Petworth Cottage Museum
The First Twenty Years
In 2016 we were able to stage an exhibition to celebrate twenty years of the museum. Extracted from the Petworth Society's scrapbooks of cuttings, the pictures and transcripts collected here occupied three sides of the exhibition hall. Five years on we cannot stage another physical exhibition but we can show these cuttings here. Unless otherwise stated the cuttings are all from the Midhurst & Petworth Observer. Click on the pictures to enlarge.
11 Cookson Spotlight on Museum - 21st March 2002
Petworth's Cottage Museum features prominently in a documentary film to be screened next Tuesday about the novelist Catherine Cookson. The Channel 4 programme at 9 pm is entitled The Real catherine Cookson and looks at her life. Yorkshire Television, which made the film, chose the Cottage Museum to illustrate the surroundings in which the writer spent her childhood. Ann Bradley, a museum trustee, said: “Our museum was chosen for her own recollections of the childhood home in which she grew up. It is not a museum in the normal sense of the word - it is a time warp.” the museum in the High Street has been created in a Leconfield Estate cottage to show the lifestyle of a lowly Petworth House employee, seamstress Mary Cummings, in the early 1900s. It is authentically furnished and equipped as it would have been in 1910, including gas lights, a stone sink and a coal-fired range. A model of Mrs. Cummings is in the spare bedroom, working at her treadle sewing machine. Outside the tiny garden has old-fashioned flowers and herbs. Business bosses at Petworth, many of whom do not live in the town and may be unaware of the museum have been invited to have a look around. Mrs. Bradley said the invitation had been issued to raise awareness of the project among the business community. The Cottage Museum is open to the public Wednesday-Sunday afternoons from April to September.
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