Staithes Museum Newsletter February 2026

Dear all,

Please find linked here this month’s Staithes Museum newsletter. A text-only version can be found below this message.

There’s lots happening in March — from visiting speakers and community workshops to our ongoing projects behind the scenes. You’ll find details about upcoming talks, the SCOTO Press Pause workshop, our developing 1851 map project, and reflections on recent museum activities.

As always, thank you for your continued support, enthusiasm, and involvement. The museum’s work is very much a shared effort, and we’re grateful to have such an engaged community around us. If you enjoy receiving this newsletter (350 of you and counting!), please consider sending the museum a donation, to help keep us running through these quiet, but no less busy, winter months!

We hope you enjoy the read — and look forward to seeing you at one of this month’s events.

With best wishes,

Staithes Museum

Hello and welcome to our February newsletter! With 2501 visitors this month, we’ve beaten last year by 10%, and we’ve enjoyed the blue skies in the last week of the month! Soon the seagulls will be back to squawking at visitors, and the Easter holidays are just around the corner...

📅 Calendar of Dates

Here’s a round-up of everything happening this month:

Saturday 14 March - After 1pm

Photo Day at the museum

Tuesday 17th March – 2pm

Visit from the High Sheriff of North Yorkshire (rearranged date)

Thursday March 19 - 6pm

Volunteers meeting and trustees meeting

Sunday 22nd March – Morning

Meet Adam Chadwick at Staithes Museum and chat about his new book on the Staithes artists

Sunday 22nd March - 1:30 pm

SCOTO Press Pause Workshop - Community tourism workshop facilitated by SCOTO

Staithes in Photographs – Community Photo Day

On Saturday 14th March after 1pm, we’re hosting a special Staithes in Photographs day at the museum — a relaxed, informal celebration of village life captured on camera.

Over the past year, we’ve been incredibly fortunate to receive two generous donations of historic photographs: a substantial collection from Mr Shipley (kindly supported by Anne in helping us with the donation), now digitised and added to the collection, and the wonderful Grant McKee photograph collection, donated by Jill Turton. Jill will be joining us at a similar event next month, when we’ll focus more closely on Grant’s photographs and the stories within them.

For this first photo day, we’ll be sharing newly digitised images on our touchscreen and as a rolling slideshow throughout the day. They include family scenes, lifeboat crews, carnivals, shops, streets, steps, and everyday moments — many partially identified, and many waiting for someone to say, “That’s my auntie,” or “That’s our front garden before the wall was altered.”

The aim is simple: to put the photographs back in front of the community they belong to. We’ll be inviting visitors to help us identify people, places and events, and to share memories that we can carefully record alongside the images. Without that local knowledge, much of this detail would quietly disappear.

There’ll be tea, coffee, conversation — and, where copyright allows, visitors can request a printed copy of a photograph for 50p to take home.

It’s not a formal exhibition or a research session — just a gentle, welcoming day of looking, remembering, and recognising familiar faces together.

We’d love to see you there.

Fisherfolk and Free Spirits – Taking Staithes on Tour

This month I’ve been invited to give two talks — one at Guisborough Library and another to the Kirkby & Broughton WI — which means Staithes Museum is going on a little outing of its own.

The talk is called, “Fisherfolk and Free Spirits: Stories from Staithes in Laura Knight’s Time.”

It’s all about Staithes at the turn of the twentieth century — the fishing village that so captivated a young Laura Knight. But rather than focusing only on canvases and compositions, I’ll be talking about the people she lived alongside: fisherwives with formidable opinions, shopkeepers with sharp memories, sailors, children, and the wonderfully eccentric mix of characters who made the village what it was.

And I’ll be taking a few objects with me, to help bring some of the stories to life. 

One of the stories I’ll be telling (with the help of the scales from Roe’s shop) is about the barber of Barbers Yard.

Before Christmas, Jackie Roe-Lawton came into the museum to record her family stories. Her family arrived in Staithes in 1679 and, as she says, “stayed.” She told me the story of her grandfather, a man with a mind that "worked around corners" and owned a property portfolio that would make a modern estate agent weep with joy. His name was John Henry Roe, and he is the reason the village still has a place called Barber’s Yard.

The Mason Who Bought the Village

John Henry started out as a master mason, building sturdy bridges around the area, including one still standing at Dalehouse. He was apparently so good at his job—or at least so good at collecting the fee—that he eventually amassed enough wealth to buy up about a third of the village.

A Very Shaky Career Change

As the years rolled by, John Henry’s eyesight began to fail and his hands developed a bit of a wobble. Naturally, he did what any man with failing vision and unsteady hands would do: he decided to become a barber.

He set up shop at the bottom of the yard that now bears his name. It was a "rough-and-ready" kind of place where a young boy (Jackie’s father) could earn a hard-won penny a week emptying the shop's spittoons.

"A Kite’s a Stomach"

John Henry was a formidable character, and the local children were rightly terrified of him. One day, two brave (or perhaps just optimistic) boys found a battered, broken kite on the beach. They knocked on his door and offered it to him, nervously declaring it to be "because my Dad says you have the biggest kite in Staithes". John Henry's deadpan response was simply: "A kite’s a stomach". (In Staithes dialect, "kite" or was indeed a word for stomach, making the pair of boys either very brave or very foolish,  and Jackie very amused when she read my post about her great granddad’s massive belly).

Banking at the Black Lion

John Henry was also a man who enjoyed his refreshments. As alcohol took a firmer hold of him, he developed a unique banking system: he would reportedly take the deeds to the houses he owned and leave them behind the bar at the Black Lion. By the end of his life, he had whittled his empire down to just a few remaining properties.

The Final Masterstroke

Even on his deathbed, John Henry’s "mind that worked around corners" was still sharp. He had three daughters who were famously cantankerous and couldn't stand to be in the same room as one another. Knowing this, he left his remaining houses to them in a way that required them to cooperate and visit a solicitor together to claim or sell them.

He knew perfectly well they would never do it. His daughters spent the rest of their lives in the village, refusing to give an inch to one another, which was exactly what he wanted—to keep his family rooted in Staithes.

Staithes in 1851 – Mapping the Village

Very exciting news — thanks to the North York Moors National Park, our second shop is being transformed into a new seating, meeting and multimedia room. It’s going to be a space for meetings, conversations, Bill Hinchley’s new Staithes village tour, and (inevitably) a fair bit of enthusiastic pointing at old photographs.

As part of the refurbishment, I’ve been asked to create something rather special:  a map of Staithes in 1851.

Not a modern map with old-fashioned font — but a proper attempt to show who lived where, and where the businesses were, in the middle of the nineteenth century.

How do you rebuild a village on paper?

Bill and I have been deep in the archives, cross-referencing old maps with the 1851 census, squinting at street names (or the absence of them), and trying to match households to buildings. It turns out Victorian enumerators were not always thinking about museum curators in 2026.

I’ve also put a call out on Facebook to our local community — because if there’s one thing we’ve learned, it’s that local knowledge fills the gaps that official records leave behind. Nicknames, yard names, shop locations — they often survive in memory long after they disappear from paper.

Why 1851?

1851 is a wonderful snapshot year. The census includes the people’s professions, and photography was just beginning to emerge. Staithes was still very much a working fishing village — decades before the artists arrived in force, and long before tourism reshaped parts of its economy.

Mapping that moment allows us to show visitors that the village wasn’t just picturesque — it was industrious, noisy, hardworking, and densely populated.

What’s emerging so far…

The 1851 census paints a vivid picture of a village that was busy, crowded, and deeply tied to the sea.

Fishing families dominated, of course — mariners, fishermen, apprentice boys living with skippers. But alongside them were:

• Dressmakers and tailors

• Grocers and general dealers

• Joiners and masons

• Publicans

• Shopkeepers operating from front rooms

• Widows running households

• Children everywhere

Some properties held multiple families; some households took in lodgers. The yards — those tight, twisting offshoots of the main street — were already full of life.

One of the fascinating challenges is identifying where businesses were operating. A “grocer” might simply be listed in the census, but not the shop’s precise position. So we compare census order (which often followed the enumerator’s walking route) with historic maps and surviving building footprints to make educated guesses.

It’s a bit like historical detective work. With lots of cups of coffee.

What this will become

Once finished, the map will live in the new video room — helping visitors quite literally place people back into the landscape.

Imagine sitting in the new space and being able to imagine how enormous and tightly packed the community really was. It turns history from something abstract into something spatial and human.

And if our Facebook community continues to add their knowledge (which I very much hope they will), the map won’t just be a historical reconstruction — it will be a collaboration between archives and living memory.

If anyone fancies a go with the census and map while we tie ourselves in knots about which house was which… the kettle will be on.

Apprenticeship Reflection – Who Are Our Stakeholders?

One of the questions we’ve been discussing in my apprenticeship recently is deceptively simple: who are the museum’s stakeholders?

Is it our volunteers, who give their time, care for the collection and bring it to life every day? Is it the local community, whose history we preserve and celebrate? Is it our visitors? Or is it, in some quiet way, the metaphorical ghost of Reg Firth — whose vision for a museum rooted in Staithes we still feel responsible to honour? Maybe it’s everyone in the whole country, who would all be a little poorer if the museum stopped existing. Perhaps it is all of them and more.

Thinking about this made me reflect on how we actively strengthen our local community’s position as stakeholders — not just as visitors, but as people who feel the museum belongs to them.

Two small projects grew out of that reflection.

The first was the Staithes Dialect colouring worksheet. Inspired by Stanley Umpleby’s dialect books and poems, I adapted an old Sutcliffe photograph of the village into a colouring page, adding animals and objects labelled with their dialect names. Before printing, I asked Bill and John to check it over — and John very firmly corrected me: in Staithes it’s a “pot”, not a “creel”. That small distinction matters. It’s exactly the sort of detail that reminds us that knowledge lives  on in the village, not just in books.

The second project was our half-term social media series, “Can You Spot in Staithes…?” Each post connected an object in the museum to a place in the village — from the old Holiday Fellowship camp to the Royal George, from Captain Pinder to corners people walk past every day. The idea was simple: to encourage people to see the whole village as part of the museum’s story, and the museum as part of the village’s living memory.

Both projects were modest, but they were attempts to gently widen and strengthen that circle of stakeholders — inviting local people not just to look at history, but to recognise themselves within it. And Can you spot in Staithes…? Is our most successful social media series yet - getting 77,000 views over the half term weeks. 

If you’d like to see all of the half-term “Can you spot…?” stories, you can find them on the museum blog here: [link]. I’ve even added in some of the fascinating comments we received!

Meet Adam Chadwick at Staithes Museum

We’re excited to share that Adam Chadwick — art historian and author — will be visiting Staithes Museum on Sunday 22nd March, the day after his talk in Whitby on Saturday 21st March.

Adam’s new book — Staithes: Life, Light and Landscape — is the first major study in years of the Staithes artist colony (c. 1870–1910), exploring how painters along our coast captured village life, fishing scenes, and landscape, and how that work fits into wider artistic networks and influences. The book also highlights the international connections of Staithes artists and includes rich imagery and insight into their work.

On Sunday morning (22nd March) Adam will be at the museum, and if you’d like to come in and chat to him about his book and the artists of Staithes, please do pop by! Whether you’re curious about the painters who made Staithes famous, or want to hear how Adam uncovered stories in archives and artworks, it promises to be a fascinating conversation.

All are welcome — drop in and say hello!

Press Pause in Staithes – A Conversation About Tourism and Community

We’re pleased to share that Staithes will be hosting a Press Pause® community tourism workshop, facilitated by Scottish Community Tourism Network (SCOTO). And we, as a tourist destination and part of the community, have been invited to join in. 

This is a half-day, structured and professionally facilitated session designed to bring local residents, community groups, and visitor-related businesses around the same table to talk about tourism — calmly, constructively, and productively.

And we’d warmly encourage local people and volunteers to come along if you’re interested.

What is Press Pause®?

The idea is simple but powerful.

Communities “press pause” on business-as-usual tourism conversations and take time to reflect together:

• What’s working well in Staithes?

• What isn’t working?

• What pressures are we feeling?

• What kind of visitors do we want to attract?

• What makes Staithes unique?

• What could we realistically improve?

This isn’t a protest meeting or a town-hall debate. It’s a facilitated workshop, designed to keep discussion balanced, forward-looking, and solutions-focused. SCOTO specialises in helping communities explore tourism in ways that centre local wellbeing — not just visitor numbers.

At the end of the process, SCOTO produces an easy-to-read destination appraisal and a set of practical recommendations shaped by the community’s input.

Why does this matter?

Tourism is part of Staithes’ life — economically, socially and culturally. But tourism isn’t just about footfall. Academic research into community-led tourism shows that when local people are actively involved in shaping tourism, outcomes are stronger:

• Communities report greater pride and cohesion

• Heritage feels valued rather than exploited

• Visitors have richer, more meaningful experiences

• Economic benefits are more likely to stay local

When tourism is rooted in participation and local identity, it becomes something shared — not something imposed.

What will be discussed?

Typical Press Pause sessions explore:

• Tourism strengths and positive contributions

• Challenges such as pressure on housing, traffic, seasonal crowding or service strain

• Visitor profiles — who comes now, and who might be encouraged

• Place identity and branding — what truly defines Staithes

• Practical next steps for local action

It’s not about “winning” arguments. It’s about building a clearer, community-shaped picture of what success looks like for Staithes.

Why the museum is involved

Staithes Museum’s mission is to increase pride and connection to  local culture. We welcome visitors because they are interested in Staithes’ real history — its fishing heritage, geology, artists and families. More, through:

• Free school visits

• Social media storytelling

• Supporting local craft makers in the shop

• Family history support

• Community events

…the museum tries to ensure tourism strengthens community identity rather than diluting it.

An invitation

If you are:

• A local resident

• A volunteer

• Part of a community group

• A holiday cottage owner

• A business owner

• Or simply someone who cares about Staithes’ future

…you are welcome to attend.

It’s a chance to speak — and just as importantly, to listen.

Tourism affects all of us in different ways, and this is an opportunity to explore that together in a thoughtful, facilitated setting.

If you’d like more information about the date, time and booking details, please get in touch with the museum — we’ll be happy to share them. Let’s press pause — and think about what we want Staithes to look like, not just next summer, but in years to come.

The Guardian of the Fleet: The Journey of a Staithes Lucky Stone

In the fiercely independent seafaring community of Staithes, survival at sea was never taken for granted. To navigate the treacherous North Sea, fishermen relied on more than just their legendary seamanship; they carried traditions intended to ward off misfortune. Among the most enduring of these was the practice of fastening a "lucky stone" to the inwire of a coble.

The Lore of the lucky stone

Locally known in the dialect as a "lucky-steean”, these objects are small stones featuring a natural perforation. These stones were traditionally picked up under the Staithes cliffs, particularly around the scaurs of Cowbar and Penny Nab. The distinctive holes in these shale and limestone rocks are often the work of the piddock, a very interesting boring mollusc that drills into the soft stone. Once fastened into the framework of a coble, the stone became a permanent part of the vessel’s luck.

A Legacy of Success: The Story of the Prosperity

The story of one particular lucky stone begins with the Prosperity, a Staithes Yawl (or "big boat") that represented the height of the village's deep-sea fishing era. The Prosperity was a family vessel, owned by Richard Cole and skippered by his son, John Carlin Cole (our John Cole’s great-grandfather). Inside the yawl was a lucky stone. In Prosperity,  it was always in the cabin. 

Yawls like the Prosperity were the heavyweights of the Staithes fleet, often reaching over 50 feet in length. They served as "mother ships" for the smaller cobles. During the spring and summer, the Prosperity would sail to the Dogger Bank for "overlining," where the crew sought cod, halibut, and turbot. These voyages were demanding; the crew often stayed at sea for days, landing their catches at Hartlepool or North Shields (and sometimes Staithes)  before returning to Staithes for the Sabbath.

From the Prosperity to the Pilot Me

Traditions in Staithes were passed down with the same care as the boats themselves. John Cole recounts how his father gave him the lucky stone that had originally belonged to his great-grandfather’s yawl, Prosperity. When the yawls were eventually sold on — many men turning instead to ploshers and mules as deep-sea fishing declined — the stone was carefully removed and fixed into his plosher, also called Prosperity.

Later, when the herring fishing came to an end, it was transferred again, this time into a winter potting and lining coble named John’s. On retirement, the stone passed to John’s father and was placed in his boat, Spindrift. When Spindrift was sold, the lucky stone finally came ashore, ending up in John’s house.

But its seafaring days were not quite over. When John went out with Bill in the Pilot Me, they took the stone with them once more — a quiet continuation of generations of habit and hope. After that, its whereabouts became uncertain. John still remembers exactly where he last placed it and says he would recognise it immediately: small, well-handled, and thick with layers of old boat paint — carrying, perhaps, a little of Staithes’ maritime luck within it still.