Titled William Smith: The Family Man, the exhibition focuses on the personal life of Smith, who was born in Churchill in 1769. Highlights include a sketch of his mother, drawn by Smith from memory, and facsimile extracts and transcriptions of unpublished personal correspondence between Smith and his niece, Anne Phillips and nephew, the geologist John Phillips, between 1819 and 1839.
The letters, drawn from the archives at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, highlight the personal side of Smith’s life, demonstrate his lifelong loyalty to his birthplace and reveal the close and loving relationship he maintained with his niece and nephew until his death in 1839.
A visit to Churchill also provides an opportunity to examine other Smith memorabilia, including a plaque that marks the site of the house on Churchill Road where Smith was born; the monolith made of local stone erected in at the top of Hastings Hill in 1831 by the 3rd Earl of Ducie that honours William Smith as the ‘Father of British Geology’, and the exterior of the All Saints Church, the parish church where, in 1831, Smith describes how he and his brothers ‘had the grace of presenting their bald heads in one Pew … in supplications to their maker’.
For more information about the Exhibition, which opens on Saturday, 26th March and runs until 25th September, see the Events page.
For further information about William Smith and the heritage centre see: www.churchillheritage.org.uk