Notice. All boys and inexperienced men must not grind on the rest side of this stone.

 

This is one of the more intriguing of many railway signs in the Assemblage area of the new Museum of Making in Derby. Another sign warned: “Danger. Midland Railway. Gunpowder van not to be loose shunted.” Yet another read: “Midland Railway. The public are earnestly requested to REFRAIN FROM SPITTING and so help the Company to keep their Stations and Carriages clean and healthy.”

Photo courtesy of John Peacock.

My friend from my days in Macmillan Publishers, John Peacock, and I were in Derby, partly to visit the city’s museums, and also to watch Derby County (John was born and raised in Derby) play Ipswich Town (my hometown). Since the score was Derby 0 – Ipswich 2, we will pass lightly over the football and concentrate on the museums.

Derby’s biggest draw is its collection of 32 of the paintings of Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-1797). Wright worked at a time of scientific enquiry and inventions that were part of the story of the Industrial Revolution. Porcelain manufacture began at Royal Crown Derby in 1750. The valley of the river Derwent became an important centre for textile mills powered by water. A silk mill began production Derby in 1725. Further upstream, in 1771 Richard Arkwright, inventor of a spinning frame to twist thread, and of a carding engine to process raw cotton, and other processes that enabled mass production of cloth, founded a cotton mill at Cromford with his partners, the nonconformist hosiery manufacturers Jedediah Strutt and Samuel Need. Arkwright built a still larger mill there in 1776, and soon afterwards at Bakewell and Wirksworth.

Portrait of Richard Arkwright (right) and of his son Richard and his family (left) in the Wright room of Derby Museum and Art Gallery

Wright’s large portrait of an expensively dressed, self-satisfied and corpulent Arkwright hangs in the Derby Museum, a spinning frame on the table next to him. In an equally grand portrait his son, also named Richard, is attired as a man of fashion, not to say a dandy, accompanied by his expensively dressed wife and daughter. Wright’s portrait of Strutt is of a more pensive character. Scientific enquiry is represented in the Derby collection by a portrait of Wright’s friend the geologist, instrument and clock maker John Whitehurst. A volcano in the background signals the sitter’s vocation. The collection also has two of Wright’s ten self-portraits. The earliest, aged about 20, shows us a slightly apprehensive or wary young man, who nevertheless has dressed himself ostentatiously in the style of a sitter of Sir Anthony van Dyck. Some twenty years later, Wright depicted himself as an artist, wearing an elaborate turban and holding white chalk in his left hand. His expression exudes the calm confidence of a man who knows he is a success.

Wright was a fine portraitist, but he is still more famous for his paintings of scientific experiments, notably An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump (1768, National Gallery, London) and manufacturing. Unfortunately, the jewel of the Derby collection, A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery (1776) was on loan, but The Alchymist in Search of the Philosopher’s Stone, an imaginary depiction of the discovery of phosphorus was on display. The alchymist looks on in wonder as the phosphorus glows on contact with oxygen. John tells me that Wright reworked this painting over a period of many years. It clearly meant much to him.

The Alchymist in Search of the Philosopher's Stone

The Derby collection also includes some accomplished landscapes, such as Landscape with a Rainbow (1795) in which Wright demonstrates his skilful handling of light. Wright’s patrons were also buyers of romantic images drawn from literary works of the time. In an idealized image of The Widow of an Indian Chief Watching the Arms of her Deceased Husband, a gorgeous young woman looks pensively over a raging sea, storm clouds above torn by lightning, while sun in the distance promises better weather. The dead chief’s weapons hang on a tree next to her. The subject is from the writings of Laurence Sterne. An equally sentimentally tragic image is Mary and her Dog Silvio (1781), based on Sterne’s novel Sentimental Journey (1768). Mary has lost her mind after being abandoned by her lover and has only her little dog to comfort her. Less successful, apparently, was Wright’s portrayal of Juliet about to kill herself after she discovers Romeo’s body. No doubt, the wife of the Indian chief was equally grief-stricken, but that image is much less dark and tragic than the painting of Shakespeare’s couple.

The Widow of an Indian Chief Watching the Arms of her Deceased Husband

A contemporary and friend of Wright was Joseph Pickford, a prolific architect, whose Georgian family home (1770) in Derby is now a museum. Like Wright, a number of Pickford’s clients were members of the Lunar Society of Birmingham, a group devoted to scientific enquiry. Josiah Wedgwood, a helpful member of the museum’s staff informed us, commissioned a number of buildings from Pickford. Wedgewood was also one of Wright’s patrons.

The dining room of the Pickford House. The large portrait of three children is Joseph Wright's The Children of Hugh and Sarah Wod of Swanwick, Derbyshire (1789) (photo courtesy of John Peacock).

The café where we had a toasted ham and cheese sandwich before going to the art gallery had a notice advertising a takeaway Yorkshire tea, instant coffee or orange squash for what the customer can afford to pay to alleviate the cost-of-living crisis. This indication that Derby’s glory days are in its past, was supported by the jaded appearance of many of the city’s Georgian buildings. Indeed, the substantial house in which, its blue plaque informs us, John Flamsteed (1646-1719), the first Astronomer Royal, lived from 1688, and which Wright occupied from 1793 until his death in 1797, is boarded up and derelict.

 

The former silk mill, now the Museum of Making, its italianate tower no doubt a reference to the stolen industrial screts that led to its opening (photo courtesy of John Peacock).

Three hundred years ago, this city of 16,308 people (the population is now 259,000) must have seemed far more prosperous, at least to its men of business. Fortunes could be made here in textiles, porcelain and other ventures, although the workers of the mills and factories would probably have appreciated a pay-what-you-can cup of tea. This Derby is showcased in the Museum of Making, housed in the silk mill, powered by the Derwent that opened in 1717, using technological secrets acquired in Italy by the industrial spy John Lombe.  As visitors walk up the stairs to the exhibit rooms, they pass cases with items from the city’s manufacturing past, all labelled consistently When, Who, How and Why. These might be barometers, items of railway equipment, white plastic calculators used to control processes, or a beautiful work of metal filigree decorated with tiny metal birds made by a retired worker to demonstrate his skill. At the top is an enormous Rolls Royce jet engine, and below it the engine made by the firm to power the plane that crossed the Atlantic from Canada to Ireland in 1915.

 

Rolls Royce jet engine (photo courtesy of John Peacock).

1915 Rolls Royce engine (photo courtesy of John Peacock).

The visitor enters the main exhibit room to find displays relating to the textile industry and other aspects of the economy of Derby in its 18^th- and 19^th-century heyday. A narrow fabric loom is on display, as are a silk waistcoat dated to c.1780, a jar of silk thread and a reel of cotton thread made at the Boar’s Head Cotton Manufactory at Darley Abbey. The latter carries the slogan “A product of British Labour”. A piece of heavy machinery, the grasshopper beam engine made by George Fletcher & Sons Ltd. sugar machine engineers, was widely used in the Caribbean sugar industry.

 

Narrow fabric loom (photo courtesy of John Peacock).

The curators have been particularly diligent in pointing out at every opportunity that many Derby businesses benefited from slavery, which clearly was the case. Repeatedly, a label ends with two or three sentences noting that a piece of machinery, an invention or a product could not have generated the wealth enjoyed by its manufacturers were it not for enslaved labour. George Fletcher’s wealth came not just from his engine, we are told, but from the Caribbean sugar industry predicated on slave labour. The effect is not so much to inform the visitor as to lecture, much as parents once told children not to speak at the table when eating. A much more visitor-friendly and informative approach would have been a more extensive display panel that set the international context for Derby’s industrial success. For example, the exploitation of British Labour is given a panel which records the Derby silk mill lockout of 1833-1834. The workers were eventually starved back to work and union members blacklisted. It would be more informative to link the exploitation of Derbyshire labourers and enslaved workers together as integral parts of an imperial economic system, rather than treating them separately and differently.

 

Indeed, one of the smallest exhibits suggests that the international links of Derby’s industries were wide and varied. A small silver coin, overstamped with the legend “Cromford Derbyshire 4/9” was minted in the Spanish Americas and bears the portrait of King Charles IV of Spain. The coin was issued as a token to Arkwright’s millworkers instead of cash wages. It could be used only in Arkwright’s mill’s own stores. The explanatory label notes that “Spain became the world’s leading supplier of silver in the 1500s due to its colonisation and exploitation of the land and people of Central [sic: North and Central] and Southern America.” In fact, the mines of Mexico and Peru were worked by impressed Indigenous labour and African slave labour – the curators missed an opportunity to lecture the visitor here.

The Cromford silver token.

However, important as all these questions are, the exhibits are, above all, a testament to enormous human ingenuity and creativity. For example, “The Whitehurst family made pioneering scientific instruments and clocks in the 1700s.” The clockmaking tradition was continued in 1856 by one of Whitehurst’s apprentices, John Smith, whose firm still makes clocks in Derby. Derby continues to be a centre for precision engineering. A local firm makes bespoke components for aerospace and motorsport, and another produces single-use sterile medical devices. The city is also a centre of video game design. 

The microscope of Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin's grandfather.

 

Some objects were made out of sheer enthusiasm and to demonstrate Derby’s or an individual’s prowess. The Jones 250 Twin motorcycle, for example, was made by “Rolls-Royce employee Dennis Jones between 1953 and 1955. This one-off bike was built to challenge the Japanese manufacturers and to compete in 250cc class races. The bike was raced in the 1955 Isle of Man Tourist Trophy.”

Dennis Jones' motorcycle.

 

John Peacock’s father, Denis, was born in Oxenhope, Yorkshire. After taking an external University of London Degree in engineering at Bradford Technical College, he arrived in Derby looking for a job. Derby was then one of the main railway hubs in the UK. Denis started as a draughtsman and eventually became a Chief Scientific Officer (research engineer), specializing in braking systems. When we spotted a wooden model of a train used to test a new design in a wind tunnel in the museum’s collection, John recalled his father entertaining him by placing him in the wind tunnel. John remarked: “To this day gale-force winds and the smell of highly varnished wood still take me all the way back.”

Notices and a technical drawing from Derby's railways. The drawing is a design for a bridge on the road from Derby to Ashby-de-la-Zouche.

 

Objects from the railways constitute a large portion of objects displayed in the Assemblage. This is the equivalent of the traditional museum store rooms where objects not on display are kept, often in deep basement rooms. Here, however, the objects are on open racks, classified by material (metal, ceramics, textile etc.), as suggested by the people of Derby. There are numbers of railway lamps, dials and other control devices such as levers to change the points, and many admonitory cast-iron notices, as well as international advertising for Midland Railway, “La route pittoresque à travers le centre de l’Angleterre.” Indeed, the railway had an office at 1 Place de l’Opéra in Paris. The ceramics section’s Midland Railway dinner services are testimony to an era of railway dining long replaced by the dreaded trolley serving industrial sandwiches and terrible tea and coffee.

 

A Midland Railway advertising poster.

John tells me that many of the railway buildings and infrastructure have disappeared under redevelopment and ground clearance schemes. One building that was spared the schemes of urban planners, is the former Roundhouse, which housed a circular turntable for repairing locomotives. It is now a reading room for Derby University.

 

Derby roundhouse (built 1839) in its original railway context. The other structures and the rail tracks have been replaced by a variety of indifferent modern business buildings and roads.

Other Derby achievements documented in the museum’s collection include: the first mass-production of red pillar boxes in the late 1800s by Andrew Handyside & Co’s foundry; William Strutt’s invention in the 1800s of ceramic pots to create fire breaks between the floors of buildings and thus reduce fire risks. Haslam Foundry and Engineering Co invented refrigeration for ships in 1894, which allowed global shipping of perishable food. The curator, never missing an opportunity to inform, reminds us: “Transporting produce by sea and air [not attributable to Haslam’s invention] has serious long term implications for the environment, but such trade can benefit the economies and living standards where the good originate.” After reading this, I reflected that the benefits in terms of living standards earnestly wished for by the museum curator might not be quite what is hoped for in a world where enormous corporations control the growing and transport of those goods, produced with cheap un-unionised workers. For example, I doubt that the directors of the United Fruit Company, who had the US government depose the elected President of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz in 1954, acted to improve the lot of its workers.

 

A Derby pillar box.

I should also note that the staff of all three museums were uniformly friendly, helpful and well-informed. They were clearly proud of their museums and were determined to ensure that visitors enjoyed the collections. They were informative and helped us to find items that we were particularly keen to see. In the Pickford House a member of staff enabled us to examine close up a painting of 18^th-century Derby which was difficult to see from the area roped off for public viewing.

 

One display that attracted our attention in the Pickford House was a splendid collection of toy theatres. The large collection was donated to Derby’s museums by a local collector. I noticed a Dracula Theatre based on the artist Edward Gorey’s stage design for the 1977 Broadway production starring Frank Langella, published by Scribner’s Sons, New York, in 1979 (I briefly did some business with Scribner’s around that time). Indeed, an information panel informs us, the world premiere of Dracula in May 1924 took place in the Grand Theatre in Derby. The widow of Bram Stoker was in the audience. The theatre was said to be haunted by the shades of an actor and carpenter who died in a fire in 1886, which made it an especially suitable venue. Bela Lugosi played the role of Dracula at the Derby Hippodrome in 1951 “to packed out audiences and rave reviews.”

 

The Scribner Dracula theatre.

Unfortunately, by the 1950s the Grand Theatre was semi-derelict. It survived as a dance hall and later a night club. More recently, it has housed an all-you-can eat Chinese buffet called May Sum. It is now an indoor golf complex called House of Holes. In some respects, the history of the theatre seems an apt metaphor for Derby’s treatment of its heritage.

The Grand Theatre Derby, 1912 (photo by F W Scarratt).