Somerset ichthyosaurs and Quaker philanthropy: Alfred Gillett, William Stephens Clark and the geological museum in the Crispin Hall, Street.

Abstract

• In 1885, William Stephens Clark (1839-1925) built and opened the Crispin Hall in the village of Street, Somerset, to house its Working Men's Club & Institute. The new complex provided a room for a geological museum set up by Clark's cousin Alfred Gillett (1814-1904), and formally opened in 1887 with a lecture by Henry Woodward, Keeper of Geology of te British Museum (Natural History), London. The museum collection was based on Gillett's, supplemented with donations from Woodward, the British Museum, the palaentologist George Jennings Hinde, and others. The museum's purposes were to retain a collection of the famous local Lowewr Liassic (Early Jurassic) fossils in Strret, to complement that with a range of fossils, minerals and rocks, and modern mollusc, from further afield, and to promote the study of geology as an improving and educational recreation. Those aims fitted well with Clark's and Gillett's Quaker beliefs, and Clark's aims for Crispin Hall: to support education, provide alternative recreations in the struggle against alcohol abuse, and contribute to civic improvement - all concerns of the Clarks and generally of Quakers. Like other museums in Britain, the geological museum suffered vicissitudes during the 20th century. In the late 1930s it was refurbished and reorganised as a more general local museum on a wider range of topics, more suited to general visitors and children, with disposals of some of the non-local material and additional archaeological and social-historical material. It was closed and partly dispersed in 1948, the local fossils remaining in Street under the care of C & J. Clark. The residual collection today comprises some 20 larger marine reptiles comprising ichtyosaurs and a plesiosaur, and almost 200 smaller and mostly local fossils and other items. It appears to include several ichthyosaurs from other collections in Street. The collection is now in the custody of the Alfred Gillett Trust, alongside other object, book and archive collections relating to the Clark family, C & J. Clark Ltd, and Street. In recent years the collection has been used for scientific research temporary pop-up displays, and public visits. It has also been given specialist curatorial attention in anticipation of a permanent museum project which is scheduled for partial; completion in 2025, the 200th anniiversary of C. & J. Clark Ltd.