A. D. Baynes-Cope

A.D. Baynes-Cope was an expert in the field of document examination and conservation at the British Museum for over 20 years. He is best known for his pioneering work on the structure and conservation of globes and his small monograph, The Study and Conservation of Globes (1985), is still the main work of reference on the subject. More popular, but equally authoritative, is his Caring for Books (1981) which is deservedly still in print

David Baynes-Cope's father had served in the Royal Flying Corps in the First World War, and his sister, Beryl, was one of the few WAAFs to be killed, in a bombing raid on an airfield in the Second World War. Baynes-Cope thus felt a special affinity with the RAF which was to come to fruition some years later when he worked with the authorities at the Church of St Clement Danes in the Strand on the environmental conditions for the display of the RAF Books of Remembrance in the 1960s.

Born in London in 1928, Baynes-Cope was educated at the Stationers' Company School at Hornsey, and then at Trinity College, Dublin, from which he emerged with a degree in Chemistry in 1951. His first employment was at the Laboratory of the Government Chemist where his meticulous laboratory technique was put to good use on analysis for government contracts and on the safety of the carriage of dangerous goods at sea. One of his projects was a contribution to showing that Piltdown Man was a modern hoax by an analysis of the uranium in the "fossil".

In 1960 he transferred to the Research Laboratory of the British Museum with responsibility for the investigation of artefacts made of animal and vegetable products, where his head of department was Dr A.E. Werner, with whom Baynes-Cope had come into contact during his first year at Trinity. He quickly narrowed this field down to paper, in all its forms, and he was soon seen as the person of first (and last) resort for paper conservators throughout the UK with a technical problem relating to books or archives. His knowledge of chemistry was encyclopaedic, and many years ago a former colleague explained why; Baynes-Cope's father had gone blind at a relatively early age and he feared the same fate. Thus he set about "learning the textbooks" so that if the day ever came when he could not read, he would still be useful to those around him.

Many of his projects were, perforce, not for publication, like his work on the Vinland Map. When he first saw it he was sure that it was a fake, but could not prove it. It was left to an American team with the latest scientific equipment to show that the ink contains titanium, and is, therefore, modern. He also worked on the authenticity of a manuscript letter from the Prophet Mohammed to the Emperor Heraclius, which analysis proved was undoubtedly a contemporary chancery copy, and was involved with the original copy of the Magna Carta belonging to Lincoln Cathedral.

When it was proposed to send this precious document on an ill-considered series of foreign exhibitions, Baynes-Cope was asked to advise on the safety of the document in transit between the various venues. He got to fly in a Vulcan bomber to the United States to monitor the conditions within a mock-up of the travelling case, thus fulfilling his dreams of flying with the RAF. For Hereford Cathedral he designed the suspension system now used to support the world famous Mappa Mundi and advised on the environmental conditions for its display.

On a more mundane level, at one stage he spent many happy hours trying to discover the source of leaks of confidential management information into the hands of the British Museum Trade Unions by comparing the products of a number of photocopiers which may have been used by "the mole". He was particularly at home with this type of forensic work, as attending meetings of the Medico-Legal Society were one of his great pleasures, together with listening to light operetta and Radio 4. He eschewed television. For many years he was also a regular at the Thursday Discourses at the Royal Institution until he resigned after a disagreement with one of the senior officials.

Baynes-Cope was a fellow of the Society of Archivists and of the Society of Antiquaries of London, a Liveryman of the Stationers' Company, a some-time member of the Architectural Advisory panel of Westminster Abbey, and a former chairman of the United Kingdom Group of the International Institute for Conservation. He was, however, most proud of his Fellowship of the Royal Society of Chemistry and his membership of the British Standards working parties on the storage and exhibition of archival documents (BS 5454) and on the binding and treatment of books (BS 4971).

Baynes-Cope was an old-fashioned chemist who, in many ways, was born half a century too late as when instrumental methods of analysis began to replace the classical micro-methods in the 1960s he soon began to be out of his depth. He clung to the techniques that he knew, but when the British Library was born out of the British Museum in 1973, the decision was made not to have a laboratory with a paper chemist on the staff, but rather to rely on contracting out scientific research.

For 10 years Baynes-Cope applied his knowledge to other organic artefacts in the British Museum, but in January 1984 he accepted early retirement, sold the parental home in London, and went to live in a cottage at Stanton, near Bury St Edmunds, which he had purchased some years earlier. Here he honed his expertise as a maker of jams and pickles, especially pickled walnuts collected from his own tree. From Stanton he made regular trips to London and Copenhagen and kept in touch with a legion of correspondents to whom he was a firm, if sometimes exacting, friend and for whom he was a never-ending source of advice.

"BC" Baynes-Cope will be remembered as a kind man, but rather an eccentric one (he once attended a conservation conference in Hungary in the height of summer in a bowler hat and carrying a rolled umbrella). He was good company and enjoyed cooking for himself and for friends. He had a wicked sense of humour but was able to laugh at himself; in retirement he was granted a coat of arms, one of the devices on which was a sloth. He will be much missed by a large number of friends and ex- colleagues from around the world. He never married but tended his mother, who exercised a dominant influence over him, through a long widowhood

Andrew Oddy