Martin Woodward on Diving

Lisa: So when did you decide that you wanted to put the objects that you’d found into a Museum?

It’s a good question and a lot of people ask me that and what happened was when I lived … I’ve lived in this house for 35 years but my previous house was in the village and I lived in a semi-detached house up in the centre of the village there and I had all this stuff that I was finding on wrecks, ‘cos I was finding a lot of things in the ‘70s and had all this brass stuff everywhere and people said to me, “Crikey, you can hardly get in the place because it is so full of stuff” and I said, “Yes, I’m desperate to find somewhere to set up a little Museum to put it all in so that it can be on display rather than only the people that come to the house see it.”

I wanted people to be able to see it and see all the stories behind it, so we looked around and eventually the local Bakery that had shut down some time before and become derelict, I actually worked there as a Baker’s Boy, I had a Saturday job when I was at school and delivered the bread and made it at 4 o’clock in the morning and there was a lovely smell. I’ll never forget that smell.

You could always smell it as you came into Bembridge, just up over the hill as you come into the village. And it was like a building with a shop and a house all in one, and it was derelict, and a Company had bought it off the Baker, Mr Chick, and they were going to make a Laundrette out of it and they went broke, so I thought well, that looks pretty good.

This was in 1977, and we bought it and turned it into a Museum and opened in June ’78. In comparison to what there is now , it’s only sort of fairly minimal. A few ship models and old diving equipment, wreck stuff that I had, all the brass work and everything like that but it just went from there really and then we were in Bembridge for 28 years and then outgrew the premises because not only was the parking no good outside, it got worse and worse and worse so the visitors couldn’t park anywhere.

So I started looking around. I wanted to go to Blackgang because that’s relevant to a lot of the stuff that I found is from that area, but that couldn’t be done at the time and we ended up moving to Arreton Barns in 2005 we started moving everything there and then opened in July 2006. And that’s where it’s been ever since.