With tender care

Down a dark corridor in a unique Sheffield museum. Into a stark former prison cell. A pair of spectacles is on show at the far side. These are no ordinary spectacles. They were worn by Charlie Peace, a criminal who became a Yorkshire legend – no, a national legend – for all the wrong reasons.

Born in Sheffield in 1832, son of a lion tamer, he worked as a picture framer, clock repairer, inventor (a brush for cleaning railway carriages) and caf-owner (in Hull). He was also a talented violinist, playing in pubs and at fairgrounds, and was once ambitiously billed as "the modern Paganini".

These, though, were only his "day jobs". His main career was as a cat burglar and double murderer, shooting a policeman and the husband of a woman he claimed was his mistress. Described in court as "of repellent aspect", he was adept at disguise, spent much of his life on the run and was a master of spectacular stunts. He once threw himself out of a speeding train to escape police arrest but was recaptured and finally hanged at Armley Jail, Leeds, in 1879.

His colourful career, which has tended to distract from the seriousness of his crimes, was the basis of two films, one made as early as 1905. Accounts of his life sometimes suggest a celebrity rogue, even an anti-establishment folk hero, and in one of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, the master detective includes him among the "great criminals". The woman he claimed as his mistress, however, described him as a demon "beyond the power of even a Shakespeare to paint".

Such is the background to a macabre display about him in Sheffield's Fire & Police Museum. Here, in the cell down the dark corridor, are his spectacles, his gun, an ingenious portable ladder he used on his burglary trips and, bizarrely, the actual railway signal on which he reputedly hit his head as he jumped from the train. A more flamboyant museum would make a great song and dance about this, but for all its status as the world's only fire and police museum open regularly to the public, this is a low-key place, not given to songs and dances.

And that may be the problem. The museum, aptly in a former Victorian fire and police station on the edge of the city centre, usually opens only on Sundays and Bank Holidays (and at other times by appointment). It pulls in around 100 visitors a week and the entrance fees just about cover costs. "It costs 12,000 a year to run and we raise more or less 12,000 a year on the door and with special events," says John Thornton, its ebullient chairman. "It's not enough." As assistant secretary Jane Ellis says: "We're trying to get more people through the doors."

The museum is a registered charity, gets no outside funding and is run by a core of eight volunteers, plus a dozen more supporters (few, strangely, ever involved with the police or fire services). They've tried for grants, have approached the Heritage Lottery Fund and English Heritage, but have never been successful because they don't meet the requirement of having a lease on the building, which they occupy rent-free.

With national arts and museums budget cuts looming at every turn, things don't look too rosy. But at least the operation here is already based on the sort of volunteering which David Cameron's Big Society wants to see playing a bigger part in the arts and museums world. Austerity already rules here. "The only things the volunteers get are cheese sandwiches at lunchtime," says Thornton.

For such a shoestring operation, they have an astonishing collection, particularly on the fire side, with pumps and engines dating back to 1710 and some 30,000 other items. It's an enthusiasts' museum, stronger on content than context, but none the worse for that.

I wonder, though, about the need to display gruesome "scene of crime" photographs of murder victims from as recently as 1961, particularly with children as visitors. "A lot of people are interested in murders," says Thornton. But should that interest be encouraged? "Shouldn't we show it as it really was?" asks Ellis. "We're a museum. Do we skim over the top?" The jury is out on that one.

The museum opened almost 30 years ago in one of Britain's first purpose-built fire stations. Its elegant watchtower gave grand panoramic views over Sheffield, particularly towards the steelworks in the East End, with their worrying potential for fires. "The firemen sat up there looking for smoke," says Thornton. Across the building's curving front are three broad doors. It's not hard to imagine them bursting open and fire engines hurtling out.

"The building was derelict when we took it over, infested with pigeons, everything," he says. "It's still nothing unusual to be up on the roof in a storm unblocking drains when the rain starts running down the walls."

The collection fills three floors. In the front yard are the vintage engines, big beasts with gleaming red paintwork and tightly reeled hoses. The captions are geared to enthusiasts. A 1968 Haflinger fire tender, for instance, has "selectable four-wheel drive and 28 BHP twin cylinder four-stroke". Glad to hear it. The blue light on a police car in the far exhibition room flashes eerily.

There's a green Dad's Army van and a firewatcher's shelter, a sort of sentry box, from the Blitz. And, fascinatingly, a map of Sheffield showing where bombs fell. I peer closely and spot the dot marking

the bomb whose blast, from the school across the road, blew my father down the cellar steps to my parents' basement shelter. There could be plenty of scope here for such humanising testimony, fleshing out the objects with memories and anecdotes.

What else? A vast display of fire extinguishers – the Ignex and the Minimax, the Wellington and the Kylfyre. Britain's longest fireman's pole (36ft 7in), which more intrepid visitors can try out (whoosh!). Uniforms and axes, crested brass helmets that made fireman look like Spartan warriors, "Instructions for Branches and Nozzles"... and a tribute to Buller, one of the fire station's first horses, who died outside the doors after coming back from a fire. One of his hoofs was made into an ink well, a curious tribute.

Over the years the museum has run memorabilia sales to raise money (the volunteers' lunches are upgraded to bacon butties on those days).

"People come from all over the country, all over the world, for our sales," says Thornton. "But we're struggling to get

old stock to sell now because brigades tend to sell it to Third-World countries or for scrap.

"It's a proper collectors' market, though the value of fire engines has dropped rapidly because people can't afford to run them. Some of them only do three miles to a gallon. And you get people who travel round visiting fire stations and taking pictures of them.

"We had a bloke here today taking pictures of police badges."

Outside, on this quiet Sunday afternoon, a police siren blares past, bringing us back to the everyday reality of emergencies.

Fire & Police Museum, Old Fire Station, West Bar, Sheffield S3 8PT

Tel: 0114 2491 999; www.firepolicemuseum.org.uk.

Opens Sundays & Bank Holiday Mondays, 11am to 5pm (last entry 4pm).

Admission 4 adults, 3 children, 11 family ticket.

YP MAG 11/9/10