 There's so many learned people in New Orleans, and particularly among them, Arthur the Rega, who was edited in the book on this museum in 1945, and who could build a much abler that connection from the same subject as I, but I will just give you a school voice account of it, and we'll start. It's supposedly uncovered that the only surviving cabinet of pureness is intact in its original cases, the 18th century cabinet of pureness in its original cases in the British Isles, and of course, one of the ones in continental Europe. Now, let's see, it was made for Newbridge House, my cabinet home in North County, Dublin, which was built by my ancestor, Archbishop Charles Cobb, he was Archbishop of Dublin. I went out recently that he had the same income from the Church of Ireland as the Earl of Leicester did from his rental estate, and indeed, the very first proposal that Gibbs made for the house that he wanted to build was about the size of Oklahoma, Newbridge. Luckily, he didn't build it, and Gibbs produced something rather small, like Charlie Miller, if you see that. Now, the interesting thing is the position of the museum, or the Ark, the two names this room was referred to in the family documents is in the mid-18th century, the Ark, and then later, in the 19th century, the museum, was never called a cabinet of curiosity. But as you see, it's one of the principle rooms that has not pushed aside, and if you think of company being entertained historically in the large drawing room picture gallery, which you see which is in the bit that the Archbishop's son added during the Archbishop's lifetime that it has, company being entertained there Now, to move in with the dinner in the afternoon, they would not have gone through the hall which would perhaps have footmen and servants carrying up dishes from the kitchens to the dining room which you see on the right. They would have gone through the sculpture, and then through the museum, then through the library, and then into the dining room, which was quite an impressive idea, I think, you had all these bits of culture as you approached your nearly. Things, I remember, since the age of four, when my mother brought us to live there with my uncle in 1949, and the museum was the room that rarely attracted me, partly because it was forbidden, partly because we were taken in by our nades, and partly because it's full of wonderful glinting things which looked like treasure, the horrendous things too. The age of four, I thought this was a witch, I think, and you mentioned the word witch, I thought it was that, and then this was hardly much better. It was poisonous rattlesnake in a snake charmed bath. The thing I hated most of all with how to see eagles already in this moment's talk is snarling seagull on the top of the case, which I was quite sure was going to come by and snip you. However, it's really sad to say that this room survived until 1959, not to be intact, but with lots of clutter added into it. There's not a single photograph of the camera cases before 1960 when my mother, when I was 14 at the time, my mother cleared it out and made a very nice sitting room. That is the oldest photograph of the museum at the British House. And so it went on. Well, of course, I was after the gossip when I came back from school one weekend, the town of the museum was gone, and I went into the room. Only a few days before, all the cases and the contents had been turfed into the basement of the house and up to the attic as well. And the rather wonderful sort of triage of Chinese landscape panels that decorated the walls, linked by cut-out bamboo trevices, all cut-out and pasted in a lighter print room, had been sold by my uncle to an endowment antique dealer, and my mother usually managed to stop my uncle from selling anything. She had her eye on the room, so this one she's had. So it all went to Chinese paper. But on the floor, I found scraps of the bamboo and chakram paper, so I decided at the age of 14, oh, yeah, well, that will come later. But I decided that somehow the room had to be in the school. And meanwhile, up in the attic where the cases came out in the settlement, more of them there, and the scraps of bamboo which I picked up off the floor and put in my desk. And it was only 40 years later when it became possible the house of people was sold. The family, in the form of me, had negotiated with Fingal County Council for a future for the family and the house. The Fingal County Council, the very double County Council, had bought the park and the house. And they actually asked me, would we keep everything in the house and continue to reside in it, as on the lines of British National Trust. It's the only instance of this ever-happened land. It came very late in the day of this proposal. It was a latex plan and everything was going to be removed. And six weeks before removal came this request because there was a misunderstanding on part of the council. They thought they would get the house in April. They were getting it in December. So they put this in the very last minute thing. And in six weeks I had three meetings a week with the council to work out an arrangement that had absolutely no possible either in the council or the country. And the council liars were telling their however, but we got there. And so the house was restored brilliantly in 12 weeks because it was the sort of budget that wouldn't have lasted for very much. In the middle of all this time of negotiating, I suddenly thought, in New Zealand, what happened to it? You know, I hadn't thought about it for almost 40 years. And luckily the house was still understated. So I rushed upstairs to the far nursery, the number rooms to see if everything was still there. The cases had been lotted by Christie's and Hamilton Dublin in one lot for 30 pounds. And those were withdrawn from the sale. Anything else they put in the sale was withdrawn. And in 1986 the house opened, restored. The museum restored. And my brother and I, my brother-in-law and I, my brother-in-law was working with me, training with me at the time to be a painter. We painted evocations of the Chinese panels derived from the Chinese wallpaper at Urban. And at this particular time it was a sort of great satisfaction to me that Martin Drury, before the restoration, came and advised the mayor to look at the house before the restoration came. He said, the council should get the people from earlier and see, or we should take them to Urban to see what they had done there. Which I would have liked if I had known up. But of course, with this budget problem, things just had to happen. And for instance, we had quarter of an hour to choose all the colours. It was fantastic. There were a hundred men working on the house. And it was heroic, actually, on the part of the council. And I invited Martin back when all was done to see what he thought. And he said, I really think I should get the people from Urban. So there we are. Now sadly, or controversially, or half not controversially, after about four years of quite intense public opening, the house shutters were having been in my childhood. The shutters were closed all the time, permanently. Now they're open every day from 9 o'clock in the morning. And then school children started breaking the amazing, wobbly, 18th century glass, and very wobbly, 18th century glass, in the cases. I had also Oliver Impey of the Ashland Only Museum, came to stay. And he told me he would need 40 experts to catanult this museum, because I wanted to catanult it. There's something like one and a half thousand objects in it. And so I then made a difficult decision, but one that I knew I had to make, but if I didn't have it with me in England, the catanult would never get done. So I decided we would replicate the cases on show for the public, and put a replica junk in them, and move the home museum over to our then living in Hatchlands, and it was a convenient room which we could put them in. It's a clearly room which didn't have to be open, it could be kept shut as per fear. And so the museum was installed in that room, and the replica museum sits in Newbridge today with various things that I bought over the preceding years to affect that, and there are two views of the room as it stands today around. Meanwhile, the museum had hundreds of hours across the park to the Hatchlands. And this was a house not familiar to that many people, but belongs to the National Trust. It was left to the National Trust with not a lot of interest. And it had a rather wonderful name room called the Saveris Names, which was deemed at the time to be rather dull because of the lack of things on display. And I was approached and said could I cheer it up and move our collections into it, which we did. I was very keen at that time, I was mad about all the picture homes in the Palazzo in Rome, and I was very interested in hanging pictures having been built up in a house brimming with them. And so we managed to turn that into this, which now hangs with three or four tishons in it and lots of other nice things for the eye. Now there's one room in Hatchlands which is as done as the last, which is called the Museum. And it had lots of photo copies of made in documents to do with Admiral Bosco. And so it was the Bosco Museum, this room, this room. And it had absolutely not a single artifact, apart from, I think, a pulley or a clock or something like that. And this was deemed not necessary to any of the public. And so I thought here was the possibility to install the original Museum in that. And there it is, two views of it. I hung it with Chinese, and I purchased an 18th century, made 18th century Chinese wallpaper as in the Moorland of the original Chinese decorations. The case is fit into it very well. It has more or less the same format as the original one. So that's the history of the Museum up to the present day. The next very significant thing that took place for this Museum. Oh, there's another case, as you see. There's everything in this Museum, there's natural history, there's Chinese fives, there's shoes, and bundles of shoes. In fact, I've noted, sometimes I might do a little publication of how the contents of the Museum's hardly changes from the 16th century to the 18th, or even the 19th. They're interesting, the same things you see here. It might see a Chinese compass up there somewhere. But anyway, the next significant thing for the Museum that took place happened in Bedford Square in the offices of the Paul Mellon Centre. And there you'll see a meeting with three people. Now it was at least two. Arthur, Brian, sharing this meeting. And when it was decided that a book would be published by the Museum. And this was the first convening of all the potential, some of the potential authors. It was achieved actually with 22 stars, rather than the original 40. Oliver, in here, predicted. And the book was sort of brought together. And the book was published in September. I had a book launch in Dublin. And there it is. And it's literally illustrated, as you can see from that slide there. So there's a history of the Museum. I could stop now if you wanted me to, but I've now got more about family history and objects in it. In which case, we're going to just remind you of what it looks like. If you look in the far right corner, the right of the family, you see a little more holding the chess. That is, that debate about whether it's Irish or English, the guy seems to be falling on the English side now. It's sort of 1740s. So happens that Charles Cobb, who hadn't been prime Archbishop of Dublin, he spent a year in London. He put a couple around, if you were a credit in those days. Mostly, I think, worried about his next advancement in the church, which would be, to be the primacy of Armagh. It went against him in the end. But he did spend 43 and 44 a lot of time in London. His favourite child, the stepson actually, had married Sir John Clussett in his quarter and David in London went to stay with him several times and he met John Clussett and probably met James Gibbs at that time. So there is his collective habit and in it, over here is just something from his accounts. The museum has very little footprint in the archive. The archive is reasonably well preserved, but there's very little footprint from the museum. But you see here that he's inherited from his sister a large goat stone in her purse and a small ivory egg. So he obviously possessed some pure recipes. But what we do know, and he commissioned a set, a quarter set of Galdasian muddles of the Monarchs of England with the famously wonderful set of these in the British Museum of Chagallusie and Gildas. He also collected relics of Swift. He was Swift, the decomposed dean of the Christ Church when he was Swift, his dean of St. Patrick's. Two cathedrals, 500 yards apart. I've never quite understood. He has two ancient cathedrals, 500 yards apart and two demons, 500 yards apart. Whether they go home or knew each other, they must have ended this committee together. But he collected copies of Swift's poems which correlate with nearer texts of those poems. So he has several copies from either Swift himself or Swift's secretary, which the university had relations. He also purchased things, knives, et cetera, at the sale of Dean Swift's effects in 1746. And these silver knives that survived in the museum rather than in the kitchen are presumed to be those knives that he purchased with Swift's. There are other relics that he had as well. And we now come to his son. Now, his son got married in 1755 in the middle of Perisburg and he gave him a rich, lots of power to his son on his wedding. States, most, a little bit. So the son got, I think, 30,000 acres, a house, an allowance of 1,200 a year and 18,000 pounds a month. He had plenty of cash. And you see that in the 1950s he and his wife were busy buying shelves, catabash, and corals. There's a coral there, I think. There is a coral, which was probably purchased in the 70s and 50s. Here we have in the 70s and 60s endless payments to David Sible, who was probably the house carpenter or the trainer. Only one of them is specified is for the son of Michael Manter of Criteria, David Sible, for E. Arc. And we cannot, after a while, cannot think that this refers to anything but the museum. It's the right date. It's the right man to have made the cabinets, which there is, there's David Sible for E. Arc. And the cabinets themselves give little clues that I think are part of the design, except one of them has a stout stack on the top. And Stevens was a merchant listed in the Dublin inventory, so Sible may have bought some within Dublin at that time. Another interesting thing about the cabinets is the stands for the boxes of specimens. Each pot has a stack. No, I mean a slot. A slot. Behind it. And again, there are four, except we think they might have been putting bats in, and the bats would tell you what was in the pot. I'm supposed to only have 15 seconds for each slide. So here are shouts brought by Thomas and Eddie. That's it. And here's one, nothing else today. Lay the done wrong. No, Clown Brassel is supposed to have a mandatory done talk, which they presumably visited and were presented with one of them, a new leg egg. It clearly got broken at some stage in its history. In 1803, it was mounted in this rather handsome mind by the William Kitzels, a make up of Prince of Russia. And Thomas Cobb's daughter being at the court, maybe waiting to the Princess of Wales at that time. Maybe the wood bed-chain, as it were, probably bought that about, and they saved the egg at the court. That's this. Stag forms, yes. Now, we have some neighbours called Barnwell, who lived in a house called Turvey. Turvey and Mewbridge were like that. And Thomas bought quite a lot of the Turvey down from the Barnwells who were in deep trouble by the 1760s. They were a cruising family, and they had let the Turvey family for a long outside his lifetime in the fourth bike hunt. And he was declared a bankrupt at that time. But we find Thomas Cobb paying his gardener's wages and paying his crook's wages. And just about this time, he buys stag forms for half a kilo, quite a lot of money. And as it was a dear part, but cannot be dear, all around the house of England, they are obviously not just all the answers. And so we imagine them to be these massive, fossilised Germans as the 19-foot scum. And what's particularly nice about these is if they are the Turvey ones, which we believe them to be, they were dug up. We have a record. They were dug up in 1689. And they're referred to in a paper read to the Royal Society by Henry Mote in 1697. In the same paper he makes this delighting remark that the Duke of Ormond presented a set that would be presented to him to Charles II. And Charles II ordered them to be hung in the Hall Gallery that had to be caught whereupon all the other specimens lost something. Thomas Cobb also was clearly interested in the cook voyages. The only book purchase in all his accounts which mentions the title is this entry here. Cook voyages, three volumes, five hours making change. This is the 1784, this is February 1785, the 1784 edition of Cook's third voyage. We've discovered this extremely interesting thing that James Cook's surgeon on his second voyage called James Patton who retired and married one of Thomas Cobb's 10 daughters and whose brother was the family doctor over the period of 23 years. So we believe that accounts for various south seats for us is like this I think it's called a tour rule, head rest. And Tapa inscribed for Mrs. Cobb which is his daughter-in-law and so we have this very nice cook connection and a cook voyage connection which is there. And one of the things that was most enjoyable for the book was this Aliva specimen which puzzled the Comacologist because it would be a unique species if there was no other like it. So unique is it. There was Kathy Wade Comacologist who was suspected that there was man intervention. And Arthur's written up and no, she has written this up very beautifully in the book and the some very good historian of shells that are always occur in old collections and they come from the new heraldies where they had invented a method of putting spots on the shells by beating up a nail obviously post-European visiting. A very hot nail does it. So the ethnographers have all said this is nonsense, we've never heard of this at all. So an experiment was done in the natural history museum with an electron microscope to see whether the spots had any interference showing what it did there was a layer missing. So the white spot areas had a missing layer and the natural white inside the shell had to develop a missing of the spots and then they actually did an experiment with a red hot nail and produced beautiful spots on the line which I would have probably had taken too many slides. So given that this specific material from a later expedition from the Challenger of the 1870s this case clearly predates this tray, clearly predates that and so it's probably again another little cook voyage specimen and there is cooks arriving on the new heraldies. Of course they're all wearing shells I think our shell is somewhere here. Combs comp also connects with wax wraithers and although there's been a tendency to put everything to the 19th century wherever possible because it's easier that way he clearly spent quite a large sum of money in wax wraithers in 1791 and these were just slightly different to the other specimens which he was going to see I think might be his and ah we now come to a friend with Thomas Koch who had the distinction of being Commander-in-Chief of the Ben Gauley Army Colonel Champion in the Navy of Fair Fortune and he was a godfather a great friend of Thomas godfather of Thomas's grandson and when he died his wife Francis adopted a daughter of another friend of his who then married another grandson of God a terrific involvement between the champions and the Kochs and quite a lot of wealth was distributed to the Kochs from the Champions and from then came these wonderful Notre-Dame Bath School in the 18th century miniature paintings and probably this lovely puzzle beam which I looked inside and I counted a few concentric spirits Thomas Koch's nephew Francis Hastings also we think contributed to the New Game because he was in the American World independence and this case of staff birds are all North Catholic and North Carolina and the mountain could be from the late 18th century and his his interest in birds is documented by Gould, mainly a pheasant species he later became a governor General of India at that time very aptly treated and Gould, deadly named a pheasant species after him so we now come to Thomas Koch's grandson his son prejudiced him leading 10,000 powers of debts which contributed very much to the New Game so the son the foster daughter of Francis and Kermit Chamkin, Charles the process and his three brothers all collectors all former collectors Reverend Henry within Bachelor maintained a room in his cousin's house in Paris to go around Kermit comes to Alexander and Catherine will impart who served in the Navy under William Ferris wheel they contributed a huge amount to the next phase of his own and Charles continues with his grandfather or his own connecting wax reference I don't know if you're familiar with these things they're produced so you could stick them on the back and on the leg of the letter instead of having to go through the messy business of putting a seal on and they're very beautiful you can't really see in this but they're incredible detail and Diana Scarfield has identified every single subject in every single one and he obviously was buying them in one they also organized the display of items in the museum in trays and you see the trays some of the trays were made out of out of dead packs of cards that's called the over-frizzled ace and it was in it was in use for a certain specific period of time between 1812 when the duty changed and there's an arm duty from the same number Thomas Kresig there was an agrahams oak acorn placed in the tray with a jack on the back and some bits of Egyptian things indeed rather beautiful embossed trays there's another one it's a quartz glass and it gladly has the name Dots London and some even written an article about embossed paper which mentions the detail of the history of Dots and so we know from the form of the name exactly what it was on this tray there was at least a piece of copper in another form I decorated tray pink pink-pink edges around it and I couldn't find the one I wanted which is a photograph of the tray with several eggs all finding the same yes I come to Thomas Alexander the drama who I mentioned is the god son of Colonel Chuck and he went to India in 1809 he married an Indian beaver much to the dysfunctional of his brothers but it was a very happy marriage he had 10 children all those 10 children were better ruled out than any other members of the cotton family and found good husbands whereas the only daughter of one of the other cousins found their husband there we are and he decided to come back to India after a good career in India which was considerably held by his cousin becoming vice president and he came home and his brother got a letter to say he was arriving at San Francisco and had such and such a date well of course it took six months for the letter to get there and he realised he was going to be arriving in a week's time so he quickly he had 10 children at school in Paris in various establishments in England so he hired a house which happened to be the house that the champions had lived in and gathered the whole family there and then went to meet the boat to find that sadly his brother had died of a fit while playing chess on the board of the boat and he found a complex freedom and one of the sons of the not the Roger but something else whatever who wasn't clear why he'd be brought back to England because and then the boat was completely packed up with Indian artifacts and specimens and bird skins and angry furniture and this catalog it's a two day sale I think yes an over 40 we've finally made it 80 it's a whole lot from a sale sadly but rather didn't see fit to extend the museum and some of the items these must deserve the sale and they're still in the museum some of them obviously have before the sale the place that they deserve the sort of presale for Christmas and there's one of the items that went into the sale and again a rather nice unbasket hookah with its snake and we also have in the museum a well thing which I learned from the Cloudy Zones where they have the hookah nut that goes with it hookah's never been less than half a nut it's not the idea it's not a barge and a series of gobs and deities that are commissioned to be made which he'd acquired to his niece and there's one of his younger children painted by an artist not an evidence in the museum W. Hutchison we have clothes very similar I don't think they're quite the same very similar clothes survived in the museum another brother never son of Charles another child a child of William there's a friend who's a William Gravit who worked with Brunel on the Bristol Exeter Railway and in the course of works in that he sent things home for the museum a lump of lyres mountain lyres in the tunnel that they were digging some constant high diamond coins that they found during the digging and the best thing of all in the picture but in one of his letters he describes being pulled on a pulley in a basket over a rope stretched over the proposed sighting of the Great Bridge over the 7 the Brunel's design and the rope was one and a half inches in diameter 800 feet in diameter we've had a rather trippy experience a late adult profession is William's elder brother Thomas looks a bit grisly this is my this is my great-grandfather another great-grandfather and he made a rather unexpected addition to the museum he traveled in Germany during the 1830s and one letter it's quite tiny actually and that's four five and that's four and five and my brother was six and seven we found in a shelf in a sort of unused room we found a lot of music room which we found very attractive in which we dug from the cupboard water pits I've still got it I've become the music librarian of the British music library I know I've found a sort of musical connection of passion and I had it in my mind to produce a postcard of a music manuscript of Dekor and Dekor as it comes but when I actually came across I'd linked the searchings and letters in England I then crossed this letter from this man traveling in Germany I think I'm going to be able to buy some Beethoven manuscripts in 1830s for five years after Beethoven's death oh my god I'm going to rush it back to Ireland and route it around to find that we've only decorated 18th century Hintrols but Thomas made a rather interesting thing in the museum this that wax relief is sort of doesn't look that competent if you don't know what it is but of course it's a wax model for a lipophane I'm sure everybody knows what a lipophane is and if you hold it up to the light of course all becomes clear it's a rather amazing thing and and this is actually produced as part of the production of maybe a false limit of it God knows how I'm going to get over it because it's something only the factory would have so maybe he went to the factory his sister was the redoubtable Francis Parkour of women's right, women's liberations and to the deception and to the disgust and to speak in favor of university education to advocate university education for women in the 1860s and has been extensively looked at and she made one or two small contributions to the museum like one with a modified air of a ball with a lovely label air of matters bought in Cairo from Louisa I don't know if you know this please my own addition to the museum I thought it was a good idea to make one or two is that a lot of men start staring better than spectacles