Another of the old booklets I recently purchased from Hull History Centre (s.p.b.) is entitled ‘Museum of Fisheries and Shipping, Pickering Park, Hull (illustrated catalogue)’, published 1915 and written by Thomas Sheppard (s.p.b.). The first illustration is a photo. of the building funded by Christopher Pickering initially as a reading room and then as a reading room and Museum (see above and C. Pickering had become a wealthy entrepreneur in the fishing industry). The building survives just west of the alms-houses beside the main entrance to the Park off Hessle High Road, it is now the base for a local boxing club. It is clear from the text that precedes the inventory that initially the Museum contained many display cabinets with other artefacts displayed on the walls etc. Proposals from Mr. Pickering to build this building are first mentioned in the minutes of the Parks and Cemeteries Committee of the Municipal Council in 1909 and it was certainly built by the Great War.
The Museum, in 1915, was very proud of its whaling industry memorabilia ‘it seemed advisable that, as far as possible, every relic of the whaling industry should be preserved’. I’m not sure if Pickering had been involved in the last days of whaling out of Hull but Sheppard’s text states that ‘towards the middle of the last century (19th) whales became scarce, and the industry waned’, this a comment on the industry without any hint of the ‘Save the Whale’ movement to come.
The inventory lists 773 items in the Museum’s collection including nearly 100 ‘Japanese Fishery Exhibits’, presented by the Japanese government!
The inventory includes copies of a number of paintings of whaling ships the first being ‘The Hull whaler Diana locked in the ice’. Two out of these four pictures show members of the crew clubbing to death seals out on the pack ice.