Item List (150)

In September 1920, the Royal Museum of Scotland welcomed the loan of a new addition to its collection of ship models: a model of the famous Mayflower. The Mayflower model was designed by Mr Morton Nance of Carbis Bay, Cornwall and constructed by Mr…

Chatham, on the Medway in North Kent, was one of several towns and cities to undertake performances of the Mayflower Pageant written by the Rev. Hugh Parry (which you can learn more about here). Like many early twentieth-century pageants, Parry’s…

Several passengers on the Mayflower came from Billericay in Essex – including Christopher Martin, who was originally the governor of the leaky Speedwell. There had been religious dissenters in the town since the early 17th century; after the…

Thursday 16th September 1920 was the date accepted as marking exactly three hundred years since the sailing of the Mayflower from Plymouth. Thus that date was chosen as the first day of the Mayflower Tercentenary celebrations in London. Earlier in…

The Liberty department store on Great Marlborough Street, today Grade II* listed, opened in 1924. After the First World War there was often a desire, despite a growing enthusiasm for Modernism in some quarters, to return to the stability of…

Congregationalism was a growing nonconformist denomination in the Victorian period, and one that increasingly liked to trace itself directly back to the Pilgrim Fathers (see, for example, the Pilgrim Father's Memorial Church built in the 1860s). In…

The Fairhaven Congregational Church was opened in 1912, perhaps the peak period for Congregationalism in Britain. Known locally as ‘the White Church’ for good reason, its tall tower and three domes are built in a striking Byzantine style. But, as the…

The Plymouth Guildhall, today Grade II listed, was built in 1874 in a Gothic revival style. Part of the new building was a series of fourteen windows that told the local history of Plymouth in connection with the national story of Britain. These…

This plaque, put up in 1996 the year after the 375th anniversary of the voyage, commemorates the sad story of four young passengers: the More children from Shipton in Shropshire. Samuel More had apparently believed that the children were not his but…

Tercentenary events took many forms, ranging from large-scale public entertainments, like pageants, to small-scale lectures held at chapels and churches. The latter events tended to be aimed at members of non-conformist communions, often under the…