where?, Other: Bramber Museum

I just acquired two very old postcards of ratty-looking taxidermy freak animals (a chicken with four legs, a duckling with four legs and four wings, a kitten with eight legs and two tails - 4 of the legs sticking straight up from its back). The cards are imprinted "Bramber Museum". Any idea where that is or was? [Kerry Regan, 07/15/1997]

[RA: The museum that you have postcards from isn't American--it's British. And it's not really known as The Bramber Museum, though it was once located in the Bramber part of Sussex.

It's called Potter's Museum of Curiosity, and is most famous for the stuffed animal tableaus created by Walter Potter in the last half of the 1800's.

His first piece, 'The Death and Burial of Cock Robin', took seven years to complete. It showed the funeral procession to the churchyard with the parts all played by stuffed animals. An owl digs the grave, a rook is the parson, the sparrow has his bow and arrow, and all the birds of the air are sobbing, some of them with glass bead tears. Ninety-eight species of British birds are represented.

The most popular scene is 'The Kittens' Wedding'--twenty stuffed kittens ceremonially arrayed--with a bride in a dress of cream brocade and a long veil, a cat as parson and six bridesmaids in charming outfits of pink or cream. They are holding tiny prayer books. This was Potter's last masterpiece, completed in 1890.

The freak animals were given to him by local farmers. Surrounding these are other Victorian curios, from human skulls to a model church made of pigeon feathers.

After Potter's death in 1918 his museum was moved to Brighton and then to Arundel, where it was an attraction for many years until it was bought for $200K by the owner of the Jamaica Inn on Bodmin Moor. The museum draws some 30,000 visitors a year.]