Have a go at leather working with Christina Charles and learn about the history of the Royal Mail with re-enactment actor and Museum Trustee, Martin Horler, in a double bill of ‘Meet the Experts’ this Saturday, 20th July between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. at Radstock Musuem.

Christina makes contemporary leather lifestyle products and accessories using Italian vegetable tanned leather and British hardware. Each piece is handmade to order, in her studio in Welton. She endeavours to unite British craftsmanship and contemporary design by using beautiful materials, traditional techniques and directional surface pattern concepts through a ‘Modern Craft’ aesthetic.

Her minimalist and almost architectural approach celebrates Leather as a material by treating it as a canvas for manipulation and ultimately creating useful vessels that will only get better with age. Having studied Fashion at the Winchester School of Art, Christina has worked for nearly twenty years as a designer and product developer for the Fashion and Accessories industry, specialising in leather.

Come and see Martin, dressed in full, traditional scarlet livery in the role of the Royal Mail Guard, telling the true and fascinating stories about the postal service from 1784 to 1840, before the railways came.

Martin travels all over the country with a team of horses and old horse-drawn mail coach, demonstrating how the mail was carried across the country in the past. He will tell of the revolutionary introduction of horse-drawn Mail Coaches, which were provided by contractors, with regular changes of horses, keeping to a strict timetable, exempt from tolls and carrying an armed guard.

The coaches sped through the night to their drop-off points. The guard, usually ex-army, was trained to shoot to kill anyone who attempted to hold up and rob the mail coach. Martin will show you the weapons used by the guard.

The mail coach had priority over all road traffic – so the guard also had to sound his horn with different calls, meaning different instructions for other road users and for those at the drop-off and pick-up points. Martin will demonstrate these different calls on his silver 51 inch coaching horn dating back to 1902. If anyone got in the way of a mail coach and was injured or even killed, the royal mail was not responsible!

Somerset Coalfield Life at Radstock Museum is celebrating twenty years in the old market hall with a summer-long programme of ‘Meet the Experts’ events included free with your annual ticket, running on Saturday afternoons at the museum. To find out more, visit: radstockmuseum.co.uk