Last Saturday an audience of 50 adults and older children were treated to the first performance of Geoff Hales’ one-man show ‘The Voyage of Charles Darwin’. The show was part of the Rockwatch activity day at the Sedgwick Museum and the script was written with experts from the Museum.
Dr Francis Neary ‘Darwin the Geologist’ Project Manager said, ‘In a setting like the Sedgwick Museum, we wanted the piece to go beyond the well-known episodes from Darwin’s early life and the Beagle Voyage. So we advised Geoff on how he could include Darwin’s early passion for geology in the story.’
The show is set in 1858 as Darwin receives a surprise letter from Alfred Rusell Wallace from Malaysia. The letter outlines a remarkably similar idea to the theory of natural selection that Darwin has been developing for 20 years. At this crunch time in Darwin’s career, Darwin looks back at his formative influences in Shrewsbury, Edinburgh, Cambridge and some of the wonderful locations that he visited on the Beagle.
This pilot performance was well recieved, ‘Darwin became more real, more of a person with his own hopes and fears’ said one delighted visitor. Geoff now plans to develop a new show that will feature Charles Darwin and his wife, Emma.
Darwin’s reconstructed rooms at Christs College opened today amid worldwide celebrations of Darwin’s 200th birthday. While the Sedgwick’s Darwin exhibition has a few more months to go before it opens in July, today the Museum put one of Darwin’s stranger geological objects on display in Christs.
The object in question was collected by young Charles Darwin in Madingley during his student days at Cambridge. It’s true identity is a bit of a mystery but it has been described as a calcified birds nest.
Apparently the student Darwin found a stream where bits of foliage dipped in the water had become covered with a crust of lime scale, ever the experimenter, he tried making his own encrustations by dipping various objects and leaving them in the stream.
It is not entirely clear how the crusty nest came to be in the Sedgwick Museum’s collections but you can see it at the reconstructed rooms of the young scientist all this year at Christs College.
This month, the cabinets of the exhibition area are being restored by master furnature conservator, Anthony Beech.
Anthony is working on the locks, the frames and the casing of the hundred-year-old mahogany cabinets to take them back to a better-than-new condition.
Anthony wrote to us with his impressions of working in the Museum: “One of the great pleasures of my work is the unusual places I have the opportunity to work in. The Sedgwick museum is no exception; in fact it has become one of my favourites, where else would you while checking the operation of a drawer find the head and foot of a Dodo?
The other great pleasure is the pure quality of the cabinet making. Most visitors will be surprised and delighted by the ammonites and dinosaur skeletons but the cases in which many of the objects are housed are of great interest in themselves. One can appreciate the evolution from the Woodwardian walnut cabinets of the 17th century to the later 19th century oak and mahogany examples with great glazed doors and complex locking mechanisms.
My favourite thing about working behind the barrier in the museum is the moment when the smallest of visitors comes through the door and says in a voice full of awe “DINOSAUR!” followed by a remarkably convincing roar.
I very much look forward to returning to see the installed exhibition and finding more inspiration amongst the objects.”
