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Show weird and wonderful sights tlEesaalSiiBg file SfilbesBit psatla Ibb nnBiraBsnssns by Ralph Stein ARE 115 muse- THERE ums and galleries in the the most London area prominent being The British Museum, The National Galand lery, The Victoria Albert, The Tate Gallery, and The Science Museum you're one of those who likes to stray fiom the exhibit path in search of the more But if people well-wor- n museums, offbeat you re sure to find London then them in 70-fo- Consider London the Piano Museum which I found to be a decayed-looking 18thcentury church almost completely en eloped by a gas works and nestled n against a gigantic A dozen gasometer or so people came into the pale-gree- museum and the enthusiastic curator, a Mr Holland, stalled his demonstrations First he showed us a few unusual old pianos, among them one built to stand on end, with a cortical keyboard, and then expounded on how sound is reproduced THEN MY an apparatus Ammjtor-djvitis- EYE caught labeled Hup-felt d Sin-fom- c Jazz Piano No 9 " This was one of those teutonic complexities in which a niish mash of violins, drums and what not, broke into insane and noisy action "ith the insertion of a com tamb-ouune- s, pipe-organ- s, But sui h noisy goodies "ere merely a preparation fur a feast of really fine in- strument automatic s P'aios, which Mr Holland lu'ingly maintains In per-frwotking order These, i"en to my untrained ears, funded totally unlike the it Buhly ' of pianolas" my youth Banng the names Stemway 'Mte and Aeolian among others, they had cost UP to $lii,oo() in their day (before the I9)0s) and produced the playing Pfdl pianists in re- of full color." Crescendos out Jhed ortissim, m full blast, fame ou! a,oly and precisely I kind of establishment, The Imperial War Museum This one (fittingly, peihaps) is in what was from lRiy to 1030 Bethlehem Royal Hospital, the insance asylum which gave us the word "bedlam " Its in Lambeth Road and is easy to get to by bus or Underground You get a pretty good idea of whats m store for you as you head through the front gate of the place Two naval long, guns sit on the lawn ou'side and aim right at you Theyre from the old battleships Ramillies and Resolution and could in their day (1915-16- ) hurl a shell from Bronx Park to the Battery The exhibits, with the mud and slime of both World Wars neatly polished away, range from German and Italian one man to the engine salManfred von from vaged Richthofens Fokker In World War I There are thousands of other items artillery, aircraft from both wars, Spads and ME 109s, tanks ship models, rockets, recruiting posters, nfles, dioramas of naval and land battles end even a touching fjllsreed Kaiser War scene which shows a soldier bidding goodbye to his girl Lx fore boarding a train back to the fighting m Flanders This one uses dressed up figures and a section of a third class railway carnage. THE NATION L Maritime Museum at Greenwich is a huge place of such grandeur and importance that one hesitates to cum mention it m the same breath as, say, the piano museum HEADED FOR a totally tturaenl, if ecjualjy unusual, one-ton- e sub-man- Tn-plan- e The best, if slowest way, to get to it, is aboard one of the small vessels which in summer ply the Thames You can board one either at Westminster Bndge or at the Tower of London The boat trip takes about an hour and a guide describes sights along the river Or you can get there by train (to the Maze Hill Station) in 20 minutes At the Hall of Fame at Beaulieu, you can see the earn of the great pioneers! an 1899 Daimler, a 1909 a 191) Aauxhall and other motor nobility. I record cam Include Campbell' "SunlH-am-. RolU-Rove- e, and-npee- The two big main buildflank the Queen's ings House which was designed bv Intgo Jones and finished tn 1635 Up a hill and through a park of fine old tiees are the ancient buildings of the Old Royal Observatory At the 18th Century Meridian building where the earth s longitude starts, you can actually stand on the line marked on the wall and in the path leading to it THE MAIN buildings of the Maritime Museum contain so much that it would take many days to see it all There are great galleries of marine paintings, uniforms, including the one Lord Nelson wore in HMS Autory at Trafalgar, plete with the hole made by the French musket ball fired from the mizzen top of the Ucdoutabte " com-- , In my view, the most im- portant and interesting artifacts in the Maiilimc Muse d um are three of John Harri- sons chronometers These were built to win a prize of 20 000 pounds offered in 1714 by the Board of Longifor tude an accurate "watch to be used for finding longitude at sea Many dockmakers had tried and had failed to build a watch accurate enough and tough enough to jteep Greenwich tfme after months at sea THE NATIONAL Motor Museum is not m London It is in Beaulieu (pro- ) nounced Hamp-shrirabout 90 miles west of London, not far from Southampton Bow-ley- The museum was e, origi- nally called the Montagu Motor Museum after the supercharged young Lord Montagu who organized it and installed its exa building near the Home he both lives in and opens to paying visitors in 1952 hibits in "Stately Transport Museum has a doulHe-de- t ancient motor bunm, Edwardian k borne oinmlmn, tieket-dihj- x liners. 4 The Salt Lake Sunday. August 19, 1973 The Reliant Newcastle, a big deam tug docked in the new Neptune Halt at the National Maritime Museum. You tan wulk her deck, look Into the crew's foreeartle, go below into the engine room and stokehold. nm |