St Albans Museums

Description

Monochrome photographic print from an album in the collection of The Hunt Museum, Limerick, showing the Ball Collection on display in the Hertfordshire County Museum (now known as the Museum of St Albans).The Ball collection was a large collection of fine and decorative arts, ethnography and archaeology. It was loaned to the Hertfordshire County Museum by Captain Ball with the proviso that it was to stay in the museum for as long as possible.Despite this proviso, after the death of Captain Ball the collection passed to his son John Brayfield Ball and was sold. Further items left the museum when parts of the Ball archaeological collection were sold to a Mr John Hunt.Meanwhile John Brayfield Ball was killed in active service in 1939 and those parts of the Ball collection remaining in the museum were thereafter bought by S. E. Lucas, then sole executor of the Ball estate who continued the loan. A sale of Neolithic and Bronze Age implements took place in 1949 and then in 1954 Lucas expressed the desire to withdraw his material. The Lucas collection was later dispersed in a series of sales. Some of the material found its way into the McAlpine Collection held at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.