During Spring 2024 the market town of Cheadle in Staffordshire, often confused with its namesake just over the county border in Cheshire, has seen an influx of thousands of people keen to see the town’s Cheadle Moon exhibition, which commemorates the life and works of the English astronomer and selenographer, Mary Adela Blagg (17 May 1858 – 14 April 1944).

Born in 1858 to Frances Caroline Foottit and John Charles Blagg, a solicitor with close associations to the local gentry, Mary Adela was initially home schooled and self-trained in mathematics – borrowing her brother’s schoolbooks in order to satiate her appetite for the subject. She later attended a private London boarding school, where she studied algebra and German. Initially, the confines of her privileged, middle-class life ensure that she would take  up vocations deemed suitable to a woman of her status – becoming a Sunday school teacher and participating in charitable endeavours.

As Mary reached middle age her interest in astronomy was piqued, after attending a ‘course of University Extension lectures given at Cheadle by Mr J.A. Hardcastle’.^[1] The lecturer then went on to suggest to Mary that she should turn her attention to a research gap within the field of selenography, so that she could participate in an original investigation. Concentrating on the nomenclature of lunar formations, Mary set about sorting what had previously been a confusing and inconsistent system of lunar mapping, into a Collated List of Lunar Formations, which was published in 1913 and edited by Samuel Arthur Saunder.

When, in 1920, the International Astronomical Union was founded, Mary was invited to join the society’s Lunar Commission and continued her work mapping the moon. Her subsequent research association with Karl Müller, the Bohemian astronomer, allowed Mary to co-produce a work entitled, Named Lunar Formations, which was published in 1935 and became the ‘standard reference until the pre-Apollo photographic lunar mapping of the 1960s’.^[2] Roughly concurrent to her work on lunar nomenclature, Mary also studied variable stars (stars whose physical properties and brilliance appear to change with time).

Mary, a chess-loving woman ‘of a modest and retiring disposition’ who was considered ‘very much of a recluse’, having spent almost her entire life in the Staffordshire Moorlands, died in Cheadle on 14 April 1944.^[3] While these comments concerning Mary’s nature and habits must be taken with a pinch of salt; They were after all, written by a male colleague, Mr P.M. Ryves, who perhaps did not factor in how far coeval societal expectations influenced women’s characters or the extent to which travel constrictions affected many provincial females’ ability to attend formal meetings in the capital. Mary’s contributions to world knowledge however, speak for themselves  – as does her propensity for hard, theoretical ‘spade work’.^[4] Her academic ‘skill and courage’, while commemorated post mortem within the global astronomical community, was relegated to the side lines of history until later twentieth-century studies began to concentrate on women in science.^[5] As the study of women’s history evolved into the twenty-first century, proponents of this flourishing sub-genre delved further into Mary

Blagg’s achievements, the Cheadle Discovery Group (CDG) amongst them. Their research initially allowed the group to curate an exhibition focusing on Mary in 2017 and later, in 2018, they were able to secure a plaque commemorating her accomplishments.

The Cheadle Moon exhibition however, could perhaps mark the culmination of the CDG’s endeavours to increase the visibility of Mary Blagg’s scientific legacy and allow her name to resound within the town that she once called home; The showcase being brought to fruition by the CDG in conjunction with a steering group made up of individuals from the following: OUTSIDE, Saint Giles the Abbot and the Parish Church Committee, Creative Cheadle and Cheadle Town Council. The Cheadle Moon exhibition also owes support to various other bodies and local businesses: JCB, Alton Towers, Film Hub Midlands and the Royal Astronomical Society, of which Mary was a fellow. The project also received funding from The National Lottery Heritage Fund and OUTSIDE, the arts group associated with the scheme, were funded by Arts Council England.

Part of a greater touring exhibition the giant lunar sphere by Luke Jerram, entitled Museum of the Moon (which for the past three weeks has dominated the nave of Saint Giles the Abbot church, Cheadle, in order to commemorate Mary Blagg’s achievements and the eighty years since her passing) has been, and will be, ‘presented in a number of different ways, both indoors and outdoors, so altering the experience and interpretation of the artwork’.^[6]

Samantha Hughes-Johnson is an art historian and confraternity scholar whose main area of expertise involves fifteenth-century Florentine art, architecture, material culture, lay religiosity and social history. Her past research focussed on groups marginalised during the Renaissance and she has published and lectured extensively on the clandestine operations of the Archconfraternity of the Buonomini di San Martino, the fresco decoration of this company’s oratory, the ashamed poor (who benefitted from this secret society’s charity) and several high-profile historic individuals connected with the sodality. Samantha is also particularly interested in the language of women’s clothing and gesture in quattrocento Florentine art and has published and lectured on this subject. When Samantha is not researching or writing, she is committed to the various duties that she undertakes for the Italian Art Society, the Society for Confraternity Studies and Women’s History Today. In her spare time, she is a staunch advocate for sexual, social and racial equality and actively supports several local community projects.

[1] The Obituary Notice of Mary Adela Blagg, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Vol. 105, p.65

[2] Kevin J. Kilburn FRAS: On behalf of the Cheadle Discovery Group, ‘Unveiling the Mary Adela Blagg Plaque’, The Royal Astronomical Society website. https://ras.ac.uk/unveiling-the-mary-adela-blagg-plaque [accessed 3 April 2024].

[3] The Obituary Notice of Mary Adela Blagg, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Vol. 105, p.65

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Museum of the Moon by Luke Jerram website. https://my-moon.org/about/ [accessed 3 April 2024].