Museum Pieces

On three different occasions in the last six months, I came across an object on display in a museum which was virtually identical to something I’ve got at home – having carefully hung onto it ever since I was at school. There’s nothing particularly Fortean about the items in question... but they’re definitely “retro”, so I thought I’d share them here.

Probably the most interesting of the three objects was in the newly reopened Imperial War Museum in London. As you can see from the photograph, they’ve got the nose and cockpit section of a WW2-era Lancaster bomber on display. I haven’t got a Lancaster bomber in my garden shed – but the right-hand picture shows a close-up of the R1155 radio receiver in the cockpit, and I do have one of those.

As a teenager in the 1970s, I already had a nostalgic obsession with anything that contained thermionic valves (aka vacuum tubes). When people discovered this, they were only too happy to unload their out-of-date technology on me! I ended up with dozens of old TVs and radios, and the R1155 was the pride of my collection. It never actually worked (I think the previous owner had cannibalized it for spare parts), but it was in pretty good physical condition when I first had it – certainly no worse than the one in the IWM:

... and here is my R1155 today, looking somewhat the worse for wear after more than 40 years in various sheds and garages:

The second item was a brass field telescope I spotted in the Royal Signals Museum near Blandford in Dorset. This looked very similar, if not identical, to one that got passed down to me when my grandfather died circa 1973. I’m not absolutely certain, but I think the telescope originally belonged to his brother, my great uncle, who spent many years travelling around the world with the British Army (possibly the Royal Signals Corps – I don’t know). This is the one in the museum:

... and this is mine (I probably should have polished it before I took the picture, but I was too lazy):

The third and last item is in the Science Museum in London. I first noticed it some time in the 1970s when I went there on a school trip, and it was still on show when I visited the museum this summer. It’s part of a display of old tools – which isn’t a subject that greatly excited the teenage me, except that I recognized the wooden drill brace as being virtually identical to one in the toolshed at home. It was one of dozens of old tools that came with the house when my parents bought it (the previous owner went mad, and a lot of his stuff was left behind when they took him away).

When I got home I carefully retrieved the drill brace, now that I knew it was a “museum piece”. I’ve still got it, along with various other bits and pieces I’ve hung onto in the naïve hope they will eventually become valuable relics of the twentieth century: