No great ceremony but today was the hand over of the keys for the town hall, to begin our lease and a new chapter for Crieff & Strathearn Museum. It marks the start of making this venue our own and creating a home for the museum. We'll have the doors open to receive visitors for the Doors Open Days on the 16th and 17th and then it is sleeves rolled up and, hopefully, a more formal opening in the spring.

Today, David visited the Scottish Conservation Studio at Hopetoun House, for a training session in cleaning photographic plates. Quite a few of the John MacGregor collection photographs were given a good clean, which should start appearing on the web site and FaceBook shortly. Many thanks to Anna Trist for her patient instruction and to Helen Creasy for organising and refreshments.

Thanks to the tremendous generosity of Janet Hughes, who donated the whole purchase amount for the John McGregor Collection, Andrew was able to go to Dumbartonshire today to collect the boxes of glass half plates from Malcolm Lindsay. It was an exciting moment which we have been anticipating since the beginning of the year but it was also a huge relief. Now begins the work…



It was a delightful bonus to find that Malcolm and Melanie had also packed all the “scraps”, another box full of the too damaged and broken half plates and quarter plates which they had considered throwing out. We will post scans of these as well as the “good” ones, to see if they mean anything to anyone, even in their damaged state. For example, who might this rather distinguished gentleman be?

Back in January we were contacted by Malcolm Lindsay who had acquired over four hundred photographic half plates by the Muthill photographer John McGregor and wanted us to know they were available for sale. Malcolm posted some on the Muthill Past & Present FaceBook page and they provoked a lot of interest. With Sandy Black of Muthill Village Trust, C&SM got in touch with Malcolm who kindly agreed to hold on to the photographs while C&SM considered the offer and then began to raise funds for the collection.

It was not until May that C&SM were able to get their fund raising platform in place and within days of the first mention of the appeal in the Quair, we received a very generous donation for the whole purchase amount from Janet Hughes, whose father's forebears came from Crieff. Janet is hoping to come to Crieff in September on a walking holiday and we hope that we might be able to help her in her quest for information about her family. We also look forward to being able to show her the collection which she has paid for.

The photographs we have seen are thought to be of people and places in and immediately around Muthill though we know there are others which are from further afield and C&SM will publish the photographs as they are repaired and cleaned and scanned, to allow people to see them and, we hope, help us to identify the people and the places shown. We are also keen to find out more about John McGregor. It is said that he was a bachelor and that he had two sisters but, aside from this collection and his press photographs for the PA, we know very little and hope there may be people who can help us to build a picture about the man and his work.

Currently we are waiting for Glasgow to move out of step 3 to step 2, so we can collect the plates and bring them back to Strathearn. When that happens, we will update this blog. The next step will be to scan the images in the condition they arrive here before taking them to a specialist conservator, to give us a quotation for the repairs which we know will be necessary to many of the pictures which have suffered from water damage and have paper adhered to them.

We will continue to run the fund-raising campaign for the conservation work and ongoing curation of the collection but we also want to raise funds to try to recover those pictures from the collection which were sold before C&SM were able to purchase it.

It is thought there may be other John McGregor pictures to get hold of; to secure for the collection, so we see this as a long term project but one which will be available for the public to see on this website very soon.

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We were very pleased to hear from John Hunt, the nephew of the late Miss Emily Hunt, who has donated a number of interesting newspaper cuttings, photos and other artefacts to C&SM. Many people who lived in the Crieff area before 1984 will remember F. N. Hunt, drapers at 2 High Street, of which Miss Hunt was the last proprietor, after two hundred years of the Hunt family being associated with the drapery trade in Perth and Crieff.

In 1905 Frederick Ninian Hunt left the family firm in Perth and opened two shops in King Street and in 1924 he took over a similar business (Ames) at 2 High Street and there it remained for sixty years and gave the name to “Hunt corner”.

One of the newspaper cuttings includes the announcement of the closure of the business in the Strathearn Herald of 17/11/1984 and this, along with several others will be featured in the articles on this web site or in the twitter feed in coming weeks. C&SM thanks John Hunt for his kindness and generosity and we look forward to showing him the Miss Hunt box file in the museum archive when we finally have it all set up.


Crieff Town Council Water Inspection at Loch Turret 1935 with Provost Hunt seated with glasses.

Today the Crieff & Strathearn Museum group became an affiliate of the Scottish Civic Trust. Which means we support their aims to: "Celebrate Scotland’s built environment, take action for its improvement and empower its communities".

Some may remember that the last time there was a Scottish Civic Trust society in Crieff it was in the 1990s. After a meeting in the Drummond Arms Hotel in May 1991, the Strathearn Society was set up by Micheil MacDonald, David Crosbie and about ten others from the area. However, pre-dating that was the Muthill Civic Trust, organised by Edith Jissel among others.

The above mentioned Strathearn Society is not to be confused with the original Strathearn Society of the 19th century which concerned itself with the breeding of livestock, information on which would be welcomed by the museum.

Today was a trip for volunteers and trustees to the Battle of Bannockburn Visitors' Centre and to the Engine Shed. Most had been before but this was to examine the space management and the way things work. As well as to engage in battle. If you have not been before, we recommend going:

https://www.nts.org.uk/visit/places/bannockburn

https://www.historicenvironment.scot/learn/the-engine-shed/

Fifty years after the closure of the Waverley Line and of the St. Andrews Railway we, as a nation, are taking stock of what we lost with the closure of a large proportion of our railway lines and, in particular, after the Beeching Reports of 1963 and 1965. There had been a steady shrinking of the lines from the 1930s which reflected the economic decline and changes in society but, between 1950 and 1973, a dramatic shift occurred when 7000 miles of railway line were taken out of service across the UK.

From 1st October 1951, the line west of Comrie to Balquhidder was closed to all traffic, while Crieff to Perth was closed the same day to Passenger traffic. Two months prior to the Forth Road Bridge opening in 1964, the last passenger train ran in Upper Strathearn, with the controversial closure of the railway between Gleneagles and Comrie, leaving the goods-only line from Crieff to Perth via Madderty as the last rail link, which hung on until September 1967. The coal deliveries from distant collieries, which were a primary reason for the railways' existence, had to switch to the road.

Although times and circumstances change, it is still being argued that the Strathearn railways were the life blood of the area. Because of the loss of the land over which key sections of railway ran, we can now only guess at what a difference it would make to have these transport links again but there is an abiding sense that everyone mourns their loss. Those of us who remember travelling by steam, seeing the trains stopping at halts along the way to pick up milk or fruit or other local produce will feel sad about the passing of a way of life which can never come again. Few things are as evocative of the post-war rural idyll as a distant whistle and a thick plume of white smoke bending over fields and woods.

Crieff & Strathearn Museum assembled stories, images and artefacts from the times of Strathearn’s railways for a free, public exhibition which was held in the upstairs chamber of the Old Town Hall in Crieff between the 9th and the 16th of November. This exhibition would not have been possible without the enthusiasm and hard work of David Ferguson, who provided most of the material used in our posters and artefacts on display.

This painting of Joanna Murray is one of a pair. Painted by Catherine Read, it is thought to be contemporary with her portrait of Joanna's sister, Helen, dating from 1756. The portrait of Helen formed part of the main summer exhibition in the Perth Museum and Art Gallery: Jacobite Clans (29/06/2019 - 26/10/2019).

https://www.culturepk.org.uk/whats-on/jacobite-clans-ancestors-at-war/

There was a satellite exhibition about the Jacobites of the Crieff area which ran at the Strathearn Community Campus for the same period as Perth’s exhibition.

https://www.pkc.gov.uk/article/18840/What-s-on-at-Strathearn-Community-Campus-

The print of the portrait of Joanna, information about Jacobite families and about Catherine Read were displayed at the Crieff & Strathearn Museum desk at the Crieff Old Town Hall from the 19th of August until October 26th.

You can hear an interview with Tony and Sue Murray talking about the paintings and the sitters at: https://vimeo.com/353217125

There is also a regular podcast available for the Perth summer exhibition on the Jacobites at this address:
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/jacobite-clans/id1474783253

Although the exhibitions have now finished, we recommend listening to Nicky Small's podcasts which are excellent.

On the 30th August, John Pelan, director of the Scottish Council on Archives shared this National Records post:

"Yesterday we published “Scotland's Population 2018 – The Registrar General's Annual Review of Demographic Trends", the key points from which you may have seen in the news last night or this morning. ‘Scotland’s Population’ has been published every year since 1855, and it includes statistics on population, births, deaths, life expectancy, migration, marriages and civil partnerships, adoptions, and households and housing. The population figures we produce influence essential work done in planning, resource allocation, and managing the economy by colleagues across the Scottish Government, local government, and the health sector. Decisions about the allocation of billions of pounds of tax-payers’ money are heavily informed by our figures, which inform local and national policy development in many ways, such as planning and resourcing public services like bin collection, roads, water and sewage services, hospitals, care homes, housing, nurseries, schools and parks. Our data is vital. Get the full ‘Scotland’s Population’ report on our website, along with a useful infographic booklet which gives a quick overview of what the figures show."

https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/news/2019/scotlands-population-2018

#ScotlandsPopulation #NRSStats #Demography #Population #Statistics

HES have published several scans of panels from the Edzell Castle garden. Click on the foregoing link to see them at the Sketchfab site, along with other interesting HES scans.

Crieff & Strathearn Museum hope to be uploading similar scans in coming months, as time permits. Keep looking in here for news when we do.

This gaming board is scored with lines for a medieval game of merelles, or nine mens morris. Each player would have nine gaming pieces that would be placed at 24 points on the board. As with the modern game of checkers, the player’s objective would be to move around the board until all the opponents’ pieces were captured.

Today (10/04/2019) Colin Mayall updated his Perthshire, Crieff, Strathearn Local History blog with a very interesting article on the Weavers of Strathearn (image is from Colin's blog).

Another wet and cold day but the visitors kept coming, which was very gratifying and we had twenty new Members sign up at the desk. We were sorry when the display closed at 4:00 but we are making plans for the next one. The photographs are all from Friday, as are those in Saturday's Courier. However, Colin Boag kindly posted a huge number of images on FaceBook on the " I grew up in Crieff (or live there now)" for people who could not make it to the event: https://www.facebook.com/colin.boag.7/media_set?set=a.2371325416235156&type=3