SIR ROBERT CRAWFORD, director-general of the Imperial War Museum, has spent his career gazing at the impact of war on the lives of ordinary people.

The museum, in south London, was conceived in 1917 in the final stages of the first world war. It has chronicled innumerable conflicts around the world involving Britain and the Commonwealth since then.

“Places like this have a role in equipping people with an understanding of the history of war and of the historical antecedents to current conflicts that should enable them to address the challenges of war more responsibly and effectively in future,” said Crawford, who retires this autumn after 40 years.

Now on a salary of £129,000 a year, he joined the museum in 1966 as a junior researcher straight from Oxford. His first job was cataloguing part of its immense film archive of the build-up to D Day and the battle for Normandy.

“I told the director it would take 35 of me the rest of the century to catalogue all the material in the amount of detail that was required.”

Crawford, 63, who became director-general in 1995, now has others among his 645 full-time staff to maintain the still-growing archive and praises his team for achievements such as the Holocaust exhibition, the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester, HMS Belfast, the air museums at Duxford and the Cabinet War Rooms.

Education is the museum’s enduring raison d’être and, despite regular debates about widening its remit, he says the first world war is still the best starting point for the collection. Suggestions it might drop Imperial from its name have also been examined frequently and rejected.

With mere months before retirement, Crawford shows no sign of flagging and was in Washington recently for a fundraising dinner for the American Air Museum at Duxford. “We managed to close Reagan airport for a flyover of three second world war aircraft,” he said.

He also attended a Downing Street reception, opened the For Your Eyes Only exhibition on James Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming, and chaired meetings about funding and the museum’s future.

From October that future will be the responsibility of the museum’s first woman director, Diane Lees, now running the Museum of Childhood in London.

“My retirement will be a clean break,” said Crawford. “Rather like headmasters and vicars, one doesn’t offer a ghostlike tread in the patch of one’s successor. But I hope they invite me back for an exhibition opening.”

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