Deal Maritime and Local History Museum

Deal Maritime and Local History Museum

Deal Maritime and Local History Museum
22 St George's Road
Deal
Kent
CT14 6BA

Tel: 01304 373 684
E-Mail: info@dealmuseum.co.uk

Web: Deal Maritime and Local History Museum

About Deal Maritime and Local History Museum

The Deal Maritime & Local History Museum is situated in the heart of Deal, just off the High Street, behind Deal Town Hall, which was built in 1803, and opposite St George’s Church and the Chapel Field.

The museum is housed on one of the last industrial sites left in Deal, showing the way in which commercial and domestic property developed next to one another from the seventeenth century onwards in what was known as the ‘New’ Town of Lower Deal. St George’s Road and the workshop complex was built on what was originally market gardens, producing the fresh produce needed to victual the Fleet lying in the Downs off Deal. In the mid nineteenth century the site became a series of workshops, with the owner living in the cottage next door. In 1867 Willard Sawyer built and stored his velocipedes, (the forerunner of the bicycle), in the front building, (he lived further up the road with his photographer son when they moved to Deal from Dover). A woodworking workshop on the second floor built ladders for the hop fields surrounding the town, taken out through the first floor doorway across the Chapel Field. Later it became stores for vegetables and then an ironmongers/builders merchant, finally becoming a garage before the site was donated to the Museum Trust by a generous benefactor.

The wealth of Deal, Walmer and Kingsdown’s history limits display space. The Maritime Gallery on the ground floor houses many artefacts from the town’s impressive maritime history when it developed after Henry VIII built his three defensive castles, Sandown, Deal and Walmer along the foreshore, and it was safe for the famously skilled Deal boatmen to live closer to the sea and supply the ships which could then safely lay off in the Downs and wait for favourable winds, with fresh water, fresh produce, mail, cargo and passengers. A figurehead, ship’s bell and the only two known examples of carved spar boards from owner of the Cutty Sark ‘White Hat’ Willis’s ships, who lived in Deal, are on display, with a magnificent collection of model boats including the earliest known example of a working model boat. Also the Deal galley Saxon King, built in 1891 and one of the oldest remaining Deal built boats, a large collection of lifebelts and jackets, with many photographs and paintings of Deal, Walmer and Kingsdown’s lifeboats and crews, illustrating the many instances of the local boatmen’s skill and commitment to lifesaving over the years as well as their long tradition of smuggling, with information on the Naval Yard which employed so many townspeople are displayed. There are photographs and paintings of some of the more famous ships that have been wrecked off Deal and Walmer’s shores, including accounts from those lucky mariners who survived the Great Storm of 1703 which gave rise to Defoe’s famous slur on the boatmen of the town, so vigorously defended by the Mayor Thomas Powell.

A display of Royal Marine memorabilia of uniforms and photographs includes personal property belonging to one of the eleven Marines murdered in 1989, with other material from the three military barracks and Royal Naval Hospital, which later became the Royal Marines School of Music. Some of the photographs shown throughout the gallery are by world famous Deal born-and-bred photographer Harold Chapman. Deal is not a Cinque Port itself, merely a ‘limb’ or supporting town, but is home to the official residence of the Lord Warden of the Cinque