Dame Margaret Weston, first woman director of a national museum – obituary

Dame Margaret Weston, who has died aged 94, became the first woman to be appointed to lead a national museum when she succeeded Sir David Follett as director of the Science Museum in 1973.

A chartered electrical engineer, Margaret Weston had been recruited from GEC to complete a new electrical engineering gallery. Though she faced a degree of obstruction from male colleagues, the new gallery, opened in 1957, was a great success.

Follett recognised her talents, but (revealingly) sent her to work on the children’s gallery, and then, in 1967, appointed her Keeper of a new department of Museum Services (the first female keeper in the museum’s history), covering such things as external contacts with industry, publicity, publications, public information and inter-museum liaison.

Though less prestigious than subject-specific curatorial posts, the position meant that she accumulated a fund of knowledge about the museum and its staff, as well as an impressive list of contacts, some of whom, including Sir David Attenborough, Sir John Harvey-Jones and Sir Dennis Rooke, she would recruit on to the museum’s board of trustees.

Stout, hardy and direct, but good-humoured, unassuming and fundamentally rather shy, on her appointment as director Margaret Weston told The Daily Telegraph of her ambition to bring in “people not directly interested in science and technology”, but intrigued by “man’s endeavours”.

To this end she oversaw a move towards thematic storytelling, with new display techniques – seen for example in a new chemical industry gallery, opened in 1986, with objects housed in a space resembling a chemical works.

An enthusiast for taking the museum’s cultural riches beyond London, she laid the foundations of what is now known as the Science Museum Group, and on her first day as director, announced that York had been chosen as the home for a new National Railway Museum, a project begun under her predecessor that opened in 1975. She presided over the acquisition of a former RAF airfield at Wroughton to provide storage facilities and as a centre for collaborative research. In 1983 she opened the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television (now the National Science and Media Museum), in Bradford, complete with the country’s largest cinema screen and the country’s first IMAX cinema.

In the main London museum, meanwhile, she oversaw the creation of the 10,000 sq ft Launch Pad gallery, opened in July 1986 shortly after her retirement, where, instead of having to stare at exhibits in glass cases and prod the odd button, children were encouraged to touch them, climb on them and even pull them apart and put them together again.

Margaret Weston set high standards, though she administered discipline with a light touch. In 1983, on a visit to the National Railway Museum, she went to see the then new model railway gallery. After she had gone, one staff member found the initials “MKW” written in dust on a glass cabinet. “We got the message!” a colleague recalled.

After her time, the Science Museum group was joined by museums in Shildon and Manchester, making five in all, four north of Liverpool, all built on the foundations she established.

But Margaret Weston’s 13 years at the helm were a period of anxiety as well as achievement. In the late 1970s IMF-imposed cuts affected the museum (then still part of the civil service) badly, and despite enjoying record visitor numbers, it was forced to cut its workforce by 11 per cent.

At first Margaret Weston made common cause with her flamboyant next-door neighbour at the V&A, Roy Strong, in opposing the cuts, but Strong was miffed when she chose not to join his strategy of open confrontation with the Labour government.

Strong was typically unforgiving, sniffily protesting that he was in the business of “guarding treasures, not fire engines”, and claiming in his diaries, after Margaret Weston was appointed DBE in 1979, that she had been “exulted [sic] to the rank of dame as a public snub to me and a ‘thank you’ for creeping low to Shirley Williams”.

Margaret Kate Weston was born on March 7 1926 at Oakridge, Gloucestershire, the only child of parents who were both heads of local elementary schools, and she was brought up surrounded by books.

During the war, her father served in the Home Guard and one of her most vivid early memories was of running from her home to a German bomber that had just crash-landed in a field to find the pilot with his head propped against a stone wall, saying: “Five men come bomb aerodrome.””

Her father arrested the man, but the authorities were perplexed by her account. There were usually only four men in the type of bomber that had crashed and four had been caught. But she was right: “They found the fifth with his neck broken in the woods.”

Margaret was educated at Stroud High School, where she was deputy head girl and decided to train as an engineer. She took a degree in Electrical Engineering at Birmingham’s College of Technology (now Aston University) and became an apprentice at GEC, Witton, where she rose rapidly, becoming a senior development engineer working on high-voltage stress problems in large turbo-alternators. In 1955, aged 28, she achieved the status of Chartered Electrical Engineer, and the same year joined the Science Museum.

Margaret Weston recalled one of the more challenging moments of her career when she received a telephone call asking her whether she wanted to buy Concorde 002 after it came to the end of its test service: “I said, well I want to preserve it but I have no place to put it. But yes I’ll take it.” In 1976, the supersonic aircraft made its last flight – to the Fleet Air Arm Museum in Yeovilton.

She was less keen, however, in 1985 when Mrs Thatcher suggested that the museum might like to display some moon rock fragments, mounted on a commemorative wooden plaque, presented in 1970 to the then Prime Minister Harold Wilson by President Richard Nixon, which had been found languishing in a Downing Street cupboard.

Dame Margaret, reported a civil service minute, was “not over-enthusiastic” about the idea: “As a curiosity (ranking with a toothbrush once used by Napoleon which they have at the museum) they would always be very willing to give it a home if we no longer wanted the exhibit at No 10, but more significant specimens of moon rock are apparently available from Nasa if required as part of a scientific display.”

Dame Margaret Weston, who retired to her native Gloucestershire, served as a member, trustee or patron on numerous public advisory bodies, museum boards and charitable trusts. A Fellow of the Museums Association, she was made an Honorary Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, in 1984 and a Fellow of the Science Museum in 2018.

A 1973 profile in New Scientist noted her interests as including theatre, outdoor activities and travel, but found her something of “an enigma as a person”.

Dame Margaret Weston, born March 7 1926, died January 12 2021