CHARD Museum will be featured on national television this afternoon, when it appears on the BBC 1 show, Antiques Road Trip.

The programme will be screened this afternoon (September 17, 2015) at 4.30pm and will follow antiques experts Charles Hanson, pictured below, and Raj Bisram on a trip searching for treasures and competing to make the most money at auction.

During Thursday’s programme, they visit Chard and its award-winning museum and learn more about the work of James Gillingham, the man who invented artificial limbs.

David Ricketts, of Chard Museum, said: “The show producers contacted us and filmed back in April and we did an interview with Raj about James Gillingham.

He added: “All went well and I heard last week that they said the programme would be transmitted on Thursday at 4.30pm.”

It was in 1863 when the story of James Gillingham and the artificial limbs began.

Back then Chard was celebrating the marriage of the Prince of Wales, but unfortunately one of the canons firing as part of the celebrations misfired badly and Will Singleton had his arm badly shattered and it had to be amputated.

Chard & Ilminster News: Charles Hanson

Three years later Singleton called at the Golden Boot in Chard’s High Street where James Gillingham ran a shoemaking business.

It was then that Gillingham offered to make him an artificial arm – at no cost.

Once it was made and fitted Singleton could life a hundredweight or more and wheel a wheelbarrow.

The Chard Museum’s archives said that Gillingham wrote: “There was nothing remarkable in its make – only the principle of fit and adjustment.”

That was the start of a business which, for three generations, produced artificial limbs unequalled anywhere in the world.

By 1903 Gillingham had treated more than 7,000 patients and the years ahead many disabled ex-servicemen from the First and Second World Wars received artificial limbs made in Chard.

Gillingham died in 1924, but his son and grandson maintained the family connection with the business until 1950, when the company passed into new ownership.

The firm finally closed for good in the 1960s.