Collection History
Origins
The first proper Bolton Museum was established late in the nineteenth century, but the collections have their origin in 1852, when the Borough adopted the Libraries and Museums Act (only the third council in the country to do so). Although intended mainly to set up a library, the first item donated to the library committee was in fact a collection of fossils.
Unlike many local authorities, Bolton did not have a pre-existing object collection gathered by a literary and philosophical society and so this donation marks the beginning of the town’s museum collections. The collections grew slowly and were displayed in a room in Bolton’s first free library opened in Victoria Square in 1853 (this building is now occupied by Nationwide Building Society in Victoria Square).
The Chadwick Museum
Over time, the library became home to a respectable collection of scientific specimens and ethnographic objects, and pressure soon grew to set up a separate museum
£5000 Bequest
With the Council unwilling to fund this development, the museum had to wait until 1876, when Dr Samuel Taylor Chadwick left a bequest of £5000 for this purpose. Samuel Taylor Chadwick, a local medical doctor of some wealth, had already gifted the Chadwick Orphanage to the town and done many other good works related to health and welfare.
Chadwick left the bequest to Bolton Corporation for the ‘building, furnishing and maintenance of a Museum of Natural History in the Bolton Park’ (later renamed Queens Park). The bequest came with the conditions that the museum had to be free entry and the museum building had to be erected in 4 years, or the fund would be lost.
Bolton's first professional curator
The Corporation accepted the bequest, and the sub-committee concerned with the building of the museum was chaired by Councillor B.A.Dobson, of textile machine manufacturers Dobson and Barlow fame. Building began in 1878. (There are statues of both Dobson and Chadwick either side of the town hall in Victoria Square.) In 1883, the Council was able to employ William Waller Midgley as the first curator of Chadwick Museum. The Museum itself was opened on the 12th June 1884 by Dobson.
As the Corporation’s first professional curator, it was Midgley’s duty to arrange the Museum’s displays out of the Library’s limited collections. However, from the time of Chadwick’s bequest, a flood of donations came into the Museum, so he was not short of material to work with. Midgley developed the style of the Bolton Museum in several distinct ways. Although founded as a natural history museum, he expanded the collecting with the establishment of nationally important collections textile machinery, textile samples and of Egyptian antiquities.
Three floors of collections
The Chadwick Museum had three levels, and a sort of hierarchy was established in the displays on each level. The basement was organised with displays of minerals, rocks and fossils, stuff that had come from out of the ground. The next level up, the ground floor, housed the zoology displays – stuffed birds and animals, birds’ nests and eggs, shells, and insects. The displays were therefore of what could be observed in nature. The first floor was devoted to objects created by human hands: anthropology, Egyptology and other antiquities. But it also housed a room of curiosities. The Museum thus combined systematically organised display with a bit of populism.
Early climatological observatory
When the Corporation was gifted a valuable set of meteorological instruments in 1885, Midgley also became the Corporation’s Observator. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society. (It is little known that Bolton has one of the oldest continuously run climatological observatories in Britain.)
New Museums
Mere Hall and Hall i' th' Wood
It had long been recognised that the Chadwick Museum building was too small for displaying the growing collections. As early as 1890, Mere Hall had been presented to the town as an art gallery by J.P.Thomasson. This was added to in 1899, when the 16th century half-timbered Hall i’ th’ Wood was purchased as a folk museum and memorial to its most famous resident, spinning mule inventor Samuel Crompton, a gift to the town by Bolton-born businessman William Lever (later Lord Levrehulme). After restoration and fitting-out work, it opened to the public in 1902.
Lord Leverhulme's proposal
Lever was also behind a 1910 proposal to build a much enlarged new museum in Queen’s Park as part of a grand design for the civic redevelopment of Bolton. Although Lever’s ambitious plans were rejected as unsustainable by the Council at the time, they were partly revived with the building of the new Le Mans Cresent civic centre in the late 1930s. As well as housing the magistrates court and council offices, this new building reunited the library and the museum once again, and added an aquarium (opened in 1941). The outbreak of the Second World War delayed the fitting out of the rest of the museum, which finally opened to the public until 1947.
Le Mans Crescent
The official opening by the Mayor was on Saturday 18th October, the public were allowed in from Monday 20th. Curator Eric Hendy (who had taken over from William Midgeley’s son and successor, Thomas Midgeley, in 1934) reported to the Bolton Evening News that the new museum was, ‘the most modern in the country, and compared favourably in its content and layout with the best.’
The decline of the Chadwick
At first the Le Mans Crescent museum contained only natural history and art, with the Chadwick Museum containing Egyptian, industrial and local history. However, the Chadwick building was in a state of serious decline. In 1956, following an appeal for advice from the Minister of Education, the town council decided that the cost of repair and renovation to the old building would be too great and that the only course of action was to demolition. The Egyptian collection was moved to the new central museum and the industrial collections were put on display in Tonge Moor library, where they remained until the 1990s.
The opening and closing of Smithills Hall and Hall i' th' Wood
The later part of the 20th century saw the addition of further museums: Smithills Hall (opened in 1963), the Nature Trail Museum in Smithills Park (1975), and Little Bolton Town Hall (1979). However, by the end of the century, increasing pressure on local authority finances saw all the branch museums bar Hall i’ th’ Wood and Smithills close. While a gallery in Le Mans Cresecent was turned over to local history, much of the industrial and social history collections are now housed in off-site stores, along with the bulk of the geology and art collections not on display.
The current picture
By the beginning of the 21st century, Bolton Council held in trust a collection of over 400,000 museum objects. Details of these can be seen in the museum’s Acquisition and Disposal Policy. Most recently, the museum has taken over responsibility for managing the Council’s archive and local studies collections. Details of these can be found in the Archives section.
