Philip Taverner knew he was on to something when he saw thousands of people queuing for up to five hours in the pouring rain to attend his exhibition: Treasures of Tutankhamun at the British Museum in 1972.
As a young marketing director for Times Newspapers, Taverner had been put in charge of the show that was jointly sponsored by The Times and The Sunday Times to mark the 50th anniversary of Howard Carter’s discovery of the boy pharaoh’s tomb in the Valley of Kings.
Harnessing all the tricks learnt as a PR executive when he helped to popularise the Pirelli calendar, Taverner effectively invented the “blockbuster exhibition” — a concept that over the years has made British art and antiquities more accessible to the British public.
Museum revolution was not on his mind when, in 1970, he was summoned to the office of Times Newspaper’s chairman, Denis Hamilton, to meet the Egyptian ambassador. He was told that he would be organising an exhibition based on the contents of the tomb of Tutankhamun, the discovery of which was revealed by The Times in a famous scoop by Arthur Merton. Two months after his report, in January 1923, Carter and Lord Carnarvon signed an exclusive deal with The Times to cover the tomb’s excavation.
Taverner’s was an inspired appointment. Despite his inexperience, he showed a talent for organising things that dated back to his days putting on plays at university in Oxford. Charming and jovial, he presided over a team of Egyptologists and designers, rose above the tantrums, and persuaded them to work together to create an almost theatrical setting for the 50 exhibits of “greatest hits” that Dr Ivan Edwards, keeper of Egyptian antiquities at the British Museum, handpicked from the Museum of Cairo. The result was a mesmerising re-creation of Carter’s discovery of the golden treasures in the almost airless tomb. Visitors walked into hushed, darkened rooms and some recalled “trembling” when they saw the death mask.
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Word quickly spread, aided by Taverner’s formidable PR apparatus. “It’s a very specialised field, getting out news releases every day, building up expectation before the show opens, telling every tour operator, school, hotel,” Taverner recalled. He organised special trains for school children — some 35,000 youngsters, paying half-price (25p), visited in the first six weeks alone — and innovated merchandising. Sales of key rings, T-shirts, mugs and tea towels increased profits to £654,000.
The public streamed in from 10am to 9pm six days a week, and half a day on the seventh. It attracted almost 1.7 million visitors and made world news. Time reported: “The English, normally phlegmatic about art, greeted the event with ecstasies of Tutankhamunophilia.” The US national security adviser Henry Kissinger persuaded the Egyptian president Nasser to allow the exhibition to go on a world tour.
The People’s Republic of China was impressed. Taverner was asked to chair the committee to organise The Genius of China exhibition at the Royal Academy and also sponsored by The Times and The Sunday Times. He soon had 853 exhibits under his responsibility and Sino-Anglo relations in his hands. He scored another hit as 750,000 visitors queued down Piccadilly.
Taverner cashed in. With Peter Saabor, he set up the company, Carlton Cleeve, to organise other museum blockbusters. Operating from a spartan office near Marble Arch, they put on more shows at the Royal Academy including The Gold of Eldorado in 1978 and The Horses of San Marco in 1979. Taverner was adept at bringing in sponsors, entertaining them to lunch at the Royal Society of Arts. He even persuaded Imperial Tobacco that the company’s link to ash would make it an appropriate sponsor of the exhibition Pompeii AD79 in 1976.
The exhibition, 1776, marking the bicentenary of the start of the American War of Independence drew 60,000 visitors a week to the National Maritime Museum. The Queen opened the exhibition, declaring that it “traces with sympathy and understanding the events that led up to the eventual confrontation.”
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Taverner’s only relative failure was the 1977 British Genius exhibition. Showcasing inventions, it had a wide sweep. Taverner admitted that trying to put on such a big exhibition in a temporary exhibition space in Battersea Park was too ambitious. The high construction cost meant less money for PR and merchandising and it was a commercial failure.
By the end of the Seventies institutions such as the Royal Academy began to organise big exhibitions in-house. Taverner left the company and returned to his first love by opening a garden centre in ancient walled flower beds at Herriard Park in Hampshire.
Philip Anthony Taverner was born in Chelmsford in 1929, the son of Wilfred Taverner, a Bank of England executive, and Leila. Educated at Bryanston, he spent school holidays working as a farm labourer during the war and was rewarded with an adult’s food ration.
He studied politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford where he joined the dramatic society, touring with Maggie Smith in an Oxford Playhouse production of Twelfth Night. He later joined the tyre company Pirelli and opened a public relations company for them. He was headhunted by the Thomson Group and, after its acquisition of Times Newspaper Group, he was appointed marketing director at Times Newspapers.
“He innovated merchandising with sales of key rings and mugs
After his garden centre failed, his close friend, John Letts, asked him to lead a project to found the Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s grade I listed Temple Meads Station, in Bristol. It opened in 2003. “At first sight the idea seems crazy, a sort of jingoistic orgy, but that is far from what we intend to do,” he said. “The influences of the empire and Commonwealth have been immense and have been relatively unrecorded and we felt we should put this right.”
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Taverner also became a judge for the Museum of the Year Award (now the Art Fund Museum of the Year) organised by National Heritage. After the charity stopped presenting the award, the Elizabeth Frink sculpture that had served as the prize was sold at his suggestion.
In later years, he lived in the Wiltshire town of Devizes with his wife of 50 years Susannah, “Zan”, a social worker, and their three sons: Rupert, a family therapist, Jonathan, a cabinet maker, and Crispin who works for the green transport charity, Sustrans. Gardening took up most of his spare time. His wife recalled an outing that was curtailed when the heavens opened and he turned the car round with a screech to save his potato crop from being washed into a stream.
He received a diagnosis of prostate cancer in 2006. As a master team builder he was comforted in his illness by the many friends he had kept in touch with in the heady years of revolutionising museum exhibitions.
Philip Taverner, exhibition organiser, was born July 2, 1929. He died on February 6, 2016, aged 86