Towneley from A to Z
Towneley from A to Z
Mary Haworth Duerden gave a collection of ninety souvenir spoons to Towneley in 1940 and a further group were added after her death in 1950.These were not individually recorded until 2011, when it was found that since 1950 a further seven spoons had added to the box in which they were stored from an unknown source. It has not been possible to identify the seven interlopers with any certainty.
She had married James Edwin Duerden (1865-1937) in 1893 and they had lived in Ireland, Jamaica, the US and South Africa whilst Professor Duerden developed his career as a zoologist, before returning to England in the 1930s. Their only child, Edwin Noel, was born in Jamaica in 1896 and died in North Carolina in 1902. Many of the spoons can be directly related to their journeys around the world. Professor Duerden was a great supporter of the Association for the Advancement of Science and was President of the Southern Africa Association for the Advancement of Science in 1921. It is most likely that the South African souvenir spoons were collected at some of the annual meetings of this association between 1906 and 1931. One unique item in the collection is ssp6_77 , a spoon commemorating a shooting event contested by Mrs Duerden on 5th June, 1915. Other souvenir spoons that would hold special memories for her would be the one from the University of North Carolina ( ssp6_67 ) where her son is buried and the one of RMS Arundel Castle, the ship that took them back to England from South Africa ( ssp6_21 ).
When the spoons were scanned in June 2011, they were arbitrarily divided into two groups of 90 (ssp6) and 49 (ssp7). There appears to have been a start at labelling the spoons in the 1980s but only around 26 spoons were marked S/SP/6 followed by a single alphabetic character (some capitals and some in lower case). No attempt has been made to retain those labellings during the scanning sequence, rather groups of similar sizes and styles were scanned together and the numbers now applied in the catalogue indicate the scanning order.