Tunny takes centre stage in new exhibition
HAVE YOU ever wondered what’s tucked away in the Scarborough Museums Trust stores?
In these monthly columns you can find out more about some of the thousands of objects in the Scarborough Collections: there just isn’t room to display them all in the trust’s two venues, Scarborough Art Gallery and the Rotunda Museum.
Everything in the collections is carefully stored in climate-controlled conditions – it’s important to take great care of these objects, which we hold on behalf of their owners: you.
We’re privileged to look after the collections on behalf of Scarborough.
There are more than 250,000 objects, some of exceptional rarity and some which are wonderful artefacts relating to the everyday life of this remarkable town.
We want to make it more accessible by working closely with our audiences when organising exhibitions, and also introduce new digital formats so people can access the collection online.
Our first object is one which many locals remember affectionately as the centrepiece of an exhibit in the old natural history museum (now Woodend Creative Workspace) on the town’s remarkable past as a centre for tunny fishing in the middle of the last century.
It’s a replica of a tuna caught by big game angler John Hedley Lewis.
From the 1920s to the 1950s, Scarborough was a Mecca for fishermen keen to catch the glittering prize of a bluefin tuna, a spectacular member of the mackerel family. Millionaires and movie stars rubbed shoulders in the town’s hotels and in the Tunny Club on Sandside.
This particular fish was at the centre of a fishy spat between Hedley Lewis and fellow angler Lorenzo Mitchell-Henry.
Mitchell-Henry was 67 when, in 1933, he landed an 851lb tunny off Whitby and set a record that still stands for the biggest tunny caught in British waters – barring a rather unfortunate business 16 years later when Hedley Lewis caught one that weighed in at just one pound more.
Mitchell-Henry’s fish had been weighed on railway scales, rather than hanging by a rope, as Hedley Lewis’s was. He argued that the rope might have contributed to that crucial extra pound.
He won, and his record stood.
From May 18 to September 12, the tunny is on show again at Scarborough Art Gallery as the centrepiece of a new exhibition called Animal Hauntings.
Scarborough Museums Trust is a member of the Museums Association and adheres to its code of ethics: https://www. museumsassociation.org/ campaigns/ethics/
If you’d like to nominate an object from the Scarborough Collections to be featured in this column, please email