In his letter to the editor Dr Selby Whittingham mentions that those of us on the staff of the Victoria and Albert Museum pushed into “voluntary” retirement during the restructuring muddle of 1989 believed ourselves still bound by the Official Secrets Act (The Art Newspaper, March, No. 57, p. 3). Too true, but we were also told by the Museum’s Staffing personnel that we had to sign the Secrets Act before leaving, as most of us had done on joining. It is ironic to learn now that we were misled, and that having seen the museum devolved from the Civil Service in 1983, we were no longer subject to the Act.
The anger generated in 1989 by Mrs Esteve-Coll’s unworkable staffing structure made many of us only too willing to take the fairly safe gamble that the V&A’s Chairman, Lord Armstrong of Ilminster, would not risk even greater ridicule than he had suffered over the Spycatcher Case by taking us to court. No one, you see, had ever explained to us exactly what, in museum terms, constituted an official secret. I had always taken the Secrets Act to apply to information that might prove of use to intending burglars. So long as confidence subsisted between a director and the staff, it never occurred to us that the document we had signed might be invoked to stifle open debate.
Since the 1989 V & A débacle, however, a sinister habit has grown up of adding a gagging clause to the redundancy package of curators pushed into “voluntary” early retirement. This was done in 1989 to Alexander Schouvaloff of the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden, a dependency of the V & A, and in 1994 to Andrew Dow of the Railway Museum at York, a dependency of the Science Museum. Your readers may recall other instances.
Am I alone in thinking it unjust that someone jostled into early retirement should be debarred, on pain of losing a payoff no doubt richly earned, from putting to the public his or her side of a dispute? And what is one to think of this shabby new practice of spending public money to keep such disputes secret from the public?
J.V.G Mallet
Originally appeared in The Art Newspaper as ‘Secrecy at the old V&A'