We have been working with Penguin and the British Museum to give reading groups the chance to explore their local museums and tell us all about their favourite discoveries. We’re showcasing the best entries throughout December.
Here we report on Teme Readers’ Group which struggled to choose just one object and so picked the museum building itself.
About Tenbury Museum
Tenbury Museum is a single room with numerous exhibits illustrating the way of life in rural Worcestershire 100 years or so ago, including cobbler’s tools, a small kitchen with its built-in oven and cooking implements, wind-up gramophones, oil lamps and stone hot water bottles which were in common use in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Before it was a museum, the building was once a ’Goff’s Free School’. Mr Goff was born in Hereford but moved to London where he made his fortune as a coal merchant. He left money in his will to found a number of free schools in Herefordshire and along the Marches to educate poor children. The school in Tenbury was built in 1819 at a cost of £150 and endowed with £50 a year. This building was a school until 1914, used for carpentry and cookery lessons until the 1960s before being renovated as a museum in 1977.
“A generous donation by a far-sighted person has helped to educate the people in Tenbury for almost 200 years, either as a school or as a museum. How many other towns in Britain benefited from individual benefactors in the Victorian period, and can modern politicians learn from people like the far-sighted Mr Goff?”.
Contributor: Sally Matthews
Find out more
Read more History of the World in 100 Objects reading group reports
Read more about Tenbury Museum
