Tilly Blyth

After a long and successful career, most notably with the Science Museum but also in television and academia, Tilly Blyth (1987-89) has returned to the South Downs to take on the role of Director of the Weald and Downland Living Museum. Here she remembers her two years at Bedales with affection, looks back on her professional life and joins the dots between those formative years and her later achievements. “In many senses, I am a true product of Bedales, which taught me to have the confidence to have a go at almost anything that appealed to me”, Tilly says.

Tilly Blyth is back in the South Downs again. More than thirty years after she left Bedales, Tilly has recently taken up a new appointment (in November 2024) as Director of the Weald and Downland Living Museum just outside Chichester. “It does feel like a return to nature”, she says. “It’s lovely to be back down here again.”

Tilly grew up in a world that mixed the urban with the rural. Her father was an Essex farmer; however, she spent much of her time in London, where she was educated until her O-levels. “I was at a London comprehensive and they were happy days”, Tilly recalls. “There were thousands of students from every conceivable background and with every level of ability but I got on pretty well there, even though it could feel a bit of a treadmill at times. Sciences were my big thing but I also wanted a way to be creative.”

Salvation was at hand. Tilly’s family had long-standing connections with Bedales and, fired with enthusiasm at their memories of the School, Tilly began the process of persuasion that would eventually lead her to follow the family tradition. “Both my parents had been to Bedales, as had a number of aunts and so on, and there was enormous fondness in their reminiscences of school days”, Tilly explains.

"Bedales sounded like a place where everyone, teachers and students alike, were in the same room as equals. I was intrigued by the stories I’d heard and wanted to experience all that for myself.”

To her delight, Tilly’s academic prowess was able to secure her a full bursary at Bedales. “Luckily for me, I think the School was interested in the fact that I was a science-oriented student, which definitely wasn’t typical in those days”, she says. “When I arrived, I found it hard to believe what a beautiful place it was. The first impressions of Bedales have always stayed with me – the Orchard, the Library, the Lupton Hall and all these glamorous students wafting effortlessly about the place!”

Tilly was by no means the only Sixth Form Bedalian scientist of her generation. “My best friend Louise Thwaites (née Ward, 1987-89) was a scientist and there were a few others but doing Physics, Maths and Chemistry A-Levels still made me a bit of an outlier,” she observes. “The teaching was excellent – Physics followed the Nuffield syllabus, which emphasises teaching through practical experiment and which I’ve always thought to be the right way to do it. I suppose my two most memorable teachers were both legends of the Chemistry classroom. Don Spivey (staff, 1969-90) in my first year was famous for his experiments which had everyone ducking behind their desks and Harry Pearson (staff, 1977-2006) was the key character after that – just a brilliant and inspiring teacher. Away from the classroom, I was also very lucky to have Ruth Whiting (1963-2000) as my house tutor in Steephurst, another amazing character and a legend of the School in so many ways.”

The great outdoors at Bedales was where Tilly found her greatest extra-curricular satisfaction. “Outdoor Work was really important to me”, she confirms. “I particularly remember baking bread for the Whole School and thinking how wonderful it was that a school would give me that kind of responsibility. There were so many things open to you if you wanted to try them but it was very much up to you to make the most of the opportunities and that was the essence of Outdoor Work. I did play the clarinet very badly but I put it away when I saw how much musical talent there was around me. Friendship was a really big part of the whole Bedales experience for me – long walks together, binges on Saturday evenings and painting and drawing together in the Art room in a fairly unstructured way. We were a bunch of budding designers, architects or engineers and I guess that sense of art and design was a part of our culture.”

Throughout her time at Bedales, Tilly remained open-minded about the likely shape of her future. “Even today, I’m not sure I’ve ever been too clear about what a career looks like!” she says with amusement. “I’ve always wanted to pursue a variety of things; I’m interested in a wide range of subjects and each step along the professional road has made sense to me at the time and certainly does with the benefit of hindsight."

Manchester University and a degree in physics, focusing on the analysis of science, technology and medicine was the nest step for Tilly. It was 1990 and the city of Manchester was becoming one of Britain’s cultural epicentres, particularly where music and the nascent rave culture were concerned. “It was a brilliant time to be there and I was absolutely a Hacienda girl”, says Tilly of Manchester’s most famous nightclub and music venue. “That was a place that brought people together across classes and generations, which was incredibly exciting. I enjoyed myself so much at Manchester that it wasn’t a difficult decision to stay on for an extra year to do my Masters.”

Here, Tilly applied herself to a more policy research-centred study of engineering, science and technology. “One key element that all my further education had in common was the way in which it fed into my natural interest in the social history and purpose of science and technology, as opposed to the study of science for science’s sake”, Tilly explains. “This invariably leads back to the question of if we have aligned it, and continue to align it, for the good of humanity or whether we are ever in danger of using it for a less noble, more domination-obsessed purpose.”

One of the most important developments of the modern technological era was, of course, the internet. Tilly’s introduction to the worldwide web in its early days would play a seminal role in the direction of her career. “I very distinctly remember using the early web for the first time and feeling in my bones that it was a game-changer”, she says. “That feeling pushed me to do a PhD at Brunel University, where I researched innovation, culture and technology for my doctorate. In turn, that led me to television. I cut my working teeth with the BBC as a consultant on a series called The Net and subsequently worked as an executive producer with a company called Illuminations, where I led the production of digital cultural content for Columbia University with the UK’s national museums and universities.”

It was only the beginning of Tilly’s long association with museums. While she was still working as a producer, she had also begun to freelance for the Science Museum on a digital project entitled ‘Making the Modern World’; in 2004, she was appointed to the role of Curator of Computing at the museum. “It was an extraordinary collection that showcased the entire history of the computer, going back to Babbage and a great privilege to be in charge of it”, Tilly says. “What was so extraordinary was to find the Bedales connections within the museum exhibits. Douglas Hartree (1910-15), for example, who developed the first ‘proof of concept’ differential analyser in Britain and built it initially from Meccano, was an Old Bedalian! So was Peter Eckersley (1902-11), who became the first Chief Engineer of the BBC in 1922.”

Across 20 years at the Science Museum, Tilly’s leadership roles became increasingly significant. She was Lead Curator of the Information Age Gallery when the late Queen Elizabeth II sent her first tweet; later, she was appointed Keeper of Technologies and Engineering and Head of Collections and Principal Curator. “They’re wonderful job titles”, she laughs. “They sound like the sort of title Hagrid had in the Harry Potter books! Telling stories is something that I love and that was the main requirement of everything I was doing at the Science Museum. I was talking about the history and the heritage of our extraordinary scientific and technological achievements and as I went along, I was lucky enough to be able to build teams and bounce ideas off them. At any museum, you can do nothing by yourself – it’s absolutely a team game and I’ve always loved working with other people. I could never have been an ivory tower scientist leading a lonely life in a laboratory somewhere.”

Leaving a place that had brought her such fulfilment for so long was not an easy decision for Tilly but her desire for a new challenge eventually became too great to ignore. “I could easily have stayed at the Science Museum forever but I suppose Covid was partly responsible for taking a different direction”, she says. “I had the space to reflect and ponder and was finally swayed by the chance to become a Professor and Head of School for Museum Studies at Leicester University. It’s really the gold standard of its type. People come from across the globe to study the subject and think critically about museums and their purpose and it’s no exaggeration to say that the university trains the sector.”

“For me, museums should exist for their audiences and their communities”, Tilly continues in true Bedalian style. “How we think of our past informs what we want from our future. There are some many existential, inter-generational questions and problems to be solved or answered and I strongly believe that museums need to be at the heart of those answers.”

And so we return to the present day. Tilly was not exactly idle when the opportunity arose to join the Weald and Downland Living Museum. In addition to her responsibilities in academia, she was (and still is) a member of the Board of Trustees for Bletchley Park and one of the Blue Plaques Panel that commemorates the lives of the great and the good in Britain under the auspices of English Heritage. However, as her family pointed out, the Weald and Downland directorship was too perfect an opportunity for Tilly to ignore.

“The Weald and Downland has many similarities to Bedales, set in the beautiful landscape, a place where the ethos of craft and making are important, with the community are at the heart of everything. I want that to be nurtured and cherished because this museum is a magical place. It has an Arts Council designated collection of over 53 historic buildings, and as one of the founding museums of the Association of Independent Museums it tells a central story for the history of the museum sector in the UK. I would like the importance of this museum to extend well beyond the South of England. To reconnect the old traditions and skills with the here and now on as wide a scale as possible seems like a worthy ambition to me.”

It’s been quite the journey for Tilly and she sees obvious connections between the person she is today and the school in Steep that fired a large part of that journey. “100% I see the Bedales influence in what I’ve done over the past thirty years or so”, she says. “I think if my seventeen-year-old self could have looked ahead, I like to think that she would have approved of the life I’ve led and my desire to make change happen whilst building from the past.”

Tilly Blyth was interviewed by James Fairweather in Autumn 2024.