The Spalding Gentlemen's Society

Advert for the display of a "Little Wild Man"

The Spalding Gentlemen’s Society (SGS) made us very welcome, the Sunday we visited. It was the opening day of the first new exhibition for 20 years, and we were even invited (although we weren’t members) to the members’ only talk to present the new exhibition, entitled “Curious Collections”.

The curator explained that the exhibition comprised a personal selection by six people of items from the collection that they found interesting. I can’t fault the sincerity of everyone involved, but to be honest, “curious” seems the best way to describe it. There seemed to be no common theme running through the exhibition. It included some 18th-century maps, a depiction of a rhinoceros, which many people described as a unicorn, never having seen a rhino before, plus a poster advertising the public display of an Inuit (described as “a little wild man” ).

This exhibition, in a way, summed up the SGS. It seems to be the victim of its original collection. Like the Tradescant Collection that formed the basis of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the SGS started as a coffee house discussion group, but soon became a collection of oddities – unusual, exceptional, sometimes (but not often) beautiful objects, donated by members, but without any coherence. However, over the years, the Tradescant Collection became a museum, with a collection policy and public role. It doesn’t look as though SGS, in its 300-year history, has ever got beyond the cabinet of curiosities.

Arranged over three or four rooms, the collection comprises many glass cases of the most amazing miscellany. Objects displayed include guns, china, prehistoric flints and axe heads, ivory carvings, playing cards, carvings by French prisoners during the Napoleonic wars, a few local items, a few items from all over the place. Some of the axe heads were found near Detroit. Largely run by volunteers, the SGS exhibits this hotchpotch in a glorious medley.

That “wild man” exhibit worries me. The poster describes how the Inuit was displayed daily to the public at an inn near Charing Cross, no doubt with admission on payment of a fee. You could pay to see the inmates at Bedlam, I believe, if you were interested. Exactly what has changed since the original display? Where was the discussion of how we no longer feel it appropriate to display what we think to be oddities of this kind? Is the SGS just the perpetuation of the cabinet of curiosities for the 21st century? YouTube and social media seem to have reinstated the cabinet of curiosities: you can see any number of questionable things on YouTube, but nobody claims they are educational. They are just there to be gawped at; which is what we appear to be invited to do with this poor Inuit man in a glass case in Spalding. 

 A quick read of a 2019 Society publication, Against the Odds: The Survival of the SGS suggested some of the claims about the society are less than accurate.

• “The oldest provincial society with a continuous record in Britain” – yet the guide reveals there are no records for 1713-1724, 1758-1828, and 1875-1889: a total of 95 years without records.
• The Wikipedia article for the SGS states that notables such as Newton, Alexander Pope, and Hans Sloane were members. I’m not sure if there is any evidence that they ever attended any meetings. They appear to have been honorary members, invited from afar. At least Newton donated a few books; I’m not sure what the contribution of the other distinguished members was.

Visiting the Society museum (open for a grand total of 12 hours each month) is not simple. It only opens for two hours a week, on Wednesdays, plus two hours on the third Sunday of each month. There is no space to display most of the collection, and yet, just down the road, there is a magnificent listed building, Ayscoughee Hall, which holds the local museum – and they have plenty of space to display more stuff. You could probably fit all the displays from the SGS in the current Ayscoughee Hall building. 

A case of coloured stones. No caption, but the stones look nice. 

As it stands, SGS is a poor museum. It doesn’t even rank on Tripadvisor as a museum in Spalding – most people wouldn’t know it was there. Even when you enter the museum, you could hardly describe the experience as educational. A report by archivists suggested that the most valuable items in the SGS collections are its own records, so perhaps studying its own history rather than all history might be one way forward. And why was the introduction to the new exhibition only for members? 

Some changes have taken place. The Society got rid of its collection of stuffed birds in 1955, so clearly, it is possible for the Society to make tough decisions about what it collects. But time is short. Its current building is subsiding and not fit for purpose. The finances of the Society make it pretty clear it is not financially viable – it cannot afford to repair its own building, quite apart from doing anything meaningful with the collection. It should rethink its purpose entirely; it looks like the major changes over the last 50 years, such as the admission of women, have been the result of external agencies such as the Charities Commission, insisting that the Society brings itself more up to date.

The example of Wisbech Museum is interesting: the history reveals that Wisbech built a public museum in 1847 that brought together the holdings of the local Literary Society and Museum Society. The museum still exists today. Like the SGS, it is full of glass cases. But it is regularly open to the public, and currently in construction is an accessible entrance and café area. Some kind of merger of the SGS with the local museum looks like the best way forward, funded partly by external bodies, and partly by judicious sales of some of the collection. Otherwise, the Society risks (and I quote from the official guide) “being run very largely for the benefit of members, and not, as declared in 1955, for the benefit of the public”.