Request for help: Clement Lindley Wragge

Staffordshire County Council (Archives and Heritage) are looking into the whereabouts of any items from what was Stafford’s first museum – the Wragge museum, given to the town of Stafford by Clement Lindley Wragge (1852-1922) in 1878.  Wragge was a traveller, meteorologist and collector and was quite a character.  The collection consisted of natural history and ethnography, including items chiefly from Australia, but also southern Africa, India, Sri Lanka, Egypt, Fiji, Tahiti and New Zealand, collected during his travels.   The story of the collection since the opening of the Museum has been mixed, and nothing remained in the Stafford Museum collection when it was first fully catalogued in the early 1960s.

What remained from the ethnographic collections was given to Mr J.T. Hooper of the Totems Museum in Arundel, Sussex in 1957.  This closed in 1963 and James Hooper disposed of his collections, or returned them to Tahiti and Fiji, between 1976 and 1983.

If you know of items which have been identified as part of Wragge’s collections please can you contact Chris Copp, Senior Museums Officer at Staffordshire County Council.

chris.copp@staffordshire.gov.uk>