ABSTRACT
In response, the Museums Association (MA) proposed in August 1941 that a Reconstruction Committee be established to consider the planning of new museums. Museum activity, forward planning and debates about modernisation were far from being curtailed during the war as some historians have suggested. To make an impact on national planning, the MA's case needed to be coordinated with the proposals that other cultural institutions and education providers were formulating at this time, but the MA had failed to collaborate with organisations outside the museum profession a fatal flaw. Planning for peacetime was directed towards a return to 'normality', equated with pre-war professional autonomy. The Standing Commission had refused to support the MA in its proposals for local museums, but ironically the Treasury held a similarly negative view of the Commission's own proposals for the post-war reconstruction of the national museums, submitted in February 1943.
