Postdoctoral Researcher
The Folk Museum, now known as the Gloucester Life Museum, is housed in Tudor timber-framed buildings. One of them is traditionally associated with the last night of John Hooper, Bishop of Gloucester and Worcester, who was burned for heresy by Queen Mary in 1555.
The museum tells the social history of Gloucestershire and includes a reconstructed Victorian classroom.
Image via roomsbooked.
Some museums are well documented, while others can be rather elusive. A case in point is the Big Four Railway Museum in Bournemouth, about which we know very little. According to one source it housed a collection of railway locomotive name plates belonging to the enthusiast Frank Burridge and was open in the 1980s. As this postmark suggests, it may also have hosted temporary exhibitions.
Burridge wrote a book about locomotive name plates. As the book’s cover indicates, the Big Four were the four main railway companies in the United Kingdom between 1923 and 1947: Great Western Railway, London, Midland and Scottish Railway, London and North Eastern Railway, and Southern Railway.
A postcard apparently showing the museum’s interior is reproduced below.
Images via ebay and Alwyn Ladell on Flickr.
This museum occupies an old blacksmith’s forge which had been unused since 1953. The collection was begun by Doreen Hodson-Smith, a local resident, but it had outgrown her home. The forge was seen as a suitable venue for a museum to house the collection, and after refurbishment it opened in 1991. The old forge and blacksmith’s bellows were retained and these remain a focal point. The museum illustrates Datchworth’s history with over 900 artefacts, and in 2009 the collection expanded to include the village telephone kiosk, still in situ on the Green.
Image via the museum.
The Basket Museum is part of Coates, a willow business based on the Somerset Levels. Willow for basket making has been grown on the levels for centuries. The museum displays a variety of willow items including bushel baskets, tricycles and traps.
Images via the museum.
David Mellor was a designer specialising in cutlery, although he also designed street furniture including bus stops and the traffic lights still in use in Britain today. The museum shares the site with a working cutlery factory, which occupies a new building on the site of Hathersage’s old village gasworks.
Image via the museum.
Freddie Fox (1913-1990) inherited his father’s Dublin cigar business, and expanded it to an international concern. In 1992 JJ Fox acquired the older business of Robert Lewis, an eighteenth-century tobacco dealer based in St James’s, London. This museum devoted to smoking history is in the London shop’s basement.
The National Fencing Museum was established in 2002 in by Malcolm Fare, a fencer and fencing historian. It includes displays of fencing equipment, paintings, prints, books, and all kinds of ephemera.
Image via the museum.
Hopewell Colliery Museum is in the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire. Mining is an ancient tradition in the forest and those born there can exercise their rights to mine coal, iron ore, ochre and stone. The museum includes a working mine, through which visitors can take a guided tour.
Image via the museum.
The Buxton Transport Museum was relatively short-lived, open for only three years. It was established in 1980 by Peter Clark, a vintage car enthusiast. The site is now occupied by Buxton Mineral Water company.
Images and information via Badge Collectors Circle and Derbyshire Through Time by Margaret Buxton on Google Books.
The Douglas Museum was the brainchild of Randolph Osborne Douglas, who created it in his home in Castleton, Derbyshire with his wife Hetty. Douglas was a silversmith, locksmith, and amateur escapologist with the stage name of The Great Randini, inspired by his childhood hero Houdini. His collection included miniature houses, locks, models of the world’s largest diamonds, a variety of Houdini ephemera, and many other curios.
Douglas opened his museum in 1926. After he died in 1956, Hetty continued to run the museum until her death in 1978. The collection was transferred to Buxton Museum and parts of it are now on show in the small museum at Castleton Visitor Centre.
Images by Mark Liebenrood.