Syms, Mr C. B. Pratt, the Borough Librarian and the Principal of the West
Ham Technical College.
Subsequently, the amicable relations with West Ham Borough led to the
most important change in the Club's history. On 21 May 1956 was signed an
Agreement, beyond but not invalidating the original agreement of 1898,
whereby, in non-legal outline, the Borough undertook to provide a properly
paid, full-time Curator of the Club's Collections, to adminster the Museum at
Stratford and to relieve the then Librarian to the Club, Mr Hall Crouch, who
had served for 21 years, by taking most of the books in the Club Library into the
charge of the Librarian at the public Reference Library (with suitable
safeguards and access for all Club members): The Passmore Edwards Museum
and its collections and library to be vested in a Board of Governors, four ap-
pointed by the Borough, three by the Club and one by the Museums
Association. This arrangement enabled the Museum to be under the
curatorship of Mr Kenneth Marshall, who was appointed by the Governors in
August 1956, and it has worked admirably. Mr Marshall's illness, and death
later in 1966, made the installation of a new Curator urgent and Mr Ian Robert-
son was appointed in May 1966; he has remained in charge ever since.
Under his care, and with the guidance of the Governors, the reputation of
the Passmore Edwards Museum has grown to at least nation-wide proportions,
and the staff and their skilled scientific work have greatly extended the value of
the Museum, beyond anything which the early curators could have dreamed
possible with their limited resources, although all that has been accomplished
since their time has been built with great care and skill upon the foundations
laid by them.
POST-WAR AND THE FUTURE
The Second World War (1939-45) was a time of great difficulty for small
organisations like ours but despite frequent bombing attacks in the neigh-
bourhood of Stratford, meetings continued to be held nearby in Woodford on
Saturday afternoons in Winter, but field meetings were necessarily restricted. It
is interesting to recall that it was the airship raids on London in the First World
War, which seem so puny to us today, the led to the pre-1914 Winter meetings,
then held on Saturday evenings, being changed to Saturday afternoons, which
practice has obtained since 1915.
Soon after the last War, Mr Percy Thompson, who had undertaken
temporarily the additional burden of Treasurership, in the absence of the writer
of these notes on War Service, found that he must relinquish the offices of
Secretary, Editor and Curator, as already described on page 10. The many
changes to which this led, some of which had been foreshadowed but not put
into practice until the 1956 Agreement with West Ham, have already been
described. In many cases the Specialist Groups arranged their own field
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