This last blog in this series focuses on No 170 which I recently bought for 50p. at Hull History Centre and entitled ‘Roman Pottery and Kilns at Throlam near Holme-on-Spalding-Moor’, dated 1930. The picture reconstruction above is copied from page 3. Here again ‘Tommy’ Sheppard was leading an excavation.
The number of this booklet in the series is evidence that by 1930 Hull Museum, based on Albion Street, had produced 170 of these relatively informative and affordable booklets available to the general public. This aspect of Sheppard’s contribution to the cultural life of the town is worthy of praise. Sadly a number of the artefacts described in these booklets would have been destroyed in the ‘Hull Blitz’ of the early 1940s.
Number 170 lists at the back 30+ of earlier booklets, a random list of five being;
- Hull Coins and Tokens,
- Ancient Model of Boat, and Warrior Crew, from Roos Carrs,
- Rare Neolithic Implements from East Yorkshire,
- Extinct Animals of East Yorkshire,
- Andrew Marvell Tercentenary Celebrations in Hull.
(The second in the above list was notorious).
Of course it may be argued that many of Sheppard’s (and his contemporaries) conclusions have superseded by subsequent excavations or research but they were still part of the story.
The East Yorkshire Local History Society similarly published a number of thoroughly researched booklets in the second half of the 20th century but costs are now too high.
Finally, in the last paragraph of the Introduction Sheppard thanks ‘my staff for their assistance, particularly G.K. Beaulah …’. Ken Beaulah much later in his life lived in Hessle and had a large collection of wall/floor tiles excavated from the site of Meaux Abbey alongside the winding road from Bransholme to Routh. There was in the 1970s briefly a little museum on the site in a surviving building, now derelict. K. B. owned the business on Park Street that made heralding shields etc. and which survives.