Curator Mike Bishop with some of the hundreds of pictures stored away. Picture by Peter Boam.
LIKE the proverbial tip of the iceberg, what you see on the surface of the museum at Carisbrooke Castle is only a fraction of what lurks beneath.
On the top side that is the museum, jewels on display include the nightcap worn by Charles I during his incarceration there and an oil by J. M. W. Turner.
There is also the gilded miniature mace, which brought gravitas to the proceedings at Newtown in days of yore, when its hall was filled with local power-brokers.
It was bought for the museum with many thousands of pounds of lottery money.
There is the medieval alabaster Virgin and Child and the Norman Tableman. Both items of great charm and beauty.
They are top-of-the-tree exhibits in a museum visited by around 100,000 people a year but which is stacked full of stuff to fascinate.
Altogether, there are nearly 30,000 items of historical interest and importance to the Island and that doesn’t include the 30,000 archaeological items, which are being looked after by the IW Council.
In all, just 1.8 per cent of what the museum holds is on public display, meaning it will be decades before some important items are seen. Some may never be.
What few people realise is the museum is not part of English Heritage, which runs the castle, nor is it an arm of the council.
It was founded by HRH Princess Beatrice, Queen Victoria’s youngest daughter, in 1898, as a memorial to her husband, Prince Henry of Battenberg.
Beatrice died in 1944 and the world has moved on a bit since then, not least in the way good works are funded.
Museums don’t make money. Instead they cost ever-increasing amounts.
The trust, which runs the museum, is doing so at a loss.
English Heritage hands over 65 per cent of what it takes and the IW Council gives a wedge in return for the fascinating educational material the museum puts into schools, including suitcases stuffed full of toys from the past 250 years.
The cases, much like those clutched by wartime child evacuees, are among the rich pageant of social history, from gas masks, tin hats and patent shoes to Brylcreem and titfers loaned out to schools throughout the Island.
But, despite the council bunce, the trust still has to dip in to dwindling reserves and knock on doors for the remainder. This year the deficit is £9,000.
That was the gloomy backdrop to a gathering of the great and good recently, where an appeal was started at a time when giving to causes like these is not top of everyone’s list.
The trust has already pared expenditure to the bone but ways of increasing income are limited.
Admission fees, catering, or a shop are all banned by English Heritage, which pays a fixed amount toward running costs.
Their biggest outgoing is for their three full-time staff — and they are bolstered by a whole team of volunteers who do it for love, with interest their only payment.
There’s a pool of people who turn up to sort and to catalogue, clean and wrap and photograph — and it is in digital photography which the museum’s fundraising shortfall may lie.
One of the little rooms tucked away is stacked full of Ruskin display cases and in those cases are charmingly worked oils, watercolours and drawings and photographs taken all over the Island.
Pull out a drawer or open any door and a gem leaps out, like the rarity of a picture of Godshill Church spire broken in two by a lightning bolt. The date? January 14, 1904.
All in all a potential goldmine, if exploited in the right limited edition, online sort of way.
The higgledy-piggledy collection of rooms, corridors and the old disused castle kitchen and basement, the vaulted room, where the trust board meets, and even the two-day-a-week curator’s office holds an ever growing collection, which the trustees have to increasingly limit.
There’s coins and medals, the Anglo-Saxon rubbing shoulders with Victorian stuff and a battery of immaculate dress uniforms, old fixtures and fittings, furniture, Island reference books — including the Parsloe Collection — records and social history.
There’s the original Blue Jenny who occupied the arbour of the school for girls in Newport’s Crocker Street, ornate toilets, a mechanical bell-ringing machine, wrapped in plastic, lawn mowers, Hoovers, typewriters, early computers and the biggest pestle missing its mortar you will ever see.
There’s things you wouldn’t immediately recognise, things you probably never will and there’s things with personal history attached, which is beyond value.
There’s the table, missing its middle leaf presented by Lt Col G. F. Perkins, DSO, of the 2nd Battalion Hampshire Regiment, at Parkhurst in 1933.
The museum board sits around that piece of history, perched on 1970s plastic chairs, in the cold.
Take, if you will, local character and lifelong Carisbrooke resident Harwina Gwen Ethel Hayter, who is sadly no longer with us.
Harwina gave the museum her grandfather’s christening gown, preserving her own little chunk of family history by placing it in the museum’s safe hands.
Museum trustees’ chairman Judi Griffin took reception guests on guided tours of the public and private parts of the museum.
"People were absolutely staggered by the material we have got and every time we have a trustees meeting we consider more items like that given by Harwina Hayter," she says.
You can tell curator Dr Mike Bishop — who retired early from the IW Council — remains a frustrated man but in a different way to when he was confined by the council.
He wants more people to see what his museum has got and local people, too. He says the vast majority of people who traipse the worn carpet through his doors originate from the mainland.
Mike’s pretty pleased that despite the Steptoe’s yard nature of a limited amount of some of the collection, at least the museum knows what it’s got, that cataloguing and photographic archiving is pretty much up-to-date.
"With the help of people joining our friends, becoming a vice-patron, a subscriber, making a donation or leaving a legacy we hope more of the Island’s heritage can be seen in and outside the castle and that the collections can be properly conserved and maintained," he said.
"We have got so much of such value here and we really do want people to be able to see it."
Judi adds: "The castle is a rich jewel in this country’s historical crown and the museum is a very important part of that. It richly deserves support."