NEWS RELEASES
Mission Impossible
14 May 2008
It is impossible to fit a quart into a pint pot, hence the saying, a genuine ‘mission impossible.’ In film and TV, Mission Impossible becomes possible, but at Horsham Museum one mission became a mission impossible no matter how hard we tried. Horsham Museum could not display all the photographic images given to it recently by the Cramp family, so the new temporary exhibition at Horsham Museum’s photographic gallery, “Cramp’s Horsham,” is as its sub-heading explains “snapshots from the archive.” And what an archive!
Born during World War One, Cecil Cramp, the son of the noted jeweller and antique dealer on West Street, took up amateur photography and film making as a pupil at Collyer’s Grammar School in 1929. Some thirty years later he started giving his celebrated slide shows which involved him recounting various stories about Horsham and the surrounding villages while showing around 60 slides, one a minute.
Throughout the 1950s, ‘60s and through to the ‘90s, Cecil was actively collecting, copying, publishing and exhibiting images of Horsham. His archive of images was becoming legendary within the town of his birth. In 1993 the Curator of Horsham Museum asked Cecil what would happen to his thousands of slides and images when he died, only to be rebuked that there were not that many and those that there were he charitably offered them to the Museum, honouring the memory of his father’s earlier gifts and those of William Albery.
Just before he died Cecil gave the museum 20 slide shows, around 1400 slides in all. Soon after his death his family contacted us and asked if we would we like the rest as well as the relevant ephemera and books. They have been arriving in slide box after slide box, hundreds of images ever since. A life’s work capturing and recording the changing face of Horsham. There is no better memorial to a man who loved film and the photograph.
Although it is impossible to show all the images, this exhibition gives a flavour of the range of images in the Cramp Archive: from the deeply personal photograph of the Cramp shop through to the Garden of Remembrance with its paddling brook; Images of West street with its muddy road to Denne Road School. It is an exhibition that surprises as well as informs, revealing hidden facets of the town’s history and giving just a taste of what future discoveries will be made over the coming years as the mammoth job of cataloguing the collection is carried out. Without doubt it is one of the most significant gifts to the town in recent years.
The exhibition opens on Thursday 15 May and closes on Saturday 2 August 2008.
For further information please contact Jeremy Knight, Curator and Heritage Officer.
Horsham Museum
9 Causeway, Horsham, West Sussex RH12 1HE
Tel: (01403) 254959 Fax: (01403) 282594
Email: museum@horsham.gov.uk
www.horshammuseum.org