Our Heritage piece on the bizarre museum tucked away in St Mildred's Church, Addiscombe, between the 1930s and 1960s stirred the hazy memories of Croydon resident Mr W J Wood, who thinks he remembers visiting a racing car exhibition there when he was a young boy.

Mr Wood, of Farm Drive, said: "My family moved into Addiscombe in the early 1920s when I was a few months old. I virtually cut my teeth in the Bingham Road area.

"I spent lots of my younger days playing in the adjacent recreation grounds, even climbing over the big iron gates after being locked in.

"I can remember visiting the hall to watch real lantern slides, which was a bit of a treat. I cannot remember what was shown or the dates.

"I am sure my friends and I visited the hall to view one of Sir Malcolm Campbell's record-breaking racing cars. It was a big, lovely blue car with large wheels.

"I still wonder to this day how the organisers managed to get the vehicle in. While visiting the car I can still recall the birds in glass cases. Was this a figment of my young imagination or did I see it somewhere else? I'm not as young as I used to be."

After reading the story, Paul Sowan, vice-president and librarian of Croydon Natural History and Scientific Society, was able to shed some light on the museum's curator RR Hutchinson.

He said: "Robert Russell Hutchinson, born in 1870, was a bank manager, probably in the Eastbourne area.

"On his retirement he settled in Croydon in 1933, joined the Croydon Natural History and Scientific Society and founded St Mildred's Museum.

"He was curator of this society's museum until 1950 and died in 1951, leaving some 700 books and his natural history collections to us.

"To what extent this material was displayed at St Mildred's is not clear from our records, it may have been all or none of it.

"The collections we inherited occupied two rooms at our then headquarters at the former Eldon House in Wellesley Road, near the present Norfolk House.

"Some of the surplus material was distributed to a local school and we have little, if any, of this material now.

"The society has always found obtaining the use of premises in central Croydon difficult and, in recent years, prohibitively expensive so we have to adhere to a strict collecting and curation policy.

"At present we have a small and cramped freehold building for use as an office and records store; a demountable classroom on another site; and rented storage space at a third location.

"Our library still contains a number of the most locally relevant and valuable books bequeathed to us by RR Hutchinson.

"We passed his botanical collection, a herbarium of pressed plants, to the South London Botanical Institute some years ago, as that body has both the space and the expertise to curate it to an appropriate standard."