Prince Charles visits Scarborough

Announcement

PRINCE Charles is to visit Scarborough in 10 days time when he will be shown around the newly-restored Rotunda Museum and he will then tour St Catherine's Hospice.

The heir to the throne has been invited to lay a stone to mark completion of the Rotunda and he is then expected to travel to the hospice which moved to a new site in Throxenby Lane three years ago.

The museum will be known as the Rotunda, the William Smith Museum of Geology when it re-opens on 2008 after displays and exhibitions have been installed. Around £4.4 million is being spent on the grade two listed building which has been described as an "architectural jewel." Lord Derwent, chairman of the trustees of Scarborough Museums Trust, said: "We are delighted that the Prince of Wales will have the opportunity of visiting this unique building on September 14 as its restoration nears completion.

"It will be the fifth time the hospice has been visited by royalty since it first opened in Scalby Road in 1985." Lee Clarke, chief executive at the hospice, said: "We have been told Prince Charles is coming here, but we are awaiting final details. It is a great honour to get another royal visit." Princess Margaret opened the original hospice and in 1991 the Duchess of York opened an education wing at the hospice. The Duchess of Kent once made an impromptu stop at the
hospice while on the way to an event at Scarborough Hospital. The Duke of Kent opened the new hospice while Geoff Bishop, a previous chief executive of the hospice met Princess Di in London in 1992.

Over the past 100 years there have been numerous royal visits to Scarborough including a previous excursion to the area by Prince Charles in May 31, 1978. The Queen visited Scarborough on July 2, 1975. It was the first time a reigning monarch had visited the town since Richard III in 1484. The Duke of Gloucester will be in Filey tomorrow to see for himself some of the after-effects of the recent floods which caused devastation in the town. Scarborough will be playing host to a second Royal visitor two days after the visit of Prince Charles. The QE2 will be passing on Sunday September 16, passing Flamborough Head (11.15am), Filey (11.30am), Scarborough South Bay (noon) and Whitby (1pm.)

Amendment

The Prince of Wales has cancelled visits to two farms because of the latest foot-and-mouth outbreak.

Charles was due to visit two farms in North Yorkshire on Friday afternoon as part of a series of public engagements.

The Prince offered his sympathy to farmers around the country. A spokesman from Clarence House said: "The Prince of Wales is so sorry that the new outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease means that he is unable to visit Grange Farm and Hill Top Farm in the North Yorkshire Moors. "His heart goes out to farmers everywhere and he hopes and prays that this desperate situation will soon end. "The Prince, who is patron of the Mutton Renaissance Campaign, was due to officially launch the new mutton season at Grange Farm in Levisham, near Pickering. After a tour of the farm, Charles was to mark the launch by tasting a dish of mutton stew, freshly prepared by chef Brian Turner. He was then scheduled to meet farmers and business leaders at Hill Top Farm in Spaunton. Earlier visits will not be affected by the change to the Prince's programme. He will arrive by Royal Train at Scarborough station before visiting the newly refurbished Georgian Rotunda Museum on Scarborough's seafront. Charles will then continue to meet staff, patients and volunteers at St Catherine's Hospice, which provides care for adults with advanced, progressive diseases.

Travel

The Prince of Wales is becoming the first member of the Royal Family to use their newly converted eco-friendly train.

Charles will arrive in Scarborough on the Royal Train in its inaugural journey since its conversion to run on bio-diesel fuel.

Speaking about the Royal Train's conversion to bio-diesel in order to reduce emissions from its journeys, a Clarence House spokesman said: "Both Clarence House and Buckingham Palace were very supportive of this move as it's another way they can help do their bit."

The birth of Scarborough as a geological centre

By chance, at the very moment when the philosophical societies were forming, the recently bankrupt surveyor William Smith was working in Yorkshire . In the late eighteenth-century, Smith had solved one of the greatest puzzles of the age: how to recognise the sequence of rocks and correlate them across country. Members of the Geological Society in London (formed 1807) sought to also answer this question but as gentlemen they distrusted the knowledge of practical men, and were more inclined to take Smith’s ideas without crediting him. In 1815 Smith published the first geological map of England and Wales , but by then his table of strata and techniques were being well publicised by various means. At the heart of Smith’s technique was the recognition that (sedimentary) rocks had a ‘natural order’ and that fossils could be used to position a rock within that order. This made possible the correlation of rocks across country. Smith came to Scarborough for the health of his mentally ill wife in 1820 and at that time had been engaged in discussions with townsfolk regarding the possible founding of a museum. A little later he, and his ward and nephew, John Phillips, were patronised by the philosophers in York and first Smith, and then the two of them, were encouraged to give lectures on the now highly fashionable subject of geology. This they did, Smith as iconic discoverer though no great speaker, and the young Phillips who became one of the most eloquent lecturers of his day. The effect on Yorkshire was utterly remarkable. They spoke to packed houses and converted audiences to the new fossil-centred science of geology. In November 1824, at Scarborough Town Hall , many underwent a biblical conversion to the new science and became fossil collectors overnight. The birth of Scarborough ’s role in geology can best be dated to this year and month. Scarborough Castle Hill was thought to be the key to achieving a cross-country correlation of rocks, from Oxfordshire and Somerset , where Smith had made his discoveries, to Yorkshire , where the rocks looked very different but contained the same fossils. The Oxford professor William Buckland believed Scarborough to be the key, as did his mentor William Conybeare (now in Bristol); two of the leading lights in the science at this time, and friends of the young president (William Vernon) of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society. In November 1824, Phillips remarked: “‘The Castle Hill may rival any hill or mountain upon earth in the extraordinary Section of Strata which it presents round its precipitous sides”; 6 months later, the two men were still in awe of its possibilities: “Scarborough Castle Hill is surely the finest spot for a geologist that the whole earth contains”. These were the words of two of the most experienced field geologists then alive, though admittedly at that time neither of them had travelled abroad. However, it should be noted that Britain had (and has) a particularly rich and varied geology, possibly unparalleled in any similarly sized area of land. It also had a coastline which exposed that geology.

The significance of Scarborough Museum (the Rotunda)

Relatively few of the original museum buildings from this period survive. Those in Leeds , Bristol and Hull were bombed; those in Manchester and Whitby were later replaced. The Yorkshire Museum remains in its original building, its spatial arrangement reflecting the social practices associated with these institutions. Architecturally, it is a museum typical of those built in this period and afterwards. Building began in 1827, with the unfinished museum opening in 1829. It is, historically, a very important museum and one that has an extraordinarily close relationship to the new museum in Scarborough . While York was a rival to the museums in Hull and Whitby , its relationship to Scarborough was almost entirely symbiotic. However, in comparison to all the museums then erected, the Scarborough Museum is architecturally the most important. Its circular design encapsulates this moment of museological and geological invention better than any other building in the world. When Smith stayed in Scarborough in 1820 for his wife’s health he was involved in discussions to found a museum. Smith was very much a museum man, always preferring to discuss his ideas with specimen in hand, and his fossils ordered on shelves which mirrored the strata. So when the citizens of Scarborough came to discuss the same topic a few years later, they asked Smith’s opinion. Smith suggested that a circular space would best suit the arrangement of fossils ordered according to the strata. And thus diminutive, and yet remarkable, Scarborough Museum was constructed, 32ft in diameter and 52ft high, a perfect and unique architectural encapsulation of a museological idea. Built of local Hackness Stone given by Sir John Johnstone who was soon to be Smith’s patron, it is also the only building that commemorates Smith’s invention of fossil ordered stratigraphy – a technique that is now used to order the world’s rocks. As Phillips noted in a letter from Scarborough in 1825: “When I think on the amazing progress of Geology and all its collateral Sciences, within the last 20 or 30 years and see in our magazines notices of new discoveries in every quarter of the globe which concur in confirming and extending the laws of structure which obtain in this kingdom, I feel assured that we are rapidly hastening to a period when the Geologists of all countries will cordially unite in developing the history of the earth. I have lately seen specimens from America and from Greenland which very much embolden my views of uniformity in the structure of very distant regions.” That structure and the way to understand it, was Smith’s and Scarborough Museum is a direct link into that world. It was the young John Phillips who published the first important geology of Yorkshire in 1829, which also served to prove the wisdom of Smith’s ideas. It also published Phillip’s famous geological section of the coast which he had begun in Scarborough in 1824, and which he used in his various lectures. This section was painted around the upper gallery of the rotunda. It now lies under a 1906 repainting, but the painting beneath (of 1829), which may have been supervised by Phillips, is painted in reverse and as such is something of a mystery which may point to the original layout of the fossils in the museum. Of the layout in 1829: “The fossils, which are very numerous are arranged on sloping shelves, in the order of their strata, showing at one view, the whole series of the kingdom. A horizontal shelf below sustains the generic arrangement of fossil shells … the collection of fossils … is one of the most perfect in England .” This was prior to the installation of the existing cases in the following decade, and being prior to the completion of the Yorkshire Museum , the statement was probably reasonably true. For many, the Scarborough Museum became the architectural paradigm for the construction of a geological museum, so much so that the Yorkshire Geological and Polytechnic Society considered the erection of an identical building in Wakefield . The national Museum of Practical Geology opened in 1851 also reflected many of Smith’s principles, flagging up his key stratigraphic fossils and curving the back wall in a manner echoing the pioneering Rotunda. At the first meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1831 in York (another invention of York ’s Vernon ), Smith was dubbed ‘The Father of English Geology’.
The Rotunda, then, is:
A unique physical representation of that knowledge which permitted deep time to be explored. As a structuring theory in science which permitted major scientific advance, Smith’s ideas stand in geology akin to those of Darwin in biology; indeed, Smith’s invention of a means to assemble a history of the past permitted Darwin to consider a history of evolution.
It embodies a relationship between the formation of museums and the founding of geology which has been lost from the history books.
It represents the immortalisation of an individual who, to use modern jargon, was socially excluded, but who, in the end and within his lifetime, gained the recognition he deserved.
It represents a moment when museums became part of English culture, when museums were places of news, of considerable importance to civic social adjustment and contributed to the birth of a new science.
It represents a moment when a town looked to its external environment and began to understand it and collect from it. In the process major deposits of fossil plants were discovered and the Yorkshire coast around Scarborough became, and remains, one of the most important locations in the world for understanding the botany of the Jurassic. Smith was very much a philosopher – an individual engaged in investigating the natural world for the sake of knowledge alone. In Scarborough he was in excellent company.


Spa-rkling reception for Prince

PRINCE Charles was greeted at Spa Bridge by a cheering crowd of hundreds of people after arriving to the town by train.

He was driven in a navy blue Jaguar to a point outside the Grand Hotel where children from Hackness, East Ayton, Overdale, Lindhead and Northstead schools waved Union Jack flags.

The Prince stopped at the spa bridge as part of his visit to Scarborough which included a tour around the Rotunda Museum and St Catherine's Hospice.

Scarborough Spa Orchestra played as he was presented to a civic line up by Lord Lieutenant, Lord Crathorne, outside the Grand Hotel. The heir to the throne wore a pale grey double breasted suit, a pale blue shirt, a red, white and blue tie and dark brown shoes. He was greeted by High Sheriff of North Yorkshire, Philip Ingham and wife, Jane, Chairman of North Yorkshire County Council, Michael Knaggs and wife Cecily, Chief Constable of North Yorkshire Police, Grahame Maxwell, Mayor of Scarborough, Janet Jefferson and consort, Geoff Jefferson, MP Robert Goodwill and wife, Ann, Deputy Leader of the council, Cllr Jane Mortimer, Chief Executive of the council, Jim Dillon and Chairman of Scarborough Museums Trust, Lord Derwent. Afterwards he greeted some of the crowd and spoke to a group of school children. East Ayton school pupil, Ben Whaling, 9, said: "He asked me if I had been getting a lot of homework, and asked me if I had been working hard at school. He also asked if I had gone away during the school holidays." Also from East Ayton school, Max Finnegan, 9, said: "He asked me if I had had a good holiday too. I do like Prince Charles and I have seen him on TV once before." Chloe Scott, 9, of Shelton Avenue said: "He asked if I had stayed at home during the holidays or gone away. He was really nice because he always speaks to people." The Prince spoke to Barry Howgate of Cliff Bridge Terrace and admired his labrador, Bell of the Dale, who was stood with him outside their house. Mr Howgate said the Prince asked him how old his dog was. He said: "He likes labradors does Charles, and it was great to speak to him." Valerie Watson, 66, was visiting from Hull. She said: "He asked me if I was a local, and then asked where I was from. He said it was a nice to place to come and visit and I agreed. It was great to meet him and I think it is important to keep the tradition." Prince Charles was led across to the centre of Spa Bridge to take a look at how the Rotunda Museum was taking shape from the outside. He was greeted by a group of Scarborough council officials and members of the town team including regeneration portfolio holder, Cllr Derek Bastiman and urban renaissance manager, Nick Taylor. He then walked back across the bridge and spoke to more onlookers, before being led down to the Rotunda Museum.

The Prince's spokesperson, Patrick Harrison, said: "He was very keen to see the refurbishment of the Rotunda Museum. He is a big supporter of renovating old buildings and was keen to see its progress near to completion. "He was also supposed to visit a couple of farms which unfortunately he is now unable to attend because of foot and mouth. He was there to launch the new mutton season which has been set up to encourage more restaurants to use mutton instead of lamb. "He hopes he will be able to visit these two farms in the future. He is also very keen to visit St Catherine's hospice and meet the staff, patients and families. He very much admires what they do there."