Eel Pie Island Museum - Virtual Tour

Hi, I'm Michelle Whitby, founder and curator of the Eel Pie Island Museum, and along with Trevor we'd love to welcome you here. Eel Pie Island is famous for many things, mainly its music heritage of the 50s and 60s - I'm going to hand you over to Pete, our music historian who is going to tell you all about it. The origins of the club in itself start in 1956 with a chap called Bryan Rutland who was playing jazz down the river at the Barmy Arms (?). He needed a bigger place to play and at that time, the hotel ballroom on the island was not being used so he approached Michael, the owner, to suggest 'well you've got a nice big ballroom, literally gathering dust, and I've got a lot of people who want to hear my jazz - why don't we bring the jazz over to the island' and of course Michal Snappard's eyes lit up at the prospect of a lot of customers from his inception in 1956 as Eel Pie Island's jazz club through to its final days as Colonel Barefoot's Rock Garden in the 1970.
We had full gamut of trad jazz going through rhythm and blues, RnB, blues itself - lots of American blues musicians coming through, through the days of psychedelia and into the final days of hard-hitting, underground music.We had the Stones on a 5 month residency, you can find out how Rod Stewart effectively kicked off his career here in 1964, find out why Pink Floyd employed bed sheets into their gigs in 1967, and David Bowie - known as he was as those days as David Jones, appeared here several times during 1964, and also there is a big story about how The Who, never booked by Arthur Chisnel who ran the club, eventually made their debut in 1968. The Arbor started their career on the island, we had soul divas such as Gina Washington and The Ram Jam Ram band plus a lot of the emerging, more experimental of 1967 such as Family, Moody Blues were coming on stream in 1968, a lot of the names who would become big in the early 70s, such as Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Mott the Hoople , and some bands that are still gigging today - such as stray.
We have on display certain little bits of memorabilia, such as one of our tea towels that was signed by Rod Stewart, where he has helpfully pointed out which is his image of tea town. We've got a drum head donated by Charlie Watts, following the Stones gig at the Twickenham Stadium in 2018, and we also have a waist coat that was worn by Bill Wyman on stage on the island in 1963, that came into our possession a few years ago.
If you visit the museum, what you get is a guided tour of everything that we have in the museum, which includes the boatyard section, and also predominantly the music side of the history from 1956-1970.