Alexander Vesey Bethune Norman, B.A. (10 February 1930, Delhi — 20 July 1998, Edinburgh).
`Nick’ Norman was born on 10 February 1930 in Delhi, where his father was serving with the Gordon Highlanders, and was brought up in Aberdeenshire at the New Castle of Kildrummy (actually a late nineteenth-century house) on Donside. His landowning family was ardently Scottish and Norman was educated at Glenalmond before going up to Peterhouse to read agriculture, with a view to spending his life on the land. Finding the theoretical course unsatisfactory, Norman abandoned it at the end of his second year to gain hands-on experience as a farm manager near Bridge of Allan and later at Glenshee. As befitted a colonel’s son, he joined the territorial army but, during a selection board for a commission in the Scottish Horse, he suffered a severe back injury which put paid not only to any further military activity but also to his livelihood as a farmer. Norman had enjoyed Cambridge life and, now that he had to find a new career, his thoughts took an academic rather than a practical turn. He enrolled as an external student at London University and completed his general degree course in two years instead of the normal three. He worked as a volunteer at the Wallace Collection under the directorship of Sir James Mann, the outstanding arms and armour scholar of his day, and went back to Scotland in 1957 as an assistant curator at the Scottish United Services Museum in Edinburgh Castle, and also honorary curator of Sir Walter Scott’s collection of arms and armour at Abbotsford. The history of swords and armour (firearms left him cold) was now Norman’s special study and he seized the opportunity to return to the Wallace Collection, with its unrivalled collection of European and oriental material, in 1963 as assistant to Sir James Mann. Although he was able to pursue research in his chosen field, staffing arrangements were such that Norman had to undertake additional tasks, one of which was to catalogue the holdings of majolica, an exercise in rigorous scholarship which was met with praise from his peers when The Catalogue of Ceramics, Wallace Collection, Part I, was published, jointly with his first wife, Catherine Barne, in 1976. Norman had begun to publish on swords and militaria in 1964 with Arms and Armour, followed by Warrior to Soldier, 449-1660 (1966) with Don Pottinger (reprinted as English Weapons and Warfare, 449-1660 in 1979); Small Swords and Military Swords (1967); The Medieval Soldier (1971) and Arms and Armour in the Royal Scottish Museum (1972), all published during his fourteen years at the Wallace Collection, often in the USA as well as the UK. In 1977 Norman’s dream came true with his appointment as Master of the Armouries with residence in the Tower of London, though the dream was soon to have nightmarish overtones since he found himself in the right place at the wrong time.What he had regarded as a major centre of scholarship was gradually being reduced to a theme park for tourists and coach parties; thereby, the trustees claimed, rendering the Armouries’ work more accessible to the world at large. Nevertheless, Norman succeeded in expanding the conservation department by the acquisition of up-to-date scientific equipment and appointing specialist staff; speeding up the cataloguing of the collections; organising the vast reserve collections and improving interpretation in the galleries. A sop to the trustees was the display of armour on life-like dummies wearing contemporary costume but the acquisition of important items such as the Southampton Armour and the Warwick Chamfron was what Norman considered the Armouries was all about. In 1985 he organized the purchase of the unique seventeenth-century private armoury at Littlecote House in Wiltshire at the pre-auction price of £580,000, thereby preserving it intact at its original site as an outreach of the Royal Armouries.The sum was raised at the eleventh hour with help from many grant-making bodies and individuals, not least the eleven members of Norman’s staff who, in Civil War costume, walked from Littlecote to London in two days to publicise the appeal. Such frenetic activity, coupled with the controversial conversion of the Armouries from a departmental museum run by the Department of the Environment into a national museum under a board of independent trustees, was alien to Norman, the gentle, civilized, conservative curator, and he opted for early retirement in 1988. His achievements as a scholar were considerable, notably his demonstration that the finest products of the armourer’s craft were no less works of art than those of the sculptors, goldsmiths and jewellers who frequently designed them; and his promotion of the importance of medieval military effigies in the study of arms and armour. He was a founder member, and president in 1986-91, of the Church Monuments Society and had recorded virtually every surviving example of military effigies in Britain, drawing many of them himself.. After ten years’ research, he produced a major work, The Rapier and Small-Sword, 1460-1820 (1980), the first full-scale typology of hilts dated from contemporary paintings and sculpture. His Supplement to James Mann’s Catalogue of European Arms and Armour in the Wallace Collection, published in 1986, was, in fact, an original reference work. Norman was a vice-president of NADFAS 1984-9, of the Arms and Armour Society 1983 and a Liveryman of the Gunmakers Company from 1981. He moved back to Edinburgh in 1993 and in 1996 wrote the catalogue for the National Trust for Scotland’s exhibition, The Swords and the Sorrows at Culloden Moor to mark the 250th anniversary of the battle. He researched as assiduously as ever and his definitive Catalogue of the Armour and Edged Weapons in the Royal Collections will be published in 2000/1 and his joint work with Margaret Scott, Scottish Military Effigies, is ready for the press. Norman’s vast archive, consisting of notes on armour, swords and military effigies, microscopic drawings and photographs was originally bequeathed to the Royal Armouries but his disagreement over the collection’s future role and the move to Leeds made him change his will in favour of the Antiquaries. The bequest also included a number of valuable books, among them his annotated copies of Laker’s Catalogue of the Windsor Armoury and the same author’s five-volume Record of European Armour and Arms. Norman died in Edinburgh on 20 July 1998 and a memorial meeting to celebrate his life and work was held in Burlington House on 9 October 1999, attended by Fellows, members of the Church Monuments Society, the Arms and Armour Society and the Monumental Brass Society. His widow, Anne, read a paper on `The Auld Stane Man’: Military Sepulchral Effigies in Lowland Scotland up to 1550’. She administrates the A V B Norman Research Fund to promote the study of subjects dear to his heart at the National Galleries of Scotland, of which she is registrar.
