AN interesting headline in the Craven Herald of 75 years ago, in January, 1946, caught my eye: ‘Skipton Castle ends wartime task’. The castle it seems, had been used by the British Museum during the Second World War for the safe storage of 1,600 sealed boxes of manuscripts and books. During the war years, the people of Skipton decided because of the level of security - a guard slept every night in the room where they were stored - it was in fact the Crown Jewels that were in the castle, a rumour that persisted until the end of the war. In the last week of January, 1946, ‘another secret of the war’ was put to bed, as a convoy of vans left the castle with their precious cargo, taking some of the nation’s treasures back to their home at the British Museum in London, reported the Herald at the time.