Sir Charles Dick — the Baronet curator of Brighton Museum

Brighton Museum celebrates its 150th birthday today, having been formally opened on 5 November 1861. To mark the occasion, we are running a free audio touch-tour of the museum, and have designed a treasure trail for our smartphone app. But it is worth taking a moment to remark upon the fate of one of Brighton Museum’s first curators: Sir Charles Dick.

When the Brighton and Sussex Museum opened in 1861 it was not in its present building. It originally occupied several  rooms on the upper floor of the Royal Pavilion. At the time, the museum consisted of the municipal art collection, and several other collections, including natural history specimens. Dick was not the first curator of the museum, but he has become the figure most closely identified with this early period.

In spite of his title, Dick lived much of his life on modest means. He was born in London in 1802, and moved to Brighton in 1820 with his father, Sir Page Dick. They lived in a house named Porthall on Dyke Road. Much of his income seems to have been derived from his father’s war pension, and when Sir Page died in 1851, Dick inherited relatively little. Other than his title, the house, some furniture, and a collection of armour and painted miniatures, Sir Charles Dick was left with little income. Believing himself to be entitled to a substantial pension from the crown, dating from a settlement made by Charles II, Dick spent much of the remainder of his life petitioning the government for these funds. His efforts would prove unsuccessful and, according to an obituary published in the Brighton Herald, he ‘sank lower and lower in worldly circumstances’. So low did he sink that he became a museum curator.

In the early 1860s, Dick and his family were forced to give up Porthall, and his collection of armour and miniatures were acquired for the museum. Dick’s knowledge of the collection, or charitable feeling, appear to have been the only reason he was appointed to the post. He certainly does not appear to have held much enthusiasm for the job, and spent most of his time fruitlessly pursuing his claim to a pension from the government. According to the Herald obituary:

‘It cannot be said that the now aged Baronet took kindly to his office; doubtless, his “heart was over where,” for his ” claims” were ever uppermost with him.’

Shortly before the museum moved to its present home in 1873, Dick was dismissed from his post with three months pay. Although he pleaded to be kept on, it seems that the town’s authorities had ambitious plans for the museum. An elderly, distracted curator clearly did not match this vision. Indeed, it seems that many people dismissed his museum entirely. John George Bishop in his 1891 The Brighton Pavilion and its Royal Associations fails to mention the museum at all, and simply dates the founding of the museum to 1873, the year it moved to its present site. This is particularly striking, as Bishop was one of the few mourners who attended his funeral several years later.

Sir Charles Dick died on 3 December 1876. The obituary published on 9 December bore the title ‘A Sad Story of a Life’. Although it may be hard to define Dick’s legacy, he is at the very least a reminder of how much has changed in the museum in the last 150 years.

Kevin Bacon
Digital Development Officer

Mary Merrifield

The Victorian era is considered the golden age of natural history collecting. The pursuit of fauna and flora from around the planet was driven both by a desire to learn about nature, as well as a quest to prove oneself against the wilderness.

Phyllophora rubens

Victorians collected almost everything to do with the natural world. However, women were excluded from collecting most things by the rules of Victorian society, usually relegated to collecting plants. Some of these women took full advantage of a science that was acceptable for them to study, becoming leading authorities in botany. One of these women was Mary Philadelphia Merrifield.

Born Mary P. Watkins in Brompton, London on 18 April 1804, to the barrister Sir Charles Watkins, she married trainee barrister John Merrifield in 1827. After qualifying as a barrister, he moved to Brighton with his family to practice law.

Flustra Foliacea

Mary started her career in the academic community by translating and publishing the works of the 15^th century Italian painter Cennino Cennini. This work bought her to the attention of the Royal Commission on the Fine Arts, who employed her to research the history of painters materials and techniques. Assisted in her work by her sons Charles and Frederick, the research was published in book form in 1846 as the Art of Fresco Painting. It proved to be a very useful manual for artists and was reprinted as late as 1952.

Image of her book along with specimens

She wrote several more books on art and fashion, and was awarded a civil pension of £100 in 1857 for services to art and literature. After receiving this pension however, her interests shifted to the field of natural history, and she soon published a book entitled A Sketch of the Natural History of Brighton. Being perfectly cited by the sea, she became an authority in the study of seaweed, and was considered one of the leading algologists in Britain. She wrote many papers for scientific journals including the Journal of the Linnaean Society and the Annals of Botany, and continued to publish articles in the journal Nature until her death.   

Image of her book A Sketch of the Natural History of Brighton

During her last few years in Brighton, she helped to arrange the natural history galleries at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery, all of which have now been relocated to the Booth Museum. She also learned Danish and Swedish so that she could keep up with botanical research from these countries, and she had a species of marine algae named after her.  

Following her husband’s death in 1877, she moved into her daughter’s home in Cambridge, and died on 4 January 1889. Her collection went to the Natural History department of the British Museum (now the Natural History Museum), but some items she had previously given to other colleagues are now housed at the Booth Museum. These are mostly seaweeds but include some other specimens as well. Several of these items will go on display at Horsham Museum in early 2012, as part of the Victorian Collectors exhibition produced by the Booth Museum. 

Lee Ismail, Curator of Natural Sciences

Brighton in the Dark Ages

Friday 29th July was the Day of Archaeology 2011. It provided the opportunity to find out all about the world of archaeology, with 400 archaeologists blogging about their work. So, with this in mind, here’s a look at a local discovery revealing another slice of Brighton’s history.

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In 1884, during the building of St Luke’s Church hall in Exeter Street, two adult male burials were uncovered with grave goods including shield bosses and spear heads. Later, in 1893, three shield bosses and a sword unearthed in Stafford Road were presented to Brighton Museum & Art Gallery. These discoveries suggested the existence of an Anglo-Saxon cemetery in the area.

In 1985, building works at a house off Stafford Road triggered an archaeological rescue operation when workmen uncovered more Anglo-Saxon burials. Over a Bank Holiday weekend, the remains of three skeletons were uncovered, two male and one female, all dating from around the 6^th Century AD. One of the males had died aged about 30 from a serious head wound inflicted by a sword and his skull also exhibited an earlier healed head wound from which he had survived. He was buried with his shield, spear and possibly an iron knife. There is no evidence of cause of death for the other male, aged about 35-40. He was fairly tall at 5’ 11” and robust, although his dental health was poor, demonstrated by evidence of tooth loss and abscesses.

The female skeletal remains were disturbed and damaged by the workmen. However it was determined that she was aged around 40-45 when she died, comparatively old for the early Anglo-Saxon period, and also had poor dental health. She was buried with objects which were likely of most value to her including two copper alloy brooches, two copper alloy rings and a pair of copper alloy tweezers.

Life for these early Saxon settlers appears to have been relatively short-lived and sometimes pretty brutal. Suffering a violent death was not uncommon and life expectancy beyond the age of 40 appears to of been rare. The deficient dental health of two of the skeletons indicates a fairly poor diet and lack of personal hygiene, all of which would have increased vulnerability to disease. This small insight into life in Brighton during the early Anglo-Saxon period suggests it may have been at times somewhat bleak.

Andy, Volunteer Local History & Archaeology