From Bolton to Brussels and Beyond: Two Women’s Passion for Museums and Collecting

Introduction

This paper focuses on two women, Annie Elizabeth Finney Barlow (1863–1941) and Raymonde Louisa Marie Frin (1912–1988?), their lives woven together through a shared passion for museums and their collections.

Bolton-born Annie Barlow (Figure 1) was a highly active figure in the British public sphere, both at a local and national level, and was very well-connected. Although her name has been largely forgotten in the wider world today, she remains an influential figure within Bolton, within its museum collections and within the Egypt Exploration Society. The details of Barlow’s life have already been discussed by Thomas (1985), my curatorial predecessor at Bolton Museum, and by the late Dr Brenda Moon (Moon 2005), so this paper will focus on the results of new research into her life and legacy, and on her protegee Raymonde Louisa Marie Frin, who grew up under her wing (Figures 2 and 3).

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Figure 1.

Miss Annie Elizabeth Finney Barlow—Barlow Family Archive, courtesy of Bolton Library and Museum Services.

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Figure 2.

The Barlows at their home “Greenthorne.” [L-R] John Robert Barlow, James Alan Noel Barlow, Lady Ada Helen Dalmahoy Barlow, Sir Thomas Barlow, Alice Barlow Jnr, Alice Barlow Snr, James Barlow, Annie Barlow, Jane Barnes, Mr Davison?, Maria Barlow, Miss Barnes—Barlow Family Archive, courtesy of Bolton Library and Museum Services.

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Figure 3.

Lecture card of textile swatches with Annie Barlow’s handwriting. From the collections of Bolton Library and Museum Services, author’s image.

Her life, and the way she chose to live it, reveals a real sense of vitality. At her memorial service, the Rev W. Bardsley Brash noted that she “flung herself into so many kinds of tasks and movements” and “had a passion for social righteousness” (Unpublished document, Bolton Archives). Of course, many aspects of Barlow’s life are beyond the scope of this paper which focuses only on aspects relevant to museums and the development of museum collections, and yet the entwined stories under discussion are underpinned by shared values of philanthropy, education, religion, health, social care, and fundamental human rights.

To truly understand Annie Barlow and the passions which motivated her, we must examine her family background and upbringing. Her father, James Barlow had already established his successful company ‘Barlow and Jones Cotton Spinning and Weaving Company Ltd’ before Barlow was born, rising from an independent subsistence weaver and merchant to become one of the wealthiest cotton magnates of northern England. James’ values were well represented in the business structure, exemplified in the names of the mills from which he made his fortune, including Coben Mills, after the social reformer Richard Coben, and Egyptian Mills, referencing the sourcing of the cotton.

Philanthropy was firmly rooted in his character, and he placed himself within institutions and public bodies where he could best make change. As a Liberal councillor within Bolton Municipal Borough Council and mayor from 1867 to 1869 he campaigned for better public health provisions and was chairman of the Bolton Parks Committee. He was President of the British Temperance League, a county court magistrate, a trustee of Dr Chadwick’s orphanage, president of the Mechanics’ Institute, worked with the YMCA, and founded the Institution for the Workshops for the Blind. Religiously, he was a Wesleyan Methodist Sunday School teacher and gave money to found various churches and schools across Bolton. He personally funded the creation of the Crowthorn school in Edgworth and the first National Children’s Home outside of London. James Barlow’s actions reveal his motivation to nurture development, both physically and educationally and to improve lives, which of course then improved society as a whole.

Barlow was one of eight children (Figure 2). The eldest, Thomas, was twenty years older than his sister and was expected to take over the running of the family cotton business. Instead, he pursued a career in medicine, leaving younger brother John Robert to head the company, within which of course the young women of the family had no expectation to work. Thomas Barlow, knighted in 1901, was a royal physician and personal doctor to Queen Victoria, and kings Edward VII and George V. This elevation to higher social spheres gives a better understanding of the circles within which he, and his family members, were able to inhabit. In 1867, as a young medical student in his twenties, Thomas Barlow travelled around Palestine and Egypt. He recorded his travels in a diary and the recounting of his excursions on his return proved hugely influential for his youngest sister Annie, then aged 5 (Unpublished diary, Wellcome Archives).

It is also worth noting that within the northwest’s social circles of that time were several women, up to thirty years Barlow’s senior, whose Egyptological interests may also have had impact. With a similar background to Barlow, Marianne Brocklehurst (1832–1898) was the daughter of a wealthy silk manufacturer from Macclesfield, travelling the Nile in 1873 and collecting material that would later form the basis of the Macclesfield Museum’s collection (Brocklehurst 2004). In Burnley, noted philanthropist and suffragist Alice Towneley, the Lady O’Hagan, (1846–1921) funded excavations led by archaeologist John Garstang, the Egyptian antiquities she received now exhibited at Towneley Hall Museum.

Both Barlow and her sister studied English Literature and History, in London. From 1880 she attended boarding college at Bedford Ladies College before going on to study at London University from 1882 to 1883. The college was founded by Elizabeth Jesser Reid, herself a social reformer and anti-slavery activist, aligning with Barlow’s values. While studying here, Barlow boarded at 78 Gower Street, near the British Museum, where she likely spent time becoming familiar with its growing Egyptology collections. Similarly, the subjects she studied would have made her familiar with the work of author Amelia Edwards, whose celebrated book ‘A Thousand Miles up the Nile’ published in 1877 (Edwards 1877) describes the author’s tour of Egypt in 1873 to 1874 (when she met the aforementioned Marianne Brocklehurst).

In 1882 Amelia launched the Egypt Exploration Fund with Reginald Stuart Poole of the British Museum and subsequently undertook extensive lecture tours to raise both awareness and funds for her new society. The appointment of Local Honorary Secretaries would similarly raise funds and advocate for the EEF in their own localities, a scheme revived in 2018 as the ‘Local Ambassadors’ program headed by Prof Joann Fletcher.

One of the first such appointments was Annie Barlow, who became the EEF’s Local Honorary Secretary for Bolton, and was already forwarding subscriptions by July 1883. Examination of the Fund’s financial reports reveal Barlow’s importance. Through her brother John Robert Barlow’s connections, she brought in wealthy business owners and institutions across the north-west, while her brother Thomas’ social circle also gave her access to wealthy individuals and institutions in the south. The Fund’s excavations at sites relating to Biblical archaeology enabled Barlow to attract religiously minded individuals. Within her own family, her siblings and father all subscribed individually to the fund to the tune of almost £14 annually, the equivalent of well over £1,100 in today’s money.

Barlow’s fundraising accounted for more than 10 percent of the EEF’s entire UK subscription income in certain years, an astonishing amount when considering she was only one of over thirty Local Honorary Secretaries (EEF 1889). She regularly gave lectures and organized exhibitions promoting the Fund in museums, libraries, and church halls, including for other groups in which she was an active member, such as the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society. Amelia Edwards, Margaret Murray, William Matthew Flinders Petrie, and Reginald Stuart Poole provided notes and excavation reports, which she combined with her personal interests and her family’s background in textile production. At one lecture in October 1889, she “read a paper on a recent visit to some of the explorations in Egypt. [It was] illustrated by diagrams and views . . . and [she] gave a graphic account of the work which for the last six years has been carried out by the Egypt Exploration Fund” (Sutton 1890). This presentation was not dissimilar to a series of seven papers she published between 1889 and 1890 in The Wesley Naturalist entitled ‘Five Years Work in the Nile Delta’ (Barlow 1888a, 1888b, 1888c, 1888d, 1889a, 1889b, 1889c).

Surviving pieces of ancient textile from Barlow’s personal collection, now in Bolton Museum, reveal Barlow’s systems of organization and her diligent recording of important contextual and interpretative information. Multiple cards, each with identical swatches and descriptions of their provenance, use, material, and production, could be easily dispersed around an audience as “handling devices,” possibly one of the earliest such creations (Figure 3).

Notably, the name of Barlow’s brother John Robert also appears. As director of the family textile business, he was in the best financial position to support EEF work, and best placed to describe the production details of textiles. However, his time would have been valuable, leaving Barlow to take the lead in fundraising and advocating, an ongoing endeavor, something that continues at the museum to this day. At a visit to the Chadwick Museum in 1895 by the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society, in which she “[added] much to the instruction and pleasure of the company by a lucid account of the objects,” it was noted that the group was “not aware previously that Bolton possessed so many objects of interest and of such unique value.” (Sutton 1896).

Barlow’s fundraising efforts did not just benefit the Bolton collection but other museums too, including the nearby Manchester Museum. From 1887 Manchester had had its own Local Honorary Secretary, Marianne Haworth, wife of Bolton-born Manchester textile magnate Jesse Haworth. Both Barlow and Haworth respected their own catchment districts in terms of EEF subscribers. The close geographical proximity of Bolton and Manchester, and Barlow’s considerable patronage of the Bolton Museum, may have influenced Haworth’s decision to support the Manchester collections rather than that of his birth town, inadvertently diverting further excavation material from entering Bolton’s collections. Yet Barlow was not parochial in nature. Following Jesse Haworth’s death in 1921, Haworth left the EES committee and from then on Barlow, recognizing the subsequent loss to Manchester, started to divide her patronage between the two regions.

The funds she and others raised progressed excavations in Egypt, in turn resulting in the partage of material to UK museums. This is something Barlow took a particularly close interest in, together with the development of the museum at Bolton. Built between 1878 and 1882, and opening in 1884, the Chadwick Museum benefitted from early participation in EEF subscriptions and finds division. Barlow persuaded most of her subscribers to direct their donations through Bolton, resulting in an extraordinarily large series of donations to Bolton Museum which now holds around 12,000 objects from Egypt and Sudan, making it the largest collection of such material in a local authority museum in the UK. Barlow also gave direct funding for specific objects, including a pair of columns from the temple of Herishef at Heracleoplis Magna. Writing to the EEF in October 1889, Barlow explains that: “Miss Edwards wrote to ask me if I could get a block subscribed for in Bolton. My brothers and I decided to pay for one ourselves for the museum. I collected £20 for a second” (Unpublished letter, Bolton Museum), the equivalent of around £2000 today.

Bolton also has one of the largest collections of ancient Egyptian textiles in the world. It has long been assumed, and even claimed by the museum itself, that the reason for such an emphasis on textiles was due to the Chadwick’s first curators, William and Thomas Midgley (the Midgleys discussed in a forthcoming article by Fletcher & Trumble). They were well known in the late C.19th and early C.20th centuries as the “go to” specialists in the analysis of ancient textiles. Flinders Petrie and Guy Brunton both sent numerous samples to Bolton, and the Midgleys wrote several independent articles on the material they studied. Both diligent curators, there is nevertheless no evidence to suggest that either were interested in textiles, ancient or otherwise, prior to their appointment. Indeed, their personal interests were cited as natural history and astronomy, which is perhaps unsurprising given the Chadwick was initially intended as a museum of natural history and they were appointed as curators before the foundation of the EEF. A more credible explanation for the bias would be the connection with the Barlows, as is stated by Barlow herself in one letter to the EES in July 1934 when discussing Thomas Midgley’s textile articles. She admits she had “started his father on the subject 50 years ago,” adding that that she was glad he was continuing in the same analytical route as his father, since he was “a most provincial lad and he has needed a great deal of pushing to get him on” (Unpublished letter, EES Archives).

With Bolton at the heart of the textile trade in the northwest, Barlow and Jones were at its forefront. Like many leaders of industry before them, they legitimized their position by demonstrating historical longevity, which could prove to be a shrewd business decision. Yet the reason for Barlow’s encouragement of textile collecting and analysis at Bolton through the EES was far more personal, stemming as it did from the pride in her own family history and her town, together with her passion for history, education, and progress.

Over the years she undoubtedly influenced hundreds of children and adults, improving their education and in turn, their social wellbeing. Yet nothing demonstrates this more clearly than the case of a single young woman, Raymonde Louisa Marie Frin, who came to the UK as a refugee from Belgium following the German invasion and occupation during the First World War. She arrived in 1914 with her parents Maria Louise and Eugene Gabriel Raymond aged just two years old. The Frins were taken in by the Barlows at the family home at Greenthorne, answering the British Government’s call for British citizens to accommodate refugees. In their time living together, Barlow built up a significant bond with Maria, and took Maria’s young daughter Raymonde under her wing.

For the young Frin, spending her formative years in Barlow’s house at Greenthorne must have been somewhat magical. Barlow’s personal collection of both Egyptology and objects from cultures around the world adorned the rooms, with gilded mummy masks atop the bookcases and Middle Kingdom block statues in the gardens, all of which must have provided endless inspiration for any child. In 1930, when she was 18, Frin studied German at the University of Vienna in Austria and then from 1931 to 1936 was enrolled at the Higher Institute of Art History and Archaeology in Brussels, Belgium. Barlow kept a close eye on Frin and tried to aid her wherever possible. When Frin completed her archaeology degree in Belgium in 1936, Barlow wrote to the EES requesting that Frin took part in the society’s excavations in Sudan that year. In the same letter she also reveals that Frin had received “three firsts and distinctions in her thesis of the highest kind,” and that as a result Prof Jean Capart, the prominent Belgian Egyptologist and curator of the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels, had asked Frin to be his assistant and that he might publish her thesis under the auspices of the museum. This would be a most promising start for the twenty-four-year-old, although Barlow did add that Frin “had not had a word of it” (Unpublished letter, EES Archives), revealing that once again she was attempting to positively influence the situation.

Following Barlow’s death in 1941, Frin went on to register at the École du Louvre and the Catholic School in Paris where she studied the History of Egyptian and Coptic Religions. In 1946 she started work for UNESCO in the Museums and Monuments Division as a Program Specialist and as the Section Head responsible for the preparation and execution of the program for museums (Unpublished documents, UNESCO Archives). In addition to her work for various museum-related publications, she became editor-in-chief of the journal MUSEUM (later Museum International). This was a publication whose aim was to document, shape and improve museums practice around the world (Frin 1998), something in which Frin excelled during her 30-year career. Raymonde Frin remained at UNESCO until she retired in 1972. Her work, like Barlow’s, was impassioned yet self-effacing. She inspired colleagues and gave her support freely, contributing to such high-profile projects as UNESCO’s International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia, which rescued the temples of Abu Simbel, Philae, Kalabsha and many others during the construction of the Aswan High Dam.

Clearly Frin’s life and career had a huge impact on the development of Egyptian archaeology, an impact made possible by the influence of the remarkable Annie Barlow. With Barlow’s passion for education and advancement continuing into the present, the collection she nurtured and developed at Bolton remains a key place for anyone studying ancient Egyptian textiles, their production, use, and development through time. Thanks to Annie Barlow, modern scientific discoveries continue to be made, one of the most notable; the world’s earliest evidence for Egyptian mummification identified on textiles within the Bolton collection in 2014 (Jones et al. 2014). As Amelia Edwards herself told the Midgleys, “I wish to add that Bolton is indebted to Miss A. E. F. Barlow, our local Honorary Secretary for that town . . . It was in consideration of the support received through Miss Barlow, from Bolton, that the committee were enabled to [give the material]” (Unpublished letter, Bolton Museum). It was therefore essential that the 2018 redevelopment of Bolton Museum’s Egyptology galleries, “Bolton’s Egypt,” featured Barlow so prominently, a specially commissioned hand-embroidered portrait (Figure 4) literally weaving together the stories of cotton, Egypt, and philanthropy. Annie Barlow’s passion and devotion to the EES, to Egypt and to Bolton, has and continues to inspire generations of children and adults both across Northwest and, although unbeknown to most, across Europe and the wider world in general.

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Figure 4.

Portrait of Annie Barlow by artist Sorrell Kerrison. Courtesy of the artist and Bolton Library and Museum Services.