LONDON'S STRANGEST MUSEUM.

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 5, 6 January 1934, Page 6 (Supplement)

LONDON'S STRANGEST MUSEUM.

The least respectable, most intriguing of all London's museums lies unknown to the public, and all but forgotten by its owners, in a corner 1 of Whitehall. Skeleton keys by which one prisoner intended to, prove that even from Dartmoor escape is possible, strange lumps of tinfoil, collected with a purpose, pieces of wood, files, blades, nails and all the tools that ought never to be found in prison cells, but sometimes are, can be seen dimly in its glass cupboards. Their stories (says a "Morning Poet" contributor) would make a romancer's theme, and are barely indicated in the faded ink inscriptions which have preserved an account of how some of them were found. Skeleton keys in wood, bone and different metals, lie scattered without history, close to a scrawled letter, written in a thick fluid by a woman in Grimsby gaol to her husband in the same gaol. How she wrote it, and how she transferred it to him, no one could discover, even in" the savage times of 1880. Primitive pictures and carved pieces of bone show the unceasing impulse of art, even in penal servitude. Medieval tiles and pottery, and an exquisite doll, mix strangely with the desperate instruments. They have been found in the soil beneath the prisons, the work of happier days and freer men.

Hundreds of years ago, when surface coal was being worked, blocks of stone or wood used to be laid along the muddy roads for the broad wheels of the colliery carts to travel over.