Museum Curator’s Column June 2025
First of all apologies that this column has not been updated for a while, but much has been going on and I have always felt it is more important to do rather than talk or write about doing it.
One of the things I have not been directly involved with, but it is important that you know about, is the we are working on achieving Accredited Museum Status. This is because it does open a number of funding avenues which would not otherwise be accessible. It is a bit of a chicken and egg situation, as until we have the funding it is difficult to set up an actual Museum, but until we do have a museum, it makes it difficult to achieve the criteria accreditation we need to get it.
I thought the rejection of the development plan put forward by the Club might put us back but it has not, in that the club is looking at giving us another room in the John Trollope Stand where the access the club has already given us to the John Trollope room means we do have a Museum site. The problem of course is disabled access which, if not making accreditation a complete no no, does lessen the strength of an application.
Moving on I want to make a couple of requests, float an idea and say a thank you. Working in reverse, the thank you goes to Jim Turner who has agreed to clean and tidy past players and officials graves at Radnor Street Cemetery. If we had this done professionally it would cost at least £200 so is saving us money that can help preserve other elements of the football clubs heritage.
It was a conversation between Jim and Andy Binks of the Swindon Society that came up with the idea of Red Plaques. You are probably aware of the Blue Plaques that commemorate where important people in the Community lived. Harold Fleming and Sam Allen are people in the football community commemorated in this way but the system is expensive and involves considerable red tape. Red Plaques could enable more recognition of Swindon people not only in the football field but others as well. It could make Swindon an innovator as it has so often been in the past.
My first request is for old notices of AGM and Annual Accountants. While we have a number of these from the post war period we only have a few from before the Second World War. Such documents seldom give you answers but do enable you to ask the right questions.
The second is for assistance with the tours and making them more child friendly. I would gladly show any sixth former who supports the town around. Doing something like a guided tour looks very good on application to University.
The third request is for old fanzines. Andy Cossens has done a brilliant job in working towards getting a more or less complete collection of post war programmes. Another thing we aim to put together is a complete collection of all the Town Fanzines. These really do show the view of fans at the time and were very
much the social media of their day.
