‘Wales in miniature’
ON February 18, 1946, the 3rd Earl of Plymouth wrote to the National Museum of Wales to confirm his generous offer of St Fagans Castle and its gardens for the creation of a ‘Field Museum’. He was aware of the great interest that both his father and his grandfather had shown in the fledgling institution and believed that they would have approved of the bequest, to allow for ‘a much desired extension of its services to the public’.
The Field Museum to which the Earl referred —an open-air folk museum—had, in fact, been an aspiration within the National Museum for many years, almost since its foundation in 1907. Even at that early date, the folk-museum concept was well established, notably in Scandinavia, as William Evans Hoyle, the first director (1908-24), observed for himself soon after his appointment. Hoyle was much impressed with Skansen, near Stockholm, founded by Artur Hazelius in 1891, and concluded that ‘a similar open-air collection of historic buildings of Wales’ would undoubtedly prove of great public interest.
The development of this idea became something of a personal crusade for