Story Category: Legacy

This is a legacy story from an earlier version of our website. It may contain some formatting issues and broken links.

How many ice ages have there been in Earth’s past? Would you expect Britain to be hot or cold during an ice age? And just how big is a mammoth or a cave bear? With our latest exhibition – Chilled to the Bone – at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery we answer these questions and more.

The exhibition came about through a desire to show more of our archaeological collections as well as presenting some of our natural history collections held at the Booth to a wider audience in the centre of town. A new gallery called the Spotlight Gallery has been built on the upper floor of the Brighton Museum in the area previously occupied by the Body Gallery. This space has been designed to be a flexible space with large scale display cabinets suitable for a wide variety of collections, and used to showcase objects from the Brighton Museum collections.

An initial plan for a Piltdown Man exhibition to tie in with the 100^th anniversary of the hoax was discounted due to a lack of material and a clash with a similar exhibition at the Natural History Museum, London. The idea was expanded to include an exhibition on ice ages throughout Earth’s history and on the archaeological discoveries resulting from a Victorian desire to learn more about these stages in our planet’s past, and how humans evolved. This Victorian ‘Bone Rush’ would also include the Piltdown fraud as one of the major events of Sussex archaeology. The exhibition also focuses particularly on the environment of Sussex during the most recent ice age, as well as Sussex archaeology and the search for human origins.

The design and construction of the exhibition was carried out by a small team working with a very limited budget. An additional challenge was that for much of the design stage of the exhibition, the cases were yet to be built. So mock ups were laid out in order to get a general idea of the look of each case and how well things fitted into the space.

The layout of the gallery is such that it was required to be as non-linear as possible as visitors can enter from three different directions, negating a start and end point. As such the intro panel is repeated at both ends of the gallery and each cabinet is built around a theme which should not require the visitor to have read text in a different cabinet before hand.

A welcome addition was an interactive program developed as part of a separate digital project. ‘Chilled to the Bone’ worked as a suitable test bed for the quiz program and allowed us to have a large scale projection and digital interactive that was otherwise out of our budget. The AV section sits alongside an activity wall and handling object to provide an uncluttered and entertaining ‘hands on’ area.

Huge thanks to everyone who worked on the design and installation of the gallery.

Lee Ismail, Curator of Natural Sciences

This is a legacy story from an earlier version of our website. It may contain some formatting issues and broken links.

As the annual closed week at the Booth draws to a close, a number of changes have been made to the museum which the casual visitor may or may not notice.

One of the main aims of the week was to get all of Booth’s birds back on display. As a result the last remaining display boards near the front of the museum have been taken down, opening up those bird cases to visitors once more.

Another major aim of the week was a refurbishment of the Discovery gallery in preparation for new display cabinets, due to be installed in mid March. This extremely well used, family orientated gallery was in need of a spruce up. Over the course of the week the walls and other painted surfaces have been repainted and those surfaces not suitable for repainting have been scrubbed down and made to look as presentable as possible. Many of the labels have also been reprinted and repaired, and some additional objects have been moved out of storage and into the gallery for visitors to see for the first time.

The removal of the panels covering several of the bird displays, as well as the imminent arrival of new cabinets for the Discovery gallery, has required us to move around several of the displays in the museum. One such move was the cornucopia display of exotic birds which has featured on much of the museum’s publicity material in the past. As the move involved building a new plinth and dismantling of parts of the display, we took the opportunity to give the birds and glass a thorough clean. The misty glass is now transparent once more, and the birds have been carefully cleaned to remove the dust that had made its way into the case.

Outside of these major tasks, our team of helpers from across the various museum sites and departments, along with many of our volunteers, did sterling work giving a good clean of the case fronts, carpets and other public areas.

Many thanks to everyone who made time in their extremely busy schedules to give us a hand, and thanks to Lucy, Steve, Peter, Sarah et al, for biscuits and cakes for the troops!

Lee Ismail, Curator of Natural Sciences

This is a legacy story from an earlier version of our website. It may contain some formatting issues and broken links.

9 February marks the anniversaries of the deaths of two well known Brighton figures: John ‘Smoaker’ Miles and John Standing. Aside from the shared first name, these Johns also share the distinction of being working class men who became local celebrities.

John ‘Smoaker’ Miles was a local ‘bather’ who capitalised on the fashion for sea dipping in the second half of the eighteenth century. Like his female contemporary, Martha Gunn, Miles operated a number of bathing machines on the seafront. Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with Thomas Rowlandson’s aquatint showing several of Miles’ bathing machines; these are identified as such in this 19th century print based on Rowlandson’s original.

John ‘Smoaker’ Miles’ bathing machines on Brighton Beach. Aquatint by Thomas Rowlandson, 1790 (FA205960)

Portrait of John ‘Smoaker’ Miles by John Russell, 1790s (FA100842)

Miles became a bathing attendant to George, Prince of Wales, and the men established a firm friendship. He was a regular visitor to the Pavilion, and is reputed to have once walked to London to pay his respects to the Prince after a bout of illness.

Miles died on 9 February 1794 and is buried in the graveyard of St Nicholas’ Church. In his honour, the Prince established the Smoaker Stakes at Brighton Racecourse in 1804. His memory is marked today by his portrait which hangs in the Royal Pavilion.

Less is known of John Standing, the ‘Brighton Matchmaker’. A local tradesman, several portraits of him exist, such as this print held by the Bodleian Library. The print may well derive from a drawing in our collections, ascribed to John Bruce. A profile portrait, the matchmaker appears a little less decrepit in the drawing than in the print. The drawing bears handwritten lines of verse that form the opening stanza of the three that can be read in the print:

The Celebrated Matchman of Brighton

There was an old woman

In Rosemary Lane

She cuts ’em and dips ’em

And I doos [sic] the same

Hand drawn portrait of John Standing, the Brighton match maker, 1829

Standing died on 9 February 1833, and the print appears to have been circulated in the last years of his life. Although the precise reasons for his fame are obscure, he is an early example of a tradition of celebrity trades persons in Brighton, such as Brandy Balls and Blind Harry.

Kevin Bacon
Digital Development Officer

This is a legacy story from an earlier version of our website. It may contain some formatting issues and broken links.

Few people have been as closely associated with the cultural life of Brighton in the early 20^th century as Henry D Roberts, who moved to the town in 1906 and was involved with our public library, museums and art galleries for nearly thirty years.

Sussex County Magazine, December 1935

The eldest of ten children, Roberts left school at 16 and started work within the library service in Newcastle. He became the youngest librarian in the country when, in 1893, he was offered a post at St Saviour’s Public Library in Southwark. On top of his responsibilities as librarian, he arranged lectures for adults and children, contributed articles to newspapers including The Times, and served on countless committees.  His appetite for work, and his ability to take on many different projects, seems to have been extraordinary.

After his arrival in Brighton, he set about raising the profile of the library, introducing longer opening hours and open access to books, while increasing the average attendance from 150 to more than 500 people per day within his first two years in the job. A profile published in 1908 declared that, ‘Mr Roberts has left no stone unturned to acquaint the public with the advantages of the library.’

In the public art gallery, he broke new ground with a series of exhibitions focusing not on English artists, as had been the norm, but on the modern art of other nations. The first of these shows, an Exhibition of the Works of Modern French Artists, opened in June 1910 and featured paintings by Monet, Degas, Matisse and Cezanne, many of which were for sale.

Sussex Daily News, 30 June 1917

In subsequent years, the art of Italy, Spain, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland, Russia and Japan was showcased in Brighton in this way. Roberts understood the importance of official patronage in raising the status of his events, and was apparently fearless in approaching heads of state or royal family members. It was reported in the Brighton Herald, for example, that he met with Mussolini in Rome to discuss the exhibition of Modern Italian art held in 1926, for which he secured the patronage of the King of Italy. Art critic Robert Dell observed, ‘Brighton is to be congratulated on the possession of a Director of its Public Art Gallery sufficiently enterprising to conceive so ambitious a scheme.’

Brighton Society, 17 February 1916

In 1920, Roberts became the first director of the Royal Pavilion Estate, an additional post for which he was paid £100 per year. During World War One, the Royal Pavilion had been used as a hospital, initially for wounded Indian soldiers and later for limbless men, andRoberts had acted as liaison officer between the military authorities and the town during this time. He was obviously seen as a safe, highly motivated, pair of hands. An article in the Brighton Herald published on 24 April 1920 spoke approvingly of his ‘thorough knowledge of the possibilities of the Royal Pavilion’ and, when he and his family had moved into their quarters within the building, he began a programme of repair and refurbishment, using original archives and accounts for reference. In his own Official Guide to the State Apartments, published in 1929, he described the glorious wall decorations in the Music Room which, he explained, ‘have only recently been exposed to the present generation…until the 1921 restoration their beauties had been covered by layers of varnish, which had become darkened through age.’

On top of his many duties, Roberts found time for a surprising number of activities, which he documented meticulously in scrapbooks that are held in Brighton History Centre’s collection of rare materials. The scrapbooks include newspaper cuttings, correspondence, invitations to official functions and all sorts of fascinating ephemera from the early 20^th century. Roberts also gave lectures, wrote books, including A History of the Royal Pavilion, Brighton, published in 1939, and at the request of Sir Charles Thomas-Stanford, transcribed and edited Brighton’s early parish registers.

Lecture invitation, 1916

Sir Charles and Lady Thomas-Stanford are known to have thought highly of Roberts and it was he who suggested that they bequeath Preston Manor and its contents to the town upon their deaths. They were happy to do this, and requested that Roberts act as director of the property. He moved there with his family in 1933 and remained until his death in 1951.

In spite of his high profile, Roberts seems to have been a modest character. His obituary in The Times described him as, ‘a keen-faced, energetic man, more ready to listen than to talk, quick to read a useful suggestion into a casual remark, and with an extraordinary perception  of what was significant, or likely to be significant in modern art.’ Looking back on his own career, he said, ‘I think I have had opportunities which have not always been given to others and I have perhaps taken advantage of many of them… I have loved my work and I have given of my best to Brighton.’

Kate Elms, Brighton History Centre

This is a legacy story from an earlier version of our website. It may contain some formatting issues and broken links.

September means the start of a new school year and, as ever, the newspapers are full of stories related to education.

Students at the Municpal Schools for Boys and Girls, based in Pelham Street and York Place, taken from school magazines published in 1911-12

Students at the Municpal Schools for Boys and Girls, based in Pelham Street and York Place, taken from school magazines published in 1911-12

A hundred years ago this month, however, journalists were talking not just about exam results, or who should be taught what, but about pupils up and down the country closing their books and going on strike. It seems that Brighton and Hove were not affected by this extraordinary wave of school strikes – during which pupils demanded free pencils, shorter hours and an end to corporal punishment – but this did not stop the local press taking issue with the strikers.

Brighton Gazette on 13 Sept 1911

According to the Brighton Gazette,

‘The latest news from the strike area is that the revolt has collapsed and that the strikers, on returning to their classrooms, received very conclusive proof that the use of the cane was still in operation.’ The report went on to conclude, ‘The vision of a national strike of schoolboys is a fearsome one indeed…So, all things considered, it is just as well that the schoolmaster still wields an instrument of repression.’

Brighton Gazette, Sat September 30 1911

On a lighter note, later that month the same paper highlighted what was described as ‘an epidemic of marriage…among the lady teachers under the Brighton and Preston Education Authority.’ Citing the coronation of George V as one reason for this wedding fever, the report goes on to say: ‘Though everyone recognises their intellectual qualities, there is no reason to suppose that lady teachers have enjoyed a monopoly of the attention of the Brighton gallants, who must be congratulated on having falsified an impression that they were fighting shy of the nuptial bliss or the responsibilities of conjugal life.’

Kate Elms, Brighton History Centre

This is a legacy story from an earlier version of our website. It may contain some formatting issues and broken links.

I first saw the Royal Pavilion one sunny afternoon in July 1993.

I had just finished my last GCSE exam when a friend suggested a celebratory trip to Brighton. I remember driving past the Royal Pavilion having no idea what this exotic building was, but it was one of the most beautiful places I had seen.

My next visit to Brighton was in my last year at University in 1998. I fell in love with the city, instantly making it my home. I enrolled on a Museum Management course and, while studying, read an article by the Royal Pavilion & Museums‘ Head of Retail.

At a time when national museums became free to visit, she was writing interesting thoughts on the importance of income generation. This was right up street and I applied for work experience. As my student loan trickled away, the gift shop manager took pity on me and arranged some paid work, eventually leading to a full time position.

Our head of commercial and business services was already looking at how we developed our customer service and I found myself at the exciting centre of creating a new booking office and implementing a new ticketing and telephone system across our venues.

This sweeping change has been an amazing challenge and the benefits for customers and the Royal Pavilion & Museums service have been bountiful. Constantly striving to improve how we work, my team has been actively engaged in systems thinking, a performance improvement exercise, and I recently had the great pleasure of watching a demonstration of the Business Objects work my booking office colleague has been involved in. This is a powerful piece of reporting software that will quietly revolutionise how we gather and present our figures giving us tools to further develop the service in a much more customer led way.

I have been so fortunate in the opportunities I have been given with the Royal Pavilion & Museums and the support I have received. Although the beautiful Royal Pavilion is thankfully little changed since I first clapped eyes on it back in 1993 I can now count myself among the number of people actively improving that all important income generation I read about as a student some 11 or so years ago. I look forward to an exciting future.

Lucy Cheffy, Booking Office Manager

This is a legacy story from an earlier version of our website. It may contain some formatting issues and broken links.

Brighton History Centre’s collection of rare materials contains many unique objects, including handwritten ledgers, albums and scrapbooks. One of the most fascinating examples recalls Billy Boardman’s time as manager of The Hippodrome Theatre in Middle Street.

Billy Boardman and members leaving for France

Boardman came to Brighton in 1910 and presided over the Hippodrome during the golden age of variety performance, bringing stars such as Lillie Langtry and Sarah Bernhardt to town. Passionate about the stage, he was also committed to charitable work, taking the world’s first concert party to France during World War I. There, stars such as Gladys Cooper and Seymour Hicks entertained thousands of troops with their singing, acting and dancing.

At home, Boardman arranged entertainment for wounded troops, including the Indian soldiers being treated at the Royal Pavilion, and raised money to provide wheelchairs for the limbless men who were later cared for there. It’s all the more poignant, then, to discover that his only son, Albert, was killed in action in May 1918.

For King and Country

Hippodrome programme

Boardman retired from the Hippodrome in 1924 and moved to France, but he returned to Brighton some years before his death in 1959. His obituary, published in the Brighton Herald, described him as ‘one of the outstanding personalities of the town. The life and soul of every party and always in the fore with any charity or benevolent appeal.’

If you’re interested in looking at the Hippodrome scrapbook, which contains correspondence, news cuttings and ephemera, see our website for details of how to access the rare collection. Boardman’s autobiography, Vaudeville Days, is also available for reference.

Kate Elms, Brighton History Centre

This is a legacy story from an earlier version of our website. It may contain some formatting issues and broken links.

Jonathan King from the British Museum visited Brighton Museum & Art Gallery recently to help us learn more about the Arctic peoples’ objects in the World Art collection.

Jonathan King examining objects from the Arctic

These objects came from different sources and donors and were originally collected by European traders and sailors in the nineteenth – and early twentieth century; for example, Frederic William Lucas acquired many carved ivories, probably at auction.

Arctic peoples have lived in the regions of Northern Canada, Greenland and Alaska for 1,000s of years. Originally the people came from Siberia across the Bering land bridge, which once joined eastern Siberia with Alaska.

Traditionally the Arctic peoples were nomadic hunters and we have many weapons and tools, used for hunting whales, seals and caribou, in our collection along side sewing implements, domestic items, decorative pieces and animal carvings made from walrus and seal bones.

Jonathan supplied invaluable information about the objects, explaining and demonstrating how hunting tools were made and used.

Pipe detail

He also provided insight into the engravings that decorate objects such as this Siberian-type pipe from Alaska (above) on which a hunting scene is depicted. The feathers in the walrus’s and whale’s mouths are a motif used by Arctic artists to represent a mammal surfacing for air from the water.

The objects decorated with hunting scenes served as diaries of the hunters’ exploits. Other carved objects like this small figure on a sledge were used for trade or sold as souvenirs.

Man on sledge

The Arctic peoples made many animal carvings, which demonstrates a keen knowledge of animals and respect for their environment. Some carvings were made as toys for children.

Polar bear carving

They might also have been worn as amulets for protection on hunting trips. Many were also made for sale to European traders and sailors. The polar bear carving to the left is an example.

These cheek studs, from our collection, would be worn by Arctic hunters to mimic walrus tusks. The hunter would believe themselves to be imbued with a walrus spirit.

Cheek studs

Some of these Arctic objects will be displayed in the new World Stories gallery opening next year.

Lucy Faithful, Assistant Curator of World Art

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The Big Butterfly Count is a nationwide survey aimed at helping to assess the health of our environment. It was launched in 2010 and 10,000 people took part, counting 210,000 butterflies and day-flying moths across the nation.

Marbled White

Butterflies react quickly to changes in their environment which makes them excellent biodiversity indicators. Marked declines in butterfly numbers are an early warning for other wildlife losses, making a count of their numbers important. This year’s big butterfly count runs until the 31st July 2011.

In preparation for this year’s event, Dan Danahar, from Dorothy Stringer High School, produced an identification poster using butterflies held in the collections of the Booth Museum. The collections at the Booth include examples of almost all known British Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) and some date back more than 150 years. Whilst they were once collected for the pleasure of Victorians, they are now used by scientists for research and identification, as well as by artists and schools.

Common Blue

The poster has been distributed to local schools, and is being given away with school loans at the Booth, while stocks last. The poster shows a selection of common and rare butterflies recently recorded in Brighton and Hove, and each picture shows the markings on both the upper and lower surfaces of the wings.

Peacock

This year’s Big Butterfly Count kicked off at the Liz Williams Butterfly Haven in the grounds of Dorothy Stringer High School, where children from the Dorothy Stringer Creche, Balfour Infants School and Dorothy Stringer Secondary School, plus students from Downsview special needs college, came to see wildflowers and butterflies. Dan Danahar has described the day.

The clouded yellow proved such a hit as it is a migrant to the United Kingdom. Native to North Africa and Southern Europe, it does occasionally stay over winter, but the larval forms are easily killed by damp and frost, both of which are common features of the British winter. These butterflies breed continuously, instead of seasonally, and can have up to 3 broods of young each year, in the United Kingdom.

Clouded Yellow

The caterpillars favour clover and lucerne plants, as well as birds-foot trefoil. The adults feed on nectar from a variety of flowers including dandelions, thistles and marjoram. Although most commonly found near the coast of Britain, many do fly inland, and they are found across the United Kingdom in the warmer months, reaching as far as Scotland and Ireland in good years. On rare occasions large numbers of clouded yellow’s can occur and in 1947 over 36,000 were seen.

Lee Ismail, Curator of Natural Sciences

This is a legacy story from an earlier version of our website. It may contain some formatting issues and broken links.

Summer Flowers in Preston Park

The 23^rd – 31^st July marks Love Parks Week. In honour of the occasion, Brighton History Centre takes a look at the history of Preston Park.

The park opened in 1883 on land purchased from the Benett-Stanford family of Preston Manor. The new park contained tennis courts and bowling greens as well as landscaped walks. It was officially opened by the Mayor of Brighton, Arthur Cox on 8 November 1884.

A cricket ground and a cycle track were added in 1887 as well as a tea chalet which housed the park police in the upper rooms. A free standing clock-tower was unveiled on 17 June 1892 and bore the following rhyme,

‘Here I stand with all my might to tell the hour day and night. Therefore example take by me and serve thy God as I serve thee’.

Tragedy occurred in August 1895 during a firework display, a mortar designed to be fired high into the air, exploded on the ground. Several people were seriously injured by shards of metal. One of the victims, fifteen year old George Carpenter, later died of his wounds.

Baseball game programme, August 1917

For most Brightonians, their first experience of a baseball game came in August 1917 when a match took place in the Park between Canadian and American teams, in aid of the British Red Cross Society. Henry Roberts, Director of Brighton Museum & Art Gallery, helped organise the event and he was overheard to say that he had bought up all the chewing gum in London for the benefit of the Americans.

A First World War tank was a feature of the Park for over twenty years. On January 10 1920, the Mayoress of Brighton, Miss E. R. Palfrey, smashed a bottle of Champagne over the tank and ‘christened’ it ‘The Brighton’. The tank was a gift to the town in recognition of Brighton’s contribution to the war savings campaign.

Baseball Advertisement

Preston Park was re-opened on 22 July 1929 by the Mayor of Brighton, Herbert J. Galliers. The Brighton Herald included a lengthy description of the newer sections of the park and illustrated it with photographs.

Of particular note was the Rotunda Café. The article described the interior decoration;

‘ The walls are of orange, the round ceiling of cream, with a bronze centre also of orange; and the French windows are of a delicate gray … a refreshment house such as this on a Continental “plage” would make the reputation of the place.’

A common myth is that the Rotunda was brought from the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley following its closure in 1925. In fact, it was the work of Brighton Corporation’s Superintendant of Parks & Gardens, Captain Bert Hubbard MacLaren.

The Chalet, The Clock Tower, Lovers’ Walk

MacLaren also made use of material from other sites. The four statues representing Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter, which had adorned the Aquarium clock tower until its demolition in 1927, were placed in the larger flower garden. The circular pond contained fountains, the heads of which were in the form of dolphins retrieved from the site of Brill’s Baths. The baths had been demolished for the Savoy Cinema in 1929. MacLaren even re-used the seat frames from the Aquarium which he had converted and re-upholstered and placed in the Rotunda lounges.

Paul Jordan, Senior History Centre Officer