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Bruce Castle – Where the Past Comes Screaming to Life
Such a small and quiet space is easier on the eyes and feet than a busy major museum, where your legs would be aching after twenty minutes of touring the galleries, and your head throbbing from the screams of bored toddlers. Bruce Castle is a delicacy to be savoured in a relaxed and civilised manner, rather than something to be bolted breathlessly and dutifully down on the been-there-done-that round. In fact, the place is so rarefied that we’re the only visitors this afternoon, and our footsteps echo like wrecking balls on the polished floorboards. The main ‘punters’, to quote the helpful and enthusiastic assistant curator, Brian, are parties of local schoolchildren, but there aren’t any booked in for today, thank goodness, so we have the whole place literally to ourselves.
Judging by the exhibits, the answer is: ‘grim but bearable’. We’re talking less Winston Churchill’s preoccupation with grand strategy and more Mrs Brown’s preoccupation with how she’s going to feed her family and avoid getting blown to smithereens during the coming week. We’re talking ration cards, the Home Guard, flying bombs and Anderson Shelters: not war as it is in documentaries, but up close and very personal.
If there are kids in your party, there’s a roomful of interactive games and puzzles for them on the first floor. There is also a small coffee shop to recover in, and those 20 private acres of the former manor house are now a public park, whose boundaries carve out an oasis of calm in this busy part of north London. Contact details Open
Wed to Sun 1.00-5.00 pm
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JustSayGO Travel Show
‘One of those things landed in our back garden,’ Barbara smiles whimsically. ‘Fortunately it didn’t go off.’ My wife and I bumped into Barbara – ‘eighty-six and proud of it’ – as we admired the freshly-painted coat-of-arms above the East entrance of the building, and she insisted on giving us a tour. Outside, beyond the ornate French windows, the air has the sharpness of early autumn; nature is erupting in a kaleidoscope of brilliant reds and greens, and squirrels and magpies lend seasonal innocence and charm to an idyllic view across the park. Inside, we are looking at the ugly, black, heavy bulk of a German bomb, which landed on Tottenham, in North London, on the night of August 16th 1941. The jagged metal where the blast ripped through curves outward like the petals of a diabolical flower. I press my palm against it. It feels cold, and evil.
This is just one of many exhibits at the Bruce Castle museum, a small gem that few visitors to the capital know about, and not many of the residents either. The ‘castle’ itself is actually a Grade 1 listed 16th century manor house, standing in 20 acres of parkland. According to local tradition, it was once the residence of Robert Bruce (father of Robert, the King of Scotland) who died in 1303. The estate has rich royal connections: Queen Elizabeth I visited and Henry VIII met his sister Margaret of Scotland there when it was owned by his powerful courtier, Sir William Compton. The museum, created in 1906, is on the ground floor.
Unlike national institutions such as the Imperial War Museum and the Royal Air Force Museum, with their vast collections, computerised exhibits and coverage of wars around the globe, the museum at Bruce Castle has a very local focus: what was daily life like for the people of Tottenham during WWII?
But despite the fascination of shell casings, uniforms and numerous photographs and cabinets full of personal memorabilia, my favourite exhibit is the period office, circa 1940. It is the size of a box bedroom rather than a soccer pitch, and is definitely not open plan. Our friend Barbara says it is so real that she feels like stepping into it and getting on with her secretarial duties of sixty years ago. ‘Where on earth did the time go?’ she wonders, staring at the wooden swivel-chair and heavy manual typewriter on the rosewood desk, the old bacolyte telephone and the calendar open at October 5th 1940.
As if all this were not enough, there’s also the resident ghost. The ghost of Bruce Castle is that of Lady Constantia Coleraine, whose husband, the first Lord Coleraine, was so jealous of her beauty that after their marriage he kept her locked away in the room under the clock tower, out of sight of visitors. Lord Coleraine was obsessed with the idea that his young wife would be snatched away from him by some handsome gallant. In a fit of despair, on 3rd November, 1680 she climbed onto the balcony outside the room which had served as her prison and jumped to the courtyard below, with a piercing scream, dying instantly. Her final act, complete with the screams, was heard regularly on the anniversary of her death until fairly modern times. The vision has faded completely now but the screams continue almost annually. 
There is also a mysterious ‘Red Tower’ standing next to the manor house. Even back in 1705, the owner (the second Lord Coleraine) wrote that he kept it in good repair, ‘in respect to its great antiquity’, though he had no idea what it was. Over the years, it has been variously explained as a vantage point for watching hunting, for holding doves, as a garden folly and a platform for flying hawks. However, archaeologists during a recent dig were astonished to find that there was as much of the tower below ground as above it, and it seems that it is actually a unique surviving Tudor water tower dating from 1505, which stored water from an encircling pond and was fed by channels controlled by sluice gates.