'Remember Preston': a surprise perfume and music mecca of the North!

Harris Museum ~ Source: Wikimedia Commons

Back in July 2011, I was up in Preston for a Monochrome Set gig at the town's noted music venue, The Continental, and managed to fit in a lightning visit to the Harris Museum just before closing time. I was keen to have even a quick look at Britain's largest collection of perfume bottles, which is on permanent display there. Some seven months later, I blogged about the visit, apologising for my woeful snook-cocking at chronology. Then the other day- four years later!- I received the following comment under my 2012 post:

"Hello - I am a curator from the Harris Museum & Art Gallery and I've just read your blog entry. I'm sorry not to have read it sooner and/or known about your visit. There is an information sheet available on Mrs French's collection which I can send to any interested parties. But I'm afraid we have no idea about whether Mrs French loved perfume or scent generally. She certainly loved the bottles. We look forward to welcoming more perfume enthusiasts at the Harris in the future. 

Sending all best from Preston."

Now the reason I found this spectacularly asynchronous comment worthy of mention is because I happened to be in Preston again myself last weekend, for another gig by - you've guessed it - The Monochrome Set, their fourth at that same venue since 2011. So the timing of the curator's comment felt a little Twilight Zone-y. ;)

The Continental

On this occasion, instead of a last minute dash to the museum, I dived into Debenhams just before they closed, on a skincare-related mission that I am saving for another day. (I am stockpiling dermatological disasters, you see, until I have a quorum worthy of a post in their own right.)

Skincare solution sorted, and after an M & S salad, a bit of a lie down and a hot shower, I drove the half mile to the gig at what seemed to me to be the fashionably late hour of 9pm, Hmm, maybe not all that fashionable in hindsight, as the band weren't on till 10.15pm. (Oh, and I would normally walk such a derisorily short distance, but I was on band ferrying duty later, and stuck to the very wonderful Fentiman's Rose Lemonade all night. It is infused with spicy botanicals and is like drinking a pink version of Hendricks gin...er...without the gin.) I immediately ran into the singer in the beer garden, closely followed by fellow fan Andy V, whom I am proud to have converted to Ormonde Jayne. Isfarkand and Zizan are his two favourites from the line as regular readers may recall, but the samples I gave him have long since run out, so he has defaulted to his existing stocks of aftershave.

Like this, only dark ~ Source: newcontinental.net

As is the way of perfumistas at large, I asked to sniff Andy, while the singer looked on in mild bemusement. I inhaled the merest vestige of a woody, spicy scent. "No idea" I said, with not even a millisecond's hesitation: "You're going to have to tell me."

"It's Bang!" he replied, "Cillit Bang!" Adding, after a dramatic pause, "Only kidding - it's by....."

"...Marc Jacobs, haha." I laughed, as I finished his sentence.

Next up, I made Andy V and the singer sniff my sample of Amouage Journey Woman, which Hamamelis had kindly sent me that very week. For a fruity floral with leather and tobacco and a smattering of spice it really is surprisingly light. To my nose, if you crossed APOM pour Femme with Diptyque Volutes edt you'd get a vague idea of how it smells. Then if you were to read the reviews on NST and Perfume Posse you'd get a much better one!

Source: Fragrantica

The pair leaned in and smelt my wrist assiduously several times. "It's supposed to represent Shanghai Art Deco or something", I added helpfully.

The singer looked incredulous: "Nah, I am getting more...more flowers, lots of flowers - we are talking French country garden."

So that was that, but whatever continent it conjures up, boy, do I love Journey!

Then inside the venue, I bumped into Andy's ex-wife J and her friend X (no, her name really did begin with 'X'!), who quickly engaged me in a conversation about perfume, announcing that they would both like to make their own natural fragrances - as would J's daughter, apparently, and did I know where to start. My mind quickly cycled through all the natural perfumers I had heard of - in the US, mostly - and I vaguely remembered that The Perfumer's Apprentice might be a good port of call for starter kits of materials. But I really didn't know what to advise, and admitted as much, adding that I would see if I could dig out any pointers on the Internet that might get them going. But even after having a look, I am still at a loss as to what to suggest to them, frankly - perfume making of any kind is just not something I have been interested in pursuing myself.

Is that you, Lindaloo?

J also remarked on how photogenic Truffle was, which reminded me that we must already be Facebook friends, and that J must therefore be one of the many hundreds of (apparently remarkably resilient!) people subjected to the near daily barrage of kitten pics...

Now J is a taxi driver, and recently picked up a lady who was wreathed in a cloud of Rochas Femme. (J couldn't resist asking her what she was wearing.) So we talked about that for a while: about vintage and modern versions of scents, and about reformulation and skin chemistry - sadly J's quest to find the very same version she sniffed in her cab is ongoing. Or it may just be that her own skin is not such a perfect canvas as that of her passenger. I mentioned that I had a smidge left of a vintage parfum formulation, not that we know if that is 'the one'...

But the perfume sub-theme to this gig did not stop there. For I handed over a bag of Le Labo samples to Caryne, who is in charge of band merchandise, and a vegan. A long-time Lush lover, she was sporting the new release All Good Things - it's reportedly a bit of a Marmite fragrance, but it was spectacular on her. I have only recently discovered that the Le Labo line is also vegan, so it will be interesting to get Caryne's take on the line.

And the last perfume-linked aspect of the gig - again thanks to one of my readers - was the fact that on the way out I donned the reflective armband that Ingeborg had kindly sent me, to boost my visibility in dark alleys and the like.

There's even the word 'band' in the name!

It didn't get much of a workout this time, as I was only walking a few yards to the car, but I am sure that in future there will be other possible outings.

Low jinks with the keyboard player ~ Source: Caryne Pearce

If anyone has any tips on how to go about making natural perfumes, do let me know in the comments!

The Scent Crimes Series: No 10 - Visiting Britain's Largest Perfume Bottle Collection In Twenty Minutes Flat

Last July I went to see the Mrs French Scent Bottle Collection at the Harris Museum & Art Gallery in Preston. In what may be the most spectacular breach of chronological order in the history of Bonkers, I am only now getting round to writing up my impressions of my visit. So I have decided to file it in the Scent Crimes Series - along with "Bathroom Storage", "Confusing Stella Flankers", "Opaque Perfume Receptacles", and posts about other fragrance-related annoyances of every stripe - because I only managed to get there at 4.30pm, a derisory half an hour before closing time. You don't really need to know the reasons, but they may have involved a missed train and an upside down Google map. And in practice I only really had 20 minutes to browse and take photographs, because the museum staff started making concerted efforts to shoo people out at about 10 to 5. Twenty minutes to look round a collection of this size and importance is shameful, the museum-visiting equivalent of a supermarket sweep, but there it is.

So, some eight months later, I will endeavour to piece together what I can from the museum's information sheet, my scribbled notes (never normally intelligible much beyond that day) and a couple of dozen photos of (mostly) unidentified perfume objects!

Now the Mrs French Scent Bottle collection is not just the largest in Britain, but one of the most important in the world, and has been kept at the Harris Museum since 1964. The 2748 bottles, made from ceramic, glass, silver and other materials, date from the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. Some are on permanent display in glass cabinets, and there are also numerous sets of drawers full of additional specimens; these are kept locked but the curator will open them on request. I did get the member of staff on duty to open a drawer just so I could see what a typical one contained, before promptly asking her to close it again...

So who was Mrs French and how did she come to amass such an enormous quantity of perfume bottles? Not just scent bottles in fact - the museum has other collections of note she donated, including visiting card cases, stone eggs, mineral specimens, decorative objects made from stone, and mother of pearl gaming counters.

Idonea French was born Idonea Thomas in 1880 in a well-to-do Anglo-Irish family in Southern Ireland, and moved to Kent during the First World War. It was here that she met her husband, Charles French, whom she married in her 30s. Idonea began collecting perfume bottles at the age of 12, when she was given one by her mother. Presumably an empty one, but I cannot say for sure. Then over the next 20 years Idonea carried on acquiring bottles, and by the time she got married her collection was already quite substantial.

Following the death of her only child, who was killed in action in the Second World War at the age of 20, Idonea's hobby escalated to a new level, possibly as a direct result of losing her son. The couple spent their free time driving round the country looking for more collectables, notably perfume bottles. According to the meticulous records she kept of her purchases, Idonea never spent more than £1.10 (about £30 / $50 at today's values). Predictably, their house quickly became cluttered with cabinets, though apparently her husband banned his wife from keeping bottles in the dining room. After his death, that room was also quickly colonised!

What I haven't been able to ascertain is whether Idonea was interested in perfume itself as well as the bottles, and if so, what she might have worn.

But meanwhile, here are some close ups of the scent bottles themselves. Unfortunately the glass roof of the museum room allowed light to bounce off the glass display cases in such a way as to make taking photos very tricky. That and the time pressure, obviously, made it a rather fraught process all round! One or two of the "roof-eclipsed" photos (eg the one of Attar Bottles below) actually look a bit arty, but not enough to mitigate my frustration at the obliteration of text on the information boards in the cabinets. There are also a number of dazzling spots of light in some of the shots: contrary to appearances these are not ghostly orbs of the sort you see in "Most Haunted" ricocheting off dungeon walls, but merely a testimony to my complete ignorance of how to take photos through glass.

I have noted down the headings that correspond to the various sub-groupings of the bottles: these are partly based on function/style and partly on materials used. Whether I have correctly matched the illustrative photos to their respective bottle category is a moot point, so please allow for material inaccuracies. : - ) I suspect that that might have been a problem even if I had written up my visit the following day - it was simply too short a time in which to log what I was seeing and photograph it in any kind of systematic fashion. So I can only urge you to go along to the Harris if you are ever in the Preston area and enjoy a more orderly eyeful of this lovely collection yourselves!

SMELLING SALTS AND VINAIGRETTE

ATTAR BOTTLES

CERAMIC BOTTLES

NOVELTY BOTTLES

PAINTED GLASS

CASED GLASS

SPIRAL GLASS

CUT GLASS

18TH CENTURY BOTTLES

COLOURED GLASS

TOILET WATER BOTTLES

CAMEOS

In my haste I failed to capture this category on film, so here is a picture of the rather impressive museum door instead, which is at least a bit "bas relief-y", like a cameo.

SILVER

FINGER RING BOTTLES

TOURIST SOUVENIRS

I suspect that these may in fact be further examples of novelty bottles, but if I was on holiday in Mevagissey, I would be well pleased to take one of these home instead of a yard of bendy pink and white nougat or some clotted cream fudge.