A Culture Builder

You’d never mistake him for Indiana Jones. Still, how Charles Trick Currelly, a small-town boy from Ontario, drifted into the booming field of archaeology at the turn of the 20th century, gained the attention of a group of wealthy Torontonians intent on putting their city on the world cultural map, and ended up at the centre of a new, major Canadian cultural institution is a compelling tale. We love these kinds of stories, their narrative arc propelling their teller from obscurity to fame. They validate our sense of the potential for greatness lying hidden in all of us. This ascent—from Exeter, Ontario, to first director of Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum of Archaeology—Currelly chronicles in his 1956 memoir, I Brought the Ages Home, which is being reissued.

Whether regaling Victoria College’s Senior Common Room with his tales of archaeological discovery and institutional derring-do or thrilling radio audiences with accounts of the ROM’s collections, Currelly seems a born storyteller, alert to every possibility for dramatic emphasis and narrative progression. We best understand his story when we understand his culture’s assumptions about the nature of museums, their holdings and how those holdings came to be held. Parsing the memoir’s title in reverse—“home,” “the ages” and “I brought”—helps us do this.

Home

His first title—“I Brought the Ages Home to Toronto”—bothered his original publishers at the Ryerson Press. Why? A reader still puzzles over how Chinese temple creatures and an ancient Egyptian wall painting can call the corner of Bloor Street and Avenue Road in Toronto home. Aren’t museums in fact known for their collections of rare and exotic items, rather than homey ones?

Empires, however—and Currelly was working within the cultural agenda set by the British one—deploy their own vocabularies of meaning. Such a system assigns a new meaning to home: it is where an object is housed within the system. Without such housing, an object is “lost.” Lost to whom? Where? Rarely posed in empire’s heyday, such questions are inescapable now.

Here is a perfect example, one that Currelly goes into in some detail. Anybody in Toronto— even those who have never set foot in the ROM itself—recognizes those two monstrous creatures camped today in front of the building’s old, Queen’s Park Crescent entrance. What are they—lions, dragons, malevolent or protective gods? What Currelly tells us is that they had originally guarded an impressive Mandarin family compound in Beijing. An international military force punished a Chinese anti-imperial insurgency around the turn of the 20th century. The pair—in the manner of loot everywhere in war—had ended up parked in front of the Austro-Hungarian empire’s embassy. Once World War I wrecked that empire, citizens of yet another empire, the British, took an interest in what remained at the Beijing site.

At which point George Crofts entered the picture. As Currelly describes him, Crofts was the offspring of Anglo-Irish gentry who had set out for China to make his fortune in the fur and hide trade there. (Canadians are used to hearing about the effects of the fur trade on their history, just not the fur trade in China.) In northern China, Crofts was privy to the accidental discovery of an ancient temple when workers were excavating for a new railway. Crofts had been a successful and knowledgeable fur trader. He also—imagine an old-time voyageur canadien who somehow understood that beadwork on a Plains Cree buckskin coat was worth more than an uncured beaver pelt—had enough of an instinct for cultural objects to acquire a number of those excavated items. Which led him to his second career, as a dealer in Chinese antiquities.

Crofts worked in a country that had been incorporated within the European imperial network. He plied his trade in the city we now know as Tianjing, a treaty port. The term designated places in a powerless China where the various European, American and even Asian (Japanese) nationals did business protected by their own laws and institutions. The very concept of a treaty port, restricting China’s sovereignty over its own territory, discloses how Crofts and many others could ship chunks of China’s cultural heritage elsewhere.

Thus George Crofts sold the two menacing guardian-creatures to the ROM. Thus the temple creatures made their way to Toronto. Thus the creatures now rest before a temple of global culture where all the ages commingle. Home.

The Ages

So grand a term as this evokes caravans of timeless loot shedding their cargo at Bloor and Avenue Road. Currelly’s memoirs present some fairly specific instances of what “the ages” signifies in museum-speak.

Museums as we know them today began as collections of curiosities accumulated by European rulers. Democratizing access to those collections proceeded hand in hand with the democratizing of political power. Museums are now one of the marks of “advanced” societies. As cultural institutions, museums may resemble many others in our society—universities, arts companies. But they differ in their content. Whereas, for example, universities strive toward uniformity—if the one down the road has a medical school, we want one too—museums work toward diversity. “Only we own and display this set of bones, or that set of temple carvings.”

These seemingly unique objects aspire toward one common state: antiquity. Can anyone today describe a museum’s holdings without using the word “old”? Our everyday museum parlance even equates “old” with “valuable.” Antiquity forms an essential characteristic of those rarities.

How come a clergyman-in-training, freshly minted by Canada’s leading Methodist faith-foundry at Toronto’s Victoria College, began his career at what would become the Royal Ontario Museum by bringing home bits of the ages from ancient Egypt? Indirectly, through the pursuit of a very modern quest. His church at the time lay under the sway of the Social Gospel movement, which urged its adherents to turn this world into an image of the next. The left-leaning professor James Mavor had dispatched Currelly along the path of wisdom that led to Prince Peter Kropotkin, gentlest and most thoughtful of anarchists. That same church, however, had also come under the spell of one of the 19th century’s most powerful secular religions, the cult of historicism, especially as it illumined the social and political circumstances at play during the time of Christianity’s origins. Increasing knowledge about the time of Jesus’ life would both illuminate and solidify the message of the Gospels. So the clergy thought.

Ever alert to the possibilities of drama and providentialism in the stories drawn from his life, Currelly weaves the net of coincidences that led him from Kropotkin and the present to his first acquaintance with Sir Flinders Petrie (one of the foremost archaeologists of his era) and the past. Currelly’s religious interests closely dovetailed with his archaeological ones; the past exerted a surer hold over him than did present and future. The bulk of Currelly’s memoir concerns itself with his adventures in Egyptian and Mediterranean digs. Three features of this self-portrait stand out:

The Currelly emerging from this period has come a long way from the wet-behind-the-ears ministerial student preaching the Gospel in Prairie settlements as remote from modernity as Palestinian oases. Away from the petty witch hunts of church politics, he carves his way upward into a world distant from his provincial origins, yet still within the system of social, cultural and material advancement that empire has chosen as its goals. Charles Currelly, in short, emerges as an advancer of empire. His personal quest melds with a larger task of cultural penetration and acquisition, a work that the global system that has made him embraces and esteems.

His memoirs help us understand how history, politics and religion colluded in fostering a culture’s preoccupation with antiquity, with those ages that museum makers sought to bring home. Even to Toronto.

I Brought

Antiquity’s cultural power made the Toronto rich want some of it. The most cultured and culturally ambitious of that elite, the banker Sir Edmund Walker, had been calling for stronger cultural institutions in this country since his presidential address to the Royal Canadian Institute in 1889. He went on to found several, including the Art Gallery of Toronto and the National Gallery of Canada. One of the most remarkable persons ever to figure in the cultural life of his country, Walker spent much of the money that he had made in his lifetime both as a collector and patron of the arts. Respected and honoured in a financial world stretching from Toronto to New York, London to Yokohama, Walker devoted his energies not only to founding a new museum in Toronto, but also to establishing that institution with the kind of leadership and governing structure that would enable it to flourish and endure. Walker found Currelly essential to his enterprise. The synergy between them helped to make the museum what it is today.

No one could have brought the ages home without having bought some of them before-hand. Walker served as the nexus that would connect the Toronto rich in their quest to stamp their city with the seal of cultural advancement, which in turn confirmed their claims to a higher social and cultural status than mere wealth could confer. A tireless student, Walker had surveyed the institutional structures of museums in both Europe and America and knew very well what he wanted for Toronto. He and the highly successful potentates whom he had assembled—more than one of them adherents to that same Methodist belief in advancing here and now God’s progressive kingdom—lobbied the provincial government for funds for the building that their own donations would fill.

Currelly had been Walker’s choice to head the world-class antiquities division of the museum for years. We have seen how bankable Currelly had become: the man who knew his donor base intimately and had even entertained them during their Egyptian holidays, who had already developed the practice of squeezing acquisition money from their deep pockets in emergencies, a man at home in the world of antiquarian dealers and middlemen, and a man gifted at organizing his subordinates toward a common goal. He understood how to transform a public into supporters. He wanted a museum built along a streetcar line. He took advantage of a new technology, giving radio talks about his collections. He also acceded (with some reluctance and hesitation) to the ambitions of Ruth Home and melded her children’s outreach (the Saturday Morning Club) into the museum’s structure. This in turn wove the ROM into the very cultural fabric of generations of Toronto middle-class children in a way that no competing cultural institution has.

But at the beginning, Currelly was simply one of the four directors of the four museums sited beneath the same roof. Those others, called “museums” rather than “departments,” looked after objects whose antiquity stretched beyond anything found in the Royal Ontario Museum of Archaeology (Currelly’s bailiwick). Toronto’s world-class geologist A.P. Coleman headed the Royal Ontario Museum of Mineralogy, the great dinosaur hunter W.A. Parks the Royal Ontario Museum of Paleontology, B.A. Bensley the Royal Ontario Museum of Zoology. All these men enjoyed a more solid power base than Currelly, located as they were at the centre of major University of Toronto departments. Wisely, Walker sought to shelter his museum within the U of T, allying it inescapably with Ontario’s most prestigious cultural institution. Yet this academic foundation left Currelly, the man with slim academic credentials, in an exposed position. Gathering a first-rate collection of antiquities solidified his role, and George Crofts’s and Currelly’s command of his donor base proved central to that reinforcement.

The Book

Parsing the title tells us a lot about the context— cultural, political and social—that produced Currelly’s memoir. The book itself, its shape and thrust, tells us about how the man himself saw his career at the ROM. It appears strange when we notice that his memoir’s shape discloses a sense of anticlimax about his tenure at the ROM. Currelly tells us so little about exactly what he did on the job. Repeatedly, we are told of an important collection appearing on the market (or sniffed out by one of his contacts before it hit the market publicly), which Currelly then hastens to acquire through his skill at squeezing the funds from a pet donor. But what was the job really like, we ask? That, Currelly never tells us.

The shape of the text we have is fundamentally nostalgic. That is, it concludes its account of the writer’s life just when he has entered into the fullness of the goal—the directorship in the new museum—that makes a reader want to read his life in the first place. In this, Currelly remains at one with the late Romantic culture in which he grew up. Early on, he recalls with pride a colleague’s observation at the number of Exeter lads standing at the forefront of the University of Toronto. In a way, he never outgrew the excitement of a small-town boy making good in the big city. Was that what he sensed as his most authentic and noteworthy achievement?

I Brought the Ages Home delivers an engrossing series of stories that concludes somewhat listlessly with a defensive account of an old controversy, that of the so-called “Beardmore Relics,” a complex story in itself. Briefly, a Viking sword, axe head and a shield grip had been “discovered” (that is, planted) in Northern Ontario by scam artists who then sought fame and fortune from any museum who would take them. The Royal Ontario Museum did so in 1938, paying $500 and putting the objects on display. A.D. Tushingham, Currelly’s successor, quietly removed them and later produced a pamphlet recounting the story of the “Beardmore Relics.”

Tushingham’s summary, and a subsequent statement by Edmund Carpenter, one of the ROM’s leading scholars, makes it clear that no professional archaeologist should ever have accepted the pieces as genuine. Currelly’s unease over the whole matter probably led him to spend a chunk of his memoir defending their authenticity, a step that reinforces the linkage of his reputation with that of the so-called relics, even as the ROM is now linked with the highly contested “James Ossuary” of 2002. The kindest way to explain what happened is to surmise that Currelly’s administrative role outpaced his professional standards and training, and that crowd-pleasing objects need not be authentic.

Readers may prefer to concentrate on the first three parts of the memoir, for there we see the author at the peak of his powers: organizing, administering, bluffing, cajoling, demanding, asserting and, above all, accumulating. The audacity and success of that enterprise compel us still. I Brought the Ages Home stands as the most detailed and revelatory first-hand account we have of the foundation and rise of a major Canadian cultural institution. Even if we discount the author’s tabulation of the ages, Currelly brought a cargo of good stories home to this book about Canada’s and Toronto’s entry into high culture’s great world.