Safeguarding the Collection, 1933–1950

Crises, when they strike, cause disruption to museums. Certain crises do so by impacting on museums physically and superficially. In other words, they are felt chiefly through damage to a museum’s infrastructure and hindrance to their processes and output. Such organisational crises have been termed herein as ‘surface-defensive crises’. The current chapter uses the case of the Imperial War Museum during the broader Second World War era and its work preparing for, mitigating and recovering from German aerial attacks to develop and explore this crisis typology. The chapter theorises and instantiates the surface-defensive crisis and shows that the best approach for managing them involves pursuing a defensive strategy.