'Without Wellcome, the collection lost its driving force, and, almost immediately, it began to fragment. Wellcome's successors could not defend such a great, and expensive, material legacy...'
Larson, F. An Infinity of Things: How Sir Henry Wellcome Collected the World (OUP, 2009) p.271
Acquisitions to both museum and library are believed to have peaked in the 1920s, and dispersals and disposals from both collections commenced soon after Sir Heny Wellcome's death in 1936. Acquisition of course continued, but with a much narrower focus on the history of medicine throughout the world rather than ethnographic museum of mankind which seems to have been Wellcome's own vision. The first auctions took place in 1937, and a further 26 sales were held over the course of the next two years, including sales of artefacts from Wellcome's private collection, and of library and museum material deemed surplus to requirements. As well as auctions held at the museum and library store at Willesden, the Wellcome Trustees leased Alford House in Kensington specifically for the purpose of holding these sales, which were run by Harrods in conjunction with Allsop's.
However, some of the surplus material was not considered suitable for public sale, and was instead offered to other museums or sold by private treaty sale. During the second world war, 5 tons of photograph albums and paper waste were sent to scrap, and 2 thousand paperback novels sent to the Red Cross, who also received invalid and dental chairs on the basis that they might make good use of them. Further material was given or sold to other cultural institutions after the war to replace or replenish collections destroyed during air raids, including to the British Museum library (now the British Library) and to Liverpool Museums.
'After the War, the dispersal of non-medical material from Willesden entered a new phase. Between 1949 and 1954, ten 'distributions' of ethnographic material were organized at the British Museum. Curators from around the country were invited to choose from hundreds of packing cases. Each representative was allotted a corner of the room in which to stack their pickings. It was not always possible to open the cases, and many curators simply took potluck, only discovering exactly what they had acquired when they got home. A total of 1,300 cases of objects were dispersed in this way. But still, thousands of non-medical artefacts remained. During the 1960s and 70s, Wellcome's Egyptology collections were given away. More than 300 crates of material from ancient Egypt were distributed - Liverpool Museum alone received ninety cases. The British Museum had received the majority of Wellcome's prehistoric artefacts in 1965, but a further two tons, six hundred weight of flint implements, packed in fifty-two cases, were sent to Ulster Museum in 1967. More ethnographic material was dispersed. The University of California Los Angeles received 30,000 anthropological objects in the mid-1960s. Large dispersals like these were accompanied by numerous smaller exchanges and auctions over the years.' (Larson, op.cit. p.275)
Finally, during the late 1970s and early 1980s, the majority of the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum collections were transferred to the Science Museum, and the remainder were donated to other museums.
With the exception of the final phase of dispersals from the late 1970s onwards, none of these dispersals or disposals were systematically documented at the time. Furthermore, the museum had, over time, operated three different systems of registration numbering, none of which encompassed the whole collection, and an unknown proportion of the collections were never recorded at all. As a consequence, tracing former Wellcome collection items to recipient organisations is a challenging undertaking. The most comprehensive overview of the dispersals from the Wellcome collections to date is Georgina Russell's 1986 report on 'The Wellcome Historical Medical Museum's Dispersal of Non-medical Material, 1936-1983' published as a supplement to the Museums Journal volume 86. Russell's Appendix B listing of museums receiving Wellcome material forms the backbone of the Recipient Museums & LIbraries table, with updated information added from other sources documenting specific parts of the dispersal process (see Wellcome collections bibliography). This information on recipient museums and libraries can also be explored on Ruth Horry's dispersal google map.