00:01So it's a very shocking event. This is a collection of national and international significance.
00:06It includes irreplaceable historical material from all around the world.
00:11It was collected as a unique collection, really 20 or 30 years ago,
00:17and it contains material from lots of different public institutions and private individuals.
00:22So really it's something quite unique and it's something that's a huge value
00:26if we want to understand the history of the British Empire, British colonialism,
00:30the history of many African and Asian countries in the Pacific.
00:33So it really is quite a shocking development.
00:36So it's a hugely diverse collection. It's got paper archives, scrapbooks, photographic collections.
00:42It's got one of a totally unique collection of 1950s photographs of Kenya.
00:47For example, famous broadcasters and journalists like Elizabeth Huxley left collections of papers there.
00:53There's also lots of textiles, clothes, dolls, a huge number of different types of objects.
00:59From what we've been told, it sounds like it is small, high value items that might have obvious resale appeal.
01:07It is things like military badges and enzymes.
01:11It's some geological samples, militaria, jewelry, small statues, arts, items like that.
01:22I think the Louvre case probably shows that even in a very big, high profile national institution with a global reputation,
01:29it's incredibly hard to protect and safeguard these enormous collections which take up a huge amount of space.
01:38So this is perhaps a reflection of a much bigger set of problems that museums face, particularly in times of austerity where funding for public institutions is at risk.
01:52How do you prioritise safeguarding these collections when so many of your resources are stripped away?
01:59These are items which I'm not sure the resale value of many of them is all that great, but the cultural value of these items and the fact that they are unique and irreplaceable
02:13and that they form part of collections built up by major institutions like what was called the Colonial Institute,
02:19the Commonwealth Institute in London, which was there to promote public understanding of empire.
02:25That in itself is something that scholars study and think about how these collections were used in the past for imperial purposes.
02:33If we lose that, we lose our ability to understand large areas of the imperial history of Britain, but also the colonial history of many countries in Africa and Asia and the Pacific.
02:45It's a real loss to our understanding of a really important aspect of the past if those collections aren't safeguarded.
02:51What we see when we visit a museum is the tip of the iceberg and no museum can show everything that it holds.
02:58That it holds.
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