Sharples' Museum

The first museum in Bolton was not exactly a bastion of culture and learning, it was more akin to today’s tabloids, or Big Brother. Sharples’s Museum of Curiosities was privately run by Mr Sharples himself in rooms above the Star Inn on Churchgate. The Museum was a mixture of cabinet of curiosities, zoo, circus and sideshow, all under the one roof.

We can imagine that for a modest fee, all sorts of wonders from all over the world were there to be witnessed. One contemporary Boltonian, a liberal dissenter named Robert Heywood certainly disproved of it claiming it was an ‘evil influence’ on the minds of the young. Sharples’ Museum of Curiosities was a distraction from the world of hardship and toil that was the reality for most people in Bolton.

We are lucky to have a copy of the Sharples’ Museum catalogue, which gives us a lot of details about this first Bolton museum and provides an interesting insight into the popular culture of the day.

Consumptive Monkeys

The first section of the catalogue deals with the live specimens in the museum. It includes exotic parrots, cockatoos and even golden eagles. It also contains the first entry related to monkeys - there seems to have been a particular fascination with all things simian. The guidebook refrains from being too specific about the exact types of living specimens. It explains:

The description of these animals would be very interesting but cannot be inserted here due to the generality of monkeys dying of consumption soon after their arrival into the changeable temperature of this country.

Also among these many testaments to the strangeness and diversity of the natural world was a cat born with no forelegs that hopped about like a kangaroo.

Waxwork murderers

The next section deals with waxworks figures which were unlikely to have been as sophisticated as Madame Tussards. Represented were Lord Nelson and the Duke of Wellington – whose successes in the Napoleonic wars would still be in the memory of many. Alongside the famous wax works were the infamous – several murderers were represented. Included, for example, was a likeness of Betty Eccles of Bolton ‘who was executed at Kirkdale, for the murder of her own children, in order that she might get money from a burial society.’

Then there were the natural curiosities – stuffed lizards, crocodiles and snakes, a polar bears paw, a two-headed duck, the hands of a monkey and two marmoset monkeys that had been born in the museum, and were ‘thought to be the first of that species born in Britain’. Yet another stuffed monkey on display had formerly been a rather popular violinist in Manchester. Slightly more disturbing was the human arm stripped of skin and preserved to show veins, tendons etc, and also a human head taken from Pompeii.

Another feature of the museum was automata – moving clockwork figures. One described is pictured on the back of the catalogue:

A group of moving figures, representing a scene in a Turkish harem. The Grand Sultan of Turkey sits smoking a hookah and occasionally looks over to his favourite wife. She sleeps, her ‘bosom heaves as though she was in the act of breathing – the motion being so accurate as to puzzle the beholder at first sight to determine whether the object he is looking at be flesh and blood or the handiwork of the artist.

  To keep the monkey theme going another automaton showed an older monkey teaching a young one to play the violin.

Bolton Trotting

There was also a collection of oil paintings. One series of these told the life of Dick Turpin, there were also

views of various exotic locations or historic occasions. Also there was the painting Bolton Trotting, this picture or a copy of it is now part of the Bolton Museum collections and on display at Hall i’ th’ Wood. Trotting was a local term for tricks played upon strangers. The trick pictured involves a bet where a local attorney had had challenged a commercial traveller that he could hold his leg in a barrel of boiling water longer than the other. The traveller of course lost the bet because the Bolton trickster had a wooden leg!

A vengeful leopard

Perhaps the best entry in the catalogue is about Barney the stuffed Leopard. Barney had been a live exhibit in the museum, but had killed
his keeper, Mr Matthew Ferguson:

It was supposed that Fergusson was teaching the animal new tricks… and that the whip, not being agreeable, [to] the animal when struck, turned upon his keeper and killed him.

Unfortunately, the Sharples Museum was destroyed by fire in 1852.

The fact it survived for 20 years of trading must have meant that it had some commercial success, which meant it must have had a steady flow of visitors. As described, Sharples’ Museum was a lurid affair: noisy with the screeches of caged birds and the coughs and mournful hoots of consumptive monkeys; and the place must have had an amazing stench, a smell that would have even competed with the most polluted river in Bolton, the Croal.

The museum focused on presenting the spectacular: the macabre, the sentimental, freaks and oddities. It was not aiming to educate, but its 20 year survival suggests it succeeded at entertaining.

There is something conglomerate about museums whereby all the historical forms of the Museum are merged into the most recent form.

There’s still a little bit of Sharples about Bolton Museum.