Story Category: Legacy

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

…Paula Wrightson, Museum Learning Officer (Adult event programme)

I have been working with the ghosts at Preston Manor for five years although I’ve yet to actually meet one.

In this time I’ve become fascinated not only by our famous Preston Manor ghost story but by the history of belief in ghosts, especially in the Victorian period. The Victorians went ghost crazy and the Stanford family of Preston Manor appear to have been drawn into the fad.

I have been lucky enough to read the letters written in the 1930s between John Benett-Stanford and Henry Roberts, the first curator of the Manor when it became a museum in 1933. It is through these letters that we can piece together some of the story. What is known is that Lady Ellen Stanford certainly did not believe her house was haunted “personally I do not believe anyone has ever seen one here” she wrote of ghosts in 1930.

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However, her mother was so convinced she took part in a séance, which was held at the house on 11^th November 1896. At this time holding a séance was fashionable in high society. Even Queen Victoria is said to have dabbled. Spiritualist mediums could make a good living on the grand house circuit and many, interestingly, were women, as the job was considered a respectable profession (especially for genteel ladies in need of an income).

The medium present at the Preston Manor séance was Ada Goodrich Freer, going under the pseudonym ‘Miss X’. She became a leading member of the Society for Psychical Research which was set up in 1882 and continues today. Without doubt Miss X provided a dazzling show that November night. A transcript of the proceedings still exists from which we can deduce a ‘talking board’ was used (marketed as the Ouija Board from 1901). Miss X’s fantastical communications with ‘the other side’ (too lengthy to go into here) together with the archive of letters, provide us with the basis of the ghost tours and events that we run at Preston Manor today.

John Benett-Stanford, who was not present at the séance, intended writing a history of his family ghost story but in his own words he was “too lazy” to do so. He hoped Henry Roberts would take up the mantle and wrote numerous lines of enquiry to Roberts including the hope that the household ghost of the White Lady might call by one night and “share your whisky and soda with you”.

No one has yet written the definitive history of the Preston Manor ghosts, not least because the story continues. I keep an on-going file of up-to-date reports of sightings and experiences.

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

Today is the anniversary of the death of Charles Darwin (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882). In tribute to the naturalist, we look at his ‘Abominable Mystery’.

Charles Darwin was concerned with the fossil record showing the sudden and rapid diversification of the flowering plants. These concerns were expressed in a letter he wrote on 22nd July 1879 to his close friend Joseph Hooker:

Letter to Joseph Hooker (Cambridge University Library)

Origins of Flowering Plants

Darwin speculated that they arose in response to a rise in ‘flower frequenting insects’. In fact we now understand that the co-evolution of plants and insects was an important process in the flowering plants’ origins and divergence. Put quit simple: no insects, no flowering plants.

The relationship between the two has been one of love and hate.

Love – the plants exploiting the insect for sex (transfer of pollen) by offering food, shelter and other rewards.

Hate – the plants having to defend themselves against the attack of insects using them for food.

The processes continue today.

We now know that the flowering plants arose in the Early Cretaceous, around 130 million years ago. By the mid Cretaceous they had rapidly diversified and spread around the world with 50 families recognised.

This special fossil is called Bevhalstia plebja and was found in 1995 at Smokejacks Quarry, a Weald clay (Lower Barremian) brick-pit in Surrey. It was described by C.R. Hill in Cretaceous Research (1996) 17, 27-38. Further examples of this strange plant have subsequently been found.

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Bevhalstia appears to be an unremarkable water weed growing on the margin of a pond or marsh. Far from being unremarkable it is a unique plant that does not match any living flowering plant. It has tiny flower buds at the ends of some of its branches that lack defined flower petals. It has leaves with veins like the leaves of modern flowing plants.  

This is an amazing plant – a true ancestor, the earliest known, of all the amazing flowering plants and featured in a National Geographic article.

Gerald Legg, Keeper of Natural Sciences

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

James Gillray, The Lover’s Dream, 24 January 1795
Hand-coloured etching and aquatint. FA208920

James Gillray, The Lover’s Dream, 24 January 1795, FA208920

George, Prince of Wales had promised to marry Caroline of Brunswick in exchange for writing off his debts. In the print, his wife to be hovers over the sleeping Prince. A winged figure holds a marriage torch in one hand as he lifts the train of the wedding dress with the other. Cupid pulls aside the bed’s heavy curtains. On the other side of George’s bed, George’s father King George III holds a bag full of cash expectantly while the Queen, anticipating her son’s forthcoming marriage, holds a book entitled ‘The Art of Getting Pretty Children’.

Behind Prince George’s parents are his companions. The politician Charles James Fox and the playwright and politician Richard Sheridan appear worried as they slink away together with George’s former wife Maria Fitzherbert (his marriage to the Catholic widow was never recognized) and George’s current mistress, Lady Jersey. A plump Bacchus is about to fall off a cask of port. The print bears the inscription: ‘”A Thousand Virtues seem to lackey her, Driving far off each thing of Sin & Guilt.” Gillray suggests satirically that George’s exuberant lifestyle will come to an end with the wedding.

The Lover’s Dream shows Prince George before he met Caroline of Brunswick. George dreams blissfully of his future wife’s beauty and of a peaceful marriage, oblivious to the trouble that lies ahead. Indeed, adultery and, ultimately, divorce would define George’s marriage to Caroline.

The Lover’s Dream is one of the highlights from our new acquisition of 235 prints from the golden age of political caricature. James Gillray (1757-1815) was one of the leading satirists of late 18th and early 19th century. This beautifully-executed print demonstrates his wit, humour and visual imagination. The Lover’s Dream will be shown together with other colourful caricatures in the display George IV And His Circle – Newly Acquired Caricatures From The Kenneth Baker Collection in the Prints & Drawings Gallery at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery from 7 June 2011.

Jenny Lund, Curator of Fine Art

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

. . . Jenny, Knowledge & Information Manager

A key part of my role at Brighton & Hove Museums is to ensure the careful organisation of vital information about the objects and archives in our care. In our exciting digital age, this means working with a huge database and many, many digital images and documents. The flexibility of digital information management makes the process of recording and retrieving information relatively quick and easy but the whole thing can be a little inhuman at times!

Back when Brighton Museum was established, in the far-from-digital year of 1873, the recording of information was a much more painstaking business with every donation, purchase and excavation find recorded by hand with pen on paper. These records can be found in the museum’s archives which contain around thirty handwritten, leather bound ledgers known as accession registers. To me, the registers are objects of beauty in themselves and to give you an idea of how much information is contained within them, each ledger has around 300 pages and each page has roughly eight donations listed on it. This makes a total of 72,000 separate donations over the course of a century and many donations consist of more than one object! What I also find intriguing is that the ledgers can illustrate, to a certain extent, the personalities of the staff who wrote so carefully in them for over 100 years until computers were introduced in the 1980s.

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In this image you can see the first page of the first accession register which began in 1890. Amongst the list of entries has to be my most favourite labelled simply and humorously, in retrospect, as ‘a section of wood with curious stain’! The entry is numbered ‘9’ in the system implemented by one of the museum’s most influential curators Herbert S Toms. Toms was a dedicated archaeologist who managed the museum between 1897 and 1939. A later account of him by his protégé Ralph Merrifield describes Toms’ approach to keeping records:

“Detailed accessioning was an innovation introduced by Toms to the museum and was gradually extended by him to cover the earlier collections, which had often been catalogued with such unhelpful entries as “one long article, probably ceremonial”. Tom’s care in recording was undoubtedly instilled in him by [Lt-General] Pitt Rivers, whose words he was fond of quoting: “If it has lost its register number throw it into the first ditch you come to” – a dictum that should not be taken quite literally by archaeologists or curators.”

We maybe quick on the digital draw these days but you cannot fault a good numbering system to help with the organisation of electronic records! At Brighton Museum we have just returned to using the ever reliable R numbers devised by Toms, thereby bringing a brilliant record keeper, born almost 140 years ago, into the 21^st century.

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

How many of you guessed that our alien story was an April Fool? We did give you a clue – in the doctors name – which is an anagram of April Fools. Can you tell us what is significant about the location and date we gave for her fictional discovery?

The specimen you see in the picture is preserved example of the foetus of a macaque, a type of monkey, which is found across the world from Japan to Gibraltar and North Africa. Macaques are the most widespread genus of primates after humans. This particular one was donated to the Booth Museum by London Zoo in 1981. It is a Southern Pig Tailed macaque, native to Malaysia and Borneo.

Although not really an extraterrestrial, macaques did become the first animals to return from space alive, in 1959, as part of the NASA space programme.

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.

Brighton & Hove Museums has recently acquired a specimen which could prove the existence of extraterrestrial life, through the bequest of a local scientist. In the will of the late Dr Pilar Sofol a number of unidentified specimens, collected by her on field trips abroad over sixty years ago, were donated to the Booth Museum of Natural History including the one featured below.

Exogiini Sofoloi

The arrival of Dr Sofol’s collection was greeted with excitement by curatorial staff at the museum. The vast numbers of plant specimens, which formed the basis of Dr Sofol’s life’s work researching horticultural subjects, were accurately documented and identified but the non-plant material collected by her during that time were poorly labelled or had no information at all. Fortunately, a reference to the specimen you see in the picture was found in a side note in her field journal. Sofol records that she found the decaying remains of what looked like a severely malformed, bald, monkey whilst on a plant collecting expedition along the Pecos River, New Mexico in August 1947. Dr Sofol simply placed the specimen in a formaldehyde solution and continued with her research. After returning to the UK in the late 1950s most of her collections were placed in storage and by all accounts generally ignored until after her death.

When curatorial staff discovered Dr Sofol’s note, identifying this specimen as a malformed primate, they attempted to identify a species through DNA analysis. Despite several attempts all samples came back showing the specimen as having no relation to any species currently living on earth. As all organisms currently alive have some relation to each other this outcome was somewhat baffling. In addition, the results showed that the specimen was a close match to bacteria found inside meteorites. As a result, the specimen has now been sent to the biological research division of a space agency for further study as a possible alien life form. Findings will be published later this year.

We are so used to the concept of alien life nowadays that it may seem strange to you that Dr Sofol didn’t go about trying to prove the existence of alien life when she made her discovery in 1947 but at that time there was little interest in extraterrestrial life. Man hadn’t yet left the earth, let alone landed on the moon.

In honour of her discovery it has been submitted that the creature should be named Exogiini Sofoloi.

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.

“The March Hare will be much the most interesting, and perhaps as this is May it won’t be raving mad — at least not so mad as it was in March.” – Alice’s adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll.

The character of the Mad March Hare in Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland is based on the old English saying ‘mad as a March hare’. This comes from the behaviour of the hare during the first breeding season of the year, which coincides with the start of spring in Western Europe.

During the early days of spring, the hares are seen in large groups acting in an increasingly erratic manner, including leaping vertically, boxing, chasing and biting other hares. This coupled with the fact that during much of the year the hares are shy animals and are difficult to spot makes their strange behaviour appear borne of madness to casual observers.

In reality, this behavior is a year round occurrence which occurs whenever females are ready to mate. This behavior is far more readily observed in spring for a number of reasons.

A Hare from the Booth Museum of Natural History

Firstly, during the harsh winter months, most females will not have been fertile, either looking after the final batch of young from the previous year, concentrating on finding food, or still too young. As a result, the vast majority of females are ready to mate at the same time, congregating in large groups.

Secondly, the males tend to create harems of the females at this time of year. They will bite and chase off subordinate males who get too near and box with other dominant males to win other harems. However, not all the females are willing to mate at the same time, and will box with the male to show their unwillingness to mate.

Finally, the hare is most often observed by humans in the spring time as the crops in the fields and meadows are still low to the ground after the winter. This coupled with the large groups makes their appearance in March all the more obvious.

The behaviour and appearance of hares has led to them being both revered and despised throughout history. The Hare was sacred and linked to a number of gods in many religions from cultures as diverse as the Native Americans, Indians, Egyptians and the Chinese. In Anglo-Saxon mythology the goddess Ostara, the rising sun, is depicted with the head of a hare. She is associated with spring, fertility and resurrection and is a friend to children. From this legend comes the story of her transforming her pet bird into a hare. This hare then laid brightly coloured eggs, which she gave to children as presents. The tradition of giving coloured eggs still exists in Easter today.

Cockney – Sportsmen Finding A Hare

As with many animals revered in the older religions, Christians changed hares into animals of evil. They said that witches transformed into hares in order to suck the blood of cows, and any wounds inflicted on a hare would be found on a woman the next day. However, old folk tales persisted throughout the centuries, leading to a number of conflicting legends presenting hares as animals of both good and bad omen.

A number of hares, including the recent acquisition pictured above, are in the collection at the Booth Museum. We also have hares (as well as a large number of other animals) available for loan to schools and other organisations. Please contact the Booth Museum for details on borrowing.

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.

Delve into the world of the craft maker Jon Mills as he brings his work to a free exhibition at Hove Museum.

Man in a Plane

Jon Mills was born in Birmingham in 1959, the latest in a line of metalworkers. He studied at Wolverhampton before helping to found Brighton’s Red Herring Studios in 1983. In the mid 1980s he honed his skills at brazing, forging, laser-cutting and welding and exhibited work at One Off, Ron Arad’s London workshop and gallery.

In recent years Jon has been involved in major architectural commissions, inventing exciting structures that engage with their surroundings whether in cities or in the countryside. He has made balconies for Caerphilly and Kings Lynn, railings at Folkestone and Wolverhampton and a bridge over the River Dyfi in Powys.

His output is extraordinarily diverse and charmingly subversive. He makes dangerous toys and automata, dysfunctional furniture and an amazing range of sculpture with themes that are witty, whimsical, and sometimes darkly Gothic.

Dan Dare Chair

Hove Museum holds one of the earliest versions of his Dan Dare Chair of 1987 (C4.1993). The sheet-steel seat, with its hand-operated, multi-directional radar dish was made two years before Wallace and Gromit’s fantasy trip to the moon in a home-made rocket (in A Grand Day Out). It inspires the visitor to explore the universe from the comfort of a domestic armchair!

In 1999 Jon created the comically horrifying Man in a Plane (DA301849) which can now be seen in Brighton Museum’s 20th-Century Design Gallery plummeting for ever towards earth.

For the reopening of Hove Museum in 2003 Jon worked with children from the Peter Gladwin School in Portslade to produce railings for the first-floor Landing Gallery. Here are a row of growing plants that look like broad beans, covered with creepy-crawlies from the compost heap!

Railings in the First Floor Landing Gallery at Hove Museum

I’m thrilled that Jon’s latest creation, Mr Watt, Grumpy Man of Metal is coming to visit Hove Museum this spring. I understand that he is intending to make some special donations to Brighton & Hove’s collections. I wonder what they can be…?

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.

The centenary of International Women’s Day falls on the 8^th of March. The theme for this year’s event is Equal access to education, training and science and technology: Pathway to decent work for women.

With this in mind, we take a look at the Lewes Road Dispensary celebrated for its entirely female staff.

145 Islingword Road, site of the original Lewes Road Dispensary

Brighton History Centre holds this 1905 Annual Report for the pioneering Lewes Road Hospital & Dispensary for Women and Children. The opening page of the report states its aim:

‘To afford to poor women of Brighton and the neighbourhood, the opportunity of free consultation with Doctors of their own sex’.

Dispensaries were a widespread means of offering free or low-cost medical treatment to members of society who couldn’t afford doctors fees. The Lewes Road Dispensary was radical in that it had an entirely female staff, at a time when women had only recently been permitted to work as doctors.

Even more revolutionary was the Lewes Road Hospital (later renamed the ‘Lady Chichester’) which ran alongside the dispensary. The annual report states:

‘the patients are chiefly women and girls who are suffering from serious nervous breakdown … it is the only institution of the kind in the kingdom where expert treatment can be obtained by those who cannot afford large payments’.

1905 Annual Report for the pioneering Lewes Road Hospital & Dispensary for Women and Children

In a pamphlet held at Brighton History Centre Dr Helen Boyle says the hospital provided an environment away from the effects of ‘bad air, bad food, noise, and worry’. She describes a treatment regime beyond bed rest that included music, massage, sea-bathing, walks on the Downs and even trips to concerts at the Dome.

Both the dispensary and hospital were extremely successful – running until 1948 when they came under NHS control.  However, as the annual reports show, funding was always a pressing issue. As well as listing names of subscribers (with sums donated), the 1905 report details gifts given by benefactors which include ‘loan of a piano’, ‘a bicycle from Miss Cohen’, and bed-linen ‘beautifully marked with monograms’ by one volunteer.

The report also lists the number of patients treated, income and expenditure, and gives names of staff including the dispensary founders Helen Boyle and Mabel Jones, and notable Brighton physician Louisa Martindale. It tells us that the dispensary and hospital Vice-President is the eminent Elizabeth Garrett-Anderson – the first British woman doctor.

The report offers us a fascinating glimpse of the work of pioneering women in Brighton and of conditions for their women patients before a free health service. Brighton History Centre also holds a 1910 annual report and further pamphlets about the hospital.

Anna Kisby, Brighton History Centre

Read more about pioneering Brighton women in our post Found! Suffragettes hiding in the Brighton Dome.

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

To mark the Centenary of International Women’s Day on the 8^th of March, we learn more about pioneering Brighton woman,  Dr Helen Boyle.

Helen Boyle (1869-1957) was Brighton’s first woman GP and transformed the lives of working-class women in the area through her ground-breaking treatment of mental illness.

Responsible for establishing a dispensary and hospital staffed by women for women, she went on to become the first female psychiatrist at the Royal Sussex County Hospital and co-founder of MIND.

As a young doctor Helen Boyle arrived in Brighton in 1897 galvanised by her work in London’s East End which gave her first-hand experience of the mental and physical strain on women living in poverty. Determined to provide medical services to working-class women, with Dr Mabel Jones she set up the Lewes Road Dispensary for Women and Children in the then deprived area of Hanover. The dispensary offered free or low-cost treatment to women who couldn’t afford GP’s charges, in a sympathetic female-only environment – and was a great success.

The Lady Chichester Hospital, Hove, 1922

But Boyle’s long-held ambition was to transform the treatment of working-class women with early-stage mental illness, whom she fiercely described as ‘neglected and maltreated until … they were turned into the finished product – lunatics’. In 1905 she founded the Lady Chichester Hospital for Women with Nervous Diseases.

Before that time, poor women of Brighton with mental illnesses from depression to borderline insanity – exacerbated by inadequate living conditions, nutrition and exhaustion – had recourse to no help other than committal to the asylum. Boyle’s hospital was the first of its kind in England, treating poor women before they became certifiable.

As well as receiving professional acclaim in the medical sector, Boyle was honoured for her war work in Serbia in 1915. She never married, but shared a home for the last seventeen years of her life with her companion Marguerite du Pre Gore Lindsay. She died in Pyecombe in 1957.

Further information on Boyle and other early women doctors is held at Brighton History Centre.

Anna Kisby, Brighton History Centre