In that weird time between Christmas and New Year I decided to go up to the Lakeside Arts part of the University of Nottingham campus as there were a few free exhibitions running that I’d been meaning to go to before they closed and realised I was fast running out of time. This bears exhibition was in the Museum of Archaeology which you can find just along from the South Entrance to the campus – if travelling by public transport there’s a tram stop very close by.
I’ve been to the museum before so I knew that it was very small (just a room) so I shouldn’t have been surprised that the bears exhibition only took up a couple of display cases, though I had been expecting something a little more substantial given the advertising I had seen for it. The exhibition was supposed to highlight the relationship between bears and humans over the years in Britain. I’m not sure I quite got that experience but it was interesting to see some of the artefacts on display.
This decorated bear jug was very familiar to me, and I realised because it’s been on loan to this exhibition from Nottingham Castle. Dating from around 1740 it’s an example of a bear used in bear baiting, holding a dog to his chest. Bear baiting was banned in England in 1835.
This other item, which was very tricky to photograph (the Archaeology Museum has one wall that is all window which makes photography in there quite hard), is a roman jet figurine of a bear that was found in Yorkshire in 1845. Usually found in the graves of children (possibly as a form of protection) they are apparently quite rare, and found only in England and Germany.
Other items included this cast pawprint from a bear that lives at the Wildwood Trust in Kent (above) and inevitably I suppose, a teddy bear!
There was one other item I particularly liked, though not all that photogenic, and that was this scroll of music to “Teddy Bears Picnic” to be used on an automatic piano. It was the BBC who produced the first vocal version of the song in 1932 which was written by American composer John Walter Bratton and Irish songwriter Jimmy Kennedy.
It was an odd little exhibition but had a few items it was interesting to see in person.
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