New displays offer so many angles of town
Diss Museum reopens on Wednesday, March 18, with several new displays.
This year I have been helped by collections manager Alison Molnos and her volunteers and also by the Fair Green History Group.
From the museum's store, Alison's team has dug out artefacts showing the history of the soft drinks industry that was so important in its day to the town.
A number of cholera epidemics in the 1850s saw a distrust of urban water supplies lead to the success of bottled mineral waters, which were thought to be purer and healthier.
In the beginning, though, a good many of these mineral manufacturers were back street entrepreneurs, with homemade purification technology and bottling facilities in family cellars or outhouses.
Toward the end of the 19th Century with the growth of the Temperance Movement, the mineral water industry developed enormously, leading to manufacturing plants on a much larger scale.
Many local people will remember Gostlings, Doubledays and Baldrys as thriving firms.
Another display was inspired by the donation, by Roger Anness, of a splendid pair of scales used in his father's butcher shop in St Nicholas Street.
The shop, which was later Cullen's the gents' outfitters and is now Diss Ironworks, used to have the shiny scales and weights in the window when I was a boy, although they are less shiny now.
Because The Shambles, home of the museum, used to be a butcher's shop, the volunteers have devised a display of its history.
The Fair Green History Group's display depicts the history of the green, from the time Henry II granted a charter for a fair, to the present day.
And, of course, we have much about Thomas Paine, to go with the festival that has created so much interest.
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Weather for Diss
Thursday 02 September 2010
Today
Sunny spells
Temperature: 9 C to 19 C
Wind Speed: 12 mph
Wind direction: South east
Tomorrow
Sunny spells
Temperature: 9 C to 18 C
Wind Speed: 9 mph
Wind direction: North east
