During the summer a group of students from Godalming College came to the museum to gain inspiration for performances developed as part of their Performing Arts Diploma.

They were charged with creating a piece of solo theatre (10 minutes) that responds 'to their local museum' that will excite and entice visitors into the museum.

The resulting pieces are creative and innovative performances that give a different perspective on our collections and Godalming’s history.

Anybody interested in finding out about the history of a place or family in West Surrey has reason to be very grateful to Percy Woods. A senior civil servant, Woods was from a family which had lived in Godalming for at least three hundred years, and his main leisure activity in his long life was research into the history of his area. He died in 1922, having sought out and written down details of deeds, wills, court cases and parish records relating to every town and village of the ‘Godalming Hundred’, an area stretching as far as Cranleigh and Haslemere. The notes and transcriptions, in his meticulous handwriting, run to more than 18,000 pages, now bound into 59 huge volumes, which can be consulted in the Museum Library.

Mary Toft or Tofts (1703-1763), became well-known as the lady who gave birth to rabbits. In 1726 she became the centre of controversy when she deceived and hoaxed doctors into believing she had given birth to rabbits.

In Godalming Museum there is a display of broken china, worn toothbrushes and empty inkpots which I find particularly moving. These items were excavated from the site of the First World War army camps on Witley Common and are poignant reminders of the everyday lives of the men who were based there.

In 1848, the Jekyll family (Gertrude was the fifth of seven children) came to Bramley where they lived for 20 years. She was a multi-talented and creative woman who supported women’s suffrage, was an accomplished painter, craftswoman and garden designer. This blog post gives an insight into her life, and the items relating to her in the Museum’s collections.

In 1881, Godalming had electric street lighting and public electricity in people’s houses. It was not the first place to have electric street lighting but it was the first place in the world to have public electricity.

Jack was appointed Chief Wireless Telegraphist on the new, “unsinkable” luxury Titanic, with Harold Bride as his junior operator. The wireless equipment on board was the most modern and most powerful of any merchant ship then afloat. It had a range of 250-400 miles in daytime and at night, when conditions for transmitting and receiving were more favourable, it occasionally spanned 2,000 miles. It is recorded that Jack had confided in a friend that while he was proud to be chosen to serve on the Titanic he would have preferred a smaller vessel. Jack expressed a dread of icebergs.