Lil
speaker
737 appearances
4 recordings
2 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard Apr 2025
Lil’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
It would be remiss of me not to mention another miscellaneous curiosity that made it from the museum's collection right into the pages of Robin Jarvis's book, the most wonderfully named Dr Meriwether's Tempest Prognosticator.
Looking somewhere between a maypole, an Indian temple and a macabre Victorian merry-go-round, the prognosticator consists of a carousel of leeches in glass jars, with stoppers attached by long strings to an unnecessarily ornate and gilded circular frame topped with an orb, spire and bell.
The idea was that when a storm was on its way, the leeches would wriggle their way up to the top of the jars and dislodge the stoppers, which, attached by their long strings, would ring a bell and warn of the coming tempest. Apparently, it actually worked, and Dr Meriwether was sure that his invention would be employed by ships all over the world.
But sadly, the prognosticator just did not catch on. can't imagine why but of course i was itching to get to the main event and apparently so were many other visitors seeking gory treasure amongst the maze of display cases for it was the only object with its own signage a trail of posters leading the way to the museum's unlikely prize exhibit printed fingers pointing this way to the hand of glory
a name of much fanfare which rather belies the macabre reality. You might expect the famous object to have some kind of pride of place in the museum, but actually one of the museum's charms is that no one object can claim this accolade, all curios being equal in their cluttered distribution around the premises.
I was grateful for the signage, otherwise I think I could have circled around for ages just trying to find it, unassuming as it is. Just a small glass panelled box atop yet another antique cabinet, with a board behind it displaying a few information leaflets and postcards.
At first glance, the object in the box could be mistaken for an appendage chipped off a stone statue and then dipped in mud that had dried to a dusty-looking brown crust. But look closer and it becomes clear that the hand has wrinkles around the knuckles. Tattered bits of skin fraying around pale smooth fingernails and nubby bones protruding from the wrist.
This is a real disembodied hand with quite a legend attached to it. Having known what to expect, I didn't find myself too squeamish at first, taking in the leathery flesh sunken around the finger bones. But despite my preparation, I found my stomach giving a little lurch when I spotted the addition the museum have made to help visitors fully experience the artefact.
The hand is displayed on a circular glass or plastic stand, rather like a cake stand, and underneath there is a circular mirror reflecting the underside of the object, revealing grisly ribbons of shriveled muscle and tendon strung from wrist to palm to fingertips. What on earth could be the reason for the infamy of this gory object? Did it belong to someone famous? Someone revered, perhaps? Nope.
Very much the opposite. By its very nature, this hand likely belonged to a nameless criminal. And, in fact, it was criminals who made this object their tool of choice. as the protagonists Ben and Janet find out in The Whitby Witches from their indomitable carer, as the 92-year-old Aunt Alice tells them the tale behind the Hand of Glory.
It was believed in those times that this charm, if used properly, could put to sleep an entire household, so that a thief could ransack the place without anyone stirring. which gives us a clue as to the nefarious deeds afoot when later on in Robin Jarvis's story, the hand mysteriously goes missing from the museum.
In real life, however, the hand is still safely ensconced in its little glass box, but Aunt Alice's telling of the legend is true enough.
At first glance, it's the items on top of the cabinet that catch the eye when walking past the display, especially that porcelain doll. Legs crossed jauntily, and hands resting lightly in her lap, as though she might at any moment hop down from her perch and skitter off across the floor in a swish of skirts and tippy-tap of tiny feet. D'oh!
But the main event of this display is what's inside the cabinet. A mahogany chest of dark, polished wood, intricately decorated with carvings and housing a set of wide, vertically stacked drawers. Some of the drawers are pulled open to varying degrees, showing inside a diverse collection of fascinating little objects.
Rocks, fossils, coins, jewellery, plaster casts, bits of plants, a pair of pince-nez glasses. I can only imagine what's inside the closed drawers.
The whole eccentric collection once belonged to a Dr Richard Ripley, a member of the Whitby Literary and Philosophical Society, and who, according to Volume 7 of the Geological Curator, was in practice with his brother, the surgeon Mr John Ripley, in Whitby's Baxtergate in the first half of the 19th century.
Unfortunately, trying to dig up more information on Dr Ripley is difficult, because it seems that his unfortunate legacy is to be remembered not for his marvellous collection of curiosities and enthusiasm for geology and fossil collecting, but for his alleged association with a scoundrel named Flint Jack.
In the 19th century, geology and fossil collecting was all the rage, as was collecting prehistoric artefacts such as flint arrowheads and other tools napped or crafted by ancient hands. And professional men like the Doctors Ripley often purchased such items from local fossil and artefact hunters who knew all the best places to find such treasures.
Flint Jack seems to have started his career in the honest work of fossil collecting, and was apparently very good at it, until one of his customers asked him if he could reproduce a prehistoric flint arrowhead from his collection, and unfortunately, Flint Jack found that he could.
Seeing a surefire way to fund his developing drinking habit, Jack went on to become a prolific producer of fake ancient artefacts. passing them off as genuine relics all over the country and becoming known as the Prince of Counterfeiters.
Showing 441–460 of 737 · page 23 of 37
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