Maritime centre celebrates half-century in some style
The Maritime Museum at Bucklers Hard in Beaulieu celebrated its 50th birthday with a well-attended ceremony yesterday.
A brass band played while Lord Ivar Mountbatten (pictured), announced the official anniversary. He said, “The Maritime Museum was opened in 1963 in dedication of all those lost at sea and the families that lived and served at Bucklers Hard for generations.”
The public anniversary celebration will be held at Bucklers Hard on the weekend of April 6 and 7, where river cruises will be laid on.
The museum features historic artefacts from the days when Bucklers Hard was a working shipbuilding town, as well as the stories of local ships and Sir Francis Chichester’s world circumnavigator, Gypsy Moth IV, which sailed across from Cowes for the celebrations.
Beaulieu also plays host to a number of other attractions, including the National Motor Museum, which is widely considered to own one of the most impressive collections of motorcars in the world. Third Baron Montagu of Beaulieu set up the collection in memory of his father, John Douglas-Scott-Montagu, 2nd Baron Montagu of Beaulieu, who was the first person to drive a car into the yard of the Houses of Parliament and introduced King Edward VII to motoring in the 1890s.
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