Museum wins County Heritage Award
The Flintham Museum was joint winner of the Inspiration Award at the Nottinghamshire Heritage Awards held at Thoresby Hall on 20 July 2010. What did we do to win the award? We worked with the Flintham Primary school basing a project about fire safety using one letter in the Collection. This is what happened.
Fred White, the village shopkeeper, wired many of the village houses for electricity in the 1930s. He had no training, relying instead on a book about domestic wiring and a series of 'tutorials' from his nephew who was an electrician in Wolverhampton. Fred would draw a diagram of his proposed wiring and switch placement which was then sent to his nephew for comments. Back came a letter with suggestions and advice about the amount of materials which Fred should buy. Fred installed the wiring and then wrote to his nephew with details of the work he'd done. The museum has the book about wiring, Fred's diagrams, lots of invoices for electrical equipment and his nephew's letters. One of these starts with an apology. "I'm sorry to hear about the fire", wrote the nephew, "I forgot to tell you to" and there follows a list of precautions which Fred should have taken.
Using this letter as the starting point, we put forward a proposal to the Nottinghamshire Fire and Rescue Service and received £200 to work with the school children on a project about smoke alarms. At an Assembly the children were told about electricity being introduced for the first time. They thought the idea of a shopkeeper doing the work rather odd and the letter about the unexpected fire very funny. Amid the laughter the serious side of fire was raised and one of the children demonstrated how to test a smoke alarm. Everyone was challenged to test their home smoke alarms once a week for a month, and they all received a diary to record when they carried out the tests. Smoke alarms were available for any family which did not have one. The regular testing exercise was a great success and we know that many grandparents were also involved and prompted by the youngsters to test their smoke alarms as well.
The Fire Service thought the project was worthy of a press release which attracted Radio Nottingham. The 20 minute Assembly was recorded and some of the children and museum volunteers were interviewed afterwards. Radio Nottingham then put together a four minute broadcast and so the message about smoke alarms and fire safety (plus free publicity for the museum) was spread across the County. And all this activity came from one letter which was written almost 80 years ago.
