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SPORTING CUPS AND JUBILEE MUGS AT THE MUSEUM

Community News March 2012

SPORTING CUPS AND JUBILEE MUGS AT THE MUSEUM

There’s been a really encouraging response to our idea of an exhibition on Halesworth’s Sporting Past to mark the Olympics this summer. We’ve had so many generous offers of material to display and so many suggestions about Halesworth’s Sporting Heroes, past and present. It’s certainly not too late to get in touch about either. We’d still be grateful for items, recollections or suggestions to make this a really good show. Call Vic Gray.

We’re also encouraged by a grant from Suffolk County Council’s ‘Suffolk Celebrates’ fund to help us do this properly.

Meanwhile, 2012 isn’t just the year of the Olympics. Our Curator, Mike Fordham is at work putting together a display on Halesworth’s past celebrations of Coronations and Jubilees, showing how the town and the villages have pulled out all the stops in the past to celebrate in style. This will be ready for the Museum’s summer opening at the beginning of May.

A forgotten Halesworth hero of a different sort has re-emerged from the mist in the shape of Thomas Fella, an Elizabethan resident of the town who spent his spare hours copying characters and details from images in books of the time and turning them into a fantastic commonplace book full of local flavour and colour, a real glimpse into Suffolk life four hundred years ago. The book was sold to an American library in the 19th century but has now been rediscovered by Dr John Blatchly and Martin Sanford of Ipswich. When it is published this summer it will attract a great deal of attention as a new historical find of some importance and fascination. The Museum has been lucky to arrange a talk by the editors to mark the launch of this volume in The Cut on June 26th. It should be a truly fascinating evening.

Meanwhile the Museum has reopened after its winter closure and is now open Tuesday and Thursday, 10.00-12.30.

WANTED! HALESWORTH’S SPORTING HEROES

Community News February 2012

WANTED! HALESWORTH’S SPORTING HEROES

We’re looking for Halesworth’s Sporting Heroes up at the Museum – people from Halesworth and the villages around who, sometime in the past, made their mark at a county, national or international level, no matter what the sport.

It’s all part of the planning for the Museum’s exhibition on Halesworth’s Sporting Past, scheduled for the summer to coincide with the Olympics. Already local people are proving generous with their help and memories and it’s been rewarding to find how many people care about this aspect of Halesworth life. But there’s plenty of scope for more. If you can nominate someone local who has made their mark in the sporting world, we’ll try to include them on a ‘wall of fame’ as part of the exhibition.

And if you have photos, trophies, objects or just memories about sporting life in the town and around, to help us put this exhibition together, please get in touch with Vic Gray at 01986 872437 (e-mail grayvw@globalnet.co.uk). You can play a really useful part here.

All in all, it’s turning into a busy year for the Museum. The beginning of June will see the Queen’s Jubilee and we shall mark that occasion with a display in the Museum recalling past Royal celebrations in the area. On top of that, we have plans for bringing back the Museum’s popular lectures during the year and, following on from the sell-out success of Mike Fordham’s booklet ‘Halesworth Quay and the Blyth Navigation’, we shall be looking at producing another popular title later in the year.

Finally – if you were one of the many people who asked at the Museum, the Library or Halesworth Bookshop for a copy of the Navigation booklet but were too late to get one – good news! By the time this appears, you’ll find them back in stock. The presses have been rolling again.

MUSEUM’S OLYMPIC CHALLENGE

Community News January 2012

MUSEUM’S OLYMPIC CHALLENGE

No prizes for guessing what will be dominating our lives come the summer. Yes, it’s the O-word!

The posters on stations may be telling us that the Olympics is just a short sprint away from Suffolk by rail, but Halesworth wants its own bit of Olympic spirit nearer to home. At least that’s what we think up at the Halesworth and District Museum where plans are being put together for our very own exhibition of ‘Halesworth’s Sporting History’.

Did you know, for example, that there was a Bowling Green attached to the Angel Hotel as far back as 1784? And have you ever heard of Bugler Ward, who won the Suffolk County Rifle Shooting Championship three times in the 1890s and on his third win was met at the station by the Town Band and paraded through the town as a civic hero. It’s fascinating facts like these that we’re hoping to pull together for the event. You may be able to help us.

We’d like this to be a real ‘community exhibition’, with all the sporting clubs in the area (don’t forget we cover Halesworth and the surrounding villages) helping us unearth aspects of their sporting past and present. It doesn’t need to be a gold medal or a championship cup. Vintage sporting equipment, old team photographs, posters of events, anything like this could help us piece together the story and provide an interesting display. And people’s recollections can, in themselves, be a great source for sporting history.

We hope to launch this display well in time for the Olympics themselves. We shall be getting in touch with the sports clubs early in the new year but, in the meantime, if anyone is interested in helping with this project or has got anything they can offer us by way of items for an exhibition or memories of Halesworth and district’s sporting past, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with Vic Gray .

The Olympic spirit, Halesworth style? The vintage bicycle race at the Halesworth Carnival, 1933.