The museum is hiring! Although all the work of running the museum is done by volunteers, we’ve reached the point where we need to pay someone to help with the admin side. Please see the brief below on who we’re looking for and how to apply.
Author: Lin White
New Exhibition: 1914-1918 Tales from the Cemetery
Timed to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the ending of World War 1, our new exhibition reveals a little of the town’s history at the time and the role it played in international events, as well as telling the stories of some of our more prominent townspeople who are buried in the local cemetery.
If you’ve driven from Herne Bay to Canterbury, or along the old Thanet Way from Greenhill towards the Canterbury Road, you will have spotted our local cemetery. On the side of a hill along Canterbury Road, it houses the remains of thousands of former residents of the town. Herne Bay Cemeterians, a group of local volunteers, have recently completed a project to transcribe all of the cemetery’s memorials, and are working to research further into some of the history of the site and its residents.
Our exhibition showcases some of that research, providing fascinating insight into this part of the town’s history, and explaining about the important work the researchers have done and are still carrying out – work that will provide a vital research source for decades and even centuries to come.
There are also two publications available to purchase from the museum written and published by the group.
Bayfest is under way!
The Bayfest 2018 event was launched on Saturday, and there are events throughout the month to help keep the children entertained.
Check out the Bayfest booklet, available around the town, or pick up a leaflet from the museum giving more details of our events.
Most events are free, some have a small charge, and some are best booked in advance, as space is limited.
We look forward to meeting you!
Don’t forget our photo competition!
Posters for our next photo competition will be going up around town soon! We are looking for photos that show off Natural Herne Bay.
We ask that your photos show some aspect of nature and can be identified as taken somewhere within the area of the Hampton/Reculver/Herne triangle.
Up to three entries per person, to be submitted as prints (preferably A4 landscape size) along with an entry form. Entries to be with the Seaside Museum by 15th January 2019.
Entries will form our January/February exhibition next year, and the top 12 entries (4 chosen by museum volunteers plus 8 chosen by public vote) will form our 2020 calendar.
We can’t wait to see what you come up with!
The Red Rover Exhibition
When, a couple of years ago, the Seaside Museum was left a maritime painting from the 1830s of a paddle steamer called the Red Rover no one realised the enormous significance it had for the development of Herne Bay. Before the 1830s, Herne Bay was a very small seaside hamlet where coastal sailing vessels unloaded goods primarily intended for Canterbury. In 1830, a group of entrepreneurs began to buy up land to develop one of the very first new towns in the UK and their plan depended on building a pier that would enable paddle-steamers to dock at any state of the tide. Herne Bay was conceived, designed and promoted to cash in the growth of the paddle-steamer trade between London and the North Kent coast and the Red Rover played a crucial role in their plans. The story of the Red Rover is the story of the foundation of Herne Bay.
Our exhibition tells a fascinating tale of ambition, disaster and disappointment. Disaster because the Red Rover was sunk in a collision when she was barely a year old. She was raised by revolutionary techniques for the time and went back into service but eventually lost out to the coming of the railways to North Kent. The original investors fared no better and their concept of a high-class development for the wealthy did not work out well and most of them lost their money. If the railway spelled the end of the coastal paddle steamers it was the saviour of Herne Bay which took off after the line was opened in 1861.
Come to the Seaside Museum until July 22nd to find out more about the founding of our town.
Red Rover Exhibition is now open
Our new exhibition is now open to the public – The Red Rover tells the story of the paddle steamer and her sister ship, how she served the town, and how she contributed to the development of the town itself.
It’s a fascinating story, about the first tourists to visit the seaside. The pier was built so they didn’t have to transfer to rowing boats to come ashore, and coaches would take them on to other parts of the county.
Do visit the museum, have a good look around our exhibition and learn something new about our wonderful town!
Herne Bay’s Oysters – talk
On Thursday 31st May we have a talk coming up – Herne Bay’s Oysters – Friend or Foe?
Tickets are available from the museum, call in or contact us by phone or email.
Volunteering at the museum
Are you looking for a new interest? The Seaside Museum is a great starting point for visitors, and our current Dambusters Raid exhibition is proving very popular, but our volunteers are thinly stretched and we’re always looking for more people to join our team.
It’s a great opportunity to gain experience in a working environment, meet new people and learn more about our town.
Please come and join us, and help us to keep this valuable resource open!
As well as taking a shift in the shop (around 3 hours a week commitment), we have people working on the marketing team, building maintenance, organising/coordinating exhibitions, organising stock and the hundred and one other jobs that go alongside running a museum.
Photography competition and exhibition – Natural Herne Bay
2020 is a long time away! But we’re already thinking about it.
The 2018 exhibition, Leisure and Pleasure in Herne Bay, is now over, and we’re in the process of putting together a calendar from the winning entries. This will be available to buy in our museum shop from around September-time, and makes an excellent present.
2019 will see our next exhibition and competition, with the theme Natural Herne Bay, and the winning photos from that will go forward into our 2020 calendar.
While January 2019 is a long way away, we want to give you plenty of notice so that you can take some fantastic photos over the next few months. So we’re already releasing the entry forms, and look forward to receiving your entries.
We’d like to see photos that show some element of nature within the Hampton/Reculver/Herne triangle (ideally there would be something within the picture that shows the location).
Photo Competition Entry Form 2019
Photo Competition Terms and Conditions 2019
Dambusters Bouncing Bomb Exhibition now open
Seventy-five years ago, this year Herne Bay was at the centre of preparations for one of the most dramatic operations of WWII. The first hint came on 11th April 1943, when the coast from Margate to Herne Bay was declared a restricted area and sealed off by police. Only those authorised by the Director of Boom Defence were allowed in of which two were a comparatively unknown aircraft designer, Barnes Wallis, and a much decorated bomber pilot Wing Commander Guy Gibson.
Sharp-eyed and sharp-eared local residents would have been aware of some new sounds and unfamiliar shaped aircraft flying from Manston and repeatedly making runs at low level out at sea from Minis Bay to Reculver. These were the converted mosquito, Wellington and Lancaster bombers that were taking part in the final trials of the remarkable weapon, which came to be known as the ‘Bouncing Bomb’.
As the prospect of the Second World War loomed, the British Air Ministry had identified the dams of Germany’s heavily industrialised Ruhr Valley as key strategic targets supplying drinking water, hydro-electric power and water for steel-making and the canal transport system. No aircraft of the time was capable of carrying a bomb big enough to destroy a major dam but a smaller explosive charge might work if it could be exploded directly against the dam wall below the surface of the water.
The challenge was that the major German dams were protected by heavy torpedo nets stretched across the reservoirs to prevent just such an attack. Barnes Wallis came up with a plan to overcome the obstacle of the nets with a drum-shaped bomb spinning backwards and dropped at exactly the right low altitude, at the correct speed and release point which would bounce across the surface of the water and over the nets before reaching the dam wall. The spin would run the bomb down the side of the dam to its underwater base where a specially designed fuse would explode it.
Few of the top brass in the Air Ministry had any confidence that Wallis’s idea would work but he persevered and finally won approval for the trials of his ‘Bouncing Bomb’ that took place just along the coast from Herne Bay. The trials lasted from April 9th 1943 until the final trial with the only ‘live’ bomb to be dropped in the trials on May 13th 1943 and a safety drop of an unfused one on May 15th. These two tests were 5 miles off Broadstairs. All the others were off Reculver and were of inert concrete filled ‘bombs’. The trials were a resounding success and, on May 16th, Squadron 617, the famous and courageous DamBusters, took off on their history-making raid that breached the Mohne and Eder dams and damaged the Sorpe dam causing considerable damage to Germany’s war-making capacity but from which many were not to return.
To commemorate the anniversary of these events, and to chronicle a story of ingenuity, of overcoming difficulties in a very short time and the courage of those who pressed home an attack with the realisation that many of them would not return, the SEASIDE MUSEUM, Herne Bay, is putting on a DamBusters exhibition. In addition to many pictures and videos, visitors will be greeted with the unmistakable roar of those mighty Merlin engines that we have heard at so many flypasts in Herne Bay. There will be examples of the ingenious bomb-sights and the height adjustment lights that people will be able to try out and test how they would have done if they had been the pilots or bomb-aimers.
There will also be two evening talks. The first will be on April 23rd, by Peter Rix from the Barnes Wallis Foundation who will show some little seen film and tell us of the work of that engineering genius, Barnes Wallis, who designed far more than the Bouncing Bomb. The second on May 14th, will be given by one of the museum volunteer team who put the exhibition together and which will fill in more detail than the exhibition has room for. It will cover local connections and the bravery of those concerned in Operation Chastise, as the Dam Busters Raid was officially known.
The exhibition opens on March 24th and ends on May 19th 2018. The museum is open Tuesday- Sunday 11.00 am to 4.00 pm. There is ample parking along the Sea Front and in nearby carparks.