Thomas Wyatt Bagshawe rural crafts and trades c...

The collection of rural crafts and trades held at Stockwood Park Museum was amassed by T. W. Bagshawe and is one of the finest regionally based collections in the country.

The collection only contains examples from Bedfordshire and the borders of neighbouring counties, giving the collection a very strong regional identity.

Thomas Wyatt Bagshawe was a notable local historian and a leading authority on folk life. He was born in Dunstable in 1901 and became a director of his family’s engineering firm, but his first love was history. He began a small private museum in Dunstable in 1925 and became the honorary curator of Luton’s Museum when it first opened in 1927. He later became the director.

Thomas Bagshawe and Charles Freeman, who succeeded Bagshawe as curator in 1936, visited many of the Scandinavian museums which were at the forefront of folk life museums in Europe. Both were profoundly influenced by the Scandinavian example and they sought ways to introduce the ideas and methods they had witnessed into Luton Museum. In 1938 a rural industries gallery was opened at Wardown designed on Scandinavian principles with built in cases and freestanding exhibits.

The museum’s annual report of that year described Luton as being at the centre of a large area that was rapidly being transformed, and that the disappearance of many rural crafts was imminent. During the 1930s and in the years immediately after the war Bagshawe undertook a systematic search of Bedfordshire villages to seek out the surviving craftspeople. He interviewed them and acquired objects from them. These were mostly the tools that they were using and examples of their finished work. From 1946 to 1949 he added over 4,700 specimens to his collection, all carefully documented and recorded.

Bagshawe also amassed a very large amount of notes, photographs and illustrations and carefully classified them all using the Royal Anthropological Institute’s British Ethnography Committee’s system. This gave the collection a far greater richness than was usual at that time. In addition he deposited with the museum his extensive library of books on agriculture, trades, crafts and related topics.

In 1954 Bagshawe offered all his collection to Luton Museum. The archaeology and occupational collections were a gift conditional upon the purchase of his ethnographic collection (furniture, treen, ceramics etc.) and the provision of adequate display facilities for the illustration of Bedfordshire occupations. The rural life gallery at Wardown survived until the early 1970s when the curator decided to change the gallery to one showing aspects of Luton life and history.

Unlike some collectors working in the same field, such as Raphael Salaman, Bagshawe confined his collecting to Bedfordshire and the borders of neighbouring counties which gives the collection a very strong regional identity. Since its inception the museum service has had a very firm collecting policy to ensure that the collections have a real local significance, rather being a random compilation of curios.

Bagshawe’s belief that many of the crafts and trades were on the verge of extinction proved correct and in a world of increasing standardisation, his collection is now one of the finest regionally based rural life collections in the country.