Elspeth King, who has died aged 76, changed the course of Scottish museum practice by insisting that the everyday lives of working people deserved the same care and attention as fine art or aristocratic relics.
As curator of the People’s Palace museum in Glasgow from 1974 to 1990, she reshaped a fading municipal institution into a living record of the city’s social history, showing that museums could speak in the voices of the communities they served.
When King arrived at the People’s Palace, the museum’s purpose had drifted. Founded in 1898 as a museum for the citizens of Glasgow’s East End, it had by the 1970s become a place of dusty cases and dwindling visitors. King brought new energy and a conviction that the city’s own people – its shipbuilders, factory workers, musicians and market traders – should be at the centre of its story.
Over 16 years, she curated more than 40 exhibitions, many developed directly with local groups. Scotland Sober and Free (1979), marking the 150th anniversary of the temperance movement, drew record audiences; another, in collaboration with her colleague and partner Michael Donnelly, assistant curator at the museum and an expert in Scottish stained glass of the 19th and early 20th centuries, celebrated Glasgow’s stained-glass tradition.
The 1981 show advanced research into the city’s pivotal role in stained-glass manufacture and, through Donnelly’s lead, helped to rescue and preserve threatened works, as well as creating a significant permanent collection at the museum.
King’s most controversial early success involved the comedian Billy Connolly’s “banana boots”, designed by the pop artist Edmund Smith, and which she included in one of her first exhibitions. Some visitors and critics protested that Connolly’s rough language and reputation had no place in a museum; King argued that the boots captured Glasgow’s irreverent spirit.
They went on to become part of the Palace’s permanent collection, and one of its best known exhibits, emblematic of her belief that culture should include the laughter of the street as much as the lessons of history.
This belief was evident when she made her cat, Smudge, the museum’s official “rodent catcher” in 1979, and a member of the GMB – a small act that summed up her blend of wit and social conscience.
King was also unafraid to take a political stance. In the late 70s she led opposition to a motorway project that threatened to demolish the People’s Palace. To strengthen the museum’s case, she enlisted the then little known artist Alasdair Gray to document the life of the city. His resulting Continuous Glasgow Show (1978), a sequence of more than 30 paintings, gave the museum fresh life and arguably saved it from closure. The friendship between King and Gray endured until his death in 2019.
Under King’s direction, the People’s Palace won European Museum of the Year in 1981 and British Museum of the Year in 1983, however her outspoken defence of community-based culture often brought her into conflict with Glasgow city council.
One of Elspeth King’s most controversial early successes involved the comedian Billy Connolly’s banana boots, designed by the pop artist Edmund Smith, and which she included in one of her first exhibitions. Photograph: Glasgow Museums Collection
In 1990 she left the museum, having been passed over for promotion as keeper of Glasgow’s social history, a position that would have run across several museums, including the People’s Palace.
She became director of the Dunfermline Heritage Trust, where she oversaw the restoration of Abbot House, transforming it into a heritage centre rooted in local history.
In 1994 she commissioned Gray again, this time to paint a vast thistle ceiling mural symbolising 10 centuries of Dunfermline’s story. In the same year she was appointed director of the Stirling Smith Art Gallery and Museum, where she remained for 24 years, reappointing Smudge to official duties.
At the Smith she broadened collections, built partnerships with schools and community groups, and fought repeated threats of closure. When funding cuts in 2018 endangered the museum, more than 7,000 people signed a petition to keep it open – a measure of the public loyalty King inspired. After retiring that year, she continued to campaign for the restoration of the People’s Palace and its adjoining Winter Gardens, both once again in disrepair. Her persistence helped rally political and public support for their current refurbishment.
Beyond her curatorial work, King made a lasting contribution to the recovery of Scotland’s feminist history. From the 70s she researched the Scottish suffrage movement, uncovering the lives of women who had fought, been arrested, and endured force-feeding for political equality.
At the time, the English campaigners were well known, but the Scottish women had largely vanished from public memory. King’s patient archival work and oral histories restored figures such as Helen Crawfurd, Ethel Moorhead, Frances Parker and Janie Allan to national awareness. Through exhibitions at the People’s Palace, lectures and her own publications, she showed that Scotland’s struggle for the vote had been as fierce and imaginative as any in Britain.
Born in Lochore, Fife, into a working-class community, King developed an early appreciation for uncovering overlooked histories.
The daughter of a miner, William King, and his wife, Christina (nee Cowie), she attended Beath high school in Cowdenbeath before studying medieval history at the University of St Andrews, then gaining a postgraduate degree in museum studies at Leicester University.
She met Donnelly while working as a museum assistant at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in 1973, the year before joining the People’s Palace.
In 2005, she was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Stirling in recognition of her contributions to Scottish museums and the promotion of Scottish history and culture.
King’s life and work demonstrated that museums could be places of civic pride and shared memory rather than quiet mausoleums of privilege. Through her exhibitions and her example, she taught that Scotland’s history belongs to everyone.
Donnelly survives her.
Elspeth Cowie King, museum curator and social historian, born 29 March 1949; died 1 November 2025
