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This season the Porch Museum presents the town with a series of sparkling events for your entertainment. Energetic fund raising and the benefit of a £460 Godmanchester Community Association grant kindly raised by citizens of the town will enable the museum’s precious collections to be displayed in well lit new wall cabinets. This is perfect timing as St Ives’ Norris Museum has lent us a selection of their unshown secrets, for display in these cabinets. The artefacts range from a dinosaur bone found in Godmanchester, to the town policemen’s equipment, dating back to the early 19th century, including a whistle and handcuffs.

On April 17th there will be a World War11 wedding exhibition put together by committee member Sandy Ferrelly which will include an extraordinary wedding and bridesmaid’s dress from a local family. There are also precious items from a war bride’s wedding day provided by Godmanchester resident Catherine Short. These delightful old things include a loving letter to the bride from her father. He had sent her ration book which was vital to give the honeymoon hotel who may otherwise have been unable to feed the young couple.

On May 1st and 2nd, we will present a fascinating ‘ Homemade In Godmanchester Exhibition ‘which will touch on the good, solid history of skilled wives, mothers and daughters of this town, who made the families’ clothes and furnishings. Women were judged in past times by their domestic skills.

This has been a wonderful opportunity for the organisers Sandy Ferrelly and David Bowers to collect contemporary examples of sewing, knitting, patchwork, embroidery and other allied crafts.. There will be an opportunity to watch people at work. If you are a passionate patchworker, embroiderer, knitter or practiser of any other magical sewing arts we would be very pleased to see your work.

We are also excited to tell you that on May 29 and 30th St Ives Norris Museum comes to Godmanchester and is hosted here by the Porch Museum. Currently undergoing a redesign, the Museum will bring many curiosities including some of their mammoth and prehistoric collection. (A baby mammoth tusk was found in The Avenue last summer and verified at the Norris Museum.

 

Sarah Russell, the Curator may also bring her plesiosaurus, a life size model of this 3.5 metre (eleven and a half foot) meat eating sea creature with nasty teeth, many of whose remains are found in Huntingdonshire. Sarah also plans to bring a great deal of jolly and interactive items for the entertainment of children, their parents and indeed, all of us.

Following our exciting celebration of VE day last summer, we are pleased to announce that Godmanchester residents Chris and Gilly January are due to return in early summer with their brilliant 1940s wartime re-enactment group. Come to our ‘Great 1940s Wartime Day’ on June 12. Surround yourself with wartime style and music. There will be vintage cars, jeeps with guns, Lindy Hop dancers, soldiers, beautiful women and stalls laden with delectable, affordable 1940s collectables. This is a perfect opportunity for family photographs, interesting discussions with knowledgeable re-enactors and wartime reminiscences from some of our older citizens. Enjoy a cup of tea and delicious cakes courtesy of the Grand Piano Café’s owner and Chef Donna Monsey. You can also see a selection of original 40s wartime posters donated to us by a local resident.

On Gala Weekend, July 2nd and 3rd, Shirley Walsh brings us a fascinating model of Godmanchester’s old railway bridge made with loving care by a local railwayman. There will be a display of old Godmanchester railway pictures plus memorabilia.

Our permanent exhibition of covetable photographs of old Godmanchester taken from the archives of collector Mike Brown, is always admired by visitors. Some also come from the town’s DVD director and Porch Museum web site master Steve Bengree who provides his own pictures, but also those taken from the private album belonging to his great uncle, the late, esteemed Neville Markham.. This album , which Nev so generously made available to us before he died spans from his own Victorian family and personal collection of Edwardian street pictures to the present day. This year Mike will be adding new images to his ‘Street Where You Live’ display boards.

To commemorate the battles of Verdun and fighting on the Somme in 1916 and remembering the seventy seven Godmanchester men who died in World War 1 the Porch Museum brings back its popular Heritage Lottery Funded World War 1 exhibition. This was put together with remarkable pictures of, and anecdotes about, relatives who fought in that war provided by their families who live in the town today. The exhibition covers the following Godmanchester families: Clarks, Fosters, Greens, the George family and its Croix de Guerre winning hero Oliver, the James family, Lewcock, Markhams, Reeve, Sheldrake and many others.

Roger Leivers’ remarkable exhibition recounting the tragic death of Squadron Leader Drummond Wilson will again be on show. Drummond Wilson crashed his Stirling Bomber in Godmanchester during World War 11. This crash is now the subject of a book by Goodliff Award winning Mr. Leivers who also brings to the museum this year a model of Stirling Bomber.

Our permanent exhibition of Roman and Iron Age antiquities will again be on display, with additions, including items from the Green End excavations in the early part of the last century, all lent to us by the Norris Museum. Our own exhibition is extremely fine. You can see a bronze votary tortoise, thought to come from a Roman temple in Godmanchester, dated 2nd to 3rd century and a fine little green glass 2nd century perfume phial found near the site of the Roman bath house in Pinfold Lane where it was most likely to have been used and somehow lost by a Roman lady. (Such a glass phial would have been too expensive and fragile for a lower class woman.)

Don’t miss our local oral history and Roman DVD collection, the latest of which, ‘Godmanchester’s Town Walk’, was made by Mike Brown, Shirley Walsh and Steven Bengree. Local Historian Ralph Clark starred as the man who completed the original excavations alongside so many distinguished archaeologists and who certainly knows more about Roman Godmanchester than the rest of us. In the film, it is he who shows us round the town. The DVD contains a Town Walk leaflet created by Tiffany Kirby. this is perfect for a summer’s evening stroll through our Roman town.

Pictures of winners from Godmanchester in Bloom will be on show in the museum August 28 and 29 and from the Town Show on September 24 and 25.