The speaker at our meeting on Friday, 13th March, will be Jay Cumberworth who is Archaeology Project Manager at Peterborough Museum. He will describe how items in their collection are cared for behind the scenes, using the latest practices to preserve them for the future.

When Peterborough Museum was being established in the 1890s, a wide variety of historic items were donated by local people, including Rev. S W Skene of Deeping St James who gave an “iron bell tongue with a wooden swivel dated 1674” which was formerly in the Priory Church. A natural history collection was also being assembled, and the museum accepted such oddities as the wing of an albatross, and a short-tailed mouse and weasel which had been caught in Minster Close.

For a few years in the 1880s, the Deepings had a local museum in a room at the Waterton Arms public house, whose landlord Alfred Elliott was a collector of curiosities, a naturalist and taxidermist. In 1885 he advertised free entry with teas provided, during the village’s Feast Week.

People of a sensitive nature may well have needed a drink after viewing his collection, as it included relics from a gibbet where the bodies of two murderers were suspended. Almost a hundred years earlier in 1788, brothers Richard and William Weldon robbed and killed a man near the village of Lower Hambleton, Rutland. While being held in Oakham gaol, Richard Weldon also murdered a prison officer. Both brothers were sentenced to be hanged, and according to a law at that time, it was forbidden to bury executed murderers unless they had first been anatomised or hung in chains. The Weldons’ corpses were suspended from a wooden frame near the scene of their crime – which was in view of their mother’s cottage – and left there to disintegrate. Somehow, Alfred Elliott had acquired part of an iron chain from the gibbet, and even more gruesomely, the skull and some bones of one of the murderers.

His museum in Deeping was short-lived, as in 1886 he put his collection of antiquities, stuffed British mammals and birds up for auction at Peterborough Corn Exchange. It was reported that the skull and bones aroused much interest, and sold for four shillings and sixpence to a local wood-turner.

Jay Cumberworth’s talk will give insights into present-day museum procedures, and starts at 7.30 pm in the main hall of the Community Centre in Market Deeping. Everyone is welcome. Admission £3.