Any followers of our Under the Eaves project will know that in 2005, the Museum of Cornish Life inherited the collections from Camborne Museum when it closed. Some of you, if you are local to Camborne, may have known that the museum was in the upstairs rooms of the public library in the Passmore Edwards building. This is the beautiful Silvanus Trevail-designed building with the bronze statue of Richard Trevithick flanking the front, at what was known as The Cross. Through my Headley Fellowship we want to re-establish the relationship between Helston and Camborne and one of our goals is to reunite some of the Camborne collections and the history of its old museum back in the town. In the meantime I wanted to share some of the research I’ve been doing on the history of libraries and museums in Camborne.

to enable town-councils to establish Museums of Art in corporate towns.

Museums Act 1845, Hansard, UK Parliament, 6 March 1845.

I want to talk about the library because it was the main vehicle to the town establishing a museum alongside. In fact the Museums Act of 1845 encouraged the establishment of public museums outside London, and these began to be attached to public libraries, whose establishment was further supported by the Public Libraries Act 1850.

It took Cornwall a further 40 years to embrace the trend towards providing access to public (free) libraries and John Passmore Edwards and his financing of libraries and schools in Cornwall was instrumental in making this happen. In 1894 the Camborne Urban District Council established its first Free Library, thanks to him. But the museum itself wasn’t set up until 1913. Libraries and museums are now literally part of the fabric of many towns and villages, but it’s hard to over-emphasise just how radical an idea these institutions were, especially those dedicated to broad public benefit.

Let’s rewind a bit to 1829, for the museum in the Passmore Edwards building was not Camborne’s first. In this year an association was set up by a group of business men and thinkers from Camborne’s emerging middle classes. They met in cottage parlour rooms in Wellington Street (now Wellington Road) and other private buildings in town for talks, discussions and demonstrations. These men then formed the Camborne Literary Institution. Among them were Dr. George Smith, safety fuse manufacturer and a Wesleyan Methodist Historian, Dr. Richard Lanyon, a surgeon and the museum’s first curator, Capt. William Petherick, Manager of Docoath Mine, Capt. Charles Thomas, agent of Dolcoath Mine, John and Charles Budge, drapers, Jon Thomas, schoolmaster, George Childs and Thomas Vaudrey. In 1842 a new building was made for the Literary Institution, principally patronised by Sir Richard Rawlings Vyvyan and Lady Basset (Tehidy).

This building will be recognised today with the heritage plaque remembering it as the Camborne Literary Institution, later the Donald Thomas Centre, and now the home of Camborne Contemporary Crafts. The Neoclassical but thick granite-built edifice doesn’t have the same impact as it used to, and now feels rather like it’s facing the wrong way as Camborne has built up around it.

The building consisted of a main room and one room on either side with an impressive oriental frontage costing over £400.

J.F. Odgers, Camborne (Free) Library 1895-1963 (1963).

When it opened on 23 October 1842, it had 1100 books and 400 specimens of minerals and curiosities. However by the early 1890s, interest in the intellectual and cultural events of the Literary Institution began to dwindle and it became more like a social club, and later in 1961 it was taken over by the Holman Bros, one of Camborne’s premier engineering firms, to take care of their ‘pensioners’. I haven’t fount out much more about the museum’s collection yet, but we do know that artefacts were “gradually disposed of” and it may be that some of these did later find their way to other museums, collectors and even Camborne’s second museum set up in the Free Library at Camborne Cross.

A meeting place for ‘touch pipe’

The site at Camborne Cross was apparently a meeting place for ‘touch pipe’ – a sociable debate, I imagine to be something like Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park, London (but I am not absolutely certain of this meaning). Here, “may be said to be the birth-place of Radicalism in Camborne” according to J.F. Odgers, who wrote a history of libraries in Camborne in 1963. Indeed the Radical Liberal MP C.A.V. Conybeare had been elected to represent East Penwith and was fully supportive of the movement to provide free access to reading and books to the Camborne’s people, particular at a time when the town, like other Cornish mining towns were experiencing large exoduses of people migrating overseas in search of work and better times.

Camborne Museum took shape by the 1910s. This period is marked by the apex of the British Empire, a domestic fascination with the rest of the world, its contemporary and ancient cultures, and wanting to bring them to the designs of their interiors, buildings, clothing, jewellery and more. Collecting and categorising objects and specimens became something of a national obsession in Britain at this time. Quite often the categories and descriptions were inaccurate and objects from far-flung parts of the world, misunderstood. Even today, this spectre still looms over museum catalogues and we have to work systematically to make our descriptions and information more accurate and reflective of the places and people from which they originated.

Unlike many other countries, British society has always accommodated and cherished amateur and enthusiast interest in, and knowledge of the past. We see this today with the Portable Antiquities Scheme (Cornwall’s Finds Liaison Officer is based here at the museum). Indeed the foundation of Camborne’s museum, and many of the artefacts we now care for in Helston, also derived from the same enthusiasm and dedication.

One of the greatest histories of any parish

James Thomas is an important name to remember in our museum’s history. Mr. Thomas was a rural postman and antiquarian. In fact this description was included in a brass plaque dedication attached to a large case of antiquities from the town and its surrounding area in 1913. These artefacts, recovered during his searches for “relics” in his spare time, included flints, Cornish crosses, old weapons, tomahawks (hand-axes deemed similar in style to those used by indigenous peoples of North America including Native American Indians) and a Royal Artillery sword from the era of Waterloo (c.1815).

Because of the meticulous way public meetings were documented, we get a real glimpse of what James Thomas’s gift meant, and how important it was in founding the town’s museum which lasted for just under 100 years. I was particularly taken by the comment from Mr. T. Knowles from Camborne School of Mines that, “the classification was done most skillfully and there was a scheme through the whole design.” Curatorial skills publicly valued!

As townsmen they felt proud of him.

J.F. Odgers, 1963.

James Thomas was also a maker, he made miniature models of the Celtic crosses he found and also donated them to the museum. I wish we could find these again. Mr. Thomas was also part of Camborne Antiquarian and Natural History Society and was inspired by Thurstan C. Peter’s excavations at Carn Brea which revealed significant neolithic settlement and activity, especially the manufacture of flint items. At the same time, James Thomas was investigating the ’rounds’ especially at Lower Rosewarne. In the end he excavated about one one-hundredweight of flints. He was fiercely proud of Camborne’s antiquity and history and once said that the town had “one of the greatest histories of any parish in the Duchy.” James Thomas died in 1933 and was buried in Camborne Parish Churchyard, his inscription reads: “The First ‘Bard’ for 1000 Years.”

The era of curios, antiques and theft

Another key name in the history of Camborne Museum’s collections is Rev. Canon J. Sims Carah, the vicar of Holy Trinity church at Penponds. Rev. Carah was also an antiquarian and also collected items from abroad. One of the founders of Camborne Old Cornwall Society, he was also an influential person on Camborne Urban District Council. He died in 1936 and in 1937 his sisters bequeathed an oak cabinet of curios such as old china and snuff boxes to the museum, together with an oil painting. In 1947 “curios and antiques” were presented to the museum by Mr. W.E. Wallace, the son-in-law of James Thomas. In fact Wallace became the museum’s curator a year later and formed a sub-committee to reorganise the museum.

In 1950, Prof. Charles Thomas, the son of Mr. D.W. Thomas, then recently graduated but already very knowledgeable about Cornish archaeology, cleaned and rearranged the exhibits. Finally in 1960-61 the museum was refurbished with new lighting and Mr. H. Lean became its curator. School groups started to visit and the museum began to take on a more public role.

J.F. Odgers gives us a glimpse of the kinds of things that were on display at the time he wrote his 1963 history of the free library and museum:

• scene of the various stages in the development of artificial lighting over 2000 years
• mining photographs of Camborne’s mines and miners
• old silver
• snuff boxes
• hand-painted china
• pavement fragment from the Roman villa at Magor Farm
• model brick-making machine
• early 19th c. pipe organ from Gwinear church
• crimping mangle
• wooden truncheons labelled “Constable of Camborne”

Unfortunately a large theft in July 1976 denuded the museum of many of its collections, particularly affecting items from Rev. Carah’s collection. We have a register here which marks all of the missing items, and they are all that’s left of what once existed.

We have some of the remaining artefacts here, and we have some of the museum’s files, now it’s a case of putting the jigsaw puzzle together.

Museums feel very permanent and we talk a lot about preservation for future generations, but the fact is that museums come and go, and always have done. They also get reinvented, and their purposes change. They always rely on enthusiasm and a dedication to preserve things that might otherwise get lost in the tide of stuff that surrounds our everyday lives. Camborne, in fact, had two other museums at one point, the Holman Bros. Museum that for a time was in the Public Rooms displaying rock drills and other mining machinery (much of this is now housed at King Edward Mine up the hill in Troon), and Camborne School of Mines’ museum (now on the Penryn campus of the University of Exeter).

If you have photographs or memories of the old Camborne Museum, please do get in touch with me, Dr. Tehmina Goskar on: tehmina@museumofcornishlife.co.uk

This history has been substantially based on J.F. Odgers, Camborne Public (Free) Library 1895-1963 (1963). Odgers self-published this history and donated all of its proceeds to the “Freedom from Hunger” campaign.