Towneley from A to Z
Towneley from A to Z
This is a diverse collection of over 500 items with costume and costume accessories being the largest part. The most important part of the collection is the Whalley Abbey Vestments.
There is a good selection of women's clothing from the 19th and early 20th centuries. There are 12 dresses dated between 1850 and 1910 including 4 wedding dresses. Costume jewellery and general accessories such as clips, buttons, hat pins, bags, purses, fans, parasols and umbrellas are also included.
There are much fewer items of men's clothing but they include a frock coat c. 1900 in excellent condition. Most of the men's clothing was used at work and one such item is a fire brigade tunic c.1930. The total of 26 items includes fire helmets and police helmets. There is a much larger collection of military wear, mostly part of the East Lancashire Regiment Collection.The 80+ entries includes helmets/caps, jackets, tunics, trousers and greatcoats. Amongst the earliest items is a coatee once worn by an officer of the 30th regiment of foot.
There are children's clothing such as christening robes and baby dresses. There are also dolls clothes to go with a small collection of dolls.
Apart from costume, there are such things as table cloths, patchwork quilts, embroidered pictures. There are a small number of flags and banners including a suffragist's banner c. 1911 (1973.T285).
Beginning in 1973, the textile collection was accessioned in a different manner to the other parts of the permanent collection. Firstly, the object numbers began with the year accessioned followed by the letter T followed by a number in sequence for that year. Secondly, rather than cataloguing using index cards, the object information was written into notebooks. Some of the objects were originally part of other collections, for example 1973.T157 was a table cloth from Kashmir, given by W. T. Taylor in 1908.
The textile collection notebooks record entries from 1973 to 1986 but only entries for 1973 to 1978 were added to the accession_register. As of 2016 nothing has been added to the Modes database.