Story Category: Legacy

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

June marks the anniversary of the death of Charles Dickens (1812-1870). To mark the occasion, we take a look at an object from the Decorative Art collection which was inspired by his work.

The blue-printed plate made by Doulton has a central portrait of Dickens with the profile of St Paul’s Cathedral in the background. Around the rim are many of his best known characters, including Fagin and Bill Sykes from Oliver Twist, Sam Weller and Mr Pickwick from the Pickwick Papers.

Charles Dickens Memorial Plate

The works of Charles Dickens are, understandably, well represented in the collections at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery. He was born in Portsmouth to John and Elizabeth Dickens. Soon after being sent to school in 1821, his whole family, apart from Charles, were sent to the Marshalsea prison because of his father’s bad debts, an episode that was to inform the experience of Little Dorrit whose father was similarly detained. Charles’s father was the inspiration for the character of Mr Micawber in David Copperfield. Charles spent three years working in Warren’s blacking factory and endured appalling conditions as well as loneliness and despair. Although he returned to school, the experience became fictionalised in two of his best-known novels, David Copperfield and Great Expectations.

Dickens began his literary career as a journalist, becoming parliamentary correspondent for The Morning Chronicle in 1833. In 1836 he published the highly successful Pickwick Papers with illustrations Hablot Knight Browne, known as Phiz, who died in 1882 and is buried in Brighton’s Extra-Mural Cemetery. Dickens himself spent time in Brighton and wrote Dombey and Son while staying at the Bedford Hotel.

Stella Beddoe, Senior Keeper and Keeper of Decorative Art

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

Henry Willett, a founding father of Brighton Museum, was a man of great energy, enthusiasm and wide-ranging interests.

Henry Willett pictured with a child, possibly his grand-child

He was born in 1823, the youngest of the eleven children of William Catt an energetic farmer and miller. His mother Hannah died shortly after his birth, so Henry was raised by his eldest sister, Elizabeth. She died in 1863 leaving her 8 surviving siblings £13,000 in her will provided they change their name from Catt to Willett. Three challenged this in a High Court case entitled ‘Catt’s Trusts’ and were able to benefit from her will but keep their name.  Henry was happy to adopt the name of Willett, perhaps to forestall teasing. In 1864, during an early foray into Brighton politics on behalf of the Liberal candidate, Professor Fawcett, he was mocked by the Tory press under the headline;

‘Mewsings on Cat-iline Willett’s Cat-asstrophe’.

Henry and his brothers and sisters were raised at Newhaven Tidemills, the largest watermill in Sussex, built on reclaimed land. He moved to Brighton in 1841 where he ran the West Street Brewery (another family business) and bought property throughout Sussex, particularly after his marriage to Frances Coombe, who came from a landed West-Sussex family. He was an astute businessman, investing in the Blackpool Electric Tramway, the Midland Railway and public utilities including electricity companies in Western Australia. In his will of 1905 he left an estate worth over £230,000.

At his family home in Upper North Street, Brighton he cultivated the acquaintance writers and thinkers such as John Ruskin, the American Oliver Wendell Holmes and Sir Augustus Franks, an influential curator at the British Museum who helped him to develop his ideas on collecting. Willett’s first collecting passion was for chalk fossils, which he excavated from the Sussex Downs. He also collected natural history specimens, archaeology, local products such as iron fire-backs and Sussex pottery as well as artefacts from other cultures.  Most of the important paintings he collected were later sold to international collections.

His most innovative collection was that of pottery and porcelain intending to illustrate British history, political social and cultural through the medium of ceramics. In pursuing his idea he acquired many mass-produced pieces that were disregarded at the time as well as rare ones, uniquely signed or decorated. They were first shown as a loan collection in the newly opened Brighton Free Museum in 1873, then enlarged and developed until it was presented as a gift to Brighton in 1903.  In his catalogue of 1899 he grouped the 2000 pieces in the collection, vessels, plaques, tiles and figures, under the twenty-three subject headings.

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

Lieutenant Colonel John Fawcett, first Mayor of Brighton, 1854.

Lieutenant Colonel John Fawcett

Before the creation of the Borough of Brighton by Incorporation on 19 January 1854 the town was led by Town Commissioners. Several attempts had been made to create a Borough prior to 1854; supporters arguing that the Town Commissioners were extravagant, too numerous and had only limited powers. Those who were anti-incorporation argued that there would be an even greater burden on the town’s rate-payers if incorporation took place.

John Fawcett was born in Mumbai (then Bombay) in 1803 and was listed on the 1851 census as ‘retired Major (East India Service)’. Fawcett was elected to Town Commissioner in January 1854 and was an active promoter for the Charter of Incorporation. At the first election of Councillors and was returned second for the newly formed Park Ward behind  William Hallett (who became Mayor of Brighton in 1855).

Brighton’s first Mayor

On 7 June 1854, at the first meeting of the new council, Fawcett was elected Mayor of Brighton. A strong Liberal in politics, he wasn’t without his critics. One newspaper article stated that:

‘The Mayor on his inauguration, addressed the Council in one of his incomprehensible speeches’.

The Brighton Guardian was outraged when the Mayor suggested he should be paid a salary. One figure mooted was £300 per annum. The Brighton Herald was no less shocked, stating that:

‘By once fixing a salary, the door is open to numerous abuses’

The Mayor’s chain was presented to the Fawcett by Jeremiah Pilcher. He had worn it himself when Sheriff of the City of London. The badge was added by ‘some ladies of Brighton’ and the borough arms and motto were selected by Alderman Burrows (Mayor of Brighton in 1857, 1858 and 1871).

Fawcett left Brighton around 1865 and resided in Jersey where he died on 24 March 1878.

Paul Jordan, Senior History Centre Officer

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Countryside 2011 takes place from the 28^th May to the 12^th June. To celebrate we take a look at some of the species on display at the Booth Museum.

The stoat has had an unfortunate relationship with man over the centuries. Along with being a highly prized fur species, gamekeepers and farmers have persecuted stoats in Britain for hundreds of years because they eat game bird eggs, chicks and even the sitting hen. However, in their natural ranges stoats are far more likely to eat rabbits, and act as a strong natural control on their numbers. This relationship is so clearly marked, that the rabbit myxomatosis outbreak in the 1950s decimated stoat numbers due to an overwhelming loss of prey.

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The stoat’s predilection for rabbits was used as justification for introducing them into New Zealand in order to control the rabbit population (which had also been introduced). However, the flightless indigenous birds proved to be easier prey for the stoats, and they have in turn become pests, helping to push many bird species to the brink of extinction. Efforts are now underway to completely eradicate stoats from many of the islands of New Zealand.

Stoats are often mistaken for weasels, but there are several differences. Appearance wise, weasels do not have a black tipped tail, and do not have a white winter coat. Stoats can live significantly longer than weasels, some living for up to ten years. Stoats also have one of the longest gestation periods in mammals, demonstrating delayed implantation, where the fertilized eggs are held in suspension for up to ten months before beginning to develop.

There are several examples of stoats in the Booth Museum collection, but one of the best examples is a case of two stoats in their winter ermine coat. This case was created by the award winning taxidermist William Farren. Farren operated in the late 19th and early 20th century, and his shop was located at 23 Regent Street, Cambridge. Farren often accompanied the Hon. E S Montague, Secretary of State for India, on expeditions, and many of his works are cared for by Leicester museums’ service. The case of stoats is typical of Farren’s creations as they usually depict the animals in their natural surroundings, with an absence of prey species. This particular example is part of the education collection, and is often used in the Booth Museum for learning.

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.

I was born not far from the Booth Museum of Natural History in 1943 and lived over a large garage in Preston Road, Brighton until I was about 10 years old. My first school, called Preston Primary (although an Infant School) was opposite Preston Manor and just around the corner from where George Hole, the telescope maker, later had his workshop. I then went to Balfour Road Primary School, from where I saw the eclipse of the Sun in 1954 from the playground. My family moved to Upper Portslade and, having passing the 11+, I spent a few rather unhappy years at the Grammar School, next to the West Blatchington Windmill leaving with some GCEs and not going on to University.

I spent most of my working life doing clerical and warehouse jobs and another twenty years working at an electrical wholesaler’s in Hove and Portslade. I was living in Mile Oak, just down the hill from the Foredown Tower, when it was first opened as a Countryside Centre by Hove Borough Council in 1991. The building had been the water tower for the old Isolation Hospital in its suitably remote location and, as part of the renovations, a camera obscura was installed. It proved to be quite a tourist attraction as its telescopic lens and mirror reflected 360 degrees living views of the surrounding countryside onto a screening dish. It was also an ideal way of looking at eclipses something I was able to witness with the partial eclipse in 1996 and the full eclipse in 2003.

I started working at Foredown Tower as a volunteer and finally became a staff member. During my very enjoyable years of working there, I gathered an enormous amount of information on camera obscuras from all over the world and it was this which became the Camera Obscura Archive which is now held at the Brighton History Centre. It includes correspondence and photographs from as far afield as Bondi Beach in Australia; Chattanooga in the USA; Fish Hoek, South Africa; Jerez, Spain and Kyoto in Japan along with material on all the camera obscuras that we know about throughout the United Kingdom. It’s an ongoing archive as members of staff at the Brighton History Centre continue to keep it updated with any new information that they or I come across.

My research into sundials (one was specially made for the Millennium and is on the Foredown Tower) and Timeballs (there is one in Brighton on the Clocktower) were also given to the History Centre, along with the complete set of ‘Towering Sky’, the newsletter of the Foredown Tower Astronomy Group, which I edited for over a decade.

Mike Feist

Mike Feist’s Camera Obscura Archive and his research into sundials and timeballs, is available to view at Brighton History Centre, Brighton Museum & Art Gallery.

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

The whistles pictured in this blog are from the collection of A J Willins (1878-1950). The collection was donated to Brighton Museum & Art Gallery by his wife, Mary Willins, on his death.

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The 454 whistles were gathered in Britain but originate from all over the world and date from between 1780 and 1934. At home, Willins displayed his collection in a cabinet with little drawers and often took them out to show visitors. It is not clear why Willins formed his collection but he was clearly interested in the diversity of whistle types and their different purposes as he compiled a catalogue of the whistles dividing them into thirteen categories according to their function. The catalogue was also donated in 1950.

The collection has whistles for every occasion. Some have a practical purpose, such as a bosun’s whistle, whilst others, like a bone whistle with a microscopic lens showing views of the Royal Pavilion and the Chain Pier, are simply beautiful souvenirs. The collection also includes toy and novelty whistles like a porcelain eggcup whistle in the shape of a rooster driving a car.

A selection of the whistles were displayed at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery December 1930 – March 1931 and in 1998 another selection was exhibited under the title ‘Just for the Shrill of It…Mr Willins’ Collection of Whistles’.

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

Earlier today, we were visited by the Beech class of St Giles School, Horsted Keynes. The pupils wrote this poem about a Royal Pavilion dragon. We like it a lot, and thought we’d share it with you.

The Brighton Pavilion Dragon

Body as flexible as a gymnast,
as bendy as a rubber tube.
Scales as strong as a suit of armour,
smooth as they can be.

Lashing tail, deadly as cobra’s poison,
coils of silver-plated muscle
glistening in the light of the chandelier
As long as a giant python.

Teeth as sharp as diamond daggers.
Forked tongue, gritty like sandpaper.
Bloodshot eyes as big as bowling balls.
Volcanic fire like a scorching oven.

Wings patterned with a leaf-like structure,
twisting and turning like shiny, leather parachutes.
Silver palm trees, bony like a skeleton,
shimmering wildly under the moonlight.

By Beech class, St Giles School, Horsted Keynes

Well done Beech class!

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

Thanks to the 2011 Brighton Festival which has positioned Burma as a central point of focus, the people of Brighton and visitors alike are currently being offered a wonderful insight in to Burma– its culture, people and politics. Within this context I would like to highlight some works of art by a Burmese artist called Soe Naing, whose art expresses the very spirit of Burma.

The World Art collection at Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove includes a small but vibrant collection of Soe Naing’s drawings, paintings and papercuts all of which express his creativity and energy. His paintings are populated by strange and often sinister creatures which appear to incorporate both human and animal forms. These oddly hybrid creatures were inspired by mythological creatures seen by the artist in temple wall paintings in the ancient city of Bagan, but in my opinion, the style in which they are painted gives them an almost child-like innocence.

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Soe Naing’s use of vivid colours and visible brushstrokes invest his paintings with a real sense of energy and spontaneity. Amongst these brightly-coloured brushstrokes he also creates inky, black, calligraphic marks which give the impression of facial features, claws, ears, talons and tongues. Along with colour you can see that the expressive quality of line is important to Soe Naing. Every brushstroke is applied with a sense of urgency and this is also the case with his pencil drawings. These appear to have been made impulsively as if the artist were drawing automatically, without considered planning.

I absolutely love Soe Naing’s work because his style is so unique, full of energy, and has a childlike quality to it which gives it such originality.

Royal Pavilion & Museums is grateful for the assistance of Networking & Initiatives for Culture & the Arts (NICA) in acquiring these works.

Sarah Cook World Art volunteer

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

… Gerald Legg, Keeper of Natural Sciences

Of exploration, empire, butterflies and beer

Having worked at the Booth Museum of Natural History for more years than I like to admit to I have had the unique opportunity and privilege to work with natural history collections and be involved with all manner of things associated with the natural world.

The collections are far more than just dead specimens or their remains tucked away in a drawer or sitting in a cabinet on display. They have their obvious ‘uses’ such as being examples of life on Earth that anyone can see and appreciate. They can help us understand an organism: where it occurs or occurred; its variations in form and structure; how its distribution or form has changed over time (a good reason to have many of the apparently ‘same’ types). As new techniques arise they can be a mine of information, e.g. analysing for heavy metals such as lead can show where and when industrial activity has polluted the environment. It may be possible to extract DNA and gain an understanding of the relationships of organisms or even determine its genome which, for a rare species may be invaluable in the future. One of the most useful aspects of the collection is its help in identifying specimens submitted to the museum by members of the public, councils, the police and others. Books with pictures or detailed ‘keys’ to help tell you what you have are all very well, but a good ‘reference’ collection is the ultimate identification guide. We do a lot of identification work and our collections have proven invaluable in helping with this.

Specimens have considerable aesthetic value too; their colours and shapes help to enrich the world around us even when they are no longer flying or running wild but in a glass case in the museum. Many of our specimens have and continue to provide inspiration for artists and students of art, from a whole eagle to parts of the detail on a microscope slide of a piece of rock.

Moving away from the specimens themselves they can illustrate how we have come to understand the world through exploration and in the case of many European powers, particularly Britain, colonial expansion and exploration. When you start to examine and think about a specimen it can take on a whole new lease of life and open up a completely different world to the ‘lovely or useful specimen’ one. Take a look at the label (one or more) attached to a specimen and you can see more than just a name of a place, date and name of who collected the specimen. Those labels say far more – you only have to use your imagination and do a little research. Take one of our Birdwing Butterflies: Troides amphrysus amphrysus BC34196.

Troides amphrysus amphrysus, BC34196

It is obviously very beautiful, as are all the Birdwing butterflies; hence they are very collectable which has not helped their survival. Many Birdwings are now very rare and driven to this state through loss of habitat and the depravations of collectors. It occurs in Java and Bali and is strictly protected locally and is also listed in Appendix II of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), and Appendix B of the EU regulation on trading with species of wild Fauna and Flora.

Now take a closer look at the label on the pin:

Three labels, a printed one, probably produced by Godman & Salvin with a date when they received it (May 1895), a hand written one, which, judging by the writing on the back, was made apparently by recycling an old label, that matches Wallace’s hand writing and one with our accession number.

Java. amphrysus

Godman-Salvin coll. 95-5 Java

Wallace.

Bates coll.

Wow! What a history, so simply written here in a few words.

This magnificent butterfly was caught around 1861 in Java, during the time when Victorian explorers were probing the world for the Empire, wealth and knowledge. Just imagine the life this insect had led before its capture. Conjure up a hot tropical forest, which over a hundred and ten years ago would have been difficult, dangerous and expensive to get to, the butterfly flitting high in the canopy. It descends into a clearing created by a fallen giant tree and is caught by a local inhabitant, pinched (to kill it), and slipped into a basket made of a local palm. Taking it back home the inhabitant awaits the explorer to visit and a deal is done. The explorer carefully puts it into a specially folded envelope, writes some details of when and where it was caught then places into an insect-proof box and tries to keep it dry and free of mould. Months pass and the explorer returns to Britain, sorts his catches and carefully mounts or ‘sets’ the butterfly. It is remarkable it has survived the perilous journey aboard a sailing vessel for months on end. Not all collections survived as we shall see.

The explorer/collector in this case is no dealer or everyday person he is Alfred Russell Wallace, OM, FRS (8 January 1823 – 7 November 1913), naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist and biologist and is best known for independently proposing a theory of evolution due to natural selection that prompted Charles Darwin to publish his own theory. Wallace did extensive fieldwork, first in the Amazon River basin and then in the Malay Archipelago, where he identified the Wallace Line that divides the Indonesian archipelago into two distinct parts, one in which animals closely related to those of Australia are common, and one in which the species are largely of Asian origin. In 1869 he published an important work ‘The Malay Archipelago, The land of the orang-utan, and the bird of paradise. A narrative of travel, with sketches of man and nature’. In this book Wallace gives an account of his three months in Java in 1861 when this butterfly was probably collected. In this book (available on line as an ebook) Wallace says:

In the east of Java I had suffered from the intense heat and drought of the dry season, which had been very inimical to insect life. Here I had got into the other extreme of damp, wet, and cloudy weather, which was equally unfavourable. During the month which I spent in the interior of West Java, I never had a really hot fine, day throughout. It rained almost every afternoon, or dense mists came down from the mountains, which equally stopped collecting, and rendered it most difficult to dry my specimens, so that I really had no chance of getting a fair sample of Javanese entomology.

He was considered the 19th century’s leading expert on the geographical distribution of animal species and is sometimes called the ‘father of biogeography;’ Wallace was one of the leading evolutionary thinkers of the 19th century and made a number of other contributions to the development of evolutionary theory besides being co-discoverer of natural selection. These included the concept of warning colouration in animals, and the Wallace effect, a hypothesis on how natural selection could contribute to speciation by encouraging the development of barriers against hybridization.

The specimen did not stay with him but was given to his friend and co-explorer Henry Walter Bates FRS FLS FGS (Leicester, 8 February 1825 – London, 16 February 1892) naturalist and explorer who gave the first scientific account of mimicry in animals. Bates was most famous for his expedition to the Amazon with Wallace in 1848. Wallace returned in 1852, but lost his collection (fortunately he did not loose his Malay Archipelago material!) in a shipwreck. When Bates arrived home in 1859 after a full eleven years, he had sent back over 14,000 species (mostly of insects) of which 8,000 were new to science.

Like many collections Bates’ was broken up and dispersed with specimens going to many notable collectors and museums of the time. In this case specimen BC33969 was acquired by Godman and Salvin a pair of naturalists who were more well-known for their ornithology but whom also amassed an extensive butterfly collection and together described many new species and published over 120 papers on butterflies.

Osbert Salvin FRS (February 25, 1835 – June 1, 1898) was a naturalist, best known for co-authoring Biologia Centrali-Americana (1879-1915) with Frederick DuCane Godman, a 52 volume encyclopaedia on the natural history of Central America. Salvin was born in Finchley, the second son of Anthony Salvin, architect, of Hawksfold, Sussex. He was educated at Westminster and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, taking his degree in 1857. Shortly afterwards he accompanied his second cousin by marriage, Henry Baker Tristram, in a natural history exploration of Tunisia and eastern Algeria. Their account of this trip was published in The Ibis in 1859 and 1860. In the autumn of 1857 he made the first of several visits to Guatemala, returning there with Godman in 1861. It was during this journey that the Biologia Centrali-Americana was planned.

In 1871 he became editor of The Ibis. He was appointed to the Strickland Curatorship in the Universityof Cambridge, and produced his Catalogue of the Strickland Collection. He was one of the original members of the British Ornithologists’ Union and produced the volumes on the Trochilidae and the Procellariidae in the Catalogue of Birds in the British Museum. One of his last works was the completion of Lord Lilford’s Coloured Figures of British Birds (1897). Salvin was a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Linnean, Zoological and Entomological Societies, and at the time of his death was Secretary of the B.O.U. The Godman-Salvin Medal, a prestigious award of the British Ornithologists ‘Union, is named after him and Godman.

Salvin is also listed as one of the pioneer photographers. He carried a camera on his expeditions, photographing indigenous peoples, ruins and other scenes.

His colleague, Frederick DuCane Godman D.C.L., F.R.S., F.L.S., F.G.S., F.R.G.S., F.E.S., F.Z.S., M.R.I., F.R.H.S., M.B.O.U. (15 January 1834 – 19 February 1919) was the lepidopterist of this ornithologist pair. Godman is best known for his co-authoring of Biologia Centrali-Americana (1879-1915) with Osbert Salvin. He also published The Natural History of the Azores (1870) and a Monograph of the Petrels (1907-10). Godman was the third son of Joseph Godman, of Park Hatch, Surrey and was educated at Eton College and Trinity College, Cambridge. At Cambridge he became acquainted with Alfred Newton and Salvin. The custom of these ornithological friends to meet and talk over their recent acquisitions led to the foundation of the British Ornithologists’ Union (BOU) in November 1857. Godman was Secretary of the BOU from 1870 to 1882 and from 1889 to 1897, and President from 1896. A partner in Whitbread & Co. (the beer connection!), Godman inherited an ample fortune which allowed him to travel the world. In 1883, Godman went on to become the developer of South Lodge, a neo-Jacobean style country house estate in Sussex.

So, a simple label has links to many great names in Victorian science and exploration:

Wallace, Bates,Darwin, Godman, Salvin, Strictland, Tristram and even a brewery – Whitbread & Co.!