In reply to Tom Ripley Mountain Guide:
Dear Tom,
I'm not going to bother responding to your personal jibes - I don't need to. Your eloquence says far more about you, and I suspect your personal predjudices, than it does about me.
You do however, attempt to criticise in a particularly petty way various individuals and organisations connected with the NME - you have been totally unfair in doing this. As anyone who has actual experience of running a museum or exhibition will tell you they are commercially very challenging and that all are heavily reliant on external funding to survive. This applies to every institution of this type from the British Museum down
It is particularly offensive, and totally inaccurate, for you to describe my former employers - Rheged, or more accurately Westmorland Ltd - as "money grabbers". They are a commercial organisation, and as such have to live in the real world, but their approach to the exhibition was anything, but money grabbing. Quite the opposite in fact and they proved to be highly altruistic in their support of the NME during it complex history. I'll be amazed if you talk to anyone connected with NME, be that in the BMC or MHT, who has enough direct experience of the events connected with the exhibition to have a balanced opinion, who will take a contrary view to this.
The NME was only got off the ground and maintained for over 6 years through the very hard work and great commitment of a number of people, who were mostly volunteers. You may feel they were the "wrong people", but they acted rather than talked.
The success of the NME is perhaps best gauged by the comments left, by thousands of visitors, in the exhibition's Visitor's Book. I read it at least once a week and I can recall only three negative comments during either the 5 years I was connected with the exhibition, or during the preceding 18 months of its life. We must have done something right.
Yours Sincerely,
Robin Ashcroft