Last chance to see: The Mammals Gallery

Matthew Hull gets down with the taxidermy and celebrates one of the city’s most beloved museum spaces, Manchester Museum’s Mammals Gallery

Lord Maurice Egerton, the fourth baron of Tatton, was a keen photographer, motorcar enthusiast and aviator, but his true passion was Africa. He spent much of his time in Kenya and wanted to make sure that some of the beauty of the African plains made it back home to the industrial north, so he shipped the pelts of the gazelles he shot on safari off to the Manchester Museum. Egerton’s gazelles are still there, positioned against a painted backdrop of golden grassland, in the museum’s splendid Mammals Gallery, a city treasure that closes for refurbishment in September.

The ground floor of Animal Life 1, as the hall is prosaically titled, is one of the oldest galleries in the museum. It opened in 1891, and from behind its mahogany panelled cases a variety of stuffed animals stare, their forlorn and dusty glass eyes forever (or until September at least) staring blankly ahead. The tiger is arranged in mid-pounce and the gorilla, with bared fangs of chipped clay, looks like it has been plucked from the original King Kong – so much so that the lack of a squealing miniature Fay Wray in its paw feels like an oversight. I heard a visiting primary school pupil exclaim that the gallery was ‘better than the zoo’. And in a way it is; the animals aren’t asleep or hidden from view. Instead, they have been frozen in the throes of being at their most spectacular, only inches from your face.

There are marvels to be found amongst the smaller animals too, like the delightful gossamer winged bats, or the reclusive Sun Bear, which looks to be the grandfather of all cartoon bears, peering from around a tree and licking honey from its paw. Admittedly some of the animals have seen better days (the lemming resembles a piece of lint shaken out of a vacuum cleaner bag) but there is a tattered charm to the exhibit and a sort of poetry to the notes attached to the displays. The information panels for the sperm whale skeleton, which hangs from the ceiling of the hall, tell of how local taxidermist Harry Brazenor took two weeks to piece together the bones of the colossal creature, while the note accompanying the spindly remains of the hedgehog bears only the melancholic legend – ‘The hedgehog has an unspecialised skeleton’.

That it is frequently mistaken for an original Victorian exhibition is testament to just how outdated the Mammals Gallery now is. ‘There is an idea that the gallery has been unchanged since it first opened,’ says Henry McGhie, the curator of zoology at the museum, ‘but it has been refreshed and refurbished a number of times in its history, the last time around twenty-five years ago.’

And, as McGhie explains, it’s not just the gallery’s glass cases that are in need of a dust-off; its whole philosophy is due for an overhaul. ‘The gallery as it stands sets out with the view that humans are fundamentally separate from animals and one of the aims of the refurbishment is to demonstrate how we are, in fact, inextricably linked.’ The reinterpreted exhibit will see a greater focus on species and habitat loss and will look unflinchingly at how humans have had an impact on the world’s ecosystem. And it will take a wider view than it currently does, exhibiting birds, insects and even shells alongside mammals to demonstrate how life on earth operates as a web, rather than a series of stratified ladders and chains.

But don’t worry, McGhie assures me that favourites such as the tiger and sperm whale will definitely be staying put and that there will be, if anything, more stuffed animals after the refurbishment. While it is comforting to know that the animals will be conserved there’s no denying that the Mammals Gallery, as we now know it, is on the brink of extinction. If it’s one of your favourite places, or if you haven’t been yet, you’ve got four months to see it before it evolves again.

Mammals Gallery, Manchester Museum, until September 6. Free Entry. Matthew Hull is a student of creative writing at The University of Manchester and the co-editor of the Manchester based prose and poetry magazine, Bewilderbliss. Images: Steve Devine.

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