Year 9 visit the Collections
All boys in Year 9 were recently given a tour of the Collections. Among the highlights on display were the Gutenberg Bible, a punishment book from the Archives, an umbrella used by Queen Victoria, the wall paintings in College Chapel and a four-footed duck in the Natural History Museum.
Amazing Mazon Creek
A new display has been installed in the Natural History Museum depicting a carboniferous ecosystem which features fossils from Mazon Creek, part of the Shabica Collection. Visitors can see prehistoric jellyfish, the incredible Tully monster and ferns that would have been brushed by the wings of dragonflies larger than a cat. You can read more about the Mazon Creek fossils in this edition of the Collections Journal.
Asian manuscripts
College Library’s collection of Asian manuscripts was on display last month in the Tower Gallery. This included two Burmese manuscripts written in black lacquer in ornate Burmese tamarind-seed script which only a few people in the world can read; a Sinhala grammar on palm leaves with decorated wooden boards; a Burmese and a Sinhalese manuscript on Buddhism and a fragment on Hinduism. Etonians, as well as visiting students from partnership schools, were surprised to learn that palm leaves were once used as a surface for writing.
Record-setting oars
A pair of sculling oars celebrating a school record set for a new course in 1912 have been given to the Museum of Eton Life. They feature the names of five Etonian rowers: Beasley-Robinson returned to Eton as an Assistant Master and House Master; J.J. Llewellin was in Churchill’s government; L.S. Campbell became a renowned racehorse trainer; Furse Fairfax Vidal Scrutton and C.F. Wilson served in WW1 in which Wilson was sadly killed.
How mad was Milton?
Boys in Year 12 and Year 13 studying English Literature A Level visited College Library to view original materials setting Milton’s writings within the religious and political context of the time. On display were plans of his childhood home in Cheapside where his father was a tenant of the College and which was destroyed in the Great Fire in 1666; the first edition of Paradise Lost; a copy of the Act for Abolishing the Kingly Office on 19 March 1648; and passports issued and signed by Charles I and Oliver Cromwell.
