Collection: Ilfracombe Museum

Collection-level records:

• Collection history (Collection development policy)

  The collection was initiated under the founding curator Mervyn Palmer, when the museum was established in 1932. Donations of large amounts of natural history, especially taxidermy, formed a major part of the museum’s early collection. Local donors predominated, and Mr Palmer actively sought to acquire a reference collection of lepidoptera, by corresponding with the RAMM in Exeter and museums in London. Early accession registers 1932-1969 provide reasonable details. The museum had an ‘anything and everything’ attitude to collecting, which has given the museum its eclectic character, but led to storage problems by the 1990s, since when the collecting has been gradually more selective. Documentation was poor from 1969-1985.

  From 1986 accessions were recorded to museum standards, and the museum began a new numbering system using the MLA prefix ILFCM. There was much re-organisation of the poorly stored and displayed material in the 1990s and 2000s.

  In 2014 the museum began to digitise the collection onto MODES and E-Hive databases.

  There are important collections of African ethnography and South American archaeology, and archives on Mervyn Palmers career, significant because he was a professional collector. A set of First World War photographs of the town’s soldiers has recently been recognised as a rare type of collection. There is now a need to conduct more research into the origins and significance of parts of the collection – for example an herbarium recently found in the loft, and the provenance and importance of the extensive lepidoptera collection.

  Source: Collection development policy

  Date: 2018

  Licence: CC BY-NC

• Collection overview (Collection development policy)

  The collections comprise of some 28,000 items including:

  1. Photographs, paintings, engravings and other pictures of local interest, demonstrating the progressive changes in the locality over the last two hundred years.
  2. Domestic social items (miscellaneous ceramics, glass, metalwork, wooden items, dolls, toys and costume)
  3. Agricultural history items, mainly hand-tools.
  4. Cobblers’, printers’ and other craftsmen’s tools and equipment.
  5. Clocks, watches, surveying instruments and other scientific equipment.
  6. Coins, tokens and medals.
  7. Maritime history items relating to Ilfracombe area and elsewhere including ship models.
  8. Militaria from Civil War to 2nd World War including firearms and edged weapons.
  9. Sporting firearms.
  10. Ethnographic items including collections from South America (Palmer), Africa and Asia and Polynesia.
  11. Archaeological material local and non-local.
  12. Geological material, minerals and fossils local and non-local.
  13. Mounted British and non-British reptiles, birds and mammals (including old specimen game heads and some educational displays of British species). An important collection of British bats preserved in fluid and cabinets of British and non-British birds’ eggs.
  14. Cabinets of butterflies, moths, beetles, shells and other invertebrates British and non-British.
  15. Herbaria including pressed flowering plants, ferns and seaweed;
  16. Archives of books, documents and papers relating to the area of interest, mainly available for reference rather than display including an important collection of bound copies of Ilfracombe newspapers 1871 – 1953.

  Source: Collection development policy

  Date: 2018

  Licence: CC BY-NC