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Collecting your Covid-19 memories
North Hertfordshire Museum has been collecting objects and archive to help tell the story of the impact of Covid-19 on our local community. If you live work or study in North Hertfordshire we want to collect some personal stories and experiences from you in the questions below. Your answers will form part of our Covid collections to help show life during the Covid era in the future. Please email northhertsmuseum@north-herts.gov.uk. with your responses.
Name
Age
Job
Town, village or postcode
Tell us about something you are personally proud of during the Covid pandemic and why
Tell us about something you are really looking forward to after lockdown ends and why
Tell us about something you did for the first time during lockdown
How did you adapt to do things differently during the lockdown? (This could be something in your work or personal life)
What will you remember the most about your life during Covid?
Any other information that you think will be important for future generations to know about this period
Privacy
Your answers will form part of our Covid Collections to help show life during the Covid era in the future. As such they may be used as historical resources by researchers, or by the North Hertfordshire Museum in displays. Your data will be stored securely and not used in its entirety by North Hertfordshire Museum i.e. if used we may say ‘Michael a builder from Hitchin said’ or ‘Claire from Baldock told us’ or ‘a resident from Brand Street explained’. For any queries or concerns please email northhertsmuseum@north-herts.gov.uk.
When people think about museums, most people think ‘Old’. People picture photographs of dour looking Victorians or broken pieces of pottery from the Roman era. Museums did not stop collecting in Victorian times and we continue to chart the history of our towns and villages into the modern era. We recently acquired this concert ticket for the appearance of the band The Damned, who played at the Regal in Hitchin on Wednesday 6 October 1982.
This ticket tells us about local history in ‘modern times’ as well as the emergence of punk and later goth subcultures.
The Regal was a cinema which opened on the site of what is now the Regal Chambers GP Surgery in 1939. Up and down the country the cinema industry boomed with 1.64 billion admissions seen in the year 1946. From the 1950s onwards the popularity of cinemas declined as televisions became cheaper and towns, often home to a few cinemas each, saw the mass disappearance of cinemas from the high street. As part of this slump The Regal closed as a cinema in 1977. The cinema industry saw its worst year in 1984. At that stage, the musical second life of The Regal was almost at an end as well. The Regal had reopened as a concert hall and recording studio in 1980, perhaps hoping the reinvention would allow them to tap into the exciting music market and appeal to new and younger audiences. Despite the change The Regal closed once again, for the final time, in 1985.
The Regal
The Damned were the first punk band to release a single, New Rose, beating the Sex Pistols release of Anarchy in the UK by five weeks in 1976. In December 1976, The Damned were set to be an opener for the Sex Pistols on their Anarchy in the UK tour. The tour marked a fascinating moment in music history. Only seven of the scheduled twenty gigs took place as many were cancelled by local authorities or concert venues out of a ‘moral panic’, largely based on the fact that the Sex Pistols had sworn on live television, goaded by the presenter to ‘say something outrageous’. University heads, venue controllers and council leaders feared violence and vandalism and more, should they have let the tour reach their town. A scheduled appearance of the tour in Caerphilly in Wales was protested against by a Christian group who sang carols and prayed for the very souls of those involved. A year later The Damned supported Marc Bolan (of T-Rex fame) on tour. The Damned also appeared on Bolan’s ITV television show Marc in 1977. Bolan was looking to revive his career and draw the attention of younger audiences unfamiliar with the height of his popularity, five years previously, but died tragically in a car crash that September.
In 1982, the year of their appearance in Hitchin, The Damned began to change. Captain Sensible, the main songwriter, scored a solo number one hit with Happy Talk, leading to a solo career. He drifted away from The Damned in the mid 1980s, playing a last concert in 1984. Meanwhile, the band adapted to the emerging Goth scene, with singer Dave Vanian’s already Dracula-like stage persona fitting in well with the new subculture.
Captain Sensible with trademark red beret and glasses, pictured in 2006
Following the departure of Captain Sensible, lead singer Dave Vanian, who was born in Hemel Hempstead in Hertfordshire took the band in the direction of gothic rock. Influencing the style of the goth subgroup. In 1976 the music magazine NME stated that Vanian “resembles a runaway from the Addams Family”. Vanian, a name derived from ‘Transylvanian’, adopted an on and off-stage fashion style that some compared to a vampire from classic horror films. You can see the obvious comparisons on the pictures below. It Is amazing to think that on an October Wednesday in 1982, in some of its final days, The Regal played host to a band that in its own way shaped music history. Hitchin caught a glimpse of the emergence of Punk and Goth and the beginnings of their music and fashions that continue to endure worldwide.
Dave Vanian
1930s Dracula film star Bela Lugosi
One hundred years ago today, Barry Parker, one of the architects of Letchworth Garden City, wrote a letter giving a fascinating insight into the beginnings of Letchworth Museum and the people involved in setting it up.
The letter is about finding a site for a museum. Barry Parker had already written about this to Aneurin Williams, Chairman of First Garden City Ltd, and had also met him to discuss the matter further. The general agreement seems to be that the committee of the Naturalists’ Society should make a formal application to the directors of First Garden City Ltd, and once First Garden City Ltd have responded, the matter can be further discussed by the wider membership of the Naturalists Society.
A letter from Barry Parker
A W Brunt gives a good summary of the setting up and early years of the museum in his book “Pageant of Letchworth”. He wrote this while he held the Chair of the Naturalists’ Society, a post he had taken up in 1923 and continued to hold into the 1940s, so he would have experienced it all first hand.
There had been talk about having a museum as part of the new Garden City for several years. In 1906 the Letchworth Citizen mentioned that part of the original plan for Howard Hall had included a museum to show the archaeology that had been uncovered on the Garden City Estate. When the Garden City Naturalists’ Society was set up in 1908, it included amongst its aims ‘the formation of a museum’. Other members of the Naturalists’ Society included Barry Parker and W P Westell (who was to become the first museum curator), and the Secretary in 1914 was Rev E Everett, to whom this letter is addressed.
Though he had written to Mr Williams, Barry Parker notes that he “did not anticipate he would be able to give any such matters consideration until after his election”. In January of that year, Aneurin Williams was elected as the Liberal candidate for North West Durham. A month later, Barry Parker had managed to meet him to discuss the museum matter further, and so plans had been put in place at this point to progress the project.
Though 100 years seems a long time ago, the letters and newspapers from this time reveal familiar stories. Just as these men spent many years discussing and working towards the building of the Letchworth Museum, so the museum service and people of North Hertfordshire have long been talking about the plans for our new museum. It will be interesting to follow the progress of the plans from 100 years ago in future blogs, and note at the same time the progress being made in our own project as both move towards realisation.