Elspeth King obituary | Scotland

Elspeth King, who has died aged 76, changed the course of Scottish Museum practice by insisting that the daily lives of workers deserved the same care and attention as fine art or aristocratic antiquities.

As curator of Glasgow’s People’s Palace from 1974 to 1990, she refashioned a faded municipal institution into a living record of the city’s social history, and showed that museums could speak with the voices of the communities they serve.

When King arrived at the People’s Palace, the museum’s purpose was sidetracked. Founded in 1898 as a citizens’ museum in Glasgow’s East End, by the 1970s it had become a dusty place and a dwindling number of visitors. King brought new energy and a conviction that the city’s people—shipbuilders, factory workers, musicians, and market traders—should be at the heart of its story.

Over the course of 16 years, she has curated more than 40 exhibitions, many of which were developed directly with local groups. Scotland Sober and Free (1979), marking the 150th anniversary of the temperance movement, attracted record audiences; Another, in collaboration with her colleague and partner Michael Donnelly, assistant curator and expert in 19th- and early 20th-century Scottish stained glass, celebrated the stained glass tradition in Glasgow.

The 1981 show demonstrated cutting-edge research on the city’s pivotal role in the stained glass industry and, through Donnelly’s leadership, helped rescue and preserve endangered works, as well as establish an important permanent collection at the museum.

King’s most controversial early success was comedian Billy Connolly’s “Banana Shoes”, designed by pop artist Edmund Smith, which she included in one of her first exhibitions. Some visitors and critics protested that Connolly’s blunt language and reputation had no place in the museum. King argued that the shoes captured Glasgow’s irreverent spirit.

They have become part of the palace’s permanent collection, one of its most famous exhibits, a symbol of her belief that culture should include street laughter as much as history’s lessons.

This belief was evident when she made her cat Smudge the museum’s official “Rodent Catcher” in 1979, and a member of the GMB – a small act that epitomizes her combination of intelligence and social conscience.

King was also not afraid to take a political stand. In the late 1970s, she led opposition to a highway project that threatened to demolish the People’s Palace. To further the museum’s cause, she enlisted the then unknown artist Alasdair Gray to document city life. His ongoing show in Glasgow (1978), a series of more than 30 paintings, gave the museum new life and arguably saved it from closure. The friendship between King and Gray continued until his death in 2019.

Under King’s direction, the People’s Palace won European Museum of the Year in 1981 and British Museum of the Year in 1983, but its outspoken defense of communal culture often brought it into conflict with Glasgow City Council.

In 1990 she left the museum, having been passed over for promotion as Keeper of Social History in Glasgow, a position that would have spanned across several museums, including the People’s Palace.

She became Director of the Dunfermline Heritage Trust, where she oversaw the restoration of Abbott House, transforming it into a heritage center steeped in local history.

In 1994, Gray was commissioned again, this time to paint a massive thistle roof mural symbolizing 10 centuries of Dunfermline’s story. That same year she was appointed director of the Sterling Smith Art Gallery and Museum, where she remained for 24 years, reappointing Smidge to official duties.

At Smith, it expanded its collections, built partnerships with schools and community groups, and fought repeated threats of closure. When funding cuts in 2018 put the museum in jeopardy, more than 7,000 people signed a petition to keep it open – a measure of the public loyalty the king has inspired. After her retirement that year, she continued to campaign for the restoration of the People’s Palace and its adjacent Winter Gardens, both of which were again in disrepair. Her persistence helped garner political and public support for its current renovation.

In addition to her organizational work, King has made a lasting contribution to the recovery of women’s history in Scotland. Since the 1970s, she has researched the Scottish suffrage movement, revealing the lives of women who fought, were arrested, and endured force-feeding for political equality.

At the time, English activists were well known, but Scottish women had largely disappeared from public memory. King’s patient archival work and oral history brought figures such as Helen Crawford, Ethel Morehead, Frances Parker, and Janie Allan back into the national consciousness. Through exhibitions at the People’s Palace, lectures and her own publications, she showed that Scotland’s struggle for the vote was as fierce and creative as any in Britain.

Born in Lochure, Fife, into a working-class community, King developed an early appreciation for uncovering neglected histories.

The daughter of a miner, William King, and his wife, Christina (née Cowie), she attended Beath High School in Cowdenbeath before studying medieval history at the University of St Andrews, then taking a postgraduate degree in museum studies at the University of Leicester.

She met Donnelly while working as a museum assistant at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in 1973, the year before she joined the People’s Palace.

In 2005, she was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Stirling in recognition of her contributions to Scottish museums and the promotion of Scottish history and culture.

King’s life and work showed that museums can be places of civic pride and shared memory rather than quiet shrines of privilege. Through her exhibitions and example, I learned that Scottish history belongs to everyone.

Donnelly survived it.