A few weeks ago, the BBC reported on the opening of an exhibition in the British Museum comprising artefacts collected by Henry Wellcome, a nineteenth-century English philanthropist, who amassed a fortune selling pharmaceuticals. If he had lived today, as one of the curators of the exhibition remarked, Wellcome would probably have been classified as suffering from obsessive-compusive disorder, since his collection totalled more than a million items. It was five times the size of the collection belonging to the Louvre in Paris at one point, while his expenditure on it eventually came to exceed that of the British Museum itself.

His dream, said the BBC, was to create a ‘museum of mankind’ - a dream which was, however, never realized, resulting in the collection being dispersed all over the world after his death. As a purveyor of pharmaceuticals, of course, he had a particular interest in health and medicine, and that provided the framework for his purchases. In practice, however, he collected what the BBC described as “a little of everything,” from Florence Nightingale’s shoes, to amputation saws, to early photographs of Navajo Indians, to the ‘Claxton earcap’ - “a cloth harness designed to be worn by children at night to correct their protruding ears.”

Many of his contemporaries must have thought of him simply as a junk collector, and he certainly frequented junk dealers (or rag and bone men) in addition to more upmarket outlets in his quest for samples of everything that had affected human health down the ages. But what he was in reality, was a kind of social historian, who used his considerable fortune to save for posterity those items which had formed part of the everyday life of countless generations all over the world.

It is the small, commonplace artefacts which tend to be destroyed in the process of time; yet it is sometimes these very things which give us the best insight into how our ancestors lived. In the early days of metropolitan museums, it was the grand sweep of the great civilizations which attracted attention and inspired the collector. Nowadays, in contrast, we have come to understand the value too of sometimes quite humble and homely items, which once had a central place in the life of ordinary people.

Guyana has never really had a social history museum - or at least, not one that lasted although individual items which might otherwise be found in one are on display in the National Museum collection. Some years ago, Patrick D’Argan’s house was left for the purpose of establishing a social history museum, but the funds were never available to sustain the vision, and the project was subsequently abandoned. It is unfortunate, because with its welter of different cultures, this country has a rich social history.

For all of that there are people around who at a private level operate in what might be called the Wellcome tradition, collecting, or in some cases preserving items already in their possession, for the benefit of posterity. Perhaps the pioneer was the late H H Nicholson, although his collecting was done in Africa itself, and did not encompass items made by the Africans in Guyana. However, he did bequeath his remarkable collection to the nation on his death, and so that, at least, is now a public museum.

Nowadays, there are people like Mrs Margery Kirkpatrick, who because of her ancestry naturally takes a particular interest in the Chinese tradition, both material and otherwise, preserving the things her family has passed down. Then there is Mr Gary Serrao, who has created a small, but extraordinary private museum on the West Coast, and whose collection includes books on Guyana.

One would hope that there are others including representatives of all the major cultural groups in the country - who are quietly collecting and conserving whatever they can from the past. We owe it to our forebears to preserve not just their photographs, but the material evidence of their world; we should see ourselves as custodians, saving the items which once belonged to our antecedents for our descendants. In the absence of a social history museum, the onus is on families to keep and then pass on the material things that earlier generations once used. In some cases, it may become possible to emulate Mr Serrao, and put small collections on display, if only for special occasions.

Not everything that is ‘old-time’ as the Guyanese say, is junk; much of it, as people like Wellcome recognised, belongs in a social history museum.