Autumn 2020 - What’s happening at Halstead Heritage Museum? – By John Walmsley
This is Stuart Lock who has been researching Cut Hedge and
the Gosfield School along with Geoff Copsey, to create an archive of the house
and boarding school. Both these individuals met at Cut Hedge, where Stuart was
an IT technician. Formerly both were educated at the school. Together they have
for several years been searching back issues of the Halstead Gazette for Cut
Hedge related items.
Whilst the Museum was based at the Mill, Stuart volunteered
to help us scan a vast collection of Halstead Gazette negatives that had been
donated by the paper to The Society and the earlier ones donated by the Geoff
Root Estate. The picture is of Stuart,
returning the last boxes on the 28th of June 2020 after his
gargantuan task. This picture was taken exactly three years to the day after he
had returned the first batch of negatives. He finally completed this massive
undertaking by downloading the last scanned images on to our computer.
Stuart has scanned in excess of 41,000 negatives, along with
the indexing and cataloguing of each item.
Also, he has matched where possible, every picture with the relevant
published newspaper article. He has done all of this from the confines of his
own home and in his own time.
The museum has several computers and laptops in
use by our volunteers. Stuart has helped us with his expertise and also by
providing and installing, at great cost to himself, hardware that enables all
our equipment to be synced as one. Only a few of the museum volunteers have
knowledge of Stuart’s existence. The Society wishes to extend thanks and
gratitude for the countless hours of work that Stuart has committed to this
task, for the benefit of the Society and the Museum.