Collection: Worcestershire County Museum

Collection-level records:

• Collection history (Collection development policy)

  The Worcestershire County Museum collection comprises material evidence and associated information relating to the history of the County of Worcestershire and the people who have lived and worked there and reflects the working life of a rural and urban county from earliest times.

  The Worcestershire County Museum was founded in 1964, with the core collection of rural life artefacts donated by the Parker family from Tickenhill Manor near Bewdley. This collection is held in a charitable trust for the benefit of the public with Worcestershire County Council as the charity’s trustee. Further collecting has continued in the following decades aligned with the County’s other collection.

  In 2006 a partnership was formed with Worcestershire City Museum in the formation of a joint museum store on Hartlebury Trading Estate. The majority of the collections have been moved from less-suitable stores and are now stored to a high professional standard in this building, making the collections more widely accessible for visitors, researchers and learning groups. The lease at the joint museum store will end in 2025 and a decision about the future location of the joint store beyond that date will be made during the lifetime of this policy.

  In 2010 Worcester City Council and Worcestershire County Council took the decision to merge the management of their collections and museum venues, although ownership remained with each authority and the collections are managed in parallel. The new service was named Museums Worcestershire and is overseen by the Joint Museums Committee, formed of representatives from each authority and, when required, additional external expertise.

  Source: Collection development policy

  Date: 2023

  Licence: CC BY-NC

• Collection overview (Collection development policy)

  Tickenhill Collection

  The Tickenhill Collection is the founding collection of Worcestershire County Museum. It was established in the 1930s when Mrs Alice Parker and Mr Joseph F Parker, began to collect items to preserve the heritage of Worcestershire. The Parkers’ used their home at Tickenhill Manor as a home for their local folk museum, but large quantities were ultimately donated to the County. In 1966 Worcestershire County Museum was opened at Hartlebury Castle to house “33 tonnes” of objects from Tickenhill. It includes:

  • • Books
  • • Textiles
  • • Furniture
  • • Agricultural items
  • • Rural crafts and trades
  • • Customs and belief
  • • Vehicles
  • • Industrial and mechanised objects
  • • Curios
  • • Decorative arts
  • • Domestic items

  The collection was established as a charitable trust in 1958 and updated in 1970 with the following purpose:

  The maintenance and administration of the Tickenhill Collection which shall be placed or kept in such one or more public rooms, halls, museums or other places for exhibition in Worcestershire or elsewhere and that it shall be kept open for inspection by the public. Also to lend the said collection or any part thereof for public exhibition or for educational purposes.

  The Charitable Activities of the Tickenhill Collecton are:

  The care and conservation of the objects, records and associated information from the Tickenhill Collection, and the use of that collection for public benefit through display and educational activities.

  Worcestershire County Council is the trustee of the Tickenhill Trust and the collection is managed by Worcestershire County Council’s Joint Museum Service, Museums Worcestershire, and the responsibility of Principal Curator of the Tickenhill Collection is within Museum Worcestershire’s Social History Curator’s role.

  The Tickenhill Collection is overseen by the two Worcestershire County Councillors serving on the Council’s Joint Museums Committee.

  Since the establishment of Worcestershire County Museum, the collections of the Tickenhill Trust have been added to with collections owned by Worcestershire County Council. These include

  Archaeology

  The Museum holds archaeological collections from within the present boundaries of Worcestershire, excluding the area covered by the collecting policy of Worcester City Museums Service, Worcester Cathedral, and the major excavation archive from Bordesley Abbey .

  Archaeological archives from sites owned by The National Trust and English Heritage may be collected after negotiation.

  The collection includes finds from research excavations prior to PPG15 and PPG16, sites investigated in response to development, chance finds and treasure items.

  The collections reflect the settlement of Worcestershire from the Pleistocene through to the post- medieval period and include:

  • • Large deposits from the key county excavations at Beckford, Madresfield, Bays Meadow Roman Villa, Upwich, Old Bowling Green and Hanbury Road, Droitwich
  • • Pleistocene mammal, particularly mammoth, remains from excavations during the M5 widening at Strensham
  • • Bronze Age burial urns from Holt.
  • • Iron age currency bars from Malvern, a rare crouched Iron Age burial from Church Lench, and a significant and extensive archive from the Iron Age settlement at Beckford
  • • Extensive collections of Roman Severn Valley Ware pottery, including from kiln sites at Newlands, briquetage from Droitwich, evidence of roman salt working from Droitwich,
  • Bredon Hill and Hartlebury Roman Coin Hoards and the archive, including wall paintings and a mosaic, from Bays Meadow Roman Villa
  • • Early medieval coin hoards from Severn Stoke and Wyre Piddle and a tenth century Anglo-
  • Scandinavian gold ring from Kyre Park.
  • • Medieval salt working evidence, including the site of the main well, from Upwich
  • • Paper archives of site records, notes, maps, plans, drawings, photographs, written reports. Digital material is deposited with the Archaeology Data Service (ADS)
  • • The County Museum holds a numismatic collection that covers most aspects of official coinage from the Roman period to the present day as well as token coinage. Gaps in the collection include the Iron Age and the seventeenth century with the exception of a rare Charles l half-crown minted at Hartlebury Castle during the Civil Wars.

  Social History

  Community, Domestic and Family Life

  Domestic and Family Life is a collection dating from 1890 to 1940 relating to cooking, heating, cleaning and lighting with examples of household furnishings and furniture.

  Included within this section are:

  • • Cultural tradition
  • • Local government
  • • Law enforcement
  • • Emergency services
  • • Health, welfare & sanitation
  • • Education & school
  • • Warfare and defence
  • • Doors, windows & structural components
  • • Heating, lighting, water and sanitation
  • • Furniture, soft furnishings, floor coverings, ornaments, curios & pictures
  • • Household management, house cleaning, costume and soft furnishings care and maintenance
  • • textile crafts of sewing, lace making and patchwork of the nineteenth and early twentieth century
  • • Family hygiene & toilet
  • • Provisioning, food, drink and tobacco, storage, preservation, preparation, cooking, serving,
  • eating and drinking
  • • Family wellbeing, Infant raising & Child rearing
  • • Toys, games, crafts and hobbies, sport, music & dolls, 1900 to 1940
  • • Broadcast and pre-recorded entertainment
  • • Books
  • • Gardening
  • • Travel
  • • Communicating equipment

  Rural Crafts and Agriculture

  The Museum has a varied collection of nineteenth-and early twentieth- century material representing aspects of the rural life and farming throughout the year before modern mechanisation including

  • • Trades such as besom making, basket making, clog sole making, bark stripping, thatching, glass manufacture, gunsmithing and hornwork.
  • • Leather working such as saddler, shoemaker and glovemaking.
  • • Tools and products of the carpenter, wheelwright and cooper and the blacksmith and mine
  • worker.
  • • Specialised industries such as Nash’s scythe making, the Lewis ironworks, and the
  • Bromsgrove Guild are also represented.
  • • Ploughs, seed drill, seed fiddle, dibbers, sickles and scythes, flails, hay knifes, weeding
  • tools, forks and spades, hoes, harrows.
  • • Small hand tools are well represented but there are fewer implements.
  • • Other agricultural items include examples of dairying equipment and veterinary tools,
  • animal and crop husbandry.

  Transport

  The Transport collection (1830s to 1950s) has both utility and passenger carrying vehicles. It includes:

  • • Types of farm waggon, drays, and carts representing agricultural processes in Worcestershire.
  • Commercial vehicles include a carrier’s cart, delivery vans from Worcestershire traders, manufacturers and crafts persons, a hearse, hansom cab and a fire engine.
  • • Private vehicles including a travelling chariot, phaeton and a governess cart.
  • • Bicycle collection (circa 1870 to 1960) which has a variety of machines including tricycles,
  • ordinaries, a quadricycle, velocipedes, and a range of safety bicycles.
  • • A motor vehicle made in Kidderminster, the Castle Three car.

  The Vardo Collection

  The collection includes a unique and nationally important series of Gypsy Vardo (wagons) including examples of a Reading Waggon, a Bow Top, a Ledge Waggon, an Open Lot and a Square Burton.

  The associated collections that represent Romany life in the County have seen development as a result of the John Ellerman funded Vardo Project and a dedicated Vardo Curatorial Officer. The collection will continue to be developed during the lifetime of this policy.

  Costume and Textiles

  The costume and textiles collection comprises material circa 1750 to 1970s and is one of the finest costume collections in the region.

  It includes:

  • • A comprehensive collection of costume and accessories, such as parasols, fans, shoes and headwear. The eighteenth-century dresses and shoes are of particular interest and regional significance.
  • • Examples of eighteenth-century baby clothes and early nineteenth-century juvenile wear.
  • • Two gentlemen’s jackets dating to the late, as well as military and civilian uniforms and
  • smocks.
  • • Collection of clothes worn by Vesta Tilley including 3-piece suit, top hat, boots and a number of waistcoats.
  • • A Queen of Your Home Town outfit inspired by Vesta Tilley and worn by drag artist, Ginny
  • Lemon, on the TV show Drag Race

  Fine art

  The County Collection includes a small collection of fine art. There are several important and intriguing pieces within the collection, including landscapes by Carleton Grant and Leopold Rivers, and an important portrait by Mary Jane Hunter.

  Working and educational collections

  The power of museum objects can sometimes only be fully accessed through handling the artefact, or seeing it work in its original function. In order to preserve significant items, it is important that some specific objects are designated or collected as handling/working items. These items are not considered part of the main collection and the processes of acquisition, documentation and disposal is less formal than for the main collection.

  Education handling collection

  Handling items enable visitors, particularly in formal learning groups and community groups, to interact directly with objects by touching, feeling, smelling and wearing and are acquired to reflect the accessioned collections. These items might bear primarily original historic items but can be or replicas, but all are considered a core learning resource. Although treated with care, it is assumed that some will be damaged or destroyed with use and that eventual disposal may be necessary.

  As with accessioned collections, the handling collection considers acquisition, disposal, management, care, and access for all handling items.

  Museums Worcestershire have a number of objects that have been collected or prepared especially for handling, particularly by school groups, the majority of which are not accessioned. Donations of historical objects have also sometimes been designated as handling rather than refusing the offer.

  Working Objects

  Working items are restored, sometimes with the addition of new parts, to more fully demonstrate the purpose they were originally used for. The restoration should not transform the original purpose or original look of the object: if parts are removed as part of the restoration they will be kept alongside the object. The decision to restore an object to ‘working’ should only be made to add to visitors’ understanding of that item rather than simply to make it look more attractive. Once an object has been restored to work it should, wherever possible, be maintained in a working state.

  As part of the full audit of the social history collections during the life of this policy, a small number of items may be designated as working.

  Source: Collection development policy

  Date: 2023

  Licence: CC BY-NC