Letter from Polly Bence

We have received a letter from Polly Bence, a PhD student researching the ethnographic collections at Bristol Museum where they hold a group of objects collected by Admiral Francis Starkie Clayton, she is looking for anything that might shed light on his motivations for collecting.

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Letters from Colin H Robertson

I have received two very interesting letters from Colin H Robertson which I think will interest our readers. Colin bought a copy of A Naval Life and found a transcript of his grandfather’s, Leading Signalman Johnston Robertson, written account of the action on 12th January 1917 against a German Submarine in the English Channel.

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Does anybody know what happened to this?

An item concerning a lost purse/spectacle case, mounted with H.M. Queen Victoria’s monogram in gold, which was picked up by a member of the party sent by the Canadian government to Smith Sound in 1924. This was dropped by one of the 22 officers on the Nares’ Arctic Expedition of 1875-6 in an effort to reach the North Pole. In the papers of the May archive currently held by Mary Jones.

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