In the dark winter days of January 2013, a mysterious, delicate package was transported by courier service from Colchester Museum to a laboratory in Salisbury, Wiltshire. Within the layers of carefully wrapped packaging lay a collection of old, partly burnt bones. But these ...

With the evacuees leaving the island we had our school back full time. The young male teachers Mr Reason, Mr Burt, Mr Davies all went off into the services. I understand Mr Hucklesby was at our school for a short time before going off into the services but I don't remember him ...

I started my education at West Mersea Council School, Barfield Road in the spring of 1937. I was a very reluctant starter and after several failed attempts my father loaded me on to the back seat of his bicycle in the pretence of going to East Mersea to visit Auntie Nellie. We ...

Now concluding my look at old Mersea shops, we can take a look at what were probably the first purpose built shops on the island. The first picture shows a busy scene at Samuel White's shop ...

Colchester builder, Stanley Hills, was involved with some of the town's largest projects and was also a major benefactor to his adopted home of West Mersea. He was born in Claudius Road, Colchester, in 1910 and was a pupil at Hamilton Road School before Joining his father's firm ...

In the last issue we had arrived at Queens Corner and the loss of the large horse chestnut tree. On the opposite side of the road in the West end of the pink cottage, there was a butcher shop many years ago, there are hooks on the ceiling beams where the meat used to hang and the ...

Firstly - I have been asked which shop it was that was owned by Mr & Mrs Slaughter. It was Central Stores which was later run for many years by Oscar and Elsie Whiting together with son Richard. It was demolished to make room for the Co-op Extension. I cannot leave the ...

Having left High Street last month, we will take a few steps into High Street North and Clem Smith's greengrocers on the corner of Mersea Avenue Clem was another local shopkeeper who was a local councillor and could often get quite excited about certain issues. I recall ...

My early memories of Mersea shops comes from the mid 1930s when we lived in Barfield Road and my mother used to take me with her when she went shopping in my pre-school days. Then later when I left school in 1946 and started working for builder Clifford White & Co. As the 'Boy' I ...

The outbreak of war in 1939 found many farms in Mersea and much of the rest of Britain in a run down state with many fields not seeing the plough for many years. Cheap imports of foreign grain made it impossible for our farmers to compete. With the ships bringing in this grain now ...

One hundred or so years ago the sailing barge was a common sight around Mersea Island, tucked into various creeks and quays around the island collecting corn, hay, straw etc and delivering manure to the farms. Many an old photograph of The Strood shows a stackie barge. In those days ...

My great great grandfather John Green lived in a cottage next to the Fox Inn. He was an agricultural labourer and the tithe awards shows him as occupier, with others, of cottages and yards owned by James Fenn. One of his sons Robert Chinnery married Maria Radford at West ...

Barrow, what barrow?

View of the Barrow from Dawes Lane Every islander knows the Mersea Barrow - or do they? For nearly two thousand years it has silently ...

On 16th April, 1912, a sprightly gentleman, resplendent in plus-fours and a bushy walrus moustache, alighted from a Great Eastern steam train at Colchester Station, en route to Mersea Island. His desti tion was Fairhaven House, still standing today in Seaview Avenue, where he ...

Ralph was born in Surrey and until the Second World War worked in telephone engineering. During the war he was seconded to the Foreign Office and was sent to Paris immediately after liberation ...

Stan Hills (centre) in front of one of his beloved steam engines with a newly built Mersea Museum in the background. Also in the picture are Mervyn Dands (left) and Leslie Haines (right) ...

The following is the text of a recording Ron Hall made for the Mersea Museum 2007 display on fish traps. Fish traps or 'weirs' as they are termed locally, are to be found in many locations within the Blackwater estuary. The traps are constructed on areas that, when traps were in ...

The Cottage, Mersea Museum. Photo Mike L. Davies. "I remember using those!" and "Granny had these on her mantelpiece" or "We found one of those in the attic" are ...

Many islanders are familiar with Mersea's surviving military defences - the concrete pill-boxes and crumbling gun placements built 70 years ago to guard against Nazi invasion. But these very visible features are not the only evidence of the island's role in times of war, whether ...

1. CLIFF. We have recently seen the sailing barge DAWN reviving a trade which was a common sight around one hundred years ago, when she loaded a stack of straw at Abbotts Hall up ...

There have been schools for the sons of rich families throughout the centuries, but schooling for the children of the poor was a consequence of the Industrial Revolution. At the end of the eighteenth century many people thought that educating the lower classes would be ...

In March 1871 Sabine Baring Gould and his family arrived on Mersea. He was to be the rector at East Mersea for the next ten years. It is well documented that he found life in East Mersea difficult. He complained that the inhabitants of this parish were "dull, reserved, shy and ...

The first of two pieces by David Nicholls, Essex Wildlife Trust warden at Ray Island. In 1970 the National Trust bought Ray Island. This was the Trust's first purchase of any property on the Essex coast, persuaded by a group of local people led by Alec Grant. This group ...

Digby's shop taken around 1910. Photo by courtesy of Miss Dorothy Brown. The business originally known as Digby Brothers was started in 1909 by two of the five sons of George Digby, ...

"I suppose you can all have a rest now" is a comment I have heard when the museum closes its doors at the end of September. So what happens when the main hall is cleared to make room for the winter meetings, art shows and fairs? As we get ready to open for the summer season on ...

I left West Mersea Council School at Easter 1946 at the age of fourteen to start work with local builder Clifford White & Co. I was to do a bricklaying apprenticeship but was unable to start officially until aged fifteen. I started on a new bungalow being built in Fenn Farm Lane, ...

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The old council houses in Barfield Road, West Mersea. Beyond is the chemist's Shop, and on the right is Clifford White's yard. The photo is dated 1944. I was born in February 1932 ...

Family historians visiting Mersea Museum's new Resource Centre, on Saturday open days over the last few months, have made a beeline for the new computers. Here, if successful, they can 'meet their ancestors'. On the computers, are hundreds of pages of information and images, where ...

In 2006 we were approached at the museum by a team of Cambridge archaeologists, with a view to digging some test pits in Mersea. The team was from the Higher Education Field Academy (HEFA) under the leadership of Carenza Lewis who some people will remember from Channel 4's Time Team ...

My father, Leslie James Green, was born on December 5th 1902 in the old Blue Row Cottages. He was the second son of Arthur John Green (known as Jack) and Alice Jane, née Mingay. Jack was born in the old Workhouse Cottages at Waldegraves on February 3rd 1878. Alice Jane ...

So, what about GEOLOGY? No museum should be without its fossils, and Mersea Museum has a few, although not displayed as such. Some years ago a committee member was able to identify and display a collection of fossilised bones. However, when she left, no-one felt able to take this ...

Shameen, circa 1924 Shameen was a large house built about 100 years ago at the end of Seaview Avenue, close to the beach. My maternal grandfather Roland 'Roly' Green worked ...

WILDLIFE EXHIBITS

The time has come to renovate the museum's  tural history section. Most of the wildlife displays in the museum consist of stuffed and mounted ...

It is often suggested that the Strood, Mersea's ancient causeway, was built by the Romans. Tales abound of a ghostly Roman centurion, pacing the Strood on stormy nights. However, when Romans first arrived on Mersea in the 1st century AD, sea levels were considerably lower than ...

"Another treat for the children was to go by Carrier's Van to Colchester. The journey was long and arduous. The horse stopped at all cottage doors to collect letters to post and parcels to be delivered. The 'boy' used to run down the lanes to collect or deliver while the horse ...

After the doors of Hadley's Ladies' Outfitters in Mill Road closed for the last time in March 2002, Mersea Museum received an unusual donation - fifteen pieces of assorted corsetry, most dating ...

It was at a spot only three miles across the Backwater Estuary at Bradwell-on-Sea that St. Cedd founded his little monastery circa 654, built the historic St. Peter's Chapel out of ...