The joy of a cluttered museum

On a clear day, from the balcony of Tullie House Museum & Art Gallery in Carlisle, you can see the McVitie’s factory. If the wind were in the right direction, I like to think you’d smell digestives on the breeze. Originally, it was the factory of Carr’s, bakers of table water biscuits since 1831. Carr’s held the Royal Warrant from 1841 until 2012, when it lost the crown due to ‘changing tastes’ in the royal household. I blame Duchy Originals Oaten Biscuits.

Inside the museum is a display of Carr’s covetable vintage biscuit tins and, on a satin hanger, the brown velvet waistcoat worn by Jonathan Dodgson Carr himself. The fabric is printed with ears of wheat and the tiny slogan ‘Free’. Carr, a supporter of the repeal of the Corn Laws, used to wear his waistcoat to public meetings. When the laws were repealed in 1846, he wore it to the celebratory tea put on for his Caldewgate factory workers.

Tullie House is full of treasures, arranged according to disorder, touching on this and that and the Cumbrian other. There are weaving combs and spindle whorls and programmes for historic Carlisle United matches. (Carlisle vs Everton, 1968, ‘a true clash of the blues’; Everton won 1-0.) There is a microscope tray with an assortment of spiders and a cabinet containing the skulls of a shrew, a mouse and a vole. So small! There are bone beads and horn toggles, microliths and arrowheads, glass bangles and a rosary. There is a whistle in the form of a cockerel and a brooch in the shape of a dog. There are odd, perforated objects like Neolithic Henry Moores. There is a fierce little bronze of a satyr and a Celtic pottery god.