Happy Birthday Ilfracombe Museum - Dave Griffin

Explorer and traveller Mervyn Palmer fulfilled a lifelong dream in August, 1932, when he founded Ilfracombe Museum, and that glorious collection of antiquities continues to grow.

The building occupies the laundry rooms of the former Ilfracombe Hotel. What a savage act of official vandalism its 1976 demolition was by unimaginative council bureaucrats who cared little for our town.

Little has changed. At its recent birthday party, museum trustee Nick Mollart presented Palmer’s son, Stephen, with lifetime membership, a gift recognising his immense contribution to one of Ilfracombe’s oldest and much-loved institutions.

BBC Devon’s Spotlight news featured the museum’s anniversary and the vast number of curiosities it preserves, some of them world-famous.

Volunteers staff the front desk, but its curators, Lindsay Armstrong, Abi Obene and Ruth Warren maintain with care and professionalism its precious treasures.

Ilfracombe museum came just second to London’s Natural History Museum in BBC’s Blue Peter competition to find viewers’ favourite collections, and every visit is a journey of discovery.

Unsurprisingly, it gets no funds whatsoever from local government and relies upon admission fees and sales of high quality merchandise from its gift shop.

Every Ilfracombe resident should buy a £10 annual ticket, entitling them to twelve months of unlimited visits. It’s an absolute bargain, and an ideal gift.

Warning: Only the bravest open the second drawer of the cabinet opposite the butterflies.

Now, what was that I said about refugees?

It would be an indulgence to spend too many words on reader Nigel McNeilly’s vituperative letter to the Gazette (July 27th). His fears that I nurture a malign, subconscious desire to mow down inconsiderate three-abreast cyclists are groundless.

He’s anxious, too, that when I’m not venting my spleen by tailgating elderly tourists travelling at 27mph, I’m a serial speedster. Perhaps I should bask in flattery following his forensic examination of my recent columns.

Such leisure time he has. Nevertheless, I am compelled to take issue with his assertion that my attitude towards migrants is ‘beneath contempt’ following his baseless accusation that last month I ‘made fun’ of desperate refugees. I did nothing of the kind.

Rather, I would refer him to his apparently mislaid Gazettes dated February 23rd and March 30th. In the former, I described and praised the work of the Pickwell Foundation, a Devon-based organisation striving to find work and accommodation for asylum seekers eager to benefit our economy.

In the latter, I proposed that given his concern for their plight, West Devon MP Sir Geoffrey Cox might provide space at one of his properties to Ukrainians fleeing their homeland.

If Nigel’s June 29th copy isn’t yet lining the bottom of a nearby parrot cage, may I suggest he re-read my column of that date in which I recommended with a clarity that eludes him that Britain could exploit the skills of those destined for Rwanda, rather than deport them.

I rather resent being portrayed as a racist. Like every other unpaid community columnist, I’m not here to take abuse and have my words twisted.

Sadly, there exists in Britain today a forbidding climate denying writers the opportunity to express popular opinion ‘in case it offends’. Offends who, precisely?

Regrettably, UK journalists have become subject to the grim scissor-wielding proscription as their Chinese and Russian contemporaries, whose styles are equally cramped.

We suffer the imposition of censorship in the guise of ‘moderation’ and political correctness, a corrosive and bogus doctrine that is actually fascism posing as good manners.

This poisonous mushroom cloud snuffs out freedom of speech as a suffocating inversion of public debate.

Minorities dictate to the majority as they conflate their whingeing victimhood into a thirst for power.

The tail wags the dog in a world in which criticism and satire are unacceptable jibes.

A genuinely free nation is one in which ridicule resides alongside adulation.

It is every citizen’s right to speak openly without risking prohibition or exclusion. Ancient liberties have evaporated to the extent where we think twice before opening our mouths.

We have sleepwalked into a gagocracy of our own making.