Visit to Gallery Oldham - 10/02/2011

Collections

There was a very wide variety of different types of items collected by Francis Buckley and given to the Oldham Gallery. We were introduced to these items by Shaun Bagguley who described the various interests of this wealthy man. Buckley had a great interest in social history and collected glass items and meticulously investigated the origins and uses of the many items shown.
He was also a JP and was a lay preacher at his local Saddleworth church. He was from a very wealthy family trained as a barrister in London but after the first world war returned to his native Saddleworth and set about his interest in collecting ancient items.
He served in the First World War in the trenches in France and one of his fellow officers introduced him to the art of looking for and finding flint arrow heads and tools which were exposed as a result of the earthworks in making trenches. As well as relics and glass he also collected buckles, Chinese porcelain, watches, 14,000 year old Chinese tomb relics, and there was even a collection of love tokens which we believe were made by a local jeweler.
He was married during the First World War and had two children; one of them died in 1948, a year before his own death, which was a great tragedy to him. Apart from his collections he docketed the area where items has been found and wrote many articles and published some books detailing the social history of many of his collected items. He also wrote a column for the Oldham Chronicle, never owned a motor car and travelled around his local villages in a pony and trap. Sadly his remaining son emigrated to New Zealand and so the family no longer resides in their manor house.
Whilst we had a cup of tea and biscuits in the Education Suite, Shaun handed round some items for us to handle; there were various flint, arrow heads, and axes. A stone glazed green bottle 14,000 years old from a Chinese tomb, the statue of what appeared to be a Chinese traveller with a load on his back, also 14,000 years old, and a vessel with the handle depicting a snake but there is some doubt as to it's authenticity as a number of fakes started to find their way onto the market when there was big financial gain for artifacts.

Our visit was organised by Jennifer and we were helped on our way around the exhibition by Maggie who is a post-graduate helping out at the gallery. Anne Hornsby gave us some vivid descriptions of the items we looked at and we would like to thank everybody for enabling this visit to take place.
Mary did her usual gargantuan organising effort gathering her volunteer drivers together to enable us to enjoy a very interesting morning. A grateful thanks to everybody involved.