Spalding Gentlemen’s Society holds exhibition at Ayscoughfee Hall while Broad Street home undergoes major refurbishment
Dr Martin Blake explains the changes happening at Spalding Gentlemen’s Society – whose historic home is undergoing major refurbishment...
Change is afoot at Spalding Gentlemen’s Society (SGS).
The museum in Broad Street, Spalding, home to the SGS collection since 1911, needs major refurbishment, meaning that a new home has had to be found for some of the Society’s treasures.
Thanks to the generosity of its curators, an exhibition entitled ‘Collections Reimagined’ had been established in one of the ground floor galleries in Ayscoughfee Hall.
The exhibition offers new perspectives on the Society’s museum, library and archive holdings. Highlights include rare pottery from antiquity to the modern day, an experimental cabinet of curiosities, and themed displays on railways, crime and punishment, eclipses and more.
One of the more striking exhibits is one of a pair of Indo-Persian steel helmets, of a style generally known as Kulah Khud. These originated several centuries ago in central Asia, were used across a wide area and were often highly ornamented. The SGS example is of a type sometimes known to collectors as devil masks, from the horns and stylised human features with which it’s decorated.
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A very different, and home-grown, exhibit is in the eclipse section of the exhibition. On April 22, 1715, parts of England experienced a total eclipse of the sun, and no less a luminary than the astronomer Edmund Halley published a guide to the event, featuring a map of the eclipse’s course, in which he attempted to demystify the event. Educated people had understood the cause of eclipses since ancient times, but into recent centuries they remained a source of popular superstition. This is vividly illustrated in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, published just a few years later.
Halley states its purpose thus: ‘[...] that the suddain darkness, wherein the Starrs will be visible about the Sun, may give no surprize to the People, who would, if unadvertized, be apt to look upon it as Ominous, and to Interpret it as portending evill [...]’ It can be seen from the map that the zone of totality included our area. Halley calculated that over London the central point of the eclipse would occur at 9.13 in the morning, and in fact he was only a few minutes out.
Halley was an acquaintance of SGS member Isaac Newton, and used Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation to calculate the periodicity of the comet which bears his name, predicting correctly that it would return in 1758, although he didn’t live to see the event. In 1720 he succeeded Flamsteed as Astronomer Royal.
‘Collections Reimagined’ will run until the end of January and is accessible free of charge during Ayscoughfee Hall’s normal opening hours, currently Tuesday, Saturday and Sunday, 10:30 - 4pm. The SGS museum in Broad Street, Spalding is open to visitors from Tuesday to Saturday from 10am to 4pm.
You can also keep in touch with us, and see some of the delights of our collections, on our website at http://sgsoc.org. Through social media, we will try to keep you up to date with everything which is going on within the Society: check out our Facebook page, find us on Twitter at @sg_soc, on Instagram at sgs1732 or email us at outreach@sgsoc.org
