Items from a much-loved Pembroke museum of domestic life are up for sale at auction this month and next.

The Museum of the Home - which was just across the road from Pembroke Castle - was the passion of local collectors Judy and John Stimson.

Peter Francis auctioneers in Carmarthen will disperse around 450 items from the museum in the coming months.

John and Judy - whose family’s holidayed together for many years when the pair were children - began collecting shortly after they were married in 1955.

On the salary of a trainee architect, funds were limited but the couple bought modestly-priced items such as Victorian and Georgian metalwork, domestic bygones, children’s toys and games and folk art.

After reading Edward Pinto’s book Treen and Wooden Bygones published in 1979, turned and carved wooden objects became a passion, and the Stimsons ultimately owning over 1000 pieces from simple ladles to love spoons and money boxes.

The pair bought mainly through dealers or at antiques and collectors fairs.

“We chose items that had been used in the home over 300 years,” they said.

“Functionality was important when we made a purchase but so too was good design. We developed an eye for the unusual.”

The Museum of The Home opened shortly after John took early retirement and the couple moved to Westgate Hill, Pembroke.

It stayed open for 20 years, delighting and educating thousands of visitors over two decades.

The Stimson’s are now ‘downsizing’ but they still have the collection at home to enjoy.

“We have so many pictures we are planning to start hanging them from the ceilings”.

The auctioneers are selling the collection across a selection of Antiques and Collectables auctions which started this week and will continue on August 28, September 11 and 25.

The first tranche was offered in the firm’s July 3 auction with the 35 lots bringing around £2,500. Many of these bygones were focused on the accoutrements of smoking (or tobaccoiana as it it known by collectors).

That meant clay, meerschaum and metal pipes, novelty pipe tampers, pipe racks, tobacco boxes, cigarette packets, cigarette cases, cigarette rollers, cigarette holders and cigar cutters.

Among the most popular entries included an iron churchwarden pipe - a type with a long stem popular in the late 18th and early 19th century.

They took their name from the night watchmen who favoured them as the smoke they emitted did not interfere with their line of sight as they kept watch. It sold with two other clay pipes for £130.