Museum news

Our John Opie presentation paintbox is currently on display in the Long Gallery at County Hall, Truro, where we hope County Councillors will notice it. It forms part of a small display of items from Cornwall’s smaller museums.

Warmest congratulations to Museum member and former Treasurer, Tony Mansell, on being made a Bard of the Gorsedh “For services to Cornish heritage and research”. Tony’s Bardic name is Skrifer Istori, or Writer of History. Two Committee members, Clive Benney and Peter Thomas, are already Bards.

For many years the Committee, and especially its Chairman Roger Radcliffe, has been searching for a photo of the Museum building showing its bell tower, so imagine our pleasure when this photo was emailed to us. It was taken from the rear of the building, with the door into the sexton’s store, now replaced by a window, clearly visible, together with a lot of ivy. The bell tower was unfortunately removed when the roof was replaced in the 1970s.

We are looking forward to reopening on Good Friday, 6 April 2012.

We will have our new touchscreen, with a virtual tour of the first floor, information on our fascinating reserve collection, and all our Family History information up and running. We will also celebrate the Olympics with a new display Sporting Activities in the Parish, and having been given a Cornish Range during the winter, which came from one of the iconic Stippy Stappy cottages, we will have a Cornish kitchen, so realistic that you will smell the saffron buns cooking!

For families we will have two new high quality resin rubbings, bought with the help of a generous grant from Cornwall Council, to add to our Cuckoo Hunt, Treasure Chest and story Sam and the Leatherback Turtle. All our family activities are free.

Tension mounted towards the end of the season when it seemed possible that visitor numbers would exceed 5000 for the first time in many years. Helped by several group visits we did indeed achieve a magnificent 5151 visitors, 552, or 12%, more than last season.

Undoubtedly the publicity from our winter refurbishment helped, with a further publicity boost in July with the presentation of the Queen’s Award for Voluntary Service, and of course, in these difficult financial times, admission to the Museum and all our children’s activities remained free.

We welcomed visitors from all over Cornwall, from all parts of the United Kingdom, and from 21 different overseas countries including Latvia, Denmark, Japan and Singapore.

From the signatures in our Visitors’ Book the most overseas visitors came from Australia (50) with Germany in second place (28), the USA third (23) and New Zealand fourth (15). Of our American visitors most (6) came from California. Many who came from Australia and the USA were seeking information on their St Agnes ancestors and found our Family History section invaluable.

There were as always some lovely comments in our Visitors’ Book:

Lovely collections and staff

Light and bright, and clear displays

Very helpful

Good to find out who Passmore Edwards was

Wonderful to see the outcome of all the efforts

Very educational

Records were a big help

Muy interesante (our one visitor from Spain)

A little gem of a museum

Fun for the kids

Thoughtfully laid out for families

Two stewards, Jean Bunt and Pat McWalter, had the distinction of welcoming the most visitors in one session (80+) on a day when we had more than 100 in total.

The season closed with a “Coffee Extravaganza” at the Museum to thank all the stewards for their hard work.