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On the 3rd of September 1939 war was declared and the Hancock Museum, situated at Barras Bridge, Newcastle upon Tyne, immediately closed its doors to the public. The Trustees of the Natural History Society of Northumberland, Durham and Newcastle upon Tyne, held an emergency Council meeting to discuss the protection of their museum and the valuable collections. The Museum Curator, Mr T Russell Goddard, was given the immense task of saving the museum and its contents from the threat of the imminent conflict.

Various items were removed from display and carefully placed in strong wooden packing cases to be stored in a variety of ‘safe’ locations.

Among the many irreplaceable items dispatched were the collections of drawings and watercolours by the famous northeast wood engraver Thomas Bewick, Albany Hancock’s drawings of Nudibranchs (Sea Slugs), the Thomas Atthey and William Hutton collection of Coal Measure fossils and the valuable specimens of the Great Auk.

Fifty-seven cases were sent by lorry to the home of Lord Armstrong at Cragside and stored in the Gilnochie Tower. One single case, containing the egg of a Great Auk was housed in the cellar of Dr Wilfred Hall’s house at Sharperton. Library books were dispersed among members living in the country. Part of the herbarium of local plants was sent to the British Museum of Natural History in London and unfortunately destroyed during a bombing raid.

Back in the Museum the staff boarded up the large windows, fixed wire netting under the glass roof and painted yellow lines on the floors to guide air raid wardens as they groped their way around the building in the dark. Staff undertook air raid precautions and fire-watching duties. A large trench was dug in the grounds for the staff but it suffered from flooding and thankfully was never required. A much more secure refuge eventually became available when the City authorities made an entrance into the Victoria Tunnel (which is still in existence on Claremont Road). Originally an 18th century waggonway running from Spital Tongues to the Tyne, the disused tunnel became one of the safest air raid shelters in the northeast.

Many of the staff were called up or left to aid the war effort, only the caretaker A E Bennett, an employee from 1916-1947, who lived in the caretakers lodge at the rear of the museum and Miss Gladys Scott, a deputy curator who joined the staff in 1914, were left to ‘man the fort.’ However the taxidermist Stephen E Cook (seen in the illustration inspecting a crate) eventually returned to look after the collections after a brief stint as a voluntary A R P Warden.

The museum reopened to the public in 1940 on a limited basis but the enforced closure and the war had brought great financial hardship due to the loss of revenue and members. Many members had died in the war including the joint president of the Society the 9th Duke of Northumberland who was killed in action in 1940.
Luckily the Hancock Museum and its collections, except for the herbarium specimens, survived the war years unscathed to become the premier natural history museum it is today.

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