Island Life Magazine Ltd October/November 2010 | Page 58

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Island Life - October/November 2010

Carisbrooke Castle

Save our
Museum
People visiting Carisbrooke Castle
Museum for the first time often ask if
there are any ghosts. Perhaps they’ve
discovered that King Charles 1 lived
in the building for a year before he
was executed and that his daughter
Elizabeth died of pneumonia in one of
the upstairs rooms.
But there’s no ghostly feel about the
museum and visitors coming into the
great hall of the medieval castle find a
fascinating history of the Island from
the Norman Conquest to the present
day. With a treasure trove of nearly
30,000 items in the collection given
by people from all over the world,
the museum’s lower gallery has a
permanent display of the history of
Carisbrooke castle while the upper
gallery features the Civil War and King
58

Charles’s imprisonment.
Special temporary exhibitions are also
mounted each year like the present
one on ‘Acclaimed Islanders’ that will
run until 31 March 2011. Downstairs
the old Victorian kitchen is home to
dozens of cases of educational material
for Island schools with objects ranging
from the Bronze Age to artefacts
from World War 11. Thanks to a band
of willing volunteers, cataloguing
and photographic archiving is kept
up-to-date and there is a library of
useful reference books that researchers
are welcome to use.
It was Queen Victoria who asked
Princess Beatrice, her youngest
daughter, to set up a museum of Island
history for the benefit of the Isle of
Wight and in 1898 Beatrice founded

the museum as an independent
charitable trust in memory of her
husband, Prince Henry of Battenberg.
Beatrice took a personal interest in the
museum and shortly before her death in
1944 passed oversight of the museum
to a committee of Trustees. It is the
only museum in the country set up by a
member of the royal family as a public
museum.
But few visitors realise that though the
museum is based in Carisbrooke Castle,
it is not part of English Heritage and
while the museum receives financial
support from English Heritage and the
Isle of Wight Council, it is not allowed
to run a shop or charge admission to
help with the problem of rising costs.
Judi Griffin, one of the Island’s
deputy lieutenants, is Chairman of the

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