National Museums Liverpool Blog - Friday, March 30, 2007

Poster accession number RD00042.0012

The Easter holidays start this weekend, and as you'd expect, we've got lots of free activities at our venues to keep the kids entertained while they're off school.

In the spirit of the season, the National Conservation Centre are holding five Easter craft afternoons from Wed 4 April, which include card making and egg painting. You could also take part in an Easter rummage at the Customs and Excise Museum over the next 3 Sundays. Please check the What's On listings for the times of each session.

It's a busy time so if you are travelling into town, this poster from the Museum of Liverpool collections has some good advice, which still rings true sixty years after it was printed. The poster is number 13 in a series produced by Liverpool Corporation Passenger Transport in the late 1940s, aimed at passengers to help reduce queues and peak time travel for workers.

Anyone for a slice of cathedral?

Today is architect Sir Edwin Lutyens's birthday. Born in 1869, he would have been 138 in the highly unlikely event that he was still around today.

I don't know if anybody out there is up to the challenge, but I think that Angela had the right idea in her blog about potentially edible buildings in Liverpool. The only suitable way to mark the occasion would be with a cathedral-shaped cake, ideally the size of the model in the Walker's exhibition The cathedral that never was (I'm being practical, not greedy - the cake needs to be big to fit all the candles on).

Or you could just treat yourself to a normal size piece of cake in the Walker cafe in Lutyens's honour if you don't have an industrial size oven of course.

Head of sculpture conservation Sam Sportun gives Pomona a quick clean

Most people decorate their garden with a nice pot from the garden centre, or maybe an ornamental bird bath or fountain. The gardens at Het Loo Palace in the Netherlands are pretty spectacular however, so they have commissioned a specially made replica marble sculpture from conservation technologies at the National Conservation Centre to grace their lawn.

The replica is a life sized copy of a 17th century marble statue of the goddess Pomona, part of the Royal Collection, that's on display in the Orangery of Kensington Palace, London.

The original statue was laser scanned to produce an accurate 3D computer model. As it is such a large sculpture it had to be divided into 8 pieces that were machined separately out of Carrara marble. These were then carefully assembled, rather like a huge 3D jigsaw puzzle that weighs around 400 kg. The joins are cleverly hidden in the sculpture, so you would think it was carved from a solid piece of marble.

You can see a Flickr slideshow of photos of Pomona being carefully packed into a crate ready for the trip to the Netherlands. 

Update: see pictures documenting the replication of Pomona and read more about the process in a new case study on the National Conservation Centre website.

If you live in the Granada television region tonight's viewing might include the current affairs programme, Granada Editions at 7.30pm. Tonight's show is a special edition looking at the role of the North West in the transatlantic slave trade.  Poet Lemn Sissay looks at how the profits of the trade are still evident around the region. Tony Tibbles, keeper of the Merseyside Maritime Museum, and assistant curator, Stephen Welsh, both feature.

I’m delighted to reveal Port Sunlight has made it into the BBC News website’s top 20 hidden tourist gems. After asking a gaggle of celebrities to pick their favourite places off the typical tourist track readers were invited to nominate secluded spots of their own. It’s heartening to hear that the Lady Lever Art Gallery is gaining a reputation on both sides of the Atlantic and I couldn’t agree more with Daniel from Charleston, USA, that the gallery does have a ‘surprisingly good art collection’. I’ll let him off for calling us a museum.

As for Tony ‘Time Team’ Robinson’s rather random choice of Newbury Park Bus Station, think I'll give that one a miss.

This weekend marked the bicentenary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in the UK. Given Liverpool's role in the trade there was strong media focus on the city, with the Merseyside Maritime Museum featuring heavily. The following radio programmes are available to 'listen again' by following the links.

The Sunday Programme on BBC Radio 4 was broadcast live from the Merseyside Maritime Museum. The programme looked at why some Christians supported slavery and others didn't, slavery in Islam, Liverpool and the slave trade, and the legacy of slavery. 

Next Sunday Worship - Set All Free, also from the Merseyside Maritime Museum, featured Bishop of Liverpool, Rt Revd James Jones and Senior Pastor of the Temple of Praise Church, Dr Tani Omideyi. The Love and Joy Gospel Choir provided the vocals for a programme looking at the legacy of slavery in a city whose fortunes and success rested on the slave trade.

Also on Sunday, Radio Five Live's Worricker Programme was broadcast from the Elmina fort in Ghana. Playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah visited the transatlantic slavery gallery at the Merseyside Maritime Museum and interviewed the keeper of the museum, Tony Tibbles, talking about the trade and the new slavery museum. Deputy PM John Prescott, Miss Dynamite and former Leeds and Ghanaian footballer, Tony Yeboah also featured.

BBC Radio Merseyside's Claire Hamilton also focused on the trade and interviewed Richard Benjamin, keeper of the forthcoming International Slavery Museum.  Wayne Clark looked at the role of abolitionist, William Wilberforce, in his Daybreak programme. Keeper of the Maritime, Tony Tibbles, was also interviewed.

HMS Liverpool's bell

The ringing of a ship’s bell had a key role in the lives of seafarers and to me, Stephen Guy, some bells have a haunting quality. 

Ships’ bells served a very practical purpose keeping crews informed of the passing of the hours when they were on watch. As far back as the 15th century, bells sounded the time on board ships. There were no chronometers or watches in those days and time was kept with an hourglass. The bell was sounded every half hour of the four-hour watch. The day was divided into five four-hour watches plus the dog watch between 4 pm and 8 pm. This was split into two, two-hour watches to allow crew members to have an evening meal and to switch watch times for crew each day, on a rota system. The first bell was rung after half an hour, two bells after one hour. Bells that followed were punctuated by pauses – for example, after 90 minutes it was two bells – pause – one bell. The maximum came at the end of the four-hour watch – a sequence of two bells rung four times, with pauses between. In other words, eight bells which meant the end of the watch.

There are many ships’ bells in the collections of the Merseyside Maritime Museum. The bell from the famous liner Mauretania (1907) was presented to Bebington Parish Church, Wirral, by Sir Percy Bates, chairman of the Cunard Line, in 1936. The bell of the sixth HMS Liverpool (1938) hangs in a frame of oak timbers (shown). The frame was made from wood from the gatehouse of the Old Hutte, a 14th century manor house, controversially demolished to make way for the Ford motor factory at Halewood in 1961. For many years the bell hung in the Liverpool Stock Exchange until its closure in 1991.

A Royal Navy bell with a fascinating story is from the battleship HMS Rodney (1927 – 48). She and another battleship, HMS King George V, pounded the German pocket battleship, Bismarck, into a blazing wreck. The cruiser HMS Dorsetshire then torpedoed Bismarck, which finally capsized and sank with her colours flying. Bismarck’s end was hastened by her crew detonating scuttling charges and opening water-tight doors. More than 2,000 crew died and only 118 were saved.

A new Maritime Tale appears every Saturday in the Liverpool Echo.

Digital, 35mm or good old pinhole, pick up your camera, I’m declaring 2007 the year of the photograph.

We've got Bernard Fallon’s atmospheric images of Liverpool going down a storm at the National Conservation Centre and the images of Merchant Palaces at the Lady Lever Art Gallery provide a fascinating insight into the way the other half lived.

If you fancy a shot at photography and are lucky enough to be aged between 12 and 16 there’s a Victorian photography workshop at the Lady Lever on Thursday 12 April. Places are limited so call our learning department on 0151 478 4178 to snap up a place. 

Never fear oldies, there's also opportunities for those of us old enough to remember when Polaroid’s were cutting edge to develop our skills. Shoot Liverpool is an interactive photographic treasure hunt happening in May and promises a fantastic day of creativity and camaraderie on the streets of Liverpool. Sounds like a reel good time.

If your photographic thirst hasn’t been quenched by that fine lot I visited the BALTIC in Gateshead last week to see the Vik Muniz exhibition. Check out a chocolate Elvis  and Che Guevara reborn through the magic of black beans. Definitely the best exhibition I’ve seen all year – apart from our own of course.

Bernard Fallon's Crosby babes

eBoy, London

I always enjoy a trip to the Harris Museum and Art Gallery in Preston. Anywhere with quirkily named displays like 'Madder Modes' (looking at the hidden meanings of wearing red, with help from some gorgeous frocks and Vivienne Westwood shoes) and 'Stuck up and Downtrodden' (decorative Victorian and Edwardian tiles) really is my kind of place.

Their latest exhibition, Digital Aesthetic 2, which explores contemporary artists' use of digital technologies, is so big it has spread into 3 other venues in the city. I started my visit with a trip to St John's Minster to see Vince Briffa's 'Playing God', an interactive video installation in which you control the decisions of a girl looking for her lost cat Tini. It sounds simple but it had a group of us completely hooked and baffled as we searched in vain.

Over at the gallery itself the main room is dominated by three huge pixelated cityscapes by eBoy. The tiny image above really doesn't do justice to the impact they have when you first walk in. I also played the most intellectual game of Space Invaders I've ever seen, courtesy of Thomson and Craighead.

There's lots more but I'll leave you to explore it for yourselves. And if anybody finds that cat please put me out of my misery and let me know it's OK.

Miss Everton Courtesy of Cunard

It only seems like the other week when it opened, but the Hello Sailor! exhibition at Merseyside Maritime Museum is due to depart our shores and sail off into the sunset next week.

To see it off in style, Pink Quartet will be providng music and performance from the high seas at 2.30pm and 3.30pm on Saturday and Sunday.

There will also be a final performance of 'Nothing's queer once you have left that pier' at 1pm on the last day of the exhibition, 25 March. This whirlwind story told by Dennis - ship steward by day and diva by night - is a real treat, well worth a trip to the Albert Dock for.

Full events listings are available on the Maritime Museum What's on page.

The exhibition will be touring once it closes here, the next stop will be Southampton, where it opens in a few weeks.

No sooner have Airside left the building, than they seem to be cropping up all over the place, leaving me with a distinct sense of having missed out on something. Airside were commissioned to do an interactive called ‘Insyde’ for the Walker Art Gallery as part of the last Biennial but we were lucky enough to have the installation until last month. I did get along to see it - just once -and intended to go back to fully immerse myself in the experience, but never quite got around to it.

Now I find out that they were also behind the design for pop darling of the moment Mika whose marvellously colourful cd cover is all over the shops. Well, strictly speaking Mika and his sister Yasmine were responsible for the initial ideas but Airside helped them to turn their fledglings into a ‘full visual identity’.

Airside are also running a Flip Book workshop at the V&A museum Friday 30th March. The event is part of Friday Late Animate which celebrates the art of the moving image. And a fine and interesting evening it looks set to be – with the programme covering everything from hand-drawn frames to computer technologies.

If you can’t make it to the big smoke for the V&A workshop, never mind, there’s still time to pick up a few design tips at Animated Adventures  at World Museum Liverpool which will be with us throughout the Summer. But don't dilly dally because the months soon fly by.

And you can still see a little of what Airside got up to at the Walker online 

In her role as office services manager at National Museums Liverpool, June McDonough has seen a lot of stamps passing through the post room over the years, but never one as big as this!

The philatelic giant is promoting a new series of special issue stamps that will be launched by Royal Mail tomorrow to mark the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the Transatlantic slave trade.

Each of the six stamps in the series features one of the most prominent anti-slavery campaigners of their time, including Olaudah Equiano on the first class stamp pictured here. The presentation pack of this series includes background information by our very own Tony Tibbles, the keeper of Merseyside Maritime Museum and project leader of the Transatlantic Slavery gallery.

There are lots of events taking place at Merseyside Maritime Museum to celebrate the abolition bicentenary, including a live broadcast by BBC Radio 4's Sunday Programme and Sunday Worship from the museum this weekend (on Sunday, in case you were wondering). Audiences are welcome, but you need to get there for 6.45am for the first programme and 7.45am for the second. So set your alarms early - and remember to adjust them to British Summer Time before you go to bed on Saturday.