Frank Francis

Sir Frank Chalton Francis KCB (5 October 1901 – 15 September 1988) was an English academic librarian and curator.

As director, Francis worked to modernise and expand the museum, and his ideas contributed to the establishment of a separate British Library after his retirement.

[1] After leaving Cambridge, Francis taught for a year at Holyhead County School,[2] and in 1926 he joined the British Museum as an assistant keeper in the department of printed books.

He paid several visits to Sweden, studied Swedish and Icelandic and became the museum's leading expert in Scandinavian languages.

He was not entirely comfortable in a wholly administrative role, and in 1948 he returned with pleasure to his old department as the junior of the two keepers of printed books.

It was under his directorship that "schoolboys knocked a leg off one of the Elgin Marbles",[5] an embarrassing event kept secret from the general public for many years, due to fears that this would affect the British Museum's continued ownership claim given the long controversy regarding the Marbles' removal from Athens.

[2] He received honorary appointments from overseas bodies including the Institut de France, Bibliographical Society of America, Kungliga Gustav Adolfs Akademien, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.

He held honorary fellowships or degrees conferred by the universities of British Columbia, Cambridge, Exeter, Leeds, Liverpool, New Brunswick, Oxford, and Wales.

[1] Francis's publications were "Historical Bibliography" in The Year's Work in Librarianship, 1929–38; and Robert Copland: Sixteenth Century Printer and Translator, (1961); and as editor, The Bibliographical Society, 1892–1942: Studies in Retrospect (1945); Facsimile of The Compleat Catalogue 1680 (1956); and Treasures of the British Museum (1971).