FROM Tutankhamun to Post-Impressionists, the Oxford Mail’s sister paper, The Oxford Times, has been reporting on major Ashmolean Museum exhibitions for decades.
But this week it was The Oxford Times’s turn to be featured in a special display at the world-famous museum, to bring to an end its 150th birthday celebrations.
Pictures from the many thousands in the paper’s archive have been selected for The Oxford Times exhibition, which opened to the public at the Ashmolean on Tuesday and will run into the New Year.
The first front page of The Oxford Times from Saturday, September 6, 1862.
Ashmolean spokesman, Tom Jowett, said: “We had been looking to change the display in the cafe. The Oxford Times has been reporting local news and what is happening for so long, and a significant number of the 800,000 visitors we see every year are local people. This exhibition means that when they come for a coffee after looking around all the ancient history in the museum, they can enjoy something more personal and local.”
Tom Jowett
Some of the 16 selections are especially timely.
With this year’s St Giles’ Fair having only just packed up and gone, there is a picture taken of the fair back in the 1950s.
To mark the centenary of the First World War, there is a photograph taken in August 1914 of the Banbury Terriers marching to Christ Church, where they were briefly quartered at the college.
And in a week when the Duke of Cambridge, Prince William, was in Oxford, there is a photograph of his father, the Prince of Wales, walking in the rain across Radcliffe Square from 1997.
1953 cup winners Pegasus FC
Moving into autumn, the Ashmolean curators chose to show museum visitors how The Oxford Times captured events on Guy Fawkes Night, 1962, when celebration turned to violence in Cornmarket Street as revellers ran amok.
The fact that one of the Ashmolean’s best known pieces is the lantern that Guido Fawkes held in his hand on November 5, 1603, in the cellars of the Houses of Parliament, makes for a fitting link with the museum’s collection.
The 1955 St Giles’ Fair
Also dating from the 1960s is a image from coverage of the Great Train Robbery. Police are shown in 1963 guarding the robbers’ hide-out at Leatherslade Farm, Oakley.
The first visitor to the exhibition was Claire Undy, a retired librarian who had worked in Old Marston. Mrs Undy, of Headington, a regular visitor to the Ashmolean, said: “I have been in Oxford since 1968 and come to the Ashmolean two or three times a week. I think most of the photographs were taken long before I came here, but I well remember the bus that had its roof ripped off having driven under the bridge at the railway station,” she said referring to a 1973 image of an accident that left three people injured.
“It would be good to see more photographs. Perhaps they could be replaced with others.”
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