Have you missed Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum?
The famous attraction – recently voted one of the world’s ‘unmissable’ places to visit – has finally re-opened its doors.
It has been a much-loved part of the city since 1901, staging many popular exhibitions and restrospectives, from Linda McCartney and Charles Rennie Mackintosh to Doctor Who and Dippy the Dinosaur.
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Back in August 1943, however, as our archive photographs show, it was all about glass.
A new display was designed to highlight new uses for glass, from a large mercury arc rectifier and Spitfire windscreens smashed, but not pierced, by German bullets, to tank windows, hand grenades and even a glass radiator.
However, the exhibit everyone wanted to see was a ‘spectacular glass outfit’ fetchingly modelled by Mrs Helen Monro Turner, a graphic artist and engraver whose husband was Professor WES Turner, head of the Department of Glass Technology at Sheffield University.
The couple had recently married in Edinburgh, and Mrs Turner was delighted to show off “the same pale blue spun-glass gown, hat, shoes and handbag as she had worn at her wedding”.
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Also on show were huge electric globes for film studios and lighthouses, tiny lights for tank controls and even glass pots and frying pans.
“The exhibits on view,” reported the Evening Times’ sister newspaper The Glasgow Herald, “show some of the latest uses of glass.
“Though many of the articles are of great industrial and domestic interest, the show-piece is likely to be a spun-glass parasol, hand-painted in pink and green.”
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