Noble Frankland, former Bomber Command navigator who revived the Imperial War Museum but ran into controversy with his official history of the air offensive against Germany.
In May 1960 the Imperial War Museum, a dusty institution cramped under the leaking dome of the former Bethlem psychiatric hospital in south London, was seeking a new director. The advertisement in the Times was noted by a man reading his paper with unusual attention that morning, having left at home the documents he had intended to study on the train.
Noble Frankland was a decorated RAF veteran and a military historian about to publish a monumental history of the second world war strategic air offensive against Germany. He had no museum experience at all, and had been profoundly unimpressed by his own research visits to the IWM, but with a young family to support he decided to go for his first permanent, pensionable job. Frankland, who has died aged 97, won over the 15-person interview panel bristling with grandees including Admiral of the Fleet Sir Algernon Willis, and believed many candidates with museum experience had been put off by what he described as the museum's "dismal state of decay". Over his 22 years as director Frankland transformed this backwater into an internationally renowned research and education resource, and a major tourist attraction. Within six years the Queen opened an extension that dramatically improved the facilities and displays, with for the first time a cinema, to show the huge film collection. Frankland went on to add
HMS Belfast, the largest cruiser ever built for the Royal Navy, saved from being scrapped to tell the story of sea warfare, moored on the Thames near Tower Bridge. On an old airfield in Cambridgeshire, where Frankland first got permission to use a few hangars to store some of the museum's more gigantic objects, he created
Duxford, a world-famous air museum. Together the sites, now expanded to include the
Churchill War Rooms in Whitehall and the
IWM North in Salford, attract more than 3 million visitors annually. Frankland had found the museum a sad place, with a decaying and barely catalogued collection including a vast photographic archive, tended by a few dozen demoralised staff: the workforce rose to more than 300 over his tenure. In his entertaining and peppery book History at War: The Campaigns of an Historian (1998) – which Frankland insisted was not a memoir, but merely used personal experience to illustrate the difficulties of recording and interpreting authentic history – he recalled one typical display: "A large case of shell fuses each of which looked very much the same as the others. The subtle differences between these only moderately interesting public exhibits were explained in lengthy handwritten captions." The outgoing director, LR Bradley, had been there since the museum was founded in 1917, devoted, but avoiding outsiders and colleagues as much as possible. He was actually living in a tiny room off his office, and rarely left the building. He had strung a washing line across the boardroom, and was once saved by a staff member who got the laundry down just before the board members arrived. Bradley told Frankland that he had recommended the post of director be downgraded, and that he believed the museum, founded to mark the sacrifice and costly victories of the first world war, had lost its purpose with the advent of the second world war and the torrent of new material into its already overcrowded storage. Under Frankland's aegis, and since, the museum's mission has expanded to cover all the conflicts in which Britain or the Commonwealth has been involved since 1914. He used the collections in his role as a historical adviser to two major television series, the BBC's The Great War (1964), which enraged him by not fully distinguishing between genuine archive film and reconstructed battle scenes; and ITV's epic and award-winning 26-episode The World at War, produced by Jeremy Isaacs, at £900,000 in 1973-74 the most expensive factual series ever made. Frankland was known in his family as Bunny, a name he chose for himself as a small boy. His first name, Anthony, was never used, and according to his daughter, he detested the exotic Noble so much that at the museum he insisted on being addressed simply as Dr Frankland; to make clear he was not just pulling rank, he retained the increasingly old-fashioned honorific usage for all staff. He was the grandson of distinguished scientists, the chemist Percy Faraday Frankland (whose father was the chemist Edward Frankland) and the microbiologist Grace Toynbee. Noble's father, Edward, was a somewhat dilettante gentleman farmer in Ravenstonedale, Westmorland, largely supported by his wife, Maud (nee Metcalfe Gibson), the daughter of a wealthy engineer, while in his ample spare time he wrote a string of mainly unpublished novels. Staff for the isolated farm was a problem. Frankland recalled a butler who once threatened to murder the two rowdy small boys – rather than sack him, Edward rigged a coal scuttle over their bedroom door to raise the alarm for Noble and his brother, Raven. Noble won scholarships to Sedbergh school and then to Trinity College, Oxford, where his history studies were interrupted by RAF service in 1941. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross after serving as navigator for 34 operations with Bomber Command, at a time when the lives of many crews were measured in days. He told his daughter the labour exchange sent him to his next post, at the Air Historical Branch of the Air Ministry. There, with the help of his first wife, Diana (nee Tavernor), who during wartime had worked at Bletchley Park and translated captured German documents, he began work on what became the four-volume The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany, co-authored with Sir Charles Webster and published in 1961 – by which time Frankland had served a stint as official military historian at the Cabinet Office. It covered campaigns still provoking moral debate, including the bombing of cities such as Dresden and the resulting civilian casualties.
Their conclusion that the bombing was initially both inaccurate and ineffective led to some bitter attacks, particularly in the Beaverbrook press. Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris, head of Bomber Command during the war, described Frankland as "a somewhat rabid individual". Years after the book's publication, access to cabinet and air ministry papers revealed to Frankland the battles that had raged above his head over what should be included and how it should be handled. "There were fierce and threatening attacks from some of the great figures of the second world war," he wrote. His other published work included the biographies Crown of Tragedy (1960) about Tsar Nicholas II; Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester (1980), about the former president of the IWM trustees; and Witness of a Century (1993), about Queen Victoria's third son, Prince Arthur, who became governor general of Canada.
Frankland was appointed CBE in 1976, and CB in 1983; in 2016 he was made a Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur.
He is survived by his children, Linda and Roger, from his 1944 marriage to Diana, who died in 1981; and by three stepchildren, William, Cathy and Serena, from his 1982 marriage to Sally (nee Davies), who died in 2015.
Anthony Noble Frankland, museum director, born 4 July 1922; died 31 October 2019
source "The Guardian"