The Castle Museum celebrates its 80th birthday this weekend. STEPHEN LEWIS remembers the man who began it all

JOHN Kirk was, by all accounts, a very good doctor. The Pickering GP was hugely well-respected by the rural patients he used to visit while doing his rounds.

But he was also known for something else: as an inveterate collector of interesting objects he called 'bygones'. These were everyday objects - horse bridles, milking stools, apple corers, snuff boxes, bottle corkers, insurance company firemarks and even police truncheons - which he felt represented a way of life that was fast disappearing as the Victorian age drew to a close.

So keen was he to build up his collection that, from the 1890s onwards, he began asking patients if he could have interesting objects he spotted about their homes - often offering to take them in lieu of payment.

"He became quite notorious!" says Katie Brown, assistant curator of history at the Castle Museum in York.

"In fact people would sometimes hide their objects if they knew he was coming!" adds the museum's interpretations and contents manager, Helen Langwick.

Dr Kirk's patients no doubt looked on his eccentricity indulgently, given that he was such a good doctor.

And today we have much to thank him for. Because the collection he built up over a period of more than 20 years formed the basis of what is today the Castle Museum.

Dr Kirk first filled his house in Houndgate, Pickering. When the collection outgrew that, he moved it to the town's Memorial Hall.

But he was never really satisfied with the way his collection was looked after there, says Katie. So towards the end of his life he began looking around for somewhere else that would preserve his collection properly for posterity. He even went to far as to place two adverts in a museums journal.

Initially, he favoured moving his collection to Whitby. But then JB Morrell, the York author, historian, conservationist and former Lord Mayor, caught wind of the collection.

He persuaded the city council to buy the then-empty former female prison at the Eye of York to house Dr Kirk's collection as a museum of everyday life.

It was the mid-1930s. The walls of the Victorian prison in York had just been pulled down, opening the Eye of York up to public view for the first time in more than a century. The female prison seemed the ideal location for a museum.

Dr Kirk was nothing if not a perfectionist. He was by this time quite ill - he was to die in 1940, just a couple of years after the museum opened - yet he oversaw every aspect of the conversion of the prison, to make sure things were just how he wanted them.

"He used to sleep until lunchtime, then come down and supervise the fitting out," says Helen.

The plan was for the new museum to house Dr Kirk's collection, displayed in traditional display cases. But the doctor's vision went much further than that.

He had visited Skansen in Sweden, where he had come across a museum unlike anything in his native country. And he was determined to reproduce something similar here.

His new museum in the female prison, therefore, included a series of rooms furnished in the style of different periods through English history.

And it also included a recreation of an entire Victorian street - the 'street' we know today as Kirkgate.

This was constructed in what had been the exercise yard of the old female prison, which was roofed over. And, as usual, Dr Kirk was on hand to ensure everything was done properly.

The new museum officially opened on April 23, 1938. There had been a display in the art gallery beforehand, which clearly created something of a buzz. On opening day, queues snaked down the steps of the female prison (now the entrance to the new museum), past Clifford's Tower, and up the street beyond.

It is not surprising that there was so much interest, says Helen Langwick: the museum was like nothing that had ever been seen in the UK before.

Yes, there were traditional display cabinets. But there was so much more. "It was a living history museum, which was quite visionary," she says. "He gave people something that they could really understand and relate to."

Dr Kirk always worried about what would become of his collection after his death.

He needn't have done so. The Castle Museum remains one of the most popular attractions in York. Since it opened, more than 32 million people have been through its doors.

That's a very large and appreciative audience for an eccentric country doctor's collection.

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Eighty years on from the day the Castle Museum first opened, it will be celebrating Dr Kirk's vision in style this weekend.

A new display showcases some of the original objects on show when Dr Kirk opened the museum - including York's earliest umbrella, with a bone handle shaped like a serpent's head; the world's oldest printed Valentine's card; and vases donated by Queen Mary.

There will be re-enactors in Kirkgate playing the parts of both Dr Kirk and Violet Rodgers, one of the museum's first curators. A new scale model has been commissioned to reveal the intricate details of the prison building which became a museum. There will be a series of guided walks and craft activities, including chocolate making in the kitchen studio. And a time capsule containing everyday objects from our age will be placed into the museum's stores, to be opened 80 years from now. "So in 80 years time, people will be able to see what our lives were like today," says Helen Langwick.

Just imagine what York - and Dr Kirk's museum - might look like then, in 2098...