WHEN I first knew Pickering, in 1949, Dr Kirk, who had died only nine years earlier, was still very much alive in people's minds.

Fifty years later, he seems almost forgotten, except for a blue plaque on the end wall of a big, rather shut-in-looking house in Hungate, and another in Kirkgate, the 'street' in the Castle Museum, York, named after him.

He was not actually a native of Pickering, but of Hull, where he was born in 1867. Trained in London as a doctor, he married Nora Rose, the daughter of a London accountant, and came in 1898 as a GP to Pickering, where he lived for nearly the rest of his life.

Most doctors in those days would have done their rounds in a horse and trap. Dr Kirk was one of the first to make use of the new petrol engine. His Minerva motorcycle with a wicker-work passenger trailer, was a well-known feature in Pickering and outlying villages. For his practice was extensive, including places on the moors, like Rosedale, still a working iron-mining village. He soon found he needed better protection from the weather, and upgraded to a de-Dion two-seater, followed in 1908 by 'Old Reliability', a Clement-Talbot Tourer.

It was in this car that he drove through the streets in the Pickering pageant of 1910, dressed as a knight in plate armour, with a lance, and a squire to carry his shield, as he can be seen in an old photograph in the Beck Isle Museum.

He loved cars, for their own sake, and soon became familiar at car-race courses. Between 1909 and 1912, he won 31 trophies in his 'Old Reliability'.

In another photograph, owned by the Castle Museum, he doesn't look at all like a racing driver. It shows him as a lean, thoughtful, scholarly type, sitting reading on a stone bench. He wears spectacles, a bushy Edwardian moustache, knicker-bockers, and what seems like gaiters. If you saw that photograph first, you would not be surprised to learn that he was an enthusiastic amateur archaeologist, who took part in many local excavations, mostly on Roman or prehistoric sites. The most spectacular of his finds was in a barrow on Pextor Moor, in which was unearthed an Iron-Age burial chariot, the chariot still in upright position.

Archaeology and ancient history were life-long passions for Dr Kirk. But even more ingrained was his passion for collecting antiques, especially 'bygones', which began very early in his professional career, and continued long after he had retired.

The first two or three decades of the 20th century were of course a time of great social change, even in a quiet rural area like North Yorkshire. As a doctor, going into people's homes, often into isolated farms and farmyards, he saw for himself how much old stuff was being thrown out, and how valuable it could be, historically. Much of his collection was acquired through his patients. Often he would bargain for some bygone, in lieu of fees. In fact, as his appetite for such things became notorious patients would hurry to hide away any valuable antiques, before they called the doctor in!

By 1918, his house in Hungate was bursting at the seams with his spoil: antique furniture, farming gear, cottage ornaments, fire insurance plaques, horse brasses, silver and copperware, brass instruments, medical and musical, children's toys - heaven knows what else. A hearse, a hansom cab, and two fire engines occupied his stable, whilst his car stood outside the house.

As for his family, according to Nora Kirk, they were driven to take refuge in his study. For years, she was begging him to find another home for this domestic museum.

In 1919, there seemed to be an opportunity. An old town mill was going to be adapted as a town hall and war memorial. Dr Kirk offered his collection to the town council, if they would set aside a room in the hall for it. After some delay, the offer was accepted, no doubt much to his wife's relief.

But the Memorial Hall was unsatisfactory from the start. No one was appointed as a paid curator. For years, Dr Kirk did the job himself, providing cases and display material out of his own pocket. Very quickly, the condition of the building deteriorated. Damp got into the collection from a leaky roof. Access was ludicrously difficult, by an iron staircase like a ladder.

His own health was deteriorating too, so much so that pessimistically, he had a cedar-wood coffin made by a local builder. In 1925, he retired as a GP, but still struggled on as "honorary" curator for another six years.

Bygones can need considerable expense to preserve and display them properly. It became clear that the town council could never provide adequate funds. And Dr Kirk felt he must find another home for them. In 1931, in despair, he put an advertisement in the Museum Bulletin.

Six towns responded, but only York proved to have anything like adequate accommodation in, of all places, the nearly ruinous female section of the Old Debtor's Prison. It was Dr Kirk's idea that this might be adapted or rebuilt, to look like an old York street, with shops containing items from his collections, plus a series of rooms, furnished like Jacobean, Georgian, and Victorian interiors, plus a moorland cottage room. The idea may have germinated back in 1910 when he and his wife had visited Scanson, the outdoor museum in Stockholm.

But in England it was a first. Nothing like it had every been seen before. The public's response was instant and cumulative.

When the Castle Museum finally opened in 1938, after seven more years of frustration and hard work, Dr Kirk was sitting, incognito, in the audience.

He had often despaired of ever seeing that day. And in fact he only lived for two more years.

Despite his eccentricities and determination, he seems to have been a reticent, private sort of man. His funeral was quiet in the extreme - almost secret.

The plaque in Kirkgate in the museum, named after him, concludes: "If you seek his monument, look around."

Perhaps he would have been well content with that.

Updated: 12:45 Thursday, January 24, 2002