced law, protect property and reduce civil disorder in civilian matters. Their powers include the legitimized use of force...
in their study of crime and criminals. By 1875, it had become an official museum of the force, with a police inspector and a police constable assigned to duty there. The first visitors for whom records exist came in 1877. The first known reference to the museum as the "Black Museum" came that year as well.
Despite being intended primarily for use by the police, the public could see it by special arrangement. The name "Black Museum" was a nickname; the collection was formally referred to as the "Crime Museum."
About
Death mask
In Western cultures a death mask is a wax or plaster cast made of a person’s face following death. Death masks may be mementos of the dead, or be used for creation of portraits...
s made of executed criminals, as well as collections of weapons, tools used by burglars
Burglary
Burglary is a crime, the essence of which is illicit entry into a building for the purposes of committing an offense. Usually that offense will be theft, but most jurisdictions specify others which fall within the ambit of burglary...
, and items that had been evidence
Evidence
Evidence in its broadest sense includes everything that is used to determine or demonstrate the truth of an assertion. Giving or procuring evidence is the process of using those things that are either presumed to be true, or were themselves proven via evidence, to demonstrate an assertion's truth...
in crimes.
In 1951, British commercial radio producer Harry Alan Towers
Harry Alan Towers
Harry Alan Towers was a British-born radio and film producer and screenwriter, regularly using the pseudonym Peter Welbeck. He produced over a hundred feature films and continued to write and produce well into his eighties...
produced a radio
Radio
Radio is the transmission of signals through free space by modulation of electromagnetic waves with frequencies below those of visible light. Electromagnetic radiation travels by means of oscillating electromagnetic fields that pass through the air and the vacuum of space...
series hosted by Orson Welles
Orson Welles
George Orson Welles , best known as Orson Welles, was an American film director, actor, theatre director, screenwriter, and producer, who worked extensively in film, theatre, television and radio...
called The Black Museum
The Black Museum
The Black Museum was a 1951 radio crime drama program independently produced by Harry Alan Towers and based on real-life cases from the files of Scotland Yard's Black Museum. Ira Marion was the scriptwriter, and music for the series was composed and conducted by Sidney Torch...
, inspired by the catalogue of items on display. Each week, the programme featured an item from the museum and a dramatization of the story surrounding the object to the macabre delight of audiences. Often mistakenly cited as a BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
production, Towers commercially syndicated the programme throughout the English speaking world. The American radio writer Wyllis Cooper
Wyllis Cooper
Wyllis Oswald Cooper was an American writer and producer.He is best remembered for creating and writing the old time radio programs Lights Out and Quiet, Please -Biography:...
also wrote and directed a similar anthology for NBC
NBC
The National Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network and former radio network headquartered in the GE Building in New York City's Rockefeller Center with additional major offices near Los Angeles and in Chicago...
that ran at the same time in the U. S.; called Whitehall 1212, for the telephone number of Scotland Yard, the program debuted on November 18, 1951, and was hosted by Chief Superintendent John Davidson, curator of the Black Museum.
Crime Museum
The Museum was moved to New Scotland Yard in the 1980s and was subject to substantial renovation in recent years. The Crime Museum, as it is now called, currently resides in Room 101 at New Scotland Yard and consists of two sections. The first, a replica of the original museum contains a substantial selection of melee weapons, some overt, some concealed, including shotgun umbrellas and numerous walking stick swordsSwordstick
A swordstick or cane-sword is a cane incorporating a concealed blade. The term is typically used to describe European weapons from around the 18th century, but similar devices have been used throughout history, notably the Japanese shikomizue and the Ancient Roman dolon.- Popularity :The swordstick...
. This room also contains a selection of hangman's nooses including that used to perform the UK's last ever execution and letters allegedly written by Jack the Ripper
Jack the Ripper
"Jack the Ripper" is the best-known name given to an unidentified serial killer who was active in the largely impoverished areas in and around the Whitechapel district of London in 1888. The name originated in a letter, written by someone claiming to be the murderer, that was disseminated in the...
. The newer section of the museum contains many exhibits from 20th century crimes, notable inclusions include the fake De Beers diamond from the Millennium Dome heist
Millennium Dome raid
On 7 November 2000, a criminal gang attempted to steal the flawless Millennium Star diamond valued at over £200 million, from an exhibition at the Millennium Dome in Greenwich, London.The robbers had been under police surveillance before the heist...
and Dennis Nilsen
Dennis Nilsen
Dennis Andrew Nilsen also known as the Muswell Hill Murderer and the Kindly Killer is a British serial killer who lived in London....
's stove. The museum can be visited by Police officers from any of the country's police forces by prior appointment, though not without difficulty due to its popularity.
The Black Museum of criminal artefacts also hosts over 500 items preserved at a constant temperature of sixty-two degrees, a special place is reserved for a set of printing plates, a remarkable series of forged bank-notes, and a cunningly hollowed out kitchen door once used to conceal some of them, once belonging to Charles Black
Charles Black (counterfeiter)
Charles Black produced counterfeit British and U.S. currency together with traveller's cheques for a number of years before being arrested. As a testament to his skills, his techniques rendered the U.S Department of the Treasury's detection equipment obsolete...
, the most prolific counterfeiter in the Western Hemisphere.
Trivia
- There is a fictional Black Museum, inspired by the actual one, inside the Grand Hall of JusticeGrand Hall of JusticeThe Grand Hall of Justice of Mega-City One is a fictional building in the Judge Dredd comic strip in 2000 AD. It actually refers to three different buildings which existed at different times...
in the Judge DreddJudge DreddJudge Joseph Dredd is a comics character whose strip in the British science fiction anthology 2000 AD is the magazine's longest running . Dredd is an American law enforcement officer in a violent city of the future where uniformed Judges combine the powers of police, judge, jury and executioner...
comic strip. - A fictional version of The Black Museum is often featured to in the Dylan DogDylan DogDylan Dog is an Italian horror comics series featuring an eponymous character created by Tiziano Sclavi for the publishing house Sergio Bonelli Editore...
comic series and, in some stories, exhibits are stolen from the museum. - A 1958 horror film called Horrors of the Black MuseumHorrors of the Black MuseumHorrors of the Black Museum is a British horror film starring Michael Gough and directed by Arthur Crabtree.It was the first film in what film critic David Pirie dubbed Anglo-Amalgamated's "Sadian trilogy" , with an emphasis on sadism, cruelty and violence , in contrast to the supernatural...
references the Black Museum in a story of a crime writer (played by Michael GoughMichael GoughMichael Gough was an English character actor who appeared in over 150 films. He is perhaps best known to international audiences for his roles in the Hammer Horror films from 1958, and for his recurring role as Alfred Pennyworth in all four movies of the Burton/Schumacher Batman franchise,...
) who commits grisly murders in order to write articles and books about them for public consumption.
Other uses
The term was also applied to a museum of failed engineering components collected by David KirkaldyDavid Kirkaldy
David Kirkaldy was a Scottish engineer who pioneered the testing of materials as a service to engineers during the Victorian period. He established a test house in Southwark, London and built a large hydraulic tensile test machine, or tensometer for examining the mechanical properties of...
at his testing works at 99 Southwark Street, Southwark
Southwark
Southwark is a district of south London, England, and the administrative headquarters of the London Borough of Southwark. Situated east of Charing Cross, it forms one of the oldest parts of London and fronts the River Thames to the north...
, London. The latter museum was destroyed in the London Blitz. The artefacts included fractured lug
Lug
-Places:* Lug , a Croatian village in Herzegovina* Lug, Bilje, a settlement in Croatian Baranja* Lug, Germany, a municipality in Germany* Ług, Łódź Voivodeship, a village in Poland* Lug , a village in Serbia-Transportation:...
s from the Tay Bridge disaster
Tay Bridge disaster
The Tay Bridge disaster occurred on 28 December 1879, when the first Tay Rail Bridge, which crossed the Firth of Tay between Dundee and Wormit in Scotland, collapsed during a violent storm while a train was passing over it. The bridge was designed by the noted railway engineer Sir Thomas Bouch,...
.
Further reading
- Ohmart, Ben. It's That Time Again." (2002) (Albany: BearManor Media) ISBN 0-9714570-2-6