Hartlebury Castle Museum reveals its secrets

Imagine standing in a room where the thigh bone of a woolly mammoth is on one side of you and all the furniture from the Cadbury family home is on the other.

The stores for the Worcestershire County Museum have only been open a few years but already the warehouse is filled to the rafters with rare and interesting items.

Most of the pieces are carefully protected in bubble wrap and boxes, but larger items such as the Victorian farm wagons, antique bicycles, a telephone exchange and printing presses are available to view.

Normally the stores for the museum based at Hartlebury Castle, near Kidderminster, are only open to the public one day a year but curator David Kendrick is keen that more people are able to see the valuable items, some of which will never be put on display.

"It is difficult to work out how many items we have in the stores but it is getting close to a million — we have hundreds of thousands of pottery items," says David, 63.

"The oldest items we have are parts of a woolly mammoth, which was found at Strensham, just off the M5 and would have lived around 100,000 years ago.

"We have his thigh bone, ribs, spine and a big tooth and we also keep a huge amount of animal bones going back to Roman times."

In boxes are outfits worn by Vesta Tilley who was born in Worcester in 1864 and went on to become the most famous and well-paid music hall male impersonator of her day.

"We have recently had a number of large boxes sent to us containing the glass from the dome at the Recent Palace Hotel, near Piccadilly Circus," says David as he stands in the stores, which are in a secret location near to the museum.

"The glass was made by the Bromsgrove Guild and so it has a great local significance.

"One of our most treasured items is a bronze-age cremation urn, and if there was any one thing from the stores that I could save, that would be it."

Two of the oldest bikes they have are penny farthings. There are also silver coin hoards going back to roman, saxon and medieval times, gypsy caravans and Georgian furniture.

There is also the art nouveau furniture from the Cadbury family home in Wast Hills, near Bromsgrove and Knight of the Garter robes worn by Stanley Baldwin who was from Bewdley and was Prime Minister three times between 1923 — 1937.

"One item that takes me back to when I was a boy was an X-ray machine that they used to use in shoe shops," he says.

"You would put your shoes on and then put your foot into the machine and would be able to see your foot to make sure your toes weren't squashed — they were very popular in the 1950s.

"We moved to our present site in 2004. There are three-climate controlled pods filled with furniture, costumes and archaeology items, whereas before, everything was stored at the museum."

David says that sadly some of the items in storage will never go on display. We can never put a value on the items we own because everything is important, especially to the people who have donated them, even the smallest item can mean a lot," he says.

"Some things will never be displayed because they are not of good enough quality, but they are great for research purposes and for future generations to study. At the moment around 80 per cent of the museum's stock is in storage."

"One of the hardest things is to say no to someone when they are offering to donate an item — but if we have a few already in stock we just don't have the space for any more," he says. "However, if it is a missing piece in our history jigsaw then we will snap it up.

"The reason we don't want to throw away items is because you never know how science will progress.

"A hundred years ago they hadn't heard of carbon dating or DNA and it is interesting to apply those sciences to items from thousands of years ago.

"Who knows what new science will be created in the next hundred years that will help to give us a new perspective on items we have now?"