A Gargrave woman who owns an assortment of period costumes spanning 200 years has decided to make her collection more accessible.

Bernadette Atkinson, of Gargrave, has been collecting clothes since she was a child, and this love has grown through the years into her collection entitled "Frills and Furbelows".

It includes an extensive range of clothing for ladies, gentlemen and children, and accessories from Victorian times right through to the present day.

With the approach of the millennium, Bernadette thinks the time has come to make the collection more available to the wider public, including schools, colleges and the tourist industry.

A graduate in humanities, she said her collection was a valuable piece of social history.

Bernadette said: "I have literally hundreds of different clothes and accessories. This is a problem because I don't have my own museum and they cannot be on display permanently. I thought the best thing to do would be to take them out to colleges and universities. I want to make it a facility people can use."

Bernadette said she also wanted to make the collection available to primary schools and has designed a special presentation called "Handy History for Schools" during which children are able to examine artefacts themselves .

She said: "Clothing to me is the most personal form of history, and if history begins with every day objects then it should start with the clothes we wear. If children really want to understand the lives of people in the past then they really need to know what people put on in the morning to face the day.

"In higher education the same principle applies but for this area my presentations are much more specific. For these talks I would liaise with the tutor and find out exactly what area they want to pinpoint. It could be looking at Victorian dress in the 19th century and the role of women."

However, Bernadette said she did not want to confine the collection to the educational sector. She believes it could be useful to the leisure and tourism industry and businesses who might be celebrating an anniversary or the millennium.

Bernadette added she would be happy to act as a consultant. "I want to make the collection available to everyone, and any income generated will go towards maintaining, conserving and even maybe adding to it.

Anyone wishing to contact Bernadette should ring 01756 748144.

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