George Harry and Muriel Wallis

Curators and Reformers: the first family at the new Castle Museum.

George Harry was born into an artistic family – his father was the first Keeper of Fine Art Collection at South Kensington Museum (later the Victoria & Albert Museum) in London – and he followed in the family business of curation.

George Harry successfully supervised a temporary art and design exhibition in Nottingham in 1872, which contained many items from the South Kensington Museum collection. He was subsequently appointed as the first Art Director and Curator of the museum at Nottingham Castle. The first museum catalogue refers to his ‘great experience and known professional ability’.

George married Kate Watson Carey and they lived in the Museum Residence at Nottingham Castle with their three children. Muriel, sat bottom left, was their eldest daughter and later a Suffragette, active in the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies and the militant Women’s Social and Political Union. She was arrested for ‘wilfully obstructing the police’ at a Suffragette procession in London on Black Friday in 1910. Muriel was also a Census evader and ‘vanished for the vote’, refusing to fill-in her census return in 1911.

George Harry would be Castle Curator for over fifty years from the museum’s foundation in 1878 until 1929.