Journal of the History of Collections Advance Access published March 21, 2007

Journal of the History of Collections () pp.

Provincial hoplology
Collecting arms and armour in Ontario,
18501950

Steven A. Walton

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Upper Canada (Ontario) never had a medieval past to glorify with the display of arms and armour, but to
its populace, conscious of their legacy as heirs to the British Empire, that display seemed sufficiently
important to merit encouragement from the earliest days of the Province. In Toronto, although some
influential nineteenth-century residents had collections of armour, its collection and display from the
earliest days essentially were tied to education. The Toronto Normal School incorporated arms and
armour into its history teaching collection, and after the Schools failure, the Royal Ontario Museum
(ROM) built arguably the third-best public armour collection in North America. Unique in this collection,
however, was the rhetoric of utility and especially of industrial design: Charles Trick Currelly, the ROMs
first director, argued that arms and armour should be seen as finely made functional art of the past that
would inspire fine functional art for the present. This philosophy, derived and elaborated from the South
Kensington model, also saw the role of armour as a cornerstone to the educational mission of the
museum. This educational emphasis begun under Currelly remains strong, despite waxing and waning
emphasis on arms and armour in the museum as a whole.

WHY do museums collect arms and armour? Why
should obsolete objects associated with bygone hero-
ics so fascinate modern, technologically advanced
civilization? More specically, into what category of
collecting do they fall? The contemporary eld of
arms and armour collecting has close ties to art his-
tory,1 but of course the pieces and collections were
initially developed for military purposes. This func-
tional necessity only later became surpassed, if not
supplanted, both by decorative and ornamental con-
siderations in the declining years of armour prod-
uction and also as collections of arms and armour
migrated into museums from their original setting in
arsenals.2 From the outset of collections, from Renais-
sance and Baroque Kunst- and Wunderkammern to
modern art and history museums, arms and armour
have been included along with other marvellous pro-
ductions of humanity and of nature; the catalogue of a
exhibition at the Hood Museum of Art at
Dartmouth College noted that as housed in Kunstkamm-
ern, armour, as articialia examined mans ingenuity
and demonstrated at once technical expertise, virtuos-
ity, and the ability to master difcult natural mater-
ials.3 Throughout the Renaissance, the importance of
historical artefacts as an element of state-building and
for conjuring up the past was widely recognized: when
a foolish young seventeenth-century gentleman asked,
of what use can [relics] be to you?, the antiquary
returned, What use! Did not the Seigniory build a
state-chamber for antiquities? and tis the best thing
that eer they did: they are the registers, the chronicles
of the age they were made in, and speak the truth
of history better than a hundred of your printed
commentaries.4
In Europe, most of the great collections derive from
national arsenals and ancestral or princely assem-
blages, which served practical functions, although
even in these, signature pieces were occasionally
included for their strictly military signicance. Col-
lecting armour for its own sake as art both ne and
applied began in the early sixteenth century, but
not until the late eighteenth and nineteenth cent-
uries did armour collections begin to move wholesale
from royal or governmental hands into a thriving art

The Author . Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1093/jhc/fhm004
 STEVEN A. WALTON
market.5 In North America, the existence of arms and
armour collecting cannot be ascribed to any form of
properly military function. In fact, it is only on very
rare occasions that any armour from the early colonial
period still exists, since its utility was already waning
as European colonists arrived.6 Instead, the great col-
lections such as those of the Metropolitan Museum of
Art in New York, the Keinbuch collection in
Philadelphia, the Severence collection in Cleveland and
the Higgins collection in Worcester, Massachusetts,
were primarily built in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century with an eye for the objects aes-
thetic merit alone.7 The second half of the nineteenth
century saw a renaissance of medieval motifs in art,
architecture, literature and even advertising, and the
museum movement joined in that trend. More impor-
tantly, all these armour collections were brought
together by very wealthy individuals who, put simply,
just loved armour. There was, however, another
impetus behind the establishment of arms and armour
collections in North America one which combined
the historicity and beauty of the armour and its func-
tional efciency into a primary raison dtre for the
collections. The establishment of just such a collec-
tion under the guidance of Charles Trick Currelly at
the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto pro-
vides a case-study to explore the meaning of arms and
armour for North Americans.8 Further, the status and
existence of armour in Toronto offer a glimpse of how
public and private collections intersected in the era of
great museum building. In what follows, the history
of arms and armour in Toronto shall serve as the
backdrop for discussing what arms and armour came
to mean in the museum world in the rst half
of the twentieth century.9
The establishment of the armour collections
in Toronto
In the middle of the nineteenth century, Toronto was
still a very provincial town, with railways only just
connecting it to the world beyond the shore of Lake
Ontario. Still, there are faint glimmers of evidence
that armour was of some importance to the British
citizens of Upper Canada as both a teaching tool and a
hereditary status marker. When the Province sought
to begin a system of public education in the s, the
Chief Superintendent of Education for Upper Canada,
Egerton Ryerson, began assembling materials for
of
what would later open as the Toronto Normal School.
Invoices for specimens exist from as far back as ,
but in Ryerson travelled to Europe on a col-
lecting trip to obtain materials that the school would
need for proper education, namely, items to ll a
museum of mineralogy, zoology, agriculture and
manufacture.10 Despite the original mandate, how-
ever, Ryerson became convinced that taste and civil-
ity the very features of the Empire would be better
served in Ontario by examples of the ne arts: most
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of the items he collected were copies of great paint-
ings and statuary obtained at the Parisian Exposition
Universelle. Ryerson did, however, collect other edu-
cationally useful objects, including armour and agri-
cultural and scientic instruments from the French
and Austrian displays at the Exposition.11 Although
Ryerson had hoped his collection would form the core
of a national museum, in the end he had to content
himself with a school for training teachers by incorpo-
rating object lesson study into the education of ele-
mentary school teachers. Ryerson built what was then
termed, the best educational museum in America,
and one which would directly inspire Edward
Sheldons Oswego Movement for object lesson teach-
ing in the United States.12
When the museum opened in St James Square,
Toronto on June , the natural history collection
had not grown at all, but the more than , educa-
tional specimens were displayed with ve rooms
devoted to paintings and statuary, one to scientic
apparatus, and one apparently devoted entirely to
several suits of armour, examples of ancient weapons
and arms.13 We know that Ryerson bought two com-
plete suits, once of bright steel from the time of
Henry VIII, and the other blackened, of the time of
Edward VI. Whether these were authentic sixteenth-
century armours or the more common reproductions
widely available in the mid-nineteenth century is
unclear. It is clear, however, that, the armour played
such a key role in Ryersons educational vision that
when Ontario sent a delegation to the Centennial
Exposition in Philadelphia, he placed the two suits of
armour prominently anking the entrance to the
exhibit, as Class xiv: History and Chronology, no. ,
Men in Armor, Historical Photographs, the Great
Seals, &c (Fig. ).14
Ryerson in effect echoed the comment from
the South Kensington Museum (founded the very
same year as the Normal School) that a collection of
 COLLECTING ARMS AND ARMOUR IN ONTARIO,
Fig. . Ontario Educational Exhibit, Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia, ; from J. George Hodgins, Special Report to the
Honourable the Minister of Education on the Ontario Educational Exhibit, and the Educational Features of the International Exhibition,
at Philadelphia, (Toronto, ), pl. , p. .
European arms and armour is for historical (and what
is of even more importance to the institution to which
it is at present conded) for educational purposes.15
However, as museums increasingly turned toward
natural history in the s and s, the Normal
Schools educational mission languished. By , it
had merged with the Ontario (Toronto) School of
Art; other more scientic collections were moved to
the Normal School building which then became
known as the Ontario Provincial Museum (an institu-
tion whose mandate was entirely unclear), while the
art and history collections were slowly dispersed
to various other secondary schools around the
Province or put into storage. The fate of the armour
is unknown it may have gone to the provincial
art schools for modelling, while the Fort George
Museum in Niagara-on-the-Lake, at least, re-
ceived some antique weapons but clearly much
of it was either lost or disposed of and thereby re-
moved from the public trust.16
Toronto in the nineteenth century may have been
small, but certainly some members of its notable
families had roots that went back into Europe, and
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they were interested in preserving those roots.
Benjamin Homer Dixon () was one such per-
son. Claiming Scots descent, but more relevantly the
successor to a shipping fortune from his Anglo-Flem-
ish family, Dixon was one of the most important
landowners in what would become downtown
Toronto and later was one of the founding partners
of the Dominion Bank of Canada (later Toronto
Dominion and now TD). We know that Dixon had a
large armour collection which was collected between
c. and c., mostly in Continental sales, and
displayed at his Homewood residence on Queen
Street East (Fig. ).
The collection was most probably begun by Benjamin
and his father, Thomas, who came from a mercantile
family in Ostend that was severely damaged by the
Napoleonic wars; as an English citizen in the Low
Countries, he was imprisoned as a Dutch Hostage
and as a foreigner he was not spared, and was sup-
posed as an Englishman to be rich, Benjamin would
later write.17 As one-time magistrate of Flushing,
Thomas travelled in high circles and when he became
partner in the trading rm of Baggen, Parker & Dixon,
of
 STEVEN A. WALTON

Fig. . The Armour Room at

Homewood, Toronto, owned by
Benjamin Homer Dixon, c..
Photo courtesy of Thomas
Homer-Dixon.

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he was sent to Boston in as their sole US agent. Leavitt & Co. Bashford Dean, curator of the Metro-
The family initially lived on India Wharf above the politan Museums collection of arms and armour,
company storehouses, but eventually ascended the noted the sale as one of the more important North
social ladder and moved to Beacon Hill. With wealth American sales of the nineteenth century.20 The sale
came a desire for the trappings of the gentry, and the catalogue described the collection as a valuable cabi-
Homer Dixons were seized by the mid-nineteenth- net of arms and armour consisting of complete suits
century mania for armour collecting as a hallmark of and parts of suits, helmets, morions, etc., shields,
upper-class mercantilism. horse equipments, swords, rapiers, daggers, poign-
Benjamin, born in Amsterdam and educated in ards, long-handled weapons, spears, halberds, maces,
Holland, joined his fathers Boston business in the martels, battle axes, cross bows, guns, pistols, short
s and beneted from his fathers position as blunderbusses, powder asks, spanners, bayonets,
Consul General of the Netherlands in the United and miscellaneous objects of great rarity from the
States, a position he inherited upon his fathers death fteenth to eighteenth centuries.21 In all, he sold ten
in but resigned when he moved to Toronto to full suits or demi-suits of armour, over two dozen hel-
marry in .18 It appears that the impulse to medi- mets, seventy European and central Asian swords and
evalism ran throughout his collecting habits. His rapiers, forty-two daggers, fty-two staff weapons, six
library contained numerous works on the Middle crossbows, eighty rearms (including fty-eight pis-
Ages, and in his art collection was a painting of tols) and numerous other weapons and accessories
Marmion and de Wilton. The now lost painting was totalling lots.22 It is curious that none of the Dixon
accompanied in the catalogue of the exhibition by an collection remained in Toronto, for he moved in the
extract of Sir Walter Scotts epic poem, Marmion: same circles of [Byron] Edmund Walker, chairman of
Well was he armed from head to heel,/ In mail and the competing Canadian Imperial bank, who also
plate of Milan steel/ But his strong helm of mighty shared an appreciation for collecting and was within a
cost,/ Was all with burnished gold embossed (canto decade to become one of the main champions of the
rst, vi).19 ROM and its arms and armour collection. It might be
In , nearing the age of seventy, Benjamin noted, in an episode of lost opportunities, that Dix-
leased out his Homewood residence and headed to ons sister later donated her house, The Grange,
Europe in the following summer, planning to stay for along with its furnishings and artwork (but sadly sans
at least two years. He sent his collection of arms and armour), to the Province as the original Art Gallery of
armour to New York to be auctioned by George A. Ontario.

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 COLLECTING ARMS AND ARMOUR IN ONTARIO,

C. T. Currelly and the origins of the ROM

The collecting of arms and armour in Ontario had to
begin anew after the turn of the century and through
another man, cut from another cloth entirely. Toronto
was yet to grow into the leading city of the country,
but it certainly had such aspirations at this early date.
It was, in fact, one of the earliest cities in North
America to devote a signicant portion of its new
museum eventually the most prominent portion to
arms and armour.23 The impetus behind the collec-

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tion came primarily from one source but also reected
a wider social movement, one which is only now
becoming acknowledged as decidedly important for
the formation of public arms and armour collections
in North America.
The history of arms and armour in Toronto
stems largely from one man, Charles Trick Currelly
(Fig. ), although it fed on and fed into a wider belief
in the propriety, desirability and utility of having such
a collection. Born east of Toronto in , Currelly
was educated at Victoria College, one of the federated
colleges which today make up the University of
Toronto. In , he entered the service of the archae-
ologist, W. M. Flinders Petrie, head of the Egyptian
Exploration Fund (EEF). It was during successive
excavations in Egypt that Currelly began his collect-
ing career, often spending more time acquiring objects
for the EEF and other collectors than on properly
sanctioned EEF expeditions. During this period,
Currelly also met and dug with Sir Arthur Evans at
the palace of Knossos on Crete, thereby connecting
himself to the Whos Who of the archaeological world
at the turn of the century.24 Over the next fourteen
years, Currelly developed a reputation as a semi-
independent collection agent, making purchases
for the EEF and for museums in Cambridge, the
University of Toronto and private collectors whose
acquaintance he had made through his wide network
of inuential backers in Canada, the United States and
Britain. But above all, Currelly longed to create a Toronto
museum of archaeology with himself as its head.
In high school during the early s, Currelly
became a good friend of the son of Victoria Colleges
chancellor, Edmund Walker. As general manager of
Canadas largest bank, Walker became a champion of
a university museum that would serve the Province as
well, and it was he who rst brought Currelly to the
attention of the trustees of the University of Toronto.
Fig. . Charles Trick Currelly, c.; University of Toronto
Archives (A-/()).
The University Act of laid the foundations for
the modern university in Ontario, a joint public/pri-
vate venture, and also incorporated a museum as one
of its provisions. Walker hoped for a museum of the
calibre of those he had haunted in the s and s
in New York City, where he had been posted during
his early years in the banking industry, and conse-
quently he championed not only this museum but also
the Art Gallery of Toronto (later the Art Gallery of
Ontario, or AGO) and the National Gallery of Art in
Ottawa for ne art. Nevertheless, he realized that
Toronto, with a population of just over , by
and with no Carnegies, Rockefellers or Morgans
to endow such a museum, had to aim for a more mod-
est, albeit modern, museum.25 Robert Fulford has
observed that During most of the years of the AGOs
development [which largely coincided with the
ROMs], wealthy Toronto people, with rare excep-
tions, were not deeply interested in buying the sort
of art that makes a museum important. They were
willing to serve on the board, but at the primary task
assigned to them by cultural tradition collecting
pictures that would eventually go onto the gallery

of
 STEVEN A. WALTON
walls they were a dismal failure.26 The same could
be said about material culture in general, and about
arms and armour in particular. So when the chancel-
lor of Victoria College learned that his sons child-
hood friend was now in a mildly inuential position
within the EEF and in a position to acquire antiqui-
ties, Walker immediately initiated contact. The result-
ing relationship was to serve the nascent Toronto
museum well.
Walker, as governmental champion, and Currelly,
as curatorial champion, formed the core of the foun-
dation of the Royal Ontario Museum of Archaeology
which was established on November , with
Currelly as director. This was not to be the only
museum for the Province; however, within a few
months parallel ROMs of Geology, Mineralogy and
Paleontology were also established sharing the same
directorial board and building (but with separate
directors, naturally), and before the doors were even
opened, a museum of Natural History (later to be split
into Biology and Zoology) was added to the mix.27
Walker acted as an intermediary between the museum
(Currelly thought of it as his) and the university pro-
fessors who ran each separate department (who began
to think of the place at theirs) and stored many items,
including armour, in his home until the building was
ready. These ve parallel ROMs (today known col-
lectively as the ROM)28 would struggle for position in
of
Fig. . The original wing of the
ROM, looking south-east, ;
contemporary postcard,
University of Toronto Archives,
accession no. B-.
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funding and ofce and display space in the museum
building for the next thirty years, but Currelly, as
head of the Museum of Archaeology and as overall
head of the ROM would develop his charge into one
of North Americas leading repositories of humanitys
productive capabilities. The new institution was not
to open until March (Fig. ) an unfortunate
time for the launch of a new museum in the British
Empire but the ROM weathered the Great War
with only slightly reduced attendance, as Toronto
became a local Mecca for soldiers on leave.
Founding the ROMs armour collections
Currellys arms and armour collecting did not begin
with the foundation and opening of the museum, for
it is clear that from his earliest adult years he was fas-
cinated with swords, helmets and medieval warfare.
Graduating from Victoria College in , Currelly
headed for France to become a clergyman, having
already abandoned the entomology and botany he
had listed in his graduating yearbook as a potential
career.29 His chance meeting with Flinders Petrie in
the British Museum that led to his job with the EEF
enabled Currelly to scour the markets of the Levant
for antiquities. Although his turn-of-the-century col-
lecting methods might be frowned upon today, Cur-
rellys networking with Petrie, other private collectors
 COLLECTING ARMS AND ARMOUR IN ONTARIO,
in England and Toronto, Victoria College and other
museums served him well in his later years as curator
of the ROM.
Egyptology is quite a distance from hoplology (the
study of arms from Greek
o, oplon weapon),
but it is clear that in parallel with his collecting duties
in ancient materials, Currelly used his time in Europe
and the Middle East to become intimately familiar
with the arms and armour trade. In , he was
offered the post of Curator of Oriental Archaeology at
the University of Toronto. The next year James
Mavor, professor of political economy at Toronto,
received a letter from William Ridgeway in Cam-
bridge recommending Currellys abilities in collecting
and organizing antiquities. Ridgeway noted that
Currelly had a ne knowledge of material remains of
all sorts and times and that although he was unfor-
tunately not a Greek scholar, he has supplied this
deciency in a marvellous way by his ne power
of observation, and his real artistic feeling and
power.30 Petrie, he continued, quite agreed with me
[Ridgeway] that Currelly would be just the man to
give Archaeology a really vigorous start in Canada
through, in particular, his noticing of afnities of
a series of objects.31 Quite outside the recommenda-
tion of Currelly as a Curator of Oriental Archaeology,
and apparently unsolicited, Ridgeway also added that
Currelly had a capital knowledge of very many sides
of medieval archaeology, especially in armour. Again,
in a postscript, he felt it important to add that Currelly
has been most useful to us for the Fitzgibbon Museum
in making purchases for us in Egypt, both of Egyptian
objects and medieval armour.32 Very early on, it
would seem, Currelly was drawn to collecting arms
and armour, even if he did not have a museum of his
own in which to display it.
The history of the arms and armour collection of
the ROM, however, is not that clear cut. We do
know that it initially occupied half the north hall of
the original museum and sparked interest from the
papers right away: the exhibit of armour and imple-
ments of war is probably the collection of greatest
public interest, as it is also one of the most extensive
in the museum. Groups of swords, spears, battle-
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axes and daggers of every form and period are to be
seen, together with suits of armour of every variety33
(Fig. ). At the gala opening of the museum in ,
the Duke of Connaught introduced the crowd to the
arms and armour gallery: The central hall of the
ground oor contains the Sir Henry Pellatt collec-
tion of arms and armour, which gives a good idea of
the offensive and defensive arms and armour, which
has occupied the attention of the men of Europe for
several centuries.34
The collection was named for one of the leading
businessmen of Toronto, Sir Henry Pellatt who
founded the Toronto Electric Light Company in
and was the rst person to build a hydroelectric gen-
erating station on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls,
eventually becoming the major stockholder in the
Ontario Hydroelectric Power Company. He had been
enamoured of the Middle Ages for years, and at the
same time as the ROM rose from its foundations, Pellatt
was building a grand, $. million, ninety-eight-room
castle named Casa Loma on the bluff overlooking
Toronto, from which he could see the ROM rising
less than a kilometre away. Although there was a gen-
eral belief that Pellatt wanted Casa Loma to become a
Fig. . The only known image
of the original ROM armour
display in ; Toronto Star,
February , p. . Photo
courtesy of the Metropolitan
Toronto Reference Library
Special Collections.
of
 STEVEN A. WALTON

military museum after his death, and while Pellatt
spent a great deal of energy promoting and funding
the Queens Own Ries in Canada Currelly recalled
later that Pellatt had dreamed of a wonderful library
of all military subjects that would be Casa Loma after
his death there is little evidence that he ever amassed
a signicant arms and armour collection. Casa Loma
was completed in , but by , Pellatt was bank- ceeded lately in rounding up some other matters in such
rupt and had to sell the castle and most of its furnish-
ings two years later; no arms or armour were in the
Sir Henry Pellatt, I will begin to get a few pieces
together, but there has been very little armour indeed
in the market. [list of items follows] If not suitable for
the museum, they should attract Sir Henry Pellatt.40
In , Currelly had written to Fenton:
I have good news for you that I have every hope of being
able to send you a cheque during this month. I have suc-
a way that even if I can get no money out of Sir Henry
Pellatt, I shall be able to send it from another account
I bought the things for our patron [Pellatt] personally, with

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collections of the grand house at its liquidation.35 The
ROM has no record of accessions directly from Pellatt
or any arms and armour connection to him at all,
although in a visit, Sir James Mann, the Master
of the Armouries at the Tower of London, made note
of Pellatts downfall and described two full suits said
to have been given by Pellatt to the ROM.36 Currelly
noted in his memoirs only that Pellatt had given rst
money to obtain a quantity of arms and armour
that would make it possible to teach, especially the
teachers, and to provide illustrators of books with
materials from which they could draw quickly.37
In his correspondence, however, Currelly was more
candid about what apparently happened. Writing to
William Fenton, a dealer in London through whom
Currelly bought the majority of the ROMs armour,
he stated in that, I am glad to say that Sir Henry
Pellatt, who is behind the armour collection, and who
got into nancial difculties, has been coming back
with a vengeance lately, and I expect that if things go
well with him, he will push the armour rather more
vigorously than he did before. I want to prepare for
this by having some tempting offers to put before
him. Two years later, however, Currelly was still
hopeful that Pellatt, although he had just escaped
bankruptcy, would be generous to the ROM.38 It is
clear that Currelly hoped that Pellatt would be a
major, if not the major benefactor from at least
when Fenton was actively on the lookout for items for
Currellys museum and for Pellats personal collection
which never materialized (Fenton was known to be a
proactive dealer for his clients).39 Fenton sent on
approval numerous staff weapons, pistols and har-
nesses (and shortly thereafter found a particular
wheel-lock pistol that he felt would probably make a
suitable trophy for Pellatt), although it seems clear
that Fenton considered Pellatts personal collection as
receiving the dregs of those items offered to the ROM:
Fenton wrote that With regard to the collection for
the view that they would be used in his house till his death,
and then come to us. The things have never gone to his
house, so weve had the use of them; but I have not been
able to get one cent out of him for the last ve years, and
I have no other money that I could use to pay that debt
until yesterday.41
Currelly, then, always assumed that Pellatt would one
day come through with substantial donations and for
his initial gift(s) had the main armour gallery named
after him, but Pellatt, whether for personal reasons
or because of obvious nancial hardships, was never
willing or able to make good that vision; he died in
, penniless.
The ROM collection instead came initially
through Currellys perseverance, personal collecting
and sometimes egregious acquisition strategies. In
, Currelly arrived back in Toronto from a lengthy
collecting trip with hundreds of artefacts, including
arms and armour. Since the ROM did not yet exist,
the University received the objects and that autumn
mounted an exhibition of the treasures in the great
hall of Wycliffe College (another of the federated
colleges). The Toronto papers took notice of these
extreme rarities and chief among the objects displayed
stood the weaponry:
The history of warfare is illustrated by a series of weapons
and armor, occupying half of the south side of the hall. A ne
suit of Turkish chain mail is one of the features of this series,
and has a verse of the Koran stamped on every link. That
this made it bullet-proof is shown by a brass bullet which
struck the armor, and, being hot, welded itself to the mail.
This is said to be the nest suit of the kind in the world.42
Despite the naivet of early-twentieth-century report-
ers when it comes to questions of armour, and in par-
ticular non-western armour, its predominance clearly
impressed visitors to the exhibition. And even if some
viewers might be naturally drawn to the military
displays, Currelly clearly made it a priority in the dis-
play of artefacts. One article in particular, gave some

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 COLLECTING ARMS AND ARMOUR IN ONTARIO,
insight into his collecting rationale. In another Wycliffe
exhibition four years later, Currelly was interviewed
by a reporter at the exhibitions opening. After
bemoaning the J. P. Morgans and William Randolph
Hearsts of the world for driving up antiquities prices
simply for the sake of collecting, Currelly gave the
reporter a tour of the exhibition:
Lets take a look around, suggests Prof. Currelly, after his
preliminary chat. Come into this room and have a look
at the armor and weapons.
There was armour enough in that room to equip any church
choir or other warring body in the city of Toronto. And the
weapons as Prof. Currelly called them! Some of those
ancients had fearful grudges against their fellowmen [sic],
to evolve weapons like these. Prof. Currelly brought
back with him a large proportion of these weapons on the
occasion of his last trip.
Puzzled his students
I nd that not one fourth year student at the University
knows the difference between a rapier and a sword, said
Prof. Currelly, in a most pessimistic tone.
Well, well, wailed the News Man, in a like tone of hope-
lessness. The latter couldnt have told the difference even
if the professor had threatened to run him through with
every sword and rapier in the establishment.
Museums assist children
Theres a reason behind every little point of development
in armor and weapons, explained the professor, and a
knowledge of these reasons aids in the understanding
of history I hope the time will come when, not only will
the students of Ontario be taught history in the museum,
but when the children of Toronto schools will be brought
up here for their history lessons.
What practical good?
People often come up here and ask: Whats the practical
good of all this stuff? Well, most men take an intellectual
interest in the relics of antiquity, and that is something to
be reckoned with in a Province that looks forward to having
an educated people.
Again, without these things the literary man, the artist, the
illustrator, is hopelessly at sea when he comes to do his
work. A country which cannot show him these things
cannot expect to excel in literature or art.
I guess weve spent enough time in this department. Come
over and see all the other things that we have over in the
other part of the building.43
Allowing for a modicum of yellow tinge to the jour-
nalism of the day, it is clear that Currelly was most
interested in showing and talking about the arms and
of
armour. Clearly passionate on the subject, he linked
weaponry to literature and art and forcibly argued
that antiquities (and weapons in particular) were not
only desirable for a civilized society but also necessary
for one. One can almost hear the implied sigh when he
feels the reporters interest wane and they have to
move on to the other exhibits.
Indeed, throughout his career as director of the
ROM, Currelly apparently took every opportunity
to turn the subject of conversation to weaponry or
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defensive arms: at a lecture on The History of
Money to the Insurance Institute of Toronto in
, he noted that the holes in Chinese coins
derived from miniaturized sword guards used as
currency and that in Nigeria spears were legal
tender;44 his lecture on Origins of Painting and
Sculpture to the Womens Art Association in
meandered to prehistoric weapons which illustrated
creative art on the part of the primitive lovers of
art;45 doubtless his numerous other lectures to the
likes of the Kiwanis Club, the Progress Club and the
Canadian Business and Professional Womens Club
included relevant and not-so-relevant mentions of
arms and armour.
Even in his ofcial University capacity (in ,
Currelly was appointed Professor of the History of
Industrial Art), he began giving a series of public
lectures on world history and the history of art which
also strayed to the topic of arms and armour. At rst,
he lectured only to third- and fourth-year under-
graduates,46 but soon thereafter his lecturing ability
and topics forced him to expand the lectures to all
students at the University, and later, even to the
public at large. According to the Toronto Star, at
his opening lecture the hall was packed to suffoca-
tion and hundreds were turned away from hearing
him speak on what they dubbed Art for your Stom-
achs sake, that is, useful art.47 His introductory lec-
ture to the course in began with his rationale
for the beauty of manufactured objects, and of
course, the sine qua non of these objects was weap-
ons: Weapons, because of their extreme usefulness
in rendering ones enemies extinct, are the articles
most closely associated with art.48 Thus, the Star
continued, a cup from which men could drink, a
sword with which men could defend themselves,
these were in the early history of art if not today
supreme objets dart. The course proper began the
next week with primitive art, where he spoke of cave
 STEVEN A. WALTON

paintings and carved gurines, but even here, in the
artistry of [primitive] spears and shields the savage
shows his instinctive sense of proportions, the rea-
son for which has not yet been found.49 Currellys
love of utility clearly dened the lecture series as a
whole, and in particular, his love of arms and armour
dominated, for as he noted in the very last lecture, it
took Europe , years to learn to put the handle in
the axe, instead of the axe on the handle a mantra
of efciency in design he liked to repeat on many
and many other museums in the hands of the Allies.
As late as , Currelly reported to his buyer in
London that there seems to be a slight lull in the
armour enthusiasm, probably as a backwash of the
war-weariness of the world.54 In his memoirs, Cur-
relly seems more interested in remembering fondly
the deals he secured on various pieces rather than the
reasons why he acquired them. Nevertheless, his out-
lay in many years was heavily biased towards arms
and armour. In , for example, he spent nearly

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occasions.50
In his capacity as the only professor of industrial
art, in Currelly took over the existing pro- armour.55
gramme in World History which included a third-
year lecture course on the progress of humanity51 and
a fourth-year lecture course on classical sculpture and
architecture. Currelly maintained the fourth-year
course, but allowed the third-year course to languish
for two years when it was replaced with two courses in
the academic year: A course on the History of then tried to nd someone to pay for them.56 In ,
Art and A course on the Development of the
Mechanical Industries. In addition, for two years,
Currelly offered a course on the History of Scientic
Thought which was described in the university
calendars as a course on the Progress of Ideas with
special reference to the evolution of science, scientic
discoveries, and the relation of science to problems of
life and thought.52 After , further courses were making the Scottish weapons clear to the people I was
steadily added (although taught by new members of
the faculty), turning the department into a recogniza-
bly modern Art and Archaeology department, the
name adopted in . Currelly, however, continued shield, with most terric hunting.
to teach those rst two courses for the next fteen
years as the ROM grew and expanded, becoming a
truly world-class museum. These courses suggest that
Currelly taught what today would fall under the rubric
of material culture tied to the history of science and
technology, with a lesser emphasis on the history of
art; ROM-sponsored lectures like one on the life and
works of James Watt carry the same implications.53
Building the ROM collections
At the time he began teaching, Currelly redoubled
his efforts to increase the collections, now that his
access to European dealers was reopened after the
armistice. In addition, many of the collections of the
now-defeated German Reich became available for
decidedly reasonable prices, to the benet of the ROM
, on auction-house purchases in New York and
Europe of which some , went for arms and
His method of paying for pieces is more reminis-
cent of melodrama than of modern curatorial prac-
tice. He was constantly short of funds and having
to explain to the University why he had exceeded
his annual acquisitions budget. On more than one
occasion, Currelly bought pieces he desired and
he wrote the secretary of the St Andrews Society of
Toronto, saying:
I am very pleased that [your] Society are [sic] taking
steps towards the presentation of the Scottish weapons
mentioned by Sir Walter Scott. As our attendance is now
approaching a thousand a day and regular classes are held
several times every day, there is a wonderful opportunity of
over twenty years nding a claymore, of which I believe
only nineteen are known. The broadsword, sometimes
called the claymore, is not difcult to get. The shields are
terribly hard to get; I was about fteen years getting my rst
He later wrote Sir John Aird of the Canadian Bank of
Commerce and directly asked for a gift of $, to
cover the cost of items he had already bought and that
they would then be called gifts of the St Andrews
Society, of which Aird was president.57 This acquisi-
tions methodology often left Currelly in a position
where his payments lagged years behind his pur-
chases. In fact, it took ten years to clear the debt of his
purchases of from Fenton & Sons alone, and
all the while he continued to buy at prodigious rates.
He made his position quite clear to Fenton: I sin-
cerely trust that we may be able to get on with the
question of arms and armour, and that I may yet suc-
ceed in getting Sir Henry [Pellatt] to come round
and continue it; but if he doesnt, we now have some
other monies that could be used.58

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 COLLECTING ARMS AND ARMOUR IN ONTARIO,
Since the ROMs curatorial staff was largely com-
posed of cross-appointed professors of the Univer-
sity of Toronto, Currelly had to report to the
president of the University each year. It is in these
reports, published as part of the University of
Torontos Presidents Report, that we can watch cer-
tain major pieces of armour entering the collections,
but more importantly, we can at times see Currellys
enthusiasm for the collection peek through the cracks
of the otherwise business-like manner of the report.
No acquisition in arms and armour was too small to
mention, and one gets the sense that many other
perhaps more important objects are set on equal
footing with the weapons acquired in any given year.
One year he noted three rare swords had been added
to the prehistoric section, a helmet and greaves to the
classics section, an important series of Saxon
weapons excavated in Sussex mentioned in its
own paragraph, and in the middle of this particular
report Currelly detailed that the arms and armour
collection has been increased by ve suits of armour,
sixteen pieces of armour, such as helmets and shields,
fty-nine weapons (swords, crossbows, halberds),
six pieces of horse trappings, a saddle, and a number
of less important pieces.59 This level of detail
hardly appears for any other department. In other
years, even though the acquisitions budget might
have been slim, his armour galleries rarely suffered.
During the Depression, he reported that, Owing to
decrease in income, acquisitions by purchase were
few in number. Very important among them were
twenty-one weapons, mostly of the th century and
from well-known collections; each piece was care-
fully chosen to ll a serious gap in the arms and
armour collection.60
Throughout the s, the ROM became well- By far the greatest advance of the year has been in the
enough established in its own right to receive more
and more donations, although Currellys continued
personal contact with the museum world and with
collectors in Europe may claim more credit for the
phenomenal growth at the time. He conded in his
European buyer that he was most anxious to push the
collection of armour because he realized early on that
there will probably be only the three collections in
America.61 Obviously, Currelly meant the ROM to
be one of those three. In , he went once again on swords [inscribed by the Arabs], a set of ne swords
a buying trip to Europe, this time returning with a
very valuable selection of Anglo-Saxon objects.
Admitting to a reporter that on the trip he had
of
acquired some things for which he had been looking
for years, the items that he chose to highlight were
arms from a Anglo-Saxon grave from Alfriston, Sus-
sex. Lord [Viscount] Gage has presented us with a
complete section of his Anglo-Saxon collection, said
Currelly. On his estate, a Saxon cemetery has been
found which is so marvellously preserved that in their
graves the warriors are lying with their swords and
axes, their short wide-bladed knife from which they
got their name, their brooches, their shields and so
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forth, all extremely well-preserved.62 Recalling the
issues of race and ethnicity that swirled about the
English-speaking world in the early twentieth century
racial stock was a phrase heard all too frequently for
modern ears to have a full selection of Anglo-Saxon
objects was undoubtedly a coup for the museum and
the people of the British Empire in Toronto.
In subsequent years, Currellys reports are full of
praise for the weapons and armour which he brought
into the museum. The real expansion in the collection
came in , when Currelly informed the Board
that As regards accessions this year has been
singularly fortunate. He rst noted that a number
of interesting English bronze weapons and a ne
Hungarian short sword were added [along with]
one Greek and two Etruscan bronze helmets. He then
added that the ROM also acquired an article of
the utmost importance a coat of Roman scale
armour commonly worn by centurions; but though
it is extremely well known from the monuments, ours
is as far as I know the only example which has sur-
vived.63 He lled nearly half his report for the year
with a report of the arms and armour department
itself, worth quoting at length:
department of arms and armour, the additions being nearly
equal to the whole of the earlier collection. We have
acquired three magnicent suits dating about , ,
and , and a boys suit of about ; a ne Spanish
Gothic breastplate, a James I pot helm, a simple Gothic
steel hat, one of the famous spider helmets, a French mor-
tuary helm, two early Turkish helmets, a manteau darmes
formerly in the possession of Prince Radzivil, and two
extremely ne chain shirts of types not previously in the
museum. Many remarkable additions have been made to
our collection of swords [including] four early Gothic
formerly in the possession of the Electors of Saxony, and
several early maces, war hammers and pistols. The conver-
sion of the imperial armoury of Russia into an armour
museum gave us the chance to get some pieces that had
 STEVEN A. WALTON
belonged to the emperors of Russia. Outstanding is a
revolving-chamber intlock gun with very gorgeous iron
and gold work [which] very nearly reached the complete
requirements of the revolver Other smaller pieces added
to the collection are a number of testers for nding the
strength of powder, as supplied to the artillery in the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries, a Viking sword found in
England, some ne Scottish weapons, an extremely rare
Highland targe, a sword such as used by the admirals of the
British eet that met the Armada and two English guns
dated in the year of the Armada.64
He continues to detail mail, Landsknecht swords, staff
weapons, crossbow bolts and horse furniture obtained
in that year, which help[ed] round out the picture of
the marvellous workmanship of the great armourers
craft that so engrossed the attention of men for many
centuries.65 The following year he had nearly as long
a section on the arms and armour department, detail-
ing six new suits of armour as well as numerous swords
and hafted weapons. Other departments simply had
their acquisitions listed.
As the Depression deepened, Currellys acquisition
budget shrank but so too did the prices of antiqui-
ties66 and in the autumn of he wrote to the
Board of Trustees of the University (for at that
time the ROM was still part of the University), and
although he could not single out acquisitions in the
department of arms and armour, he none the less
addressed them immediately: The objects purchased
during the year were few in number but important.
Outstanding were a Scottish claymore of the early
sixteenth century, an early fteenth-century base-
lard, a collection of Peruvian textiles, [and] a Chinese
helmet dated B.C.67 In addition, he had returned
from Europe the previous year laden with both fur-
niture and armour as his major purchases, the latter
largely from the sale of the collection of the late
Garter King-at-Arms, Sir Henry Farnham Burke, at
Christies on May .68 And this despite his
pessimism about the lack of armour on the market
and that that was being snapped up by wealthier
purchasers. He wrote to his personal assistant while
in Europe, saying:
I have spent all day on the Burke Sale. I expect that it will be
a terrible op, unless heavy reserve bids are put on. She [?]
has angered everyone. A great deal of the stuff is also in ter-
rible condition rusted through. Foreign buyers have gone
home before the sale . Nearly everything [i.e. the budget]
has gone on Armour but some few others good things
are getting underway.
Ultimately though, Currelly came home with an impor-
tant sixteenth-century Huguenot suit of armour
captured by the Earl of Pembroke at the Battle of
San Quentin () and a Knights Hospitaller helm
from Rhodes.69
At the same time, the ROMs buildings were
undergoing major renovations and an expansion, as
they had been seriously overstuffed for some years.
Despite a major rearrangement and extension of the
armour galleries in , Currelly even went out of
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his way to keep the old galleries designedly in some-
what of a muddle as it made the place look more con-
gested, in the hopes that this congestion might
bring about talk that would eventually bring about a
new building.70 At the ROMs grand reopening in
, the curators could rejoice at the new extension
to the building that more than tripled display area.
The new building was in the shape of an H, with the
original museum forming the western upright. The
crossbar, however, was a magnicent two-storey,
barrel-vaulted gallery devoted entirely to arms and
armour. The armour gallery greeted the visitors as
they entered from the new entrance rotunda (at the
eastern juncture of the H), and in that ft
( m) nave-like space Currelly nally had
the space to display his ever-increasing collection
of armour.71
In the opening year, he reported to the President
of the University that in the prehistoric eld, a dream
of thirty years has come true and a Bronze Age shield
has been received, the only one in America as far as
we know.72 By the end of the s, weapons and
armour came in at prodigious rates, being
a particularly good year with the ROM acquiring
several objects never dreamed of as possible pos-
sessions of this province, including a Luristan
inscribed bronze sword of Marduk-shpik-zri, King
of Babylon about BC. They also acquired ne
Turkish helmets and the Tower of London presented
the ROM with thirty-two pieces of armour.73
The s also witnessed controversy over the
ROMs purchase of a set of Viking weapons found
near Beardmore, Ontario, a small logging community
in north-western part of the Province, just north of
Lake Superior.74 At this time, Eurocentric beliefs that
the Vikings entering the heart of North America by
way of Hudsons Bay and its tributaries (particularly
to Minnesota, which, not incidentally, had drawn vast
numbers of Scandinavian settlers around the turn of
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 COLLECTING ARMS AND ARMOUR IN ONTARIO,

the century) had become something of a standard
myth which many sought to prove.75 These Viking
weapons a sword, axe and shield boss seemed to
conrm that sometime around the year , Vikings
had indeed travelled in northern Ontario. The ROM
purchased the artefacts in and proudly displayed
them in the armour gallery for many years. Although
the weapons are authentic Viking artefacts, current
opinion holds that they were brought to Ontario by
Scandinavian settlers in the early twentieth century,
America was Londons South Kensington Museum
(today the Victoria and Albert Museum) which
housed examples of the ne art of industry for the
edication and education of the English.76
More relevant to the present analysis, over ,
pieces of armour came to the South Kensington
Museum from the important ur-collection of Sir
Samuel Rush Meyrick to form an important element
of the the Science and Art department.77 The collec-
tion was devised not simply for its aesthetic merit, but

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not the late tenth century. Nevertheless, for Currelly,
such a nd just at the time the ROM was expanding
doubtless showed that it was weaponry that marked
humanitys passage through the ages.
By the time World War II erupted, the ROM was
just a quarter of a century old. Charles Trick Currelly
had overseen its formation and growth, successfully
blunting the advances of departments other than
Archaeology so that while oor space might be roughly
equitably assigned (although there were always squab-
bles about that), it was to the visitors rst impression,
truly the house that Currelly built. Front and centre
in that house was his collection of arms and armour
which by had grown nearly to its maximum
extent. After the war the ROMs collection of arms and
armour was arguably the third-best public collection
in North America; Currelly entered semi-retirement,
however, and little entered the collections of arms
and armour after that point, except for substantial
collection of pistols. By and large, the ROMs collec-
tion of medieval and Renaissance armour stands as a
tribute to the passion and drive of C.T. Currelly.
Arms and armour as industrial art
The term industrial art has, by and large, fallen into
disuse if not disgrace in museum circles. At the turn of
the millennium, industrial is equated with factories,
pollution and large-scale publicly-unfriendly under-
takings. But to the Victorian mind, industry was the
means by which mankind had progressed from cave-
dwellers (and apes, if you believed that upstart Darwin)
to iron-wielding creators of civilization, and led nally
to empire-building societies civilizing the whole
world. As European prosperity burgeoned in the
mid-nineteenth century, and the great industrial exhi-
bitions were organized, museums were founded to
house the products of human industry. Of these,
the one with the most profound effect in North
rather for didactic purposes. In that vein, the armour
was to be organized chronologically, for without such
organization it would mingle in such a manner as to
bewilder the visitor and leave no useful impression on
his mind as to the gradation of form, or the progress
of art and manufacture.78 Other museums in the
English-speaking world rapidly sought to imitate the
South Kensington Museums success; the ROM was
no exception, albeit a late addition.
For those not resident in London, a raft of books
appeared in the Victorian period on the industrial arts
of various cultures, highlighting their pottery, tex-
tiles, costume, wood- and metal-working and espe-
cially their weaponry.79 General books on the industrial
arts, too, considered arms and armour one of the main
subdivisions of the eld, along with gold and silver
work, enamels, furniture, glass, textiles and pottery.80
Industrial art would become a subject in its own
right just before World War II, although echoes of
the idea that workers in commercial industries ought
to know about correct applied ornament may be
found throughout the South Kensington school of art
education from onwards.81 Some museums in
America, notably the Boston Museum of Fine Art and
the Philadelphia Museum of Art consciously attempted
to follow the South Kensington example (and even the
Metropolitan held a brief irtation with the model),
at once appealing to the spirit of democracy and
anti-elitism that America has always espoused.82
Just after the Great War, Currelly tried to make a
formal connection with the South Kensington
Museum. He wrote to Sir Cecil Smith, proposing the
joining up of the British Industrial Museums into a
kind of federation with you as the mother house.
Currelly added that there is throughout Western
Canada [i.e. west of Quebec] a very strong feeling
about the absolute necessity for the development
of your type of Museum but there is an equal help-
lessness as to how to set about it. Nor was the idea

of
 STEVEN A. WALTON

apparently unique to Currelly or to Toronto, for he at
least claimed that he had recently spoken to the Mani-
toba government who seemed very enthusiastic
about an opportunity of putting themselves under the
wing of the South Kensington.83
As the ROMs original building began to rise in
Queens Park in , a reporter in the Toronto Globe
characterized it as a boon to the public for they will
be surprised to nd in it a unique collection of articles
illustrative of the development of all the mechanical
gave in the s [and] stating that Machinery, tools
of all sort [are] closely associated with art.87
One distinction began to be made in the nineteenth
century, one which has remained an active focus for
debate in diverse areas such as the industrial arts,
architecture, even engineering: the tacit understand-
ing that industrial art connoted human products
which were not ne art. Art critics have spilled rivers
of ink debating the line between ne and applied
art, and Currelly certainly created a few rivulets of

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arts from the earliest times.84 Currelly, only recently
appointed the director, knew how to work the media,
and gave interviews to promote the nascent ROM as
more than simply a warehouse of artefacts. That may
have been its form, but its function was to be much
more than that. His characterization of the ROM,
then, as a museum gathered together with a denite
scientic aim, i.e. to show the development of handi-
craft in the world [and] a text book of the develop-
ment of civilisation on its mechanical side was to him
a selling point not surprising given its Victorian
antecedents and he fed such rhetoric to the report-
ers.85 For him, the mechanical arts were the key to
humanitys progress through the ages. The lowly pots
allowed us to cook, the mediocre furniture raised our
standard of living and the pinnacle of furniture and
armaments exemplied all that was impressive about
our functional artistic abilities. As one reviewer put
it in , the art of design while made to serve or pencil-box to the most expensive picture-frame or
useful industrial purposes through mechanical
means, is often as truly ne as much painting and
sculpture, and represents just as surely, just as vividly
as they do, the minds and hearts of great nations
ancient and modern, and of great periods, like the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance.86
This attitude was in fact a response to rising
industrialization in the negative sense of the term
as more and more consumer items became mass pro-
duced social conditions deteriorated as factory work
increased and itself degraded. It is no coincidence that
at the same time academics and collectors became
interested in simpler industrial arts, reformers also
sought a return to more wholesome work for the indi-
vidual. Those reformers William Morris and John
Ruskin principal among them were to inspire the
Arts and Crafts Movement. While Currelly would not
become a whole-hearted devotee to the Arts and
Crafts Movement, he would quote Ruskins dictum
that nal beauty is utility in the series of lectures he
his own. The argument, as far as Currelly could see,
was that well-designed objects from the past could
and indeed should become models for artisans in
the present.88 In his vision, museums of industrial
art, which he thought could be traced directly to
Napoleon, had for at least a century exerted consider-
able and direct inuence on commercial industries.
Ontario, he felt, should not miss out on this positive
interaction by ignoring its museum. The problem was
that the public believed that the patient collector was
very far removed from those great industries; the
ROM would be the link to bring those separate
spheres together and be the stimulator of thought of
new lines in industry.89
The Victorians heaped aesthetic ornament upon
objects which were by this time mass produced: lavish
mouldings, colours and textures could be found on
most manufactured goods, from a lowly plant-stand
credenza. By the late s, industrial art had become
a concept associated with machine-age aesthetics and
art deco modernism and was more commonly referred
to as Industrial Design: new materials, streamlined
forms and solid colours combined with copious
chrome. By , one writer would claim that the
attempts of the previous hundred years were to
impose upon the products of machinery aesthetic val-
ues which are not only irrelevant, but generally costly
and harmful to efciency.90 Currelly argued through-
out his career as the director of the ROM for a middle
way, somewhere between the idea of applied orna-
ment and the idea of functional streamlining.91 Domi-
nating Currellys exemplars were arms and armour.
Most weapons are works of art, Currelly once told
the Womens Auxiliary Association, because a great
deal of thought and skill is put into their making,
and most pictures are not works of art because little
thought and comparatively little skill are put into
them.92 In , he increased his rhetoric of the

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 COLLECTING ARMS AND ARMOUR IN ONTARIO,

museum as the place for artisans to derive their inspi-
ration, and told the story of a dress designer who came
to the ROM in search of ideas. The conformation
and colouring of an old Greek vase struck her and
she saw the lines made into a dress. She went into her
designing room, lled with re, and produced a pat-
tern which swept the market from one coast to
another. He continued: In another instance, a suit of
old armour caught her fancy, and she built a dress
in its lines that was one of the best sellers.93 While
fashion and attitudes towards its citizens. George
Brown Goode, curator of the US National Museum at
the Smithsonian Institution argued as early as
that museums should not consist of mere assemblages
of curiosities, but rather should serve professional
research agendas as well as providing vehicles for
public enlightenment not mere entertainment as
he (mistakenly) assessed the goals of such places as
Peales Museum in Philadelphia and his view spread
throughout North America in the later decades of the

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we might reasonably accept the story of a Grecian century.95 There were however, other, more tangible
fashion sweeping from coast to coast, it seems inuences on Toronto and Currelly. In , Oscar
unlikely that a breastplate-inspired design would do Wilde paid a visit to Toronto on his North American
the same. Nevertheless, it is indeed likely that tour and, while not converting the masses to the Aes-
Currelly could believe the latter to be possible. thetic movement of which he had become the harbin-
By the time the Second World War had begun, ger, he none the less (re)planted the seeds of the idea
although the Arts and Crafts Movement had largely of a teaching museum that would inspire craftsmen to
faded and modernism lurked under wartime short- better productions in his lecture on The Decorative
ages and rationing, Currelly none the less held on to Art: you must attach to each [art and design] school
the idea of the ROM and its collections as a partner a museum I do not mean the dreadful modern
of and inspiration for industry. In , Currelly museum where you nd a stuffed and very dusty
reported to the President of the University that giraffe face to face with a case or two of fossils but
the Armour Gallery was used during May for another where the workman can see clay, marble, wood, or
special exhibition, Design in Industry, planned glass specimens of the best decorative art to be found
and executed by the Canadian Handicrafts Guild in Europe and Asia so that he may come to know what
(Ontario). The Museum of Archaeology loaned is simple and true and beautiful.96 Although Currelly
material for this exhibition, as did other museums, may not have attended Wildes lecture, Wilde was
and the museum pieces were shown in conjunction fted by the young Henry Pellatt, who seems to have
with modern material to illustrate design and work- been quite taken with his Aesthetic ideals. More
manship.94 For a decade, this model for the interface than that, with the closing of the Normal School
of artefacts and contemporary design held sway: in museum in , the s saw a growing undercur-
the summer of over , visitors attended an rent of a desire for a museum in Toronto among the
exhibition similar to that of and six years later citys lite.
the ROM staged another popular exhibition, Indus- More interesting, from a prosopographical point of
trial Design B.C.A.D. . On one hand, the view, would be to connect Currellys outlook on the
ROM seemed to be following the lead of the design- products of humanity to one of his mentors. The most
minded Museum of Modern Art (opened ), but obvious connection would be to his immediate guide,
still working from the traditional Currellian idea of Flinders Petrie. Petries publication list is long, for as
ancient and modern juxtapositions as the goal. head of the EEF he penned their major reports for
To understand the origins of Currellys drive in over three decades. But among most of his works, we
developing a museum of industrial art centring on nd an apparent unease at making connections
arms and armour, we could simply fall back on an beyond the archaeological remains.97 Petrie strikes
explanation of late nineteenth-century Zeitgeist, when his modern reader as a classic antiquarian: interested
Currelly came of age as a mature student of historical in cataloguing and recording the objects found at his
artefacts. After all, the Normal School in Toronto had archaeological digs, but less willing to venture at
opened a museum in the very same year as the South their wider signicance, and clearly unwilling to argue
Kensington Museum for the express purpose of that they would be benecial to modern design indus-
teaching from objects. Toronto, as a good British tries. His closing thought in his book on Egyptian
colonial city was following the mother country in tools and weapons was that it was premature to make

of
 STEVEN A. WALTON

wider generalizations about people from objects, for
there was not enough information at that time (in
).98 But then in the same year, he opined that the
history of tools [including weapons] has yet to be
studied by a far more complete collection of speci-
mens exactly dated from scientic excavations. It will
certainly be, in the future, an important aid in trac-
ing the growth and decay of civilizations. In that same
article he does correlate technologies to climates,
social systems and other evolutionary pressures.99
Unlike Flinders Petrie or Pitt Rivers, Currelly was
only too willing to forge the connection between tech-
nological development and human progress. In his
autobiography, he wrote that when he saw the arms
display at the War Museum in Munich arranged in
evolutionary order, the rst instance of this [he] had
seen in an archaeological museum, it appealed to
[him] greatly.103 He would later fall squarely into the
camp of technological determinism that became all
the rage between the wars and the form of determin-

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In effect, in Petrie, we see a transitional archaeolo-
gist, somewhere between the Victorian and earlier
pot-hunters, looking toward systematic excavations,
but one for whom archaeological remains only illu-
minate the past. Ultimately, in those places where he
did venture broader generalizations, the meaning
of the artefacts he spent his life recovering was not
to illuminate design principles, but rather to shed
light on what he considered the higher principles of
human development, namely, religion and philoso-
phy.100 Petrie followed in the august steps of Augustus
Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers, whose place in the
archaeological hall of fame is assured and whose
eponymous museum in Oxford still bears testament
to his indefatigable collecting abilities. Pitt Rivers
was bitten by the evolution bug shortly after Darwin
published The Origin of Species in , but applied
the logic of evolutionary theory to objects rather
than organisms. He most famously coined the term
typology and investigated the evolution of military
ries; the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford has a won-
derful collection and display of arms and armour
from around the world.101 The sociological and seri-
ation methods pioneered by Pitt Rivers and Petrie
must surely have inuenced the young Currelly and
certainly taught him to love and respect objects and
taxonomies but Currellys design arguments seem
to have been his own. In particular, Pitt Rivers looked
to the artefact as the product of unconscious selec-
tion by culture and was relatively unconcerned with
accurate dating and even blithely mixed artefacts that
appeared to form an unbroken series even thought
they might have been from quite distinct cultures.102
Currelly, instead, looked at the implication of Pitt
Riverss view: to locate objects clearly within one
culture was to know the mentality governing the
unconscious selection of that culture and more
importantly it should inspire the conscious selection
in the mind of our culture.
ism he found most compelling probably due in part
to current events in Europe but combined with a life-
long interest was that focused on military technol-
ogy. In a lecture to the Ontario College of Architecture
in , Currelly would claim that Europe owed
its civilization to the mechanical contrivances devel-
oped for war, that the Chinese crossbow was directly
responsible for the change in Western architecture
after it had been modied by the Greeks and Romans
into stone-throwing catapults, and in what would
later become known as the Lynn White Thesis that
the stirrup, developed in China, would later create
feudalism, which would itself be broken down by the
importation of gunpowder, again from China.104
Throughout the s, Currelly lectured widely on
the history of technology, including an eleven-part
radio series for the Canadian Broadcasting Corpora-
tion in in all of which humanitys progress in
arms and armour gured heavily.
Education with arms and armour
The philosophy of the industrial arts has always
included museums as teaching centres for work-
men.105 In Munich, Currelly also saw for the rst
time teachers conducting history lessons among col-
lections of artefacts. He would certainly have agreed
with the pundit who said the phrase art for arts
sake, coined by an impractical culture, has no place
in a healthy republic.106 Rather, he told the Toronto
Globe that, if we are to remain a part of the British
Empire our people should know of our military his-
tory, and to that end should be familiar with our
military equipment and the wonderful craftsman-
ship which went into its making.107 To him, the
museum was by denition a teaching museum and
indeed arms and armour serve as a cornerstone
of the educational programmes at the ROM. Since
his retirement, the armour galleries in their various

of
 COLLECTING ARMS AND ARMOUR IN ONTARIO,
incarnations have served as a principal attraction
within a museum with a much wider collections
mandate and indeed with other collections more
extensive and important than those of arms and
armour.
From the beginning, Currelly argued for the place
of the museum in the education of the schoolchildren
of Ontario, suggesting that such a purpose was far
from a foregone conclusion. In , he testied
before the Management Committee of the Ontario
Board of Education that schools should have been
making use of the ROM: Torontos museum ranks as
third in America and had become developed grad-
ually up to its present dimensions [which included]
a mass of material which bears upon the history
of mechanical life, from the simplest beginnings up
to the peak attained, for example, in the matter of
furniture in the th century.108 His argument was
not entirely altruistic, for he wanted the Province to
employ a number of teachers who would teach directly
in the Museum. This, he argued, would not only
encourage schools to send classes on eld trips to the
professional teachers at the ROM but also alleviate
the chronic understafng experienced at the ROM
during school visits. Although rebuffed that year, he
persisted with the request in subsequent years, and
even here at times he made abundantly clear his love
of arms and armour: History, he argued, taught in
a room where the weapons of the period under discus-
sion are on display, becomes a living subject,109
reecting an era where military and political history
still dominated the curriculum in school. Currelly
never managed to get teachers appointed directly by
the Board of Education, but in their absence, he hired
staff to give guided tours.
At times, though, the Museum realized that it had
perhaps overemphasized the arms, or at least realized
they needed other material to complement them. In
, the ROM commissioned two large paintings of
Vikings, for the subject was one frequently requested
by school classes, but at the time, Currelly noted,
the galleries provide no illustrations other than weap-
ons.110 When one looks at attendance on Museum-led
school classes, arms and armour were popular,
although they did not compete with some other areas:
in of some twenty-four types of tours offering
school classes (just over , schoolchildren), the s and s, schoolchildren would line up for
only twenty-nine of these classes were on arms and
armour, about the same as A Visit to Roman London
and Reptiles & Amphibians but far outnumbered by
visits on What we owe the Chinese and Bird
Talks.111
Currelly clearly had a staff who took care of the
arms and armour, especially through the s. As
early as , Lionel Rawlinson lectured on arms and
armour to a teachers convention at the Museum.112 As
the collections grew to bursting point, Langley Rawles
is noted as either specializing in or being in charge
of the arms and armour. He had also developed a sort
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of wish list for Currellys buying trips and standing
orders; on one occasion, he purchased surplus pieces
from the ROM.113 Rawles is interesting in that while
he was listed as the ROMs draughtsman in the museum
guides throughout the s and early s, he also
wrote all of the descriptions of new arms and armour
acquisitions in the Bulletin of the Royal Museum of
Archaeology from to .114 But beyond that, his
identity is a mystery: he was never formally on the
ROM or the University staff; he was not, it seems, a
prominent Torontonian and he disappeared as quietly
as he had arrived.115 It is possible that Rawles was a
dilettante who was pushed aside in the later s by
a professional: at the end of the decade, one reporter
looking for information on Viking weapons turned not
to Rawles, but to John Henry Iliffe, a Cambridge grad-
uate. Iliffe joined the ROM in as keeper of the
Classical section and became a lecturer in archaeology
at the University in . Appointed as an Assistant
Professor of Industrial Art the next year, he held that
post only until when he became the British keeper
of the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem.116 Currelly
seems to have been looking for a second keeper for
curatorial and teaching duties when he hired Iliffe
(perhaps to Rawless detriment), and then lost him to
a better position.
From the beginning, Currelly argued that the
material remains of the past were more than just
sparks to the imagination of youngsters. During his
great expansion of the arms and armour collection in
, he noted that an Indian suit of armour contained
practically every type of armour construction known,
[which] as a teaching piece is invaluable, as besides
illustrating every type of armour on one suit, the
workmanship shows the wonderful mastery that the
Indian craftsmen had over metal at that time.117 In
hours for programmes that included drawing time
in the armour galleries (Fig. ). Severely reduced in
of
 STEVEN A. WALTON

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Fig. . Children draw in the Armour Court as part of the
Saturday Morning Club, ; ROM, Education Department
accession no. ..39 (AR-). With permission of the Royal
Ontario Museum @ ROM.
Fig. . Poster advertising the ROM, Armour to Measure, c.
(the English-language version used the slogan Visit our Suit
Department); courtesy of ROM Publicity Department. With
permission of the Royal Ontario Museum @ ROM.

scope, the armour gallery, still retains elements of its
teaching mission, with an emphasis on technology.
Displays on the making of mail and the step-by-step
production of an early pistol educate visitors about
the underlying mechanics of these artefacts.118
In the twentieth century, museums also needed to
target tourists as an audience. Currelly argued that in
that regard, armour was ideal and that Canada needed
to make sure that Canadians and especially Americans
knew that the ROM had a rich collection of it. He noted
that it was for this reason that the armour is opposite the
front door in [the inter-war] plan. Just after World War
II, Currelly addressed the tourism question and wrote:
As soon as the Royal Ontario Museum got under weigh [sic],
I started investigating the tourist question here. The fol-
lowing was a fairly common conversation: say, do you work
here? Yes. Now I dont understand this; I used to read
Walter Scott and a lot of books about the past, and about
knights in armour, and I have never seen a suit of armour in
my life before. How is it that we havent got anything like
that in our country? O, yes, you have, said I, you have a
marvelous collection in New York. Never been to New
York. The popularity of the armour was soon proved at
the front door of the Museum: say Mr., wheres your
armour? And the wife wants to see the laces and dresses.119
And although it effectively sold itself, he drove the
point home by relating that when Murray Gibbon,
in charge of advertising for the Canadian Pacic
Railroad, pointed to a case of armour and said, An
American returning from a trip would rather be able
to tell children about suits of armour than about any
city in existence. There is your advertising point for
this province. Apparently, it was working even
before the war, for Currelly was always astounded at
the lines of motor cars with American licenses
parked in front of the ROM.
In the s, the then rather modest armour display
nevertheless appeared prominently in promotional
advertisements (Fig. ). One punning advertisement

of
 COLLECTING ARMS AND ARMOUR IN ONTARIO,
Fig. . The left half of the s mural by Sylvia Hahn in the ROM Armour Court [now C. T. Currelly Hall] the lord on the right
seated above the small railing tapestry is C. T. Curelly; ROM, European Department, accession no. .. (AR-). With
permission of the Royal Ontario Museum @ ROM.
invites visitors to Visit our suit department. On a
recent membership yer, a full mid-sixteenth-century
suit stands backlit with a red glow with a bold white
title above ordering the reader, Enlist Today. Inter-
estingly, the suit of armour is the only museum object
shown in the brochure which is not described in an
adjacent caption, suggesting that it is too iconic to need
description; the public, it is assumed will react and be
drawn to the image to discover what is inside the
brochure. In another brochure for the Discovery
Gallery, a small child is shown engulfed in a breast-
plate and burgonet helmet with ostrich plumage, invit-
ing the children to this hands-on education centre
where trying on armour is a must indeed, the very
rst display that children are presented with upon
entering the area is one with reproduction pieces of
armour. This is hardly a new development, simply
riding the wave of the development of hands-on chil-
drens areas in museums; Currelly argued that in order
to make a medieval history lesson even more interest-
of
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ing, a boys suit of armor is being secured, and there
will be practical demonstrations by boys in the visiting
classes.120 Arms and armour imagery resonates with
the public and despite being a quite small proportion
of the ROMs holdings is considered one of its strong-
est weapons in public relations campaigns.
As a tting tribute to Charles Trick Currelly upon
his retirement in , the Armour Court was named
in his honour, for, as a newspaper article lamented,
there was to be no tangible gift to offer him [for]
building up the Museum to its present high estate.
His armour collection was called a magnicently con-
structive achievement assembled patiently over a
long period of years.121 Still, after his retirement, little
was done to augment the collection, although as late as
, the ofcial guidebooks would still suggest they
wanted to expand it, and especially to ll some notable
gaps in the collection, such as a full equestrian armour,
grotesque helms and early rearms.122 In , Gerard
Brett, then director of the ROM, oversaw a major
 STEVEN A. WALTON
reorganization and thinning of the armour court and
by the s the premier space was used for temporary
exhibitions, such as the Art Treasures from
Japan exhibit, but in , the armour was for a short
time redisplayed. In the mid-s, the gallery was
rearranged slightly, but by the end of the decade while
it was seen by most visitors, it was for some reason
claimed to be the least liked exhibit in the museum
and was consequently disassembled.123 It was replaced
with densely packed, spot-lit cases in a darkened gal-
lery with dropped ceilings, showing the methods of
such disciplines as archaeology, palaeontology and
geology used in the discovery, preservation and analy-
sis of museum artefacts. Consequently, the rooms
vast barrel vault was obscured and the sense of gran-
deur lost. In addition, two large murals on the west
wall (Fig. ) were lost from view. The armour itself
was put in storage for about a decade, and nally redis-
played in the late s in a small gallery on the third
oor. Although used for other purposes for nearly
thirty years, in , the grand Armour Gallery was
rededicated as the C. T. Currelly Court and once again
serves as the grand reception space one encounters
upon passing through the grand entry rotunda. Recent
renovation revealed the murals once again as the dom-
inant feature greeting visitors upon entry beyond the
lobbys rotunda.124 The murals are of spectators at a
joust, but their faces are those of prominent curators at
the ROM at the time of the addition in . And the
face for the lordly patron presiding over the joust
that is to say, the arms and armour court for the dis-
play of the highest form of art and technology known
to man was that of Charles Trick Currelly.125
It would seem, then, that the ROM was unique in a
number of ways in its collecting of arms and armour:
in its accumulation through the desire and drive of
the ROMs curator; in the expenditure of public
funds on the collection rather than a reliance upon
individual wealthy patrons; in the justications that
Currelly repeatedly gave for the existence of a splen-
did collection of its kind as industrial inspiration,
even if that argument was over half a century old
at the time; and also in the prominent display of the
collection within the museum itself, especially after
the completion of the addition.126 In his bottom
up approach, Currelly argued that the Museum
needed artefacts that could demonstrate good design
and went ahead in acquiring arms and armour as
illustrations to this end. While other museums may
have believed the same thing, they came into their col-
lections either en masse as gifts or without having to
justify their existence. Moreover, by the time the
ROM came into being, other North American muse-
ums had mostly rejected the South Kensington model
as a goal, and embraced instead the Louvre model of
housing only quintessential, authentic examples of
art, and in the process dening what art meant. The
ROMs arms and armour collection stands as an
interesting artefact in its own right, demonstrating a
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conscious fusion of the history of art and the history
of technology. In a way, we have a museological
example here of the biological dictum that ontogeny
recapitulates phylogeny, in that the ROM went
through the South Kensington phase as had other
museums, on their way to their nal incarnations as
art museums. Even in its full incarnation the ROM
never became a full Louvre-model museum because
the ROM has always been a hybrid between the
decorative and industrial arts, ethnography and
archaeology and natural history, and consequently
the collection of arms and armour has been able to
serve as a focal point for humanitys fusion of art and
industry. Such a fusion could only have ourished
between the wars as norms of art were in ux, as
Canada and especially Toronto began to exhibit
the trappings of a world-class city, and as North
American museum holdings themselves burgeoned,
growing either ex nihilo or from modest beginnings
in the rst part of the twentieth century. That the
fusion happened around arms and armour in Toronto
speaks volumes about our understanding of the
growth and development of what a museum is, about
the relation of Canadian (and by extension, North
American) culture and its European antecedent, as
well as about the iconic and metaphorical importance
of arms and armour in our culture.
Address for correspondence
Steven A. Walton, Program in Science, Technology and Society,
Old Botany, Penn State University, University Park, PA ,
USA.
saw@psu.edu
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank heartily K. Corey Keeble, Julia Matthews and
Stephanie Balon at the ROM for their interest in my project and for
their assistance in uncovering important records at the ROM. Ed
Tracy, Tara Abraham and Beverly Eadie selessly checked some
of
 COLLECTING ARMS AND ARMOUR IN ONTARIO,
details for me in libraries and archives closer to them than to me and
Kent Ahrends offered some suggestions on Weirs Marmion and de
Wilton. Thomas Homer-Dixon generously shared his memories and
photograph of his Toronto ancestors armour collection. The late
Walter Karcheski kindly read an early draft of this paper and pro-
vided encouragement and some excellent suggestions for its devel-
opment and Stuart W. Phyrr was kind enough to answer a number
of questions and allow me to access the armour departments library
at short notice. Finally, Robert D. Smith rediscovered the Dixon
sale catalogue in the stacks of the Royal Armouries in Leeds, and
happily discussed a number of issues over many hours.
Notes and references
This connection developed only in the late s, spearheaded
by Bruno Thomas of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in
Vienna; see the chapter Arms, armor, and ne art, in Peter
Krenn, Imperial Austria: Treasures of Art, Arms & Armor from
the State of Styria (Sydney, ), pp. .
National collections, including arsenals, often functioned
effectively as museums in any case; see Thomas DaCosta
Kaufmann, From treasury to museum: the collections of
the Austrian Hapsburgs, in John Elsner and Roger Cardinal
(eds.), The Cultures of Collecting (Cambridge, MA, ),
pp. .
Joy Kenseth (ed.), The Age of the Marvelous, exh. cat., Hood
Museum of Art (Hanover, NH, ), p. . The installation
included a number of weapons and pieces of armour, as well
as a full suit prominently displayed in the main gallery; see
p. . In , Gabriel Kaltemarckt suggested to Christian
I of Saxony that in regard to his new Kunstkammer, the
best adornment and treasure of a prince and sovereign
includes his possession of magnicent munitions and
military equipment (ibid., p. ). At the Medici court, at
about the same time, visitors could view parade armour in
the same galleries as live coral, a hazelnut-sized pearl and
ethnological collections from North America; see Joy Kenseth,
A world of wonders in one closet shut, in ibid., p. .
Shackerley Marmion, The Antiquary (), act II, scene i: see
The Dramatic Works of Shackerley Marmion (Edinburgh and
London, ), p. . Later in the scene, the Duke, holding
[rarities] an unt treasure for a private man to possess sent
his mandamus to take them from [the Antiquary] (p. ).
Francis Henry Cripps-Day, A Record of Armour Sales,
(London, ), pp. xxilxviii. For early twentieth- Kensington Museum (London, ), p. xviii (emphasis added
century collecting culture, see F. Gordon Roe, Personal
reminiscences of some arms and armour collectors of the past,
Journal of the Arms and Armour Society, nos (), system in Ontario (see below).
pp. .
See Harold L. Peterson, Arms and Armor in Colonial America,
(New York, ), and three important works by have received some of the collections, but primarily those in
Walter J. Karcheski Jr: Arms and Armor of the Conquistadors,
, exh. cat., Florida Museum of Natural History
(Gainesville, ); Arms, armor and equipment of the
Trained Bands of early th Century New England, in
th Century War, Weaponry and Politics, Proceedings of the
International Association of Museums of Arms and Military
History (IAMAM), Xth Congress, Stockholm, Sweden
(Stockholm, ); and In Defense of the Common-wealth:
arms, armor and equipment of th century New England,
Man at Arms no. (), pp. . Toronto before his marriage. In , he was reappointed
See Steven A. Walton, The object of North American armor
collections, c., in John MacFarlane (ed.), Acta of the
th Conference of the International Committee of Museums and
Collections of Arms and Military History, Organized under the
theme The Storyline in Arms and Military Museums (Ottawa,
), pp. .
For the general history of the Royal Ontario Museum (here-
after ROM), see Lovat Dickson, The Museum Makers: The
Story of the Royal Ontario Museum (Toronto, ). Unless
otherwise noted, information on C. T. Currellys life
comes from his autobiography, I Brought the Ages Home
(Toronto, ; reprinted ).
This is also a tangential study to that of what museums of
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science and (particularly) technology meant in society as they
began to be formed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century. Currellys ROM was not a museum of technology (i.e.
an industrial museum) per se, but as a museum of technological
artefacts its creation shares many aspects of those museums.
For a general introduction to this branch of museology, see
Brigitte Schroeder-Gudehus, Patrons and publics: museums as
historical artefacts, in Industrial Society and its Museums,
: Social Aspirations and Cultural Politics (Chur, Switzerland,
), pp. , and the subsequent articles in that volume.
Harold G. Needham, The Origins of the Royal Ontario
Museum, M.A. thesis, University of Toronto (), pp.
, . See also F. Henry Johnson, A colonial Canadian in
search of a museum, Queens Quarterly no. (), pp.
.
John C. Carter, Ryerson, Hodgins, and Boyle: early innovators
in Ontario school museums, Ontario History, no. (),
p. .
F. Henry Johnson, The fate of Canadas rst art museum,
Queens Quarterly no. (), pp. ; quote from the
US Commissioner of Education, John Eaton, in (p. ).
Carter, op. cit. (note ), p. .
Fern Bayer, The Ontario Collection (Toronto, ), pp.
(quote on p. ).
J. George Hodgins, Special Report to the Honourable the
Minister of Education on the Ontario Educational Exhibit, and
the Educational Features of the International Exhibition, at
Philadelphia, (Toronto, ), p. .
Catalogue of the Armour and the Miscellaneous Objects of Art,
Known as the Meyrick Collection Exhibited at the South
in the text). Ryerson and especially his assistant Samuel May
were actively engaged in developing the South Kensington
The disbursement lasted until when all remaining materials
were transferred to other institutions. The ROM may eventually
the natural history sections of the Normal School Museum.
Enquiries at Fort George were unsuccessful in nding any of
this material; see Johnson, op. cit. (note ), p. .
B. Homer Dixon, K.N.L., The Border Riding Clans and a
Brief Account of the Family of the Author (Albany, NY, ),
p. .
Benjamin had already been acting as Vice-Consul in Boston
since at least and had been active as a merchant in
of
 STEVEN A. WALTON

Consul-General of the Netherlands in Canada and purchased Registration Department, Fenton & Sons le (hereafter
Homewood the following year (City of Toronto By-law no. ROM-F&S), September . By comparison, New York
-). See Dixon, op. cit. (note ), pp. , and City in had a population of nearly . million (http://
The Boston Almanac for the Year (Boston, ), pp. www.census.gov/population/documentation/twps/
, . His father was also mistaken as an English Consul tab.txt). For the early history of the Metropolitan Museum
in social circles; see Justin Winson (ed.), The Memorial of New York, see below. Currelly would directly lament the
History of Boston, , vol. IV (Boston, ), p. . situation to a newspaperman fteen years after the opening
of the ROM: The United States has museums and each
The painting was loaned (and offered for sale at a premium)
has an endowment of about as much as this museum has cost
to the Boston Athenaeum in ; Robert F. Perkins Jr and
since it was built in (Lack cash for old helmet, Evening
William J. Gauin III, The Boston Athenaeum Art Exhibition
Telegram, May , p. ).
Index, (Boston, ), pp. , ; Doreen B.
Burke, J. Alden Weir: An American Impressionist (Newark, DE, Robert Fulford, Accidental City: The Transformation of Toronto
), p. , and [Jacob E.] Kent Ahrens, Robert Walter Weir (Boston, ), p. .

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(), Ph.D. thesis, University of Delaware (), esp.
Dickson, op. cit. (note ), pp. . A Royal Commission
pp. . Ahrens kindly conrmed that the painting is missing
in had recommended that such a museum be built as
(personal communication), and he is sceptical that the Marmion
early as possible; Report of the Royal Commission on the Univer-
armour may be the one in An Artists Studio () by J. F.
sity of Toronto (Toronto, ), p. xli.
Weir (showing his father in his studio) and mentioned in a
poem in The Kinickerbocker: A massive oaken cabinet, and many Until the s, and emphatically so during Currellys tenure,
a curious chair/ Bright armor of the olden time, and relics these museums were always known as the R.O.M., with each
quaint and rare; see Betsy Fahlman, John Ferguson Weir: the letter pronounced individually, and Currelly was director
Labor of Art (Newark, DE, ), pp. . of the R.O.M.A. Since then, however, ROM is generally
written as an acronym and pronounced as a one-syllable word
Bashford Dean, Catalogue of a Loan Exhibition of Arms and
rhyming with bomb.
Armor, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York,
), p. xix. There is no concise history of the Dixon family; Torontonensis (Toronto, ).
I am deeply indebted to Professor Thomas Homer-Dixon, William Ridgeway to James Mavor, November
Benjamins great-grandson, for information on the family. (University of Toronto, Ofce of the President (Sir Robert
George A. Leavitt & Co., A Miscellaneous Collection of Books Falconer), UTA A-/(letter no. )). Letter no.
Belonging to J.T. White, [with] Addenda. To be Sold May th in the same folder is President Falconers offer of the
and th, (New York, ), inside front cover. See also curatorship to Currelly dated July . The job was as
ibid., The B. Homer Dixon Library of Antiquarian, Chivalric, an educator and a collector and the letter noted his ability
Archaeological, Heraldic, Genealogical, Topographical, and not only as a brilliant collector, but also as a patient and exact
Miscellaneous Works. To be Sold by Auction, Tuesday, June th, student of details and a scientic expositor.
(New York, ). This desire to see afnities was both a boon and bane to
George A. Leavitt & Co., The B. Homer Dixon Cabinet of Arms Currelly, as it was to many other hoplogists early in the
and Armor, To be Sold by Auction, Thursday and Friday, June twentieth century. In some cases, it allowed Currelly to
th and th, , at - oclock (New York, ). At least correctly reinterpret the stylistic inuences in pottery or
two of the pieces a Miquelet-lock and a wheel-lock went art, but in others he relied overmuch on it. For example, at
through the Clements and Keasby collections; Francis Henry the end of the First World War and no doubt at least tacitly
Cripps-Day, A Record of Armour Sales, (London, inuenced by particular imperialistic sympathies, Currelly
), p. , nos . claimed that the Turks were in fact from central Asia (so far
correct), but that their origin apparently dates back as far as
Stephen N. Fliegel notes in the introduction to his recent
the Chinese, for they used the same kind of weapons the
catalogue of the Cleveland Museum of Arts collections of
bow and arrow. Such simplistic analogies no longer withstand
arms and armour that Cleveland was the second ne arts
scrutiny. (Turks came from Central Asia, Globe, May
museum [after the Metropolitan Museum of New York] in the
[DGR]: this clipping and those that follow, come from
United States to create a dedicated space within its galleries
the UTA, Department of Graduate Records press clippings,
for the display of European arms and armor. In fact, the
UTA A-/ ( and ), which compiled notices for
Cincinnati Art Museum pre-dated both these collections (see
all faculty members through the s. Hereafter, clippings
below) and the Severence collection in Cleveland opened to
found here but not cross-referenced in the papers themselves
the public in , two years after the opening of the ROM,
will be noted by [DGR]. In addition, all newspapers are
although it remains one of the foremost arms and armour
Toronto dailies unless otherwise noted.)
collections in North America; Stephen N. Fliegel, Arms &
Armor (Cleveland, ). Ridgeway very clearly wrote Fitzgibbon, not Fitzwilliam, as one
might expect for a Cambridge museum. What he was referring
A new Archaeological Museum, [Toronto] News,
to remains unclear and the current armour collection of the
October (University of Toronto Archives (hereafter
Fitzwilliam Museum was not begun until well after Currelly had
UTA), accession no. A-/(.)). The article also
taken the post at Toronto. See Ian Eaves, Catalogue of European
romantically notes that he unearthed a collection of weapons of
Armour at the Fitzwilliam Museum (Woodbridge, ), pp. ivii.
Carthaginian and Roman manufacture from one of Hannibals
battleelds, a ne series of weapons from the Dordogne, and University museum nears completion, Mail, July
another from Belgium. (clipping in UTA A-//(), ROM, ).
Walker also bought pieces of armour occasionally from Opening of the Royal Ontario Museum, a speech delivered
the same dealer used by Currelly for the ROM; see ROM by H.R.H. the Duke of Connaught, March , UTA

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 COLLECTING ARMS AND ARMOUR IN ONTARIO,

A-/(), p. . The and museum guides Final lecture given on art, Varsity, December [DGR].
continue to refer to the armour as the Pellatt collection.
The Casa Loma fakes, Antiques and Cabinet Makers Journal
no. (), pp. .
David Flint, Henry Pellatt (Toronto, ), p. ; personal
communication, Julia Matthews, ROM archivist, March
2001; Royal Armouries, Leeds, Sir James Mann MS, Box
, vol. II/VI, n.p. [ROM visit on pp. and Pellatt is
mentioned on pp. , ].
Currelly, op. cit. (note ), pp. .
ROM-F&S, Currelly to W. H. Fenton, February
and May . Information on dealers is very difcult to
Currelly further noted that the Egyptians took , years to
do the same thing, and both learned it from outside countries.
He would frequently use this chestnut in public lecture. For a
more recent appraisal of this sort of development, see George
Basalla, The Evolution of Technology (Cambridge, ).
The course read Sir William Dampiers Foundations of Science,
Sir John Linton Myress Dawn of History and Hugo Berthold
von Buttel-Reepens Man and his Forerunners, all very rmly
committed to the march of progress school of thought.
University of Toronto, Calendar (), p. . Unless
otherwise noted, information on courses comes from the

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Calendars for the relevant years.
discover, and I have found none of Fentons correspondence.
But for a contemporary, albeit slightly higher prole dealer, Life of James Watt outlined in lecture, Star, January
see Stuart W. Phyrr, S.J. Whawell and the art market, Park (UTA A-//(), ROM, -).
Lane Arms Fair, vol. XI (), pp. . ROM-F&S, Currelly to W. H. Fenton, August .
Eaves, op. cit. (note ), p. xiii. ROM-Acquisitions le, Registrations Department, Mr.
ROM-F&S, W. H. Fenton to Currelly, February Currellys purchases in New York and Europe, MarchMay,
and June . . His outlay was ,. s. d. ($,. at the time)
and . s. went for twenty-three pieces of arms and
ROM-F&S, Currelly to W. H. Fenton, January . armour from Furmage and Fenton & Sons.
Collection of antiquities now on exhibition in Wycliffe Lack cash for old helmet, Evening Telegram, May ,
Convocation Hall, Globe, September . The Wycliffe p. .
College Board of Directors Minutes for conrm that
the exhibition merely borrowed space in Wycliffe College. ROM-Currelly Archive Material folders (hereafter ROM-
The suit of Turkish armour was bought on September CAM), , Currelly to J. S. Murray, February
for . s. it still exists in the ROMs collections as and Currelly to Aird, December .
accession no. .. (formerly M.). ROM-F&S, Currelly to W. H. Fenton, January .
Archaeologist and reporter organize tour of exploration, University of Toronto, Presidents Report, , pp. .
News, June [DGR].
University of Toronto, Presidents Report, , pp. .
Coins, stamps and material has proved nations merit since the
rst use of money, Globe, October [DGR]. He claimed ROM-F&S, Currelly to W. H. Fenton, December .
that when swords in China were the accepted tender, they were The Metropolitan is obviously one of the others, but whether
suspended from the walls of the dwellings by rings. Later, he had another extant collection specically in mind, or simply
miniature swords represented currency. As time went on the believed that the aggregate wealth and armour availability
blade and the handle disappeared, and only the rings survived would ultimately only allow three collections is unclear.
[akin to Japanese tsuba, which are still collected as independent Gets new treasures for Ontario Museum, Globe, May .
works of art]. Currelly also waxed rhapsodic over Japanese See also Complete Saxon tomb coming to the museum, Star
swords in Wonderful example of Japanese skill, Daily Star, Weekly, June [DGR]; Saxon weapons at Museum,
October , p. : I cannot conceive of anything ner The Evening Telegram, October , p. 10; Museum obtains old
study of the ghting weapons of the world is one of the best Saxon relics, Varsity, October , p. . Henry Hall Gage
ways I know to show beauty at its best. See also Rare Nippon (Viscount Gage, ) had discovered approximately
swords acquired by Museum, Daily Star, March , p. . seventh- to ninth-century graves on his property.
Primitive man felt urge of creative art, Mail, November While this quote is from the Presidents Report, the scale
[DGR]. The article went on to note which lady was tea armour appears not to have arrived in Toronto until ve years
hostess for the day. See the parallel report of the meeting, later: Only scale armor suit in world arrived here, Daily Mail
Fine blade may hold more art than dwells on gaudy canvas, and Empire, January , p. [DGR].
Globe, November [DGR].
University of Toronto, Presidents Report, , pp. .
Course in world history for & yr. arts, Varsity, February
; Painting sculpture and art, Varsity, February Despite the ROMs great reputation for Asian collections, it
[DGR]. The Varsity remains the main University of Toronto is interesting to note Currellys European bias towards the
student newspaper. collecting of arms and armour, for in a separate, tiny paragraph,
he adds A ne collection of Japanese sword furniture, guards
Practical motive ruled art of primitive man, Star, November and the caps for handles, shows the highest pitch of the work
[DGR].
in many metals (Presidents Report , p. ); even here
The history of art topic of speech by Professor Currelly, his devotion to the underlying technology manifests itself.
Varsity, November [DGR].
Treasures secured at bargain prices for Ontario Museum,
True art appears in primitive man, Varsity, November Globe, June , p. 12: It is a bargain year in antiquities [and]
[DGR]. The comment immediately following this was, yet we a great year in arms in armor, for Turkey, Russia, and other
are quite capable of producing the ugly (italics added). lands have turned many valuable artifacts on the market.

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 STEVEN A. WALTON

Currelly to Board of Trustees [of the University of Toronto], Pagan Time (London, ). These last two books were in fact
November (UTA, Ofce of the President (Cody), collection guides from the South Kensington Museum.
A-/()). The baselard was a type of sword or dagger William Maskell, The Industrial Arts (London, ),
referred to in medieval documents, but the precise meaning of pp. , or Philippe Burty, Chefs-duvre of the Industrial
the word is unclear. None the less, Currelly condently called Arts (New York, ), pp. .
it a favourite weapon of the well-off franklins (University of
Toronto, Presidents Report, , p. ). Chalmers, op. cit. (note ).
Currelly returning with big treasure, Telegram, May ; Steven Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life,
Curator back with antiques, Telegram, May [DGR]. (Chicago, ), ch. , titled From South Kensington
to the Louvre: art museums and the creation of ne art.
ROM-CAM, , Currelly to Ethlyn M. Greenaway,
May . Ontario museum buys treasures, Telegraph, ROM-CAM, Currelly to Sir Cecil Smith, March .
May (UTA A-//(), ROM, -). W. A. Craick, Charles Trick Currelly Canadian archaeologist,
Shot with cog wheel, Evening Telegram, January , Globe, February [DGR]

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p. and Armour and lace feature exhibit now at Museum,
Varsity, January , p. . ROM-F&S, Currelly to W.
H. Fenton, May . Blades of knightly days, Evening
Telegram, November , p. .
Sharon Gaum, Romancing the ROM: a look at the architecture
of the addition and how it related to the collections at the
Royal Ontario Museum, unpublished report, University of
Toronto (), p. . The armour was displayed in a series
of uniform nine-foot cases according to period.
University of Toronto, Presidents Report, , p. . pp. ; the quote is from p. . At about the same time,
University of Toronto, Presidents Report, , pp. . and argued that its natural afnities were to the school
Currelly rst reported the nd in Viking weapons found near
Beardmore, Ontario, Canadian Historical Review no.
(), pp. . They were noticed internationally in Viking
weapons found near Beardmore, Ontario, Antiquity (),
pp. . The subsequent controversy and authentication
of the pieces are more fully detailed in O. C. Elliott and
C. T. Currelly, The case of the Beardmore relics, Canadian
Historical Review no. (), pp. . ).
Stephen Williams, Fantastic Archaeology: The Wild Side of
North American Prehistory (Philadelphia, ), ch. .
For the Ontario case relating to art instruction, see Graeme
Chalmers, Who is to do this Great Work for Canada? South
Kensington in Ontario, Journal of Art and Design Education
no. (), pp. . See also the special issue of the Memory (Stanford, ), pp. at p. , speaking of
journal of the History of Collections ( no. , ) titled The
Making of the South Kensington Museum.
See his Critical Inquiry into Antient Armour, as it existed
in Europe, particularly in Great Britain, from the Norman
Conquest to the Reign of King Charles II (London, ) as
well as Rosalind Lowe, Sir Samuel Meyrick & Goodrich Court
(Almeley, ).
Catalogue of the Armour and the Miscellaneous Objects of Art,
Known as the Meyrick Collection Exhibited at the South
Kensington Museum (London, ), p. vi. Just after the turn
of the century, Munichs Deutsches Museum was founded for
a similar purpose, although more focused on engineering.
See, for example, the inspirational Sir M. Digby Wyatt, The
Industrial Arts of the Nineteenth Century (London, ) from
the Crystal Palace Exhibition, which spawned such works as:
J. Baye and T. B. Harbottle, The Industrial Arts of the Anglo-
Saxons (London, ); Ernest Babelon, Manual of Oriental
Antiquities: Including the Architecture, Sculpture, and Industrial
Arts of Chaldaea, Assyria, Persia, Syria, Judaea, Phoenicia,
and Carthage (London, ); G. C. M. Birdwood and G.
C. Molesworth, The Industrial Arts of India (London, );
and H. Hildebrand, The Industrial Arts of Scandinavia in the
C. T. Currelly, The new museum, University [of Toronto]
Monthly no. (), pp. , quote on p. . On
p. he specically acknowledges the Deutsches Museum in
Munich as the inspiration for history classes in the museum.
And in his autobiography (op. cit. (note ), p. ), he credits
the Munich War Museum as the rst archaeological museum
where he had seen objects exhibited in evolutionary order.
Henry W. Kent, The museum and industrial art, in
Charles R. Richards (ed.), Art in Industry (New York, ),
the Faculty of Fine Art was established at the University
of architecture (then part of Engineering), the ROM, and
the Professor of Industrial Art, that is, Currelly (UTA
A-/(ROM)).
The history of art topic of speech by Professor Currelly,
Varsity, November [DGR]. On the Arts and Crafts
Movement in North America, see Eileen Boris, Art and Labor:
Ruskin, Morris and the Craftsman Ideal in America (Philadelphia,
He was not the rst exponent of this idea. Rather, it seems to
have been proposed with some regularity but little continuity
from as early as the end of the eighteenth century; see Suzanne
Marchand, The quarrel of the ancients and moderns in the
German museums, in Susan A. Crane (ed.), Museums and
Alois Hirts plans for the initial Berlin Museums.
Link museums and schools, Telegram, January
[DGR]. Also, Shows museum in new light, Globe, January
, p. . Here, I use the idea of separate spheres in a paral-
lel sense as C. P. Snow would in his The Two Cultures in the
s, for it is exactly this science/technology vs. humanities
rift that Currelly, too, tried to mend.
Herbert Read, Art and Industry: The Principles of Industrial
Design (London, ), p. . Read would go on to argue that
even the stripped-down functionalism of Ruskin and Morris
was not drastic enough to erase centuries of over-applied
ornament. Instead, the rst step was to dene art which he
did as primarily formal and then decide what machines can
do within this more limited arena. The efciency to which
Read refers derived from the ideas of Scientic Management,
popularized by Frederick Winslow Taylor in the s; by the
s Taylorism had become the mantra of the business world,
and much of society as well, although Read noted (contra
Taylor) that a perfectly efcient object is not necessarily a
beautiful one.
In this, he was somewhat anticipated by Oscar Lovell Triggs
and the Industrial Art League of Chicago from to .

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 COLLECTING ARMS AND ARMOUR IN ONTARIO,

Their work was largely sociological, providing lectures on the
great industrial artists (inspired by Ruskin), and attempting
to educate workmen in good design. See Boris, op. cit. (note
), pp. .
Fine blade may hold more art than dwells on gaudy canvas,
Globe, November [DGR].
Art objects play mighty part in craft design development,
Telegram, January [DGR]. There is an interesting
comparable exhibition of high fashion and antique armour held
recently at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; see Roberto
Casati, Roben wie Ruestungen: Mode in Stahl und Seide einst
und heute (Vienna, ). By way of contrast, the Philadelphia
Commercial Museum (opened ) housed manufactured
see C. T. Currelly, Jumps in our civilization, lecture to the
Eaton Business Mens Club, October and reprinted in
Museum News no. (), pp. . Many of these issues
have been reinterpreted, generally away from the technological
determinism camp. On determinism itself, see Merrit Roe
Smith and Leo Marx (eds.), Does Technology Drive History? The
Dilemma of Technological Determinism (Cambridge, MA, ).
On the White Thesis, see Lynn White Jr, Medieval Technology
and Social Change (Oxford, ) and Kelly DeVries, Medieval
Military Technology (Peterborough, Ontario, ).
Currelly would make the connection explicitly, while others
would include museums in their education schemes either
secondarily or implicitly. See, for example, Charles A.

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Bennett, A national program of industrial art education,
objects largely obtained from Worlds Fairs specically to
Art Bulletin no. (), pp. and Richard F. Bach,
promote trade; see Steven Conn, op. cit. (note ), pp. .
Schools, colleges, and the industrial arts, Art Bulletin no.
University of Toronto, Presidents Report, , p. . (), pp. .
G. B. Goode, Museum-history and museums of history, Kent, op. cit. (note ), p. .
Papers of the American History Association, vol. III (),
Treasures secured at bargain prices for Ontario Museum,
pp. ; epitomized in Joel J. Orosz, Curators and Culture:
Globe, June , p. .
The Museum Movement in America, (Tuscaloosa,
AL, ), pp. . Wants school to use Provincial Museum, Star, March
. See also the Globe and the Telegram for the same
Oscar Wilde, The decorative arts, printed in Kevin OBrien,
date [DGR].
Oscar Wilde in Canada: An Apostle for the Arts (Toronto,
), p. . Wildes activities in Toronto are detailed on Link museums and schools, Telegram, January
pp. . [DGR].
He was, however, one of many to lament the articial divide University of Toronto, Presidents Report, , p. .
between the arts and sciences: The one-sided growth of Report of the School Classes attending the ROM during the
modern training, which produces a B.A. who knows nothing Year ending Oct. , , UTA A-/a().
of natural science, or else a B.Sc. who knows nothing of human
nature, is assuredly not the ideal for a reasonable man; see Museum staff members address concerning teachers, Globe,
W. M. Flinders Petrie, Methods & Aims in Archaeology (New October [DGR]. Little is known about Rawlinson
York, ; reprinted ), p. viii. For a general survey, see he was apparently neither a staff member nor employed by
Margaret S. Brower, Flinders Petrie: A Life in Archaeology or graduated from the University; Currelly (op. cit. (note ),
(London, ), which notices Currelly on occasion, but only p. ) mentions him only in passing in his autobiography,
as one more of Petries colleagues. as having passed a positive judgment on the new display
cases and their carpenter.
W. M. Flinders Petrie, Tools and Weapons (London, ),
p. . Petries memoir, Seventy Years in Archaeology (London, At one point, Currelly mentioned that Rawles is still hanker-
), mentions Currelly only in passing. ing for the hand-and-a-half sword mentioned in [Fenton
& Sons] catalogue. Great two-handed sword, Evening
W. M. Flinders Petrie, History in tools, Science Progress, Telegram, October , p. ; Blades of knightly days,
no. (), pp. ; reprinted in the Annual Report of Evening Telegram, November , p. . Also ROM-F&S,
the Smithsonian Institution (), pp. . By this time, Currelly to W. H. Fenton, July and December ;
Currelly had already begun to develop his own style, and one Fenton to Currelly, December and Currelly to Fenton,
wonders if in this instance the inuence owed in the other January mention that Rawles bought two tulwars
direction. (a type of sword from India) from the ROM. Rawles may have
W. M. Flinders Petrie, The Revolutions of Civilization directed the Museums purchases or may have been acquir-
(New York, ), pp. . ing for himself, for Currelly wrote that he included [in the
purchase request] a Court rapier for Mr. Rawles [Currelly
Pitt Rivers did publish an interesting anthropological survey
to Fenton, February ].
of Primitive warfare in three instalments in the Journal of
the Royal United Service Institution (), pp. Bulletin of the Royal Ontario Museum of Archaeology no.
(), pp. ; and (), pp. . See William (), pp. ; no. (), pp. ; no. (), pp. ;
Chapman, Toward an institutional history of archaeology: no. (), pp. ; no. (), pp. . All are signed
British archaeologists and allied interests in the s, in simply L.R. In this last one, Rawles states quite explicitly
Andrew L. Christienson (ed.), Tracing Archaeologys Past: that for the ROM addition A large and handsome
The Historiography of Archaeology (Carbondale, IL, ), gallery has been designed especially for the purpose of housing
pp. . the armour to best advantage reminiscent of the ancestral
halls and corridors of the old world.
Basalla, op. cit. (note ), pp. .
Currelly enigmatically reported to Fenton that he had not
Currelly, op. cit. (note ), p. .
seen anything of Mr Rawles since you were here, apparently
States war engines hastened progress, Star, April referring to Fentons visit in late or early . ROM-
[DGR]. He had argued similarly in a lecture three years earlier; F&S, Currelly to W. H. Fenton, July .

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 STEVEN A. WALTON

Great Viking sword displayed in Museum, Mail and Empire, Armor gallery to bear name of Dr. Currelly, Evening
February , p. and A product of Viking art, Bulletin of Telegram, November , p. .
the Royal Ontario Museum of Archaeology no. (), pp. . Jean Basco, The Armour Court: A General Guide (Toronto,
Iliffe was shot and killed on April by Arab nationalists, ), p. .
shortly after another British archaeologist connected with the
Rockefeller Museum suffered the same fate; see clippings in Heather Robinson, The Royal Ontario muddle, Toronto Life
UTA A-/(). (June ), pp. , .
The Renaissance ROM addition by Daniel Liebeskind, due
University of Toronto, Presidents Report, , p. .
to open in mid-, will once again reorientate the museum
Such attention was apparent even in Currellys time where and visitors will no longer enter through the Rotunda. The
he took pains to explain the armour in terms that everyone Currelly Gallery will remain, however.
could understand: The latest acquisition to the valuable col- Sylvia Hahn, the ROMs staff artist from the s to the s,
lection of armor in the [ROM] is a suit of iron underwear painted the murals and also ran many classes for school children.
weighing about pounds as flexible as a knitted

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She once told Corey Keeble, the current curator of arms and
sweater (Iron underwear suit acquired by Museum, Daily armour, that she spoke on swords and armour quite often.
Star, January , p. ).
Unlike Cincinnati, where the collections grew as a collection
ROM-CAM, , Currelly to Miss Reynar, January of curiosities; see Jonathan Z. Kamholtz, Arms and the
. museum: the tower treasures in a social context, Queen City
Link museums and schools, Telegram, January Heritage (Journal of the Cincinnati Historical Society) no.
[DGR]. (), pp. at p. .

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