Gold Hill Museum opened to the public on Friday 07 August at 10.30a.m. Visitors will be asked to wear face coverings (unless exempt) and to provide contact details at the newly-screened Reception desk. This information is purely for any possible use by NHS Test and Trace, and will be destroyed after 21 days. On the ground floor a one-way system will be operative and exit will be through the garden and a gate separate from the entrance.

On the first floor visitors should “follow the arrows” (our footprints were lost in the delivery process) while observing social distancing in the smaller spaces, and especially on the stairs. COVID-19 and Lockdown mean that we are restricted this year to one Temporary Exhibition, on the theme of the famous Hovis ad made in 1973 by Ridley Scott. Our popular hands-on exhibits and laminated guides will not be available, for obvious reasons. Our friendly and knowledgeable volunteer stewards will however be present, and as helpful as ever behind their face coverings / visors.

There is no charge for admission to Gold Hill Museum. Contactless purchases and donations may be made in the Shop / Reception area and cash donations may still be deposited in our collecting box.

Gold Hill Museum will be open from 10.30a.m. to 4.30p.m. on Friday 28 August and from 10.30a.m. to 2.30p.m. on Saturday 29 August. Weekends are difficult to staff at the best of times and the lack of available volunteer stewards during COVID-19, when even more are needed than normal, means that regretfully the Museum will close for the 2020 season at 2.30p.m. on 29 August.

On 15 June 1920 the renowned Australian operatic soprano Dame Nellie Melba made the world’s first radio broadcast of a live recital by a professional musician, from the Marconi Factory in Chelmsford. The Marconi Wireless Company had been making experimental broadcasts since February 1920. Dame Nellie was persuaded to lend her undoubted star quality with a handsome fee from the Daily Mail. Born Helen Porter Mitchell in 1861, she had adopted a shortened version of “Melbourne” as her stage name, and sung in most of the world’s great opera houses. Her charitable works during the First World War had been recognised by the award of a Damehood.

Unfortunately the primitive recording equipment of the era does not do justice to the quality of her voice and she was reluctant to commit performances to wax cylinders. She could also live up to the reputation of the diva: the great tenor Caruso was said to have pressed a hot sausage into her palm while singing that her “tiny hand was frozen; let me warm it.” On a more positive note, both Peach Melba and Melba Toast were named in her honour.

At 7.10p.m. on 15 June Dame Nellie began singing into a microphone cannibalised from a telephone mouthpiece and a wooden cigar box. ‘Home Sweet Home’ still carried an emotional charge from the Great War. Two arias and a rousing rendition of the National Anthem followed. The programme was heard across Europe and as far afield as Iran and Newfoundland. It would certainly have been heard in Shaftesbury: legally if the listener possessed a GPO licence, and probably on a home-made crystal set.

Between 1920 and 1922 570 radio stations were licensed in the USA. The British Broadcasting Company (later Corporation) was founded in October 1922 and made its first broadcast, an evening news bulletin, on 14 November 1922 on Station2LO. The BBC retained a monopoly of public radio until the 1970s.

New levels of inventiveness were necessary to commemorate the 75th anniversary of VE Day in Lockdown Shaftesbury. At least the Appleby family’s Big Ben was not cocooned in scaffolding. Contemporary Swing music, Churchill’s 3pm speech and an Aunt Sally sideshow contributed to the 1945 atmosphere, while Social Distancing was strictly observed.

Social Distancing also figured on the agenda of the first-ever virtual Trustees’ meeting of The S&DHS. A Risk Assessment indicated that while Social Distancing was set at 2 metres the capacity of the Garden Room would be limited to 10 persons. Small groups should be able to enter and exit this annexe of the Museum in comparative safety – when it is permitted. However the much-reduced capacity would have repercussions for events such as lectures and the Annual General Meeting. It was decided to move the AGM from Tuesday 07 July to the date and venue originally planned for the annual Teulon Porter Memorial Lecture, i.e. Shaftesbury Town Hall at 7p.m. on Tuesday 06 October. It might be possible to hold a lecture after the AGM. Time will tell.

For the foreseeable future Gold Hill Museum will remain closed. Even when cultural venues are allowed to re-open, the Trustees will have to consider how to operate the Museum safely, in terms of the circulation of visitors and the welfare of stewards (and Trustees), all of whom are volunteers.

In September 1918 Britain’s dynamic wartime Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, visited Manchester Town Hall to receive the Freedom of the City. It was the city of his birth, to Welsh parents in 1863. By 1918 he had a formidable list of achievements in an illustrious political career. Old Age Pensions, introduced in 1908; National Insurance in 1911 to pay for unemployment benefit; overcoming a shortage of artillery shells on the Western Front as Minister of Munitions in 1915; and as Prime Minister implementing the convoy system to minimise losses of shipping to German U boats.

In the evening Lloyd George collapsed, a victim of the ‘Spanish Flu’. This was a virulent, possibly avian flu. It certainly didn’t originate in Spain, but as Spain was a neutral country and King Alfonso XIII an early patient, its existence was widely reported. Accurate news of Lloyd George’s condition was however suppressed, for fear of giving encouragement to Germany and her allies. The Prime Minister was too ill to move and received treatment in a Committee Room in the Town Hall for ten days, at one stage being put on a ventilator. As his valet later remarked, it was “touch and go.”

Lloyd George recovered and played a key role at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919. Though his social reforms did much to remove the fear of the workhouse from the old and the sick, there was no entitlement to free medical treatment before the advent of the NHS in 1948. Until then philanthropy, voluntary contributions and community fund-raising played a vital role in providing health care. The Westminster Memorial Hospital was a Grosvenor foundation in 1874 and the annual Shaftesbury Carnival made a significant contribution to its running costs, as you can read at Shaftesbury Remembers by clicking here.

Shaftesbury’s cinema The Picture Palace opened in the High Street in 1913. The neo-Classical frontage was adjacent to the cycle shop on the site of what is now Bargains. After five grim years of war and a devastating flu pandemic in 1918-19, the cinema offered an escape – to a world of adventure, glamour and even comedy.

This was the heyday of the silent movie. Many films were two-reelers, knocked out in a few days at minimal cost and using real locations. The reliably sunny weather of California was appreciated by film makers in a hurry. Prior to World War One, Arthur Stanley Jefferson toured Music Halls in the US with another unknown, Charlie Chaplin, as part of Fred Karno’s (British) slapstick vaudeville troupe. Both stayed to find employment in Hollywood, with Chaplin’s creation of The Tramp in 1915 earning star status. Jefferson became Stan Laurel but had to wait until he was paired in the mid-1920’s with Babe Hardy, another bit-part player of heavies, for his particular comedy genius to be recognised.

In 1919 the giants of Hollywood were Chaplin, Mary Pickford (“America’s sweetheart”), Douglas Fairbanks Snr (“King of Hollywood”) and director DW Griffith. They founded United Artists in 1919 so that they had total control over the making and marketing of their films. On 28 March 1920 Pickford and Fairbanks made a marriage in publicists’ heaven. They honeymooned in Europe and were mobbed in Paris and London. Their return to the USA was equally triumphant and as “Hollywood royalty” they entertained regally at ‘Pickfair’, their Beverly Hills mansion.

So which films might Shaftesbury cinema-goers have seen in 1920? There were British film companies: Broadwest based in Walthamstow; Ideal at Elstree and Borehamwood; and Gaumont-British at Lime Grove in Shepherd’s Bush. But presumably the Picture Palace could also show the latest Hollywood movies featuring the biggest stars. Pickford (aged 27) played Pollyanna (aged 12). Her special talent lay in portraying the innocent ingenue and the film was popular, making $1.1 million against a budget of $300,000. It ran for 58 minutes and would have been a multi-reeler, requiring the projectionist to make quick changes and show the reels in the right order. Fairbanks played a typical swashbuckling role in the first film version of The Mark of Zorro. This ran for 90 minutes and featured Noah Beery, father and son, in supporting roles.

DW Griffith was a pioneer film director. Many of his innovations became standard practice in film-making: close-ups, cross-cutting, fade-in / fade-out. He experimented with colour tints in 1919’s Broken Blossoms and used the same star (“The First Lady of American Cinema”), Lillian Gish in 1920’s Way Down East. This was a blockbuster: it cost $700,000 to make, ran for 145 minutes, and made $4.5 million at the box office. Performers often did their own stunts, and the 26 year old Gish lay on a real ice floe and trailed her hand in freezing river water. As a result her hair froze and she permanently lost the feeling in some of her fingers. She certainly made an impression on the British cinema-going public and, according to Juliet Nicholson, ‘Billingsgate market resounded to cries of “Would you like a nice bit of Lillian for your supper?”‘ (The Great Silence 1918-20 Living in the Shadow of the Great War, p258)

Apart from going to the cinema, Shastonians were very good at making their own amusements , as detailed at the Shaftesbury Remembers website. They could also stay at home and read a book, as many of us are doing during the current lockdown. In 1920, after many rejections, Agatha Christie published her first novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles . This featured the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, probably inspired by Christie’s meeting Belgian refugees in Torquay who had fled their homeland in1914.