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
Part of my work across the last year has been to increase the levels of information held for objects in our collections, making them available to the public via our online database. Information on how to search the database is at the end. I recently came across a record with a slightly fuzzy image of a man, (which was out of focus when the photo was taken many years ago). Through the fuzziness I could see the face of a man who looked like he was sleeping. I scrolled down to read the short and simple record that told me that this was the “corpse of Benjamin Tatham”.
Why had somebody drawn a picture of the recently deceased Benjamin Tatham? Well it may seem strange now, but post-mortem art was fairly common in the past. Initially only the wealthy could afford to commemorate their dead with a mourning portrait. Later with the invention of photography post-mortem photographs became affordable to many, for some this would have been the only image to remember their loved one by. A search on Google reveals many photographs of deceased people, including this image of German Emperor Frederick III who died in 1888.
German Emperor Frederick III
Our drawing of Benjamin Tatham was created by Hitchin artist Samuel Lucas Senior. It’s thanks to Samuel and his prolific sketching output that we can look upon the faces of many Hitchin residents of times gone by. The image below is a sketch he made of school master Benjamin Abbot of Tilehouse Street.
Benjamin Abbot
Both the image of Benjamin Tatham and of Benjamin Abbot entered our museum service at the same time on 12 August 1940 among a collection of many Lucas sketches, close to a century after they were drawn. This means that the post-mortem drawing of Benjamin Tatham stayed with Lucas and was not given to Tatham’s family. Perhaps Samuel Lucas visited the family to pay his respects and, ever the sketcher, could not help himself but sketch a final image of Tatham posed in his bed, or coffin. Perhaps the image stuck with him so much that he jotted down his memories at a later time. Maybe this formed a preparatory sketch for a later image given to the Tatham family? We think this is the only drawing of the dead that Samuel Lucas Senior created.
What do we know of Benjamin Tatham himself? Well we know that in life he worked as a woolstapler, a dealer in wool, on Bancroft, just around the corner from our museum. Trade directories show him operating from Bancroft in 1823, 1832, 1839 and a final appearance of 1846, perhaps suggesting his death shortly afterwards. To the best of our knowledge this is the only image of Benjamin Tatham to survive to the modern day. Samuel Lucas’ simple but moving sketch allows Benjamin Tatham to live on into 2021. More than one hundred and fifty years after his passing, we can look at this picture and imagine the man, dealing wool in Hitchin, walking the same streets we walk and interacting with the other residents captured in Lucas’s sketches. Perhaps he is amongst the crowd of people in the Lucas painting of the Market Place.
Samuel Lucas Senior’s Market Place painting
You can explore our collections database via the link below.
The Greek helmet supposedly found at Baldock about 1880
On 23 November 1911, the prominent antiquary William Page (1861-1934) reported the discovery of what was described as a “Hellenistic bronze helmet” to a meeting of the Society of Antiquaries of London. A brief summary appeared in the Society’s Proceedings volume 24, page 5. According to Page, it had been found in a pit in Baldock (Hertfordshire) in 1880, but he provided no further details about its provenance. He did show a photograph of the object but did not reveal its current whereabouts. The announcement was soon forgotten, although the Hertfordshire Historic Environment Record lists the discovery, commenting that “[u]nless more information, or the object itself, comes to light it still appears more likely that the helmet was ‘brought to England by a modern collector’”.
William Page
William Page originally trained as an engineer and emigrated to Australia in 1881 to join an older brother. On returning to England in 1884, he became a record agent for his brother-in-law, W J Hardy, whose interest in antiquarian pursuits encouraged his change of career. He was elected to the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1887. In 1896, he moved to St Albans and soon became involved with the St Albans Architectural and Archaeological Society, being elected its secretary in 1897. In 1902, he became co-editor of the Hertfordshire volumes of the Victoria History of the Counties of England (more popularly known as the Victoria County History). Two years later, he was promoted to general editor of the series, a post he held until his death in 1934.
Page was clearly neither naïve nor a fraudster; he did not claim credit for the discovery, and the published report did not state who had found it. Nor does he name the helmet’s owner, which was later to become a focus of dispute. His presentation of the discovery to the Society of Antiquaries of London was clearly done in good faith and intended to excite the interest of his peers. What more can be learnt about it?
Displaying the helmet
On 2 April 1912, the helmet was put on display at Hertford County Museum in St Albans. Perhaps this was done with the encouragement of Page, who was at this time a prominent member of the St Albans and Hertfordshire Architectural and Archaeological Society. Unfortunately, it is not clear who was responsible for depositing it with the museum. This was to become significant twenty years later and underlines why museums are so keen to record all the details about who leaves an object, whether or not they are the owner and what rights they have to it.
George John Buller (1850-1931)
The well-known collector William Charles Wells (1870-1949), who was the helmet’s owner, provided a detailed account of its provenance. He claimed to have purchased it from a Mr Buller of Hitchin. This was probably George John Buller (1850-1931), who was the landlord of the Half Moon on Queen Street from before 1894 to after 1901, a keen apiarist, naturalist and antiquary who donated numerous objects to Letchworth Museum, founded in 1914. Wells said that Mr Buller had acquired it from a friend, although he did not say whether or not Buller had told him the name of this friend. The friend, though, got it from the son of a publican – perhaps like Buller, the friend was also involved in the pub trade – who had swapped it with two labourers for half a gallon of beer. It was this pair who had discovered the helmet in Baldock. This is a detailed, not to say convoluted, story. Nevertheless, it provides a chain of ownership that purports to stretch back to the original finders.
Tracing the findspot
If the helmet had been found in Baldock, as the account given by William Page suggests, then where might it have been buried? According to Page, it was found in a pit and it is not too much of a leap of the imagination to suggest that the workmen who had exchanged it for beer were working as quarrymen. This is perhaps more likely than assuming that Page intended his audience to understand that the provenance was an ancient pit, found during unspecified digging. The only quarries that appear to have been operating in 1880 were chalk pits to the south of the town, in the Weston Hills, where limekilns existed on Limekiln Lane and Hatch Lane.
Evaluation of the chalk quarry at the former Stationmaster’s house in Baldock, 1992
A note in the North Hertfordshire Museum’s card Sites and Monuments Record (Record 89) suggests that it came from the site of the old Stationmaster’s House, in the angle between Icknield Way East and the station approach. However, no authority is cited for this precise findspot and it is unclear what the source of information was. According to a note by the late Kit Westaway, whose copy of a photograph of the helmet is in the Museum’s collection (reproduced at the start of this blog post), it was “found in Baldock 1880 by Mr Parry’s”. Although no-one with the surname Parry or Perry (or any obvious variant of these) is recorded as living in Baldock in the 1881 census, labourers Peter, Thomas and William Perry were recorded as residents in 1871, while Thomas was the landlord of The Cock on Baldock High Street in 1886.
This returns us to the pub trade once again. Could Thomas Perry have been the publican whose son sold the helmet to George Buller? Perhaps it had been Perry who deposited it in the museum in St Albans. Unfortunately, although the scenario is plausible, it is also entirely conjectural. We also do not know how Kit Westaway attributed its discovery to ‘Mr Parry’; she had good local connections, was an inveterate collector of gossip and was well-placed to have heard stories about the alleged discovery. She was convinced that it was genuine, as she told me more than once during conversations in the 1980s.
The story unravels
When W C Wells attempted to take it from the museum in 1933, the original depositor claimed that Wells had no right to remove it. Wells disputed this, apparently backed up with threats of litigation, and, when he collected the helmet on 28 June 1933, he signed a document confirming that he was its true owner. There does not appear to be a record of the original depositor’s name, unfortunately.
After W C Wells collected the helmet from the museum, no more was ever heard of it. This is not unusual for an object loaned to a museum by a private collector. However, Wells was not an ordinary collector: he was well known both for collecting and as an authority on numismatics. His views on numismatics could be uncompromising and, after his death, it was discovered that he was not above creating forgeries as ‘evidence’ for his views.
Particularly troubling in view of the Baldock helmet is his modus operandi for passing off forgeries on numismatists. He would claim that the forged coins had been purchased from an antique dealer or found at a relatively specific location. This is similar to his attribution of the helmet to Baldock, with a purported chain of transfers of ownership; Wells claimed that he had made enquiries locally to confirm the story and that this was how he learned the date of discovery.
Nevertheless, George Buller, the alleged vendor of the helmet to Wells, was still alive at the time of Page’s announcement of the discovery. As a locally prominent antiquary, it is unlikely that he would have consented to have his name attached to a blatant hoax.
Ownership dispute
The helmet later became the subject of an ownership row, when a third party who had deposited the object in the museum claimed to staff that he was the owner, not W C Wells. There then appears to have been a legal dispute, with Wells threatening this third party and the museum insisting that he sign to confirm his ownership when he asked for it back from loan on 28 June 1933. With its return to W C Wells, the trail goes cold and nothing seems to be known about its subsequent history.
It is unclear how the note in North Herts Museum’s records attributed the discovery to the site of the Stationmaster’s House. There is certainly no evidence for activity on the site before the later first century AD, when a series of ditched enclosures were laid out on the site, apparently in the angle between the Icknield Way to the south and the road to Sandy to the west. There was also no evidence found during evaluation for activity between the end of the Roman period and the construction of the Stationmaster’s House in the 1850s, making deposition from the discard of a Grand Tour collection unlikely.
Hoaxing in archaeology
The ‘Baldock helmet’ is an extremely problematical find, as the story of its acquisition is so complex as to raise considerable suspicion about its exact provenance. If the story does involve a hoax, it may have been one played by W C Wells on William Page to detract from the Welwyn discovery. It may have been perpetrated by someone else on Wells, Page or the Society of Antiquaries in general. The context of its announcement does suggest that someone was playing a game of one-upmanship.
Reconstruction of Eoanthropus dawsoni, ‘Piltdown man’ (Popular Science Monthly 82, Public Domain)
Intriguingly, this ‘discovery’ was announced at the time that Charles Dawson, a known serial forger, was operating. His most famous fraud, the remains that became known as ‘Piltdown man’ was announced the following year. Might this have been in part inspired by the ‘Baldock helmet’ in an attempt to provide the ultimate archaeological discovery, the ‘missing link’?
The discipline of archaeology is not immune to hoaxing. So much emphasis is placed on making groundbreaking discoveries that will ‘rewrite history’ that many professionals are encouraged to make claims about significance that are not always borne out by the evidence. I published a paper last year on claims made about Offa’s and Wat’s Dykes in Wales and the marches. I began by looking into claims that the earthworks are older than usually believed. I entered a rabbit-hole of overblown claims about the significance of scientifically-obtained dates, press-releases that don’t match the original data and an understandable desire for those working in the field to say something new. Such claims from archaeological professionals are rarely fraudulent, but I do worry that they mislead the public by over-egging the pudding. Archaeology is an exciting enough pursuit without the need to over-state claims about the significance of each discovery. The rare frauds and hoaxes like the ‘Baldock helmet’ only serve to undermine public confidence in the discipline and allow bizarre conspiracy theories to proliferate.