W. W. Midgley & Son

The first professional curators of the Chadwick Museum were the father and son William and Thomas Midgley. William Waller Midgley was appointed to his post by the Corporation in 1883. It is recorded that he took a pay cut by accepting the post – proof positive of his curatorial calling.

As the Corporation’s first professional curator it was his duty to arrange the Museum’s displays out of the Library’s collections. 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 the elder was the innovator behind the range of the Museum’s present day collections.

Although founded as a natural history museum he expanded the collecting with the establishment of nationally important collections of Egyptian antiquities, textile machinery and textile samples. The acquisitions made by both of the Midgleys laid the foundations and direction of the Museum’s future collecting. This marks them out as probably the most important collectors associated with the Museum’s history.

The Midgelys were kept very busy in their work. In 1883 J. P. Thomasson gifted Mere Hall to the town and had it refitted to be used as an art gallery. William Midgley had the role of art curator added to his job  description.

When the Corporation was gifted a valuable set of meteorological instruments in 1885, Midgley also became the Corporations Observator. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society.

During the 1890's the Borough of Bolton Botanical Society was founded by William Midgley and others. This organisation had regular meetings and excursions, mostly to explore and record the plant life of the Bolton area; Thomas Midgley was also a member.

As was common practice at the time, members collected and pressed flowers and plants and mounted these onto paper for preservation. These specimens are still in  the museum today, a few examples are on this page.

In 1901 Sir William Lever, later Viscount Leverhulme, gifted Hall i’ th’ Wood to the town to be a museum of Samuel Crompton. William and Thomas successively developed this museum and prompted a good deal of collecting to stock it.

Displays at the Chadwick

The displays were arranged systematically within each collecting discipline, and hierarchically using the levels of the building.

The Chadwick Museum had three levels. The basement was organized 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 – taxidermied birds and animals, birds’ nests and eggs, shells, and insects.

The displays were therefore of what could be observed in the natural environment. Going up the stairs to the first floor was a metaphorical ascendance to the work of human hands. The first floor was devoted anthropology, Egyptology and other antiquities. It also housed a room of curiosities. The Museum thus combined systematically organized display with a bit of populism.