Museum blog

Publishing company Bamforth and Co. depicted the seaside in bright, often lewd postcards. Their cartoonish images became part of the quintessentially British experience, exploring the ridiculous side of the seaside and pushing humour to the limit of acceptability. The company made numerous court appearances during the 1950s - but how do we view these images today?

It will be five years this July that our team of Navy Board In-letters volunteers: Derek, Roger, Terry, David, John and Fred, have so far provided full page summaries to seventy-six of our volumes from the archive. This is over more than double what had been achieved only two years ago.

In July 1988, the National Maritime Museum purchased the papers of William Schaw Lindsay. Comprising an extensive collection of journals, diaries, newspaper cuttings and correspondence, it covers the period throughout his life and relates mostly to matters nautical. The Caird Library is grateful for this guest-authored piece, written by Lindsay’s great-great-grandson, William Stewart Lindsay, who is researching his illustrious forebear.

Funny inflatables. Sandcastles and ice lollies. We usually associate the seaside with a place of fun and childhood nostalgia. But beneath the bright exterior lies a grimy underside of gang fighting and industrial decay. From Banksy to Dracula, discover how pop culture has explored the darker regions of British seaside life.

Boteler was appointed Second Lieutenant of the Leven under Captain William Fitz-William Owen, and later First Lieutenant of the Barracouta. During a long surveying voyage between 1821 and 1826 to map parts of the coast of Africa which hadn’t been surveyed since the first wave of Portuguese explorers 300 years earlier, Boteler wrote a personal account of what he saw, and created many detailed and interesting drawings. This blog aims to show some of the highlights from this collection of drawings, which I had the pleasure of cataloguing last year alongside a manuscript copy of the account. 

In a world of bright deckchairs and beach huts, black and white photographs demand that we look at the seaside differently.

Grace Darling, born 1815, was one of the most celebrated figures of the nineteenth century. She lives on in the collections of RMG and in our broader national memory.