News Archive

The auction record for a painting by Sir Stanley Spencer was broken twice within minutes at Sotheby's in London.

Workmen in the House, which had an upper estimate of £2m, sold for £4.7m before Sunflower and Dog Worship, with a top estimate of £1.5m, fetched £5.4m.

The previous record was the £1.43m achieved at Sotheby's in December for 1954 work Hilda and I at Pond Street.

Stanley Spencer served with the 7th Battalion, The Royal berkshire Regiment during World War One and served in Salonika. The museum currently has an exhibition entitled 'The Creative and Inventive Soldier' in which reproduction s of his work are on display.

The museum extends very warm congratulations on his 90th Birthday to Field Marshall (now High Admiral) His Royal Highness The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, KG, KT, GBE, Colonel-in-Chief The Wiltshire Regiment, the Duke of Edinburgh's Royal Regiment, The Royal Gloucestershire, Berkshire and Wiltshire Regiment and The Rifles.

Many of those who served or serve in the regiments remember his visits to the various  battalions and here at the Wardrobe where he took a great interest in what was going on.

The Country Search criteria is now working properly and will enhance your searching capability.   For example you can list a a unit and the country in which they were stationed and then under key word you could also put in another country to narrow your search. 

For example one could put DERR as the unit, in 1978 - 1983 they were stationed in Germany, but went to Canada.  By putting in those details with Canada as the key word one may well find images from their Exercise Medicine Hat. 

We have just identified that if you search by Country, where we had made some editorial corrections yesterday, it has thrown the data slightly out of sync.  For the time being we suggest that you search by another criteria.

We apologise for this minor blip we are in the process of fixing it.

Welcome!!   As promised we have at last completed the process, with Datasouth UK, of trialling the new site and have taken the step to go live.  The whole process was driven by the fact that we wished improve our service to you the on-line visitor.

It is envitable that visitors to the site will find some errors and we would welcome constructive comments to improve, where we can, the site.   Just as important, if anyone finds any errors within the text panels would you please informs us by leaving comments on the Guestbook. 

I would like to take this opportunity of thanking those, who have been aware for some time of the work in progress, for their patience.  

I would also wish to publicly thank Richard Long-Fox, Martin McIntyre for their hours of dedication of checking the Collection and re-writing the History of the Regiments resepctively, David Chilton for the work on the Soldier Search database , Bob Hambling for the photographic work involved in producing images for the shop and the remainder of the volunteers and staff who have had to endure a rather scratchy Curator for the past few months. 

We intend during the Easter Holidays to update the web site; something we have been trying to do for some time.   There will be major changes to the look of the site and how one navigates through the site.   Whilst we appreciate that this may cause some concerns, the volunteers who have been working like Trojans behind the scenes, are sure that the enhanced data available will be welcomed by our visitors.

As you navigate through the new site, may we ask that any constructive comments are left in the new web site's "Guest Book", as this will enable us to improve our service to you.