BEDFORD MUSEUM

SOCIAL HISTORY

The social history collections consist of some 20,500 items covering the wide range of domestic, corporate, military and agricultural life as well local crafts and industries. Some material has good local provenance but the collection has been formed generally along traditional lines and there is much unprovenanced material. Larger items of particular importance include the Adams Mail Phaeton car 1907 and the Fire Engine of the Sharnbrook Volunteer Fire Brigade, circa 1832. Since the 1980s emphasis has been given to provenanced local material and now includes collections from important local industries such as John Howard Engineering, Meltis Works, George Fischer Castings and Allens Engineering. Collections also feature local people such as the table, chair and stained glass window relating to John Howard, philanthropist and prison reformer. The work is now extending to oral history recordings.

Items particularly relating to the Castle Lane building include beer bottles and match holder from the Higgins Castle Brewery, and the sales particulars of the brewery from 1929 as well as the cheque for the sale of the brewery to Wells and Wynch.

Bedford and it's village are famous for their traditional Bedfordshire lace made with bobbins. The Museum houses a small collection of lace as well as lace making equipment, in particular lace prickings and a large collection of the traditional East Midlands bobbins.

The gallery displays look at the development of Bedford as a community including health and medicine, weights and measures, law and order, fire fighting and leisure activities. There are also room sets depicting life in a farming community.

The Bedford Humane Society resuscitation kit of 1807 (pictured here) was designed to revive the apparently dead.  The bellows were used to blow tobacco smoke into the lungs or up the rectum, and the syringe (bottom right) was used to inject cordials into the stomach.

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