Two Behind the Scenes tours of the Collections Centre, Museum and Workshop took place this week.

The tours – one for Beaulieu One Hundred members and their guests, and the other for Lloyd’s Motor Club members, were a great success and thoroughly enjoyed by everyone who came.

Lloyd’s Motor Club, who had a large number of their members come through a year ago were a captivated audience. Fascinated by the size of the collection in the Reference Library fronted by Caroline Johnson and Patrick Collins; mesmerised by the old film footage shown to them by Sarah Wyatt in the Film and Video department and blown away by nuggets of information about the preservation of our Photographic collection as told to them by Mandy Schaller and Tim Woodcock and then it was down into the basement to meet up with Gail Stewart Bye – Curator of Objects – who lets people open drawers and discover what incredible objects lie within. This culminated with a great finale in the workshop where Chief Engineer and Museum Manager Doug Hill held them captive with all the jobs on the go in the small workshop, finally knocking their socks off with a great engine start up.

We finally managed to prise them away for some lovely lunch where they wanted to show their appreciation and made an on the spot donation to the Trusts adopt a book scheme. After lunch they went back into the museum and lost themselves amongst all the exhibits.

We have had a lovely letter from John H about the great day where he says…

“ Just a short note as promised to provide my contact details but more importantly ..thank you, Patrick, Dominic, Doug & your other colleagues for a truly  great day yesterday. I feel the only adjective appropriate is ‘Passionate’….”

And a great tweet from James Pepe, who made the tour in the nick of time!

Thank you both!