Ian's Public/Private Collection Debate

greetings oh i have power i have water again the snow has completely melted we went for a nice walk on the trail today just a shirt kind of bizarre that maybe 48 hours ago i was under three inches of snow well there's texas for you also shout out to the lads who found me in fort hood apparently the face masks do make it hard to identify folks but i can't hide the height of the name tape anyway to business i got a message on facebook earlier today asking me what i thought of ian mccollum's comments about museums and this surprised me somewhat as i had no idea what the message was referencing and ian doesn't strike me as a sort of person to cause industry controversy then i saw on my youtube feed that the german panzer museum had issued a reaction video to ian's video actually ian's two videos that got my attention ralph the director helpfully put links to ian's videos in his description so i went and watched those and then went back and watched ralph's since i was asked my opinion well i'll throw it in here and it's worth what you pay for it this actually has a possibility of becoming a much bigger discussion it would be fascinating to see other experts and museum folks all get involved because there's a lot going on behind the scenes that i don't think most folk think about overall i think i'll lean more in ralph's direction but there are a couple of caveats the first is that ian's position is more from the level of practical effect as opposed to theory yes a theory is failing where the rubber meets the road a position that ralph acknowledges secondly and particularly from the perspective of firearms eons in the country which has a radically different philosophy to ralphs on such matters private collectors can and do own fully functional and operational weapons in this country from pistols to tanks the matter of deactivation is much less of an issue for somebody looking to donate a military artifact to a u.s museum versus private collection as opposed to someone in a non-u.s country those interested in preserving an artifact in europe have much less choice in the matter not that many people have their grandfather's tank in the attic to donate to either public or private collections so to a point ralph is actually an interesting person to choose to make the museum response now both of them of course make valid comments as ralph did i'm going to put the links to all three videos now in the description below go ahead check them out and then come back here cue pause but intermission music all right i am not so much going to stake a position for or against the perspective of museums versus private collectors i am not a museum staff member and i don't own a collection of anything except a bunch of small arms which for my field doesn't really count instead i'm going to make some third-party observations based on my discussions with a large number of the leaders in the tank field from both the public and private sectors publicly i think both museums and collectors are required as a side note public can mean accessible to the public or not privately owned i do try to make the distinction clear as to which i mean when i say the word public in the rest of this video but if i slip please try to extrapolate which of the two i actually mean the first thing to say is that things are entirely situational depending on the geographic region and the nature of the subject matter and not just on the question of whether or not the guns work or if holes have to be cut in the armor of the subject vehicle like in germany it's impossible to make any overarching statements which are applicable to the us as the germany as to the vatican the next thing to say is that as ralph points out it's down to the almighty dollar or pound or euro whatever ralph very correctly points out that the money is a huge issue for a museum which can get funding from either ticket sales or from the government unless they're fortunate enough to have a wealthy sponsor and unfortunately government money just isn't particularly dependable you may have noticed how the u.s is one of the few major countries in the world without a national tank museum it has an absolutely massive collection of vehicles just not a public museum the were plans to create one opposite national infantry museum they ended up having to try private fundraising and it failed this also brings a small difference to the first point in ralph's video ralph quotes the purpose of a museum straight from the manual as it were however if you were to go and ask len or rob over in fort benning they will explicitly tell you that the purpose of the army's vehicle collection is the training of u.s troops not the teaching of the public they do want to teach the public at large and are doing the best they can to achieve it but it is not their mission statement so public access is only a nice to have i suspect this also is the case for the australian army's museum and pacopanio last i checked it was officially a unit in the australian army they just happen to have a few buildings available for the public to wander within the limits of base access and funding but either way no drachmas no museum whatever the funding source be a public ticket sales private endowments the first priority of the museum is the survival of itself and the collection it houses richard smith and bobbington made it very clear a couple of years ago as we were chatting about the rearrangements which were being made in the collection that they had no choice but to become family friendly for two reasons the first as ian points out is simply to be something which is viable for a family on vacation somewhere it increases ticket sales increases revenue and allows the museum to do everything else it does the second as ralph points out is that once they're there you have to hold their attention in order to teach anything the panzer museum is in a bit of a rejiggering of its own for similar reasons to bobbington way back in the day i was giving tours of the mvtf collection now you've seen in some of the old chieftains hatch videos basically four large buildings with side by side something like a hundred armored vehicles on display the largest public display of armor in north america with vehicles ranging from the common to the rare first we had to put a minimum age on access which immediately limits some of the audience who have families and secondly even if we did get those 12 to 15 year olds it was a bear because at show up they go oh cool tanks and then their interest wanes in about 20 minutes after they're told no they're not going to move they're certainly not going to shoot and you're not allowed climbing them and all it did was it just made it difficult to teach the adults who were still trying to pay attention making the museum more family friendly even if it does mean reducing the numbers of vehicles on display makes both financial sense for the museum and also better enables the museum to teach those people who are now inside their doors and a potential captive audience if their attention can remain captured now this can apply both to public and private collections as well arguably the best tank museum in the us right now is the american heritage museum in massachusetts remember private collections can be museums open to the public as well and we go in it's not arranged like the world war ii holland bobbington nor is it displayed in the same manner as those exact same vehicles were when they were the mvtf collection in california they have the vehicle spread out they are placed in some form of environmental context even the lighting is tuned to evoke a certain response to the audience such as blue for the cold or the battle of the bulge or orange for the heat of desert storm they have a physically moving audio visual display in the t-3485 versus panther now these features do absolutely nothing for me but they will be fantastic in aiding the typical tourist who is the ticket buying punter who makes up the majority of the visitorship and yes you buy tickets not all private collectors need the money from visitors but if the museum is to be an item in perpetuity it needs income the fate of the littlefield collection is proof of this it was not a viable museum an absolutely astonishing world-class collection a font of knowledge for the specialist but utterly non-viable as a museum on its own without the owner's support the rump of the collection lives on a massachusetts and hopefully it will be viable in itself so if we take it as a given that the museum must for lack of a better turn or phrase dumb down which in fairness ian does not blame them for the question remains as the ian's concern what of the specialist and his needs now i don't think the matter is inherently as bad as ian states at least not for the purposes of tanks ralph's dojo comment is amusing but i think likely underplays in actually his favor the idea that a specialist will not learn anything by visiting a public museum i have yet to go visit a public exhibit collection of tanks of any size even on a repeat visit and not learned something tanks are massive multi-component vehicles with thousands of parts and every single part is there for a purpose and i for one don't know them all so i can go to a museum and where a common tourist may go oh so that's how big a sherman really is i'll go look at the same tank and go ah so that's what that bolt does the idea that a museum can lose a tank in the back storage and nobody knows where it is does seem a little bit unlikely when you're talking about something a few meters long and weighing multiple tons and no the t28 doesn't count because at the time it wasn't in a museum's control generally speaking we know what is in the reserve collections of tank museums i grant that in ian's case there are many many more firearms and firearms collections than there are tanks and tank collections but that's not my focus the question is if we know where a tank is how accessible is it now i'm personally in the happy position that by now most museums from kansas threaten us know me and if i ask to see a vehicle around the back in the shed they know i likely won't damage the vehicle or myself and they will just let me do it better yet if i bring my camera and as long as i put out accurate information then it's both advertising for them and it also furthers their cause of distributing knowledge of the non-wiki available type again as ralph put it museum creators aren't dragons hoarding their gold i mean for example if hillary doyle wrote anyone in the world who owned a german afv and said i'd like to come crawl over it please i have absolutely no doubt that he will be welcomed with open arms be the vehicle officially on public display or not i would not be surprised to discover that ian has a similar level of access to firearms museum but what if you're a serious enthusiast you want to look at something in reserve collection but the museum doesn't know you from adam and that's where you start to get in the difference between the theory and the practice which i think is the crux of ian's point in theory any museum will be pleased to show off the lesser-known stuff which often i have found to be is oh this is a favorite of the museum staff and the museum staff are themselves sad it's not on public display i have not yet encountered any museum staff who will be averse to the idea of somebody writing ahead of time asking permission to see something in reserve collection or the document archives or whatever for whatever reason and then making arrangements for that access the practical reality however this again acquire applies equally to both public and private museum is that even though the will may be there the ability may not be it could be that they just don't have a staff member handy to keep an eye on you because they're short staffed due to a lack of funds they could be that their insurance policy flat prohibits non-staff from clambering on the tanks again these are things you throw enough money and the problem goes away but it's a lot of money for very little gain for a museum oftentimes and thus is a low priority and so on in an ideal world a public museum will equally accommodate the specialist and the neophyte but we don't live in ideal world but they'll still do their best to help i more than once emailed the creator a question they've hopped downstairs into a tank found the answer and emailed me back but i would challenge anyone to post below and say i attempted to access a museum's reserve collection or documents archive because i had a specialty request and i was refused due to an arbitrary decision like we don't know you similarly if you are a public museum staff member i'd be very surprised if you would write in the comments below and say we don't allow access to the reserve collection even with arrangements made ahead of time and yes ian does mention one of the flaws with private collections some folks just don't like to advertise maybe because if you advertise that you have a panther in the basement the government will come and take it from you maybe it's for security and i know a couple of private tank collections who don't advertise where they are because if it's a secret there's less chance of theft or vandalism and yes there are downsides to this for example i'd love to do an inside the hatch on an m88 now granted i've not actually yet asked the army if they let me do one of theirs but i know there is a gas m88 in private hands in the u.s it's the one littlefield used to have i hear rumor it's in maine with the same owner as the m103 and the m60a2 which i would love to crawl over again but the guy wants his privacy and i have absolutely no idea where it is or who to ask for access if you are the owner please pm me but as far as i can tell for now these three vehicles in excellent condition may as well no longer exist for the historian or enthusiast a hopefully temporary state of affairs i would observe that one of ralph's arguments isn't as strong as perhaps he'd like though he points out that if someone donates to a museum it'll be preserved and if it's donated to a private collector it can be sold destroyed whatever with no controls yes and no not that museum don't sometimes divest themselves of artifacts either but a tank is a five or six digit dollar investment for a private collector i find it highly unlikely that he'll willingly destroy it in fact being a tank is also pretty hard to unwillingly destroy it now there is such an argument happening in the aviation museum world because if you fly it aircraft accidents tend to destroy the artifact in question that's a that's a debate that bismarck can attack and if it's going to get sold the places it would likely be sold to are either another enthusiast with an interest in preservation because these things aren't cheap or museum however the government isn't necessarily the best steward of things either ian made the point of government destruction of experimental firearms but happens to tanks too i have records from the archives ordering vehicles be sent to the aberdeen proving grounds collection to be maintained as part of the historical record they sure as heck don't exist anymore supposedly they were cut up in the early 1950s if you look at the one remaining churchill gun carrier and a lot in bovington there's really not much left of it because the government decided to use it as a hard target and if you think that modern governments are any more enlightened about their property they go no further than the destruction a year or so ago of the collection in danbury connecticut now in fairness to the armor collection and benning they were as furious as the rest of us were they weren't the ones who ordered the vehicles be caught up but the bottom line is that dilapidated though they were when they're in the custody of a private individual they existed and after the government retook control well they didn't exist anymore the private collectors be they either publicly accessible collections or not tend to be better funded for restoration work if you look at all the best preserved vehicles that are privately owned a government museum often will stop a coat of paint on the outside to whatever jewelry rigging it takes to get a vehicle moving again that's about all they can do if they can even do that much a private collector has just spent a third of a million dollars on a sherman can probably afford to get it cleaned up get the tin work rebuilt radio and intercoms installed and even but stowage and personal kit and dummy ammunition inside and out and in the case of collectors with the right permits in the right states live ammunition and they'll shoot them i have my eyes set on a few us vehicles for example the film a couple of tds and a 76 millimeter sherman but these ones are going to be a privately owned not public because i'm trying to get to film the best preserved conditioned vehicles that i can get a hold of this applies also to moving equipment i cannot overstate just how much of a different impression you get between seeing and hearing a vehicle moving and a vehicle static i found the is-3 to be sort of interesting when static but when i finally start moving it was menacing in an entirely different way and suddenly i can get a new appreciation for the panic in the west when these things show up in the berlin parade now the european government museums usually do have some form of history and motion event tankfest is the obvious one but the other national tank museum usually have a running day or a weekend but if you're in the us and you want to see a running tank you pretty much have to rely on the private sector to do it there are one c2z exceptions like the texas military forces museum and similarly if you're interested in airplanes as well and you want to hear the roar of four right cyclones i could be wrong but i don't think the u.s air force flies any b-17s or b-29s at air shows the private sector does most private owners are just as passionate about teaching the story and history of the vehicles that they own as museum staff are and most are in a happy position that they're able to do so by doing what the vehicles were built to do in the first place move and shoot the big exception here and this is almost a worldwide oddity is the ontario regiment museum their collection up near toronto they're an accredited canadian forces museum with a large collection of vehicles all of which are routinely run it's not a once a year thing of a portion of the collection like most government museum and i suspect it's actually a public-private partnership i've never asked but somehow they're in this amazing confluence of position where they could both afford to maintain and run a few score vehicles and they are also allowed to have vehicle operators and maintainers who are volunteers and not employed staff to make up the required numbers of staffing for running these things i cannot think of any tank museum or private collection anywhere else in the world with the same combination of resources and permissive regulatory environment which allows them to have so many vehicles able to run routinely for the general public the other exception to this rule is with relation to museum pieces firing live ammunition you will have seen the russian government's t-34s being driven hard and put through their paces in the tank by athlon this year and the danish army have this annual event called abenhade where they drag vehicles and crewmen out of museum storage and send main gun downrange on public display so seeing museum peace tanks fire live ammo is certainly more common in the u.s but there is no regulatory reason why it must be so if there is the will and the money government museums can do it too finally note of the effect of the internet or museum ralph is correct that there has been a shift in museum opinion on the merits of the internet so for example there is a matter of virtual tours or videos covering the artifacts there is something of a concern a few years ago that if a museum went and put its wares on public display for free on the internet the people would say well i've seen it now no point my showing up in person and then the museum would lose out on a admission fee it took a little while for the data to show that actually such things increase interest and attendance people are going oh cool and i get to see that for myself in person some museums have also started crowdsourcing information they'll put an obscure picture or detail or question out there in the hopes of gaining more information for a while the old school were afraid of publicly saying we don't know because after all they were the place that one was supposed to go to find such knowledge now as ralph says museums are happy to use the internet to gain information as much as the rest of us are so anyway the bottom line for me is generally that if they're working as they should a public museum be it either government or private owned is equally beneficial to the mission of teaching the basics to the masses and facilitating the research specialists unfortunately few museums are funded to the level that we would like to do such things and thus it has fallen on the private sector to fill the gap oh and if you do have a tank that you're not sure who to donate it to public and private give it to me i assure you i'll take good care of it anyway that's it response piece complete take care i'll see you on the next one

Channel: The_Chieftain

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Length: 21min 37sec (1297 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 21 2021