OPENING OF THE ESSEX MUSEUM, ETC. 321
Club, the Staff of the Institute, and inhabitants of the Borough
and their friends) awaited the arrival of Lady Warwick in the
Museum building.2
Her Ladyship arrived just after six o'clock, and was con-
ducted by the Mayor (Alderman R. White) to the first floor of
the Museum. Accompanying His Worship were Mr. Passmore
Edwards, Councillor F. H. Billows, J.P. (Chairman of the
Technical Institute and Libraries Committee), Mr. David
Howard, J.P. (President of the Essex Field Club) and many
others.
The Mayor, on behalf of the burgesses, the West Ham Town Council,
and the Essex Field Club, welcomed her Ladyship and Mr. Passmore
Edwards, who had graciously accepted the invitation to open the Museum
and Institute. (Applause.) He called upon Mr. David Howard to make a
statement and to ask the Countess to declare the Museum open.
Mr. Howard said that twenty-one years ago the Field Club was started
for the study of natural history and similar scientific pursuits in the county of
Essex. In the course of their work they had got together collections of con-
siderable interest, but which were unavailable because they lay in rooms,
cellars, cupboards, and packing boxes. They could not show these specimens
to the public, and the Field Club desired that they should be able to exhibit
the results of arduous labour. A point ot importance was that the student
would now have the Museum to refer to, and it must also be noticed that the
members of the Club had contributed generously from their own private
collections so that they should be laid open for public use and for the public
benefit. They all thanked Mr. Passmore Edwards for his magnificent gener-
osity—(loud applause)—and for the manner in which the subject had been
wisely approached by the Town Council of the Borough. The collections
which they had there were only a beginning ; do not let them think they
were completed. The more one worked the more completion appeared a
long way off. He thought enough had already been given and put before
them to show how very important to different students that Museum was,
and how much more it would prove to be. They were asking the Countess
of Warwick to open the Museum because of the great interest which she took
in education of all kinds, not only of the kind before them, but of other of more
practical and modern application. He asked her to open the Museum. (Loud
applause.)
Mr. S. B. Russell, the architect, presented her Ladyship with a richly
ornamented key of the Museum enclosed in a casket.
Lady Warwick considered it a great honour, as well as a pleasure, to have
been asked to come and declare that Museum open. In common with other
Essex people the welfare of the county lay very close to her heart, and she
2 We are indebted to the excellent report in the West Ham Guardian of October 20th for
the main portions of our account of the opening, supplemented by the reports in the South
Essex Mail, the Essex Times and other papers.—Ed.