National Museums Liverpool Blog - Monday, December 03, 2007

Model of the Samarina. Image courtesy Liverpool Daily Post and Echo

To me, Stephen Guy, the story of the Liberty Ships shows brilliantly what can be done when people and nations are threatened and have their backs to the wall.

The United States built three Liberty Ships a day to boost the convoys which acted as Britain’s lifelines during the Second World War. In early 1942, President Franklin D Roosevelt set in motion probably the greatest shipbuilding programme in world history. The aim of this huge US-Government sponsored scheme was to produce 750 new ships by the end of 1942 and a further 1,500 in 1943. This amounted to three new ships every day. To meet these targets, many new shipyards were opened and thousands of extra workers – male and female – were recruited. Ships were built in sections and then assembled, like cars, on huge production lines.

The first of the 2,700 Liberty Ships built in the USA during the war slid down the slipway in mid-1942. By the end of the year, the Americans were building ships faster than the German U-boat submarines could sink them.

The astounding success of the Liberty Ship programme was to be a major reason for the Allied victory in the Atlantic. At least 290,000 civilian seafarers served in the US merchant marine and army transportation service during the war. Of these, 114,000 received the Merchant Marine Combatant Ribbon, indicating that they had been in combat action. More than 6,000 were killed while serving in merchant ships. The United States lost about 278 ships on the north Atlantic and Arctic routes, almost one half of the total US merchant ship losses during the war.

At the Merseyside Maritime Museum there is a model of the 7,200-ton Liberty Ship Samarina of 1943. Built by the Bethlehem-Fairfield company of Baltimore, USA, she carried valuable war cargoes throughout the rest of the conflict. Like all Liberty Ships, she was based on a British tramp steamer design and was rather an “ugly duckling”. She had good anti-aircraft armament and her bridge was shielded by “plastic armour”. This was a British invention made from granite, limestone mineral and bitumen which could be moulded, hence the term “plastic”. It was applied in a layer two inches thick and backed by half an inch of steel. Plastic armour was very effective at stopping armour-piercing bullets from German war planes. The plastic armour was applied by pouring it into a cavity formed by the steel backing plate and a temporary wooden frame.

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

Can you believe it's December already? I'm sure last time I checked it was August, I just don't know where the time goes, I really don't.

If Christmas is creeping up a bit too quickly on you as well then National Museums Liverpool's latest festive offering may come in handy. This weekend we launched an online advent calendar, to count down to the big day and hopefully get you in the Christmas spirit.

Behind each window is an artefact or an event from our collections and venues with a Christmas link, revealing insights into popular festive traditions as well as historic reminders of past Christmases. So far I've found out how the Norse god Odin may have inspired a Christmas tradition and why decorating your house with holly and ivy could lead to a harmonious Christmas - and it's only day 3.

A ghostly Phil Sayers gives us an insight into his work

I went to the Walker Art Gallery yesterday to catch a talk by artist Phil Sayers about the Changing Places project he has produced with fellow artist Rikki Lundgreen. It consists of reinterpretations of certain paintings and sculptures that are on display in the Walker and the Lady Lever Art Gallery. Phil told us that one of the main reasons for doing the project was his and Rikke’s love of dressing up! They seem to have used this interest to great effect in their re-workings of the paintings, giving them a 21st century twist. Phil explained that he felt the women in the paintings they had chosen were portrayed as passive or dependent on men, so the artists’ idea was to ‘free’ them from this in their versions of the work.

Rikki’s video installation, ‘Ascension’, was inspired by Segantini’s ‘The Punishment of Lust’. Her version shows the central woman as a living, breathing person whose heart you can hear beating. Phil explained that his, ‘St Agnes’ Eve with hindsight’ was inspired by the painting ‘Madeline After Prayer’ by Daniel Maclise. The original depicts a young woman ‘looking to the heavens’ as a ritual before sleeping, so that she will dream of her future husband. This idea is turned on its head in Phil’s digitally created image, as he dresses as Madeline and looks towards the floor, holding a string of eye-shaped beads. He told us that he wanted to show Madeline as an independent woman who sees everything around her and is rebelling against the ritual in the original.

Some of the pieces in the collection have an eerie, almost ghost-like quality, using double exposure to layer images on top of each other. As you can see from my great photograph (!) of a blurry Phil Sayers on the left and his transparent hands, I have accidentally paid a small homage to their work!

The installations will be on display at the Walker and the Lady Lever Art Gallery until 20 April 2008.

Fierce!

Local press attended a preview this morning of the lovely exhibition Victorian Visions, which opens to the public at the Lady Lever Art Gallery on Saturday.

There are some big names in the world of Victorian photography included in the exhibition such as Julia Margaret Cameron and Francis Frith. But my favourite work is by Lady Hawarden, an artist I had never heard of before this exhibition.

What I love about her photographs is their intensity. Hawarden was a master of composition and used light and shadow to give her images an amazing elegance. I also love the models. She used her own daughters who appear to be experts at striking dark, moody poses. Their gloominess may well have more to do with being forced to pose for hours for a perfectionist mother than artistic expression, but they might have been comforted to know that their intense and unusual photographs could easily be on the pages of modern day fashion spreads. Contestants of America’s Next Top Model should watch and learn!

Ian Cooke, Doris Cooke-Smith, Chris Cooke, Malcolm Cooke and Arthur Smith in front of the Wincham

One of the boats in the Merseyside Maritime Museum's collection had a special visitor recently. Doris Cooke-Smith is the daughter of John Siddal, who was the first captain of the weaver packet Wincham back in 1948. She remembers travelling on the Wincham when it was a working ship, and can recall her father first collecting the boat when it was brand new.

Doris brought her family to the Albert Dock to see the Wincham while her eldest son Ian was visiting from Canada, where he now lives. Ian was taken on board the boat when he was young and remembers sleeping on board on an improvised bunk.

The Wincham is now owned and looked after by the Wincham Preservation Trust. Members of the trust who were working on the boat at the time spoke to the family and showed some of them around below decks. The family enjoyed the visit which brought back many memories and Doris has kindly agreed to be interviewed by museum curators for an oral history of her time on the working steam packet.

The Empress of Ireland. Image courtesy of Liverpool Daily Post and Echo.

The Empress liners were well known to me, Stephen Guy, in the 1960s when they were a familiar sight at the Prince’s Landing Stage on Liverpool’s waterfront. However, this sad tale belongs to an earlier era and the loss of the Empress of Ireland was quickly forgotten.

More than 1,000 people died when the Canadian Pacific Line passenger liner sank four miles off shore after colliding with another ship in thick fog in May 1914.

The Empress of Ireland had just left Quebec, Canada, at 2.30 am and most of her 1,054 passengers and 413 crew were asleep. Suddenly there was a grinding thud as the Norwegian collier, Storstad, ploughed into her, tearing a huge a hole in the liner’s side. The  stricken Empress sank to the bottom of the St Lawrence river in less than 15 minutes. The terrible loss of the “Forgotten Empress” has always been overshadowed by the sinkings of the Titanic in 1912 and Lusitania in 1915. 

The Empress of Ireland and her sister the Empress of Britain were the first passenger liners to be built especially for the Canadian Pacific Line’s growing emigrant trade from Liverpool to Canada. Both began service in 1906. Larger, faster and more comfortable than their rivals, they soon became the most popular ships on this route.

The sinking of the Empress of Ireland is featured in a new permanent exhibition at the Merseyside Maritime Museum called Titanic, Lusitania and The Forgotten Empress. Among items on display is a tartan blanket given to surviving officer Robert Brennan of Liverpool, by one of his rescuers. Robert was junior second engineer on the Empress and gave evidence at the Canadian inquiry into the disaster in June 1914. Part of his typed report is on display. Robert graphically describes the moment of collision:

“There was a terrific crash which had only one meaning and that was we had been run into by a vessel of considerable size and weight.
The very fact of the collision had no effect whatever on the engine room or stokehold crowd at the time but ere many seconds elapsed the report from the stokehold indicated that our good old ship was injured badly and making water at a great rate.”

Also on display is a seven-versed tribute by Liverpool poet James Ernest Bygroves, known as The Docker, which was distributed following the disaster. It includes the lines:

“And deeds were done on that dark morn of which we’ll never hear.
And many a last farewell was given and many a parting tear”.

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

Last week a group of us from National Museums Liverpool were taken on a ‘behind the scenes’ tour of the bug-tastic World Museum, so I thought I’d fill you in on what we saw. After visiting the aquarium we explored the learning areas, designed our own colourful fish in the Eye For Colour exhibition and then got up close and personal with a few six & eight-legged friends!

Bughouse Demonstrator, Jenny Dobson, took our group behind the scenes in the Bughouse where we were introduced to a pregnant Flat Rock Scorpian (let’s call her Sally) who is expected to give birth to up to 100 babies in the next few months! We also came face to face with a Mexican Red-Kneed tarantula (let’s call her Tammy) who thankfully stayed very still, unlike her more boisterous male tarantula neighbour who looked like he wanted to escape. Apparently you can tell between the sexes if you compare the size of their rear ends – females have larger bottoms. I decided to give them these names as Jenny told me that she had stopped naming the bughouse residents due to her getting too attached to them! Thanks to Laura Healy for these great photos.

Tammy & Sally relax in the bughouse.

Textile conservator Anne-Marie Hughes has been preparing this 2000 year old Egyptian shroud for display in the new Egyptian gallery at World Museum Liverpool, which opens next year. I was privileged to see it in her studio while she was working on it.

The shroud was framed in the 19th century and had been glued to the back board, so Anne-Marie has had to remove it, which was quite a job, before remounting it on silk. You can see photos of the shroud with the backing board and the silk backing on our Flickr page.

The pink paint on the shroud is going to be analysed to see if it's from Rio Tinto in Spain. Recent research by the Brooklyn Museum has revealed Spanish paint on one of their mummies.

Head of Antiquities Ashley Cooke told me more about the shroud itself:

"This is a small fragment from a large painted linen shroud that once was wrapped around a mummified body. It dates to circa AD 100 - 200, a time when Egypt was a province of the Roman empire. Mummification continued to be practiced during the Roman period but the techniques employed were inferior to those of earlier periods. It was common for greater attention to be devoted to the external appearance of the wrapped mummy. Shrouds were painted with portraits representing the deceased in poses adapted from Hellenistic Greek repertoire. The Liverpool shroud depicts the transfigured dead person who has assumed the identity of Osiris, appearing in mummy form in frontal pose. Osiris is wearing the Atef crown with a plume on either side and a small disc and uraeus at the centre. His hands clasping across his chest hold the flail and sceptre of Egypt.

The shroud was found in Egypt in 1870 but other information about the excavation was not recorded. The museum acquired this piece from the collection of the famous pharmaceutical entrepreneur Sir Henry Wellcome in 1973.
 
Funerary shrouds such as this offer an interesting conjunction of Greek, Roman and Egyptian forms of representing the individual. Over the next year the museum will be carefully studying the iconography and artistic techniques used to further our understanding of this fascinating and beautiful object."

Jeannie documenting the colection

Volunteers do extremely valuable work across National Museums Liverpool. Jeannie has been volunteering for the Museum of Liverpool since September, and is getting hands-on collections experience documenting a diverse range of items kindly bequeathed by the late John Hamilton.

Jeannie became a volunteer to gain experience and an understanding of the museum environment after completing her University degree.

She says 'The wide ranging items keep the work interesting as you never know what you may uncover next; from evacuation labels and blow torches to French comics! Every week there is something different that develops my knowledge and understanding, not only of John Hamilton's personal history but also that of Liverpool'.

The home of Maashri

Today we travelled the 80km from Orissa's state capital Bhubaneshwara to the coastal town of Puri, a major centre for Hindu pilgrimage and the home of one of the most distinctive Hindu Gods, Lord Jaganatha; a manifestation of Krishna.

Along the way we stopped at several rural villages, many known to me through the work of a friend Stephen Huyler, a cultural anthropologist who has worked in Orissa with Babu Mohapatra for over 30 years. It was a privilege to see the work of the potters who effortlessly create beautiful water pots and vessels for the Jaganatha temple in Puri. Having dabbled in potting myself I know just how difficult it is to create the pieces that they shape in a matter of seconds.

We then moved on through several villages to the home of Maashri (pronounced Mousey), a 76 year-old woman who is a renowned alpana (floor painting) and wall painter. We were a little too earlier to see her work, as each home in the village had just been freshly covered in a mud/dung mixture ready for the painting that will take place in 10 days time to celebrate the end of an important month of fasting for women. While we didn't get to see Maashri's wall paintings she created a beautiful little Ganesha (the Hindu Elephant God, who is the Lord of New Beginnings), using a rice flour that she trickled into fine lines through her fingers. This practice of wall painting is slowly changing as many homes in the village are now pukka (cement) rather than the traditional chakka (mud/dung), which women are reluctant to decorate as the walls are not able to be renewed with mud/dung plaster once the painting needs renewing. We sat and drank tea and the family asked me many questions about my life, they were particularly interested in my decision to have a career rather than a family. They were also distinctly unimpressed with my style choices as one of Maashri's grand-daughters quickly ran for nail polish and bindis (a small dot that is placed between the eyebrows) to beautify me!

Reluctantly, we moved on to our final stop, which included several stone carving workshops. Here I made my first purchase for the Weston Discovery Centre. I was particularly taken by the work of one workshop, which used the local sandstone used in the creation of the magnificent sun temple at Konarak (more on that later in the week). I picked out a beautiful piece depicting Lord Krishna with the gopis (female cow herders), which is a very popular Hindu story. The work and detail on the piece is exquisite and we discovered that many of the pieces currently in production would be going to temples in the area. I've included a picture of the stone carving workshop, which is a chakka building. 

Tomorrow I will be visiting the bazaars around the great Jaganatha temple, but tonight I will be relaxing by walking along the wide sandy beach, sorry to rub it in as I know it is snowing and bitterly cold in the UK.

Peacock's apparatus. Image courtesy of Liverpool Daily Post and Echo

I, Stephen Guy, love the wonderfully refreshing qualities of pure water – especially from a natural spring on a hot summer’s day – and can well imagine the terrors of seafarers unable to quench their thirsts.

Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

These famous lines from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge sum up the fear seafarers have always had about running out of fresh water.

Captain George Peacock, RN, came up with an apparatus to help turn seawater into drinking water in 1828. There is a contemporary scale model of the device on display at Merseyside Maritime Museum. It was designed to remove the salt from seawater at a time when the lack of drinking water on sailing vessels was a common problem. From 1906, merchant seafarers were allocated three quarts (six pints) of water daily. The scale metal model is inscribed:

“Model of Captain Peacock’s apparatus for aerating fresh water condensed from salt water. Invented by him and fitted on board HM steam ship Echo in September 1828. On board HM steam ship Salamander in March 1833 and on board HM steam ship Medea in Feb 1834.”

Captain Peacock’s apparatus features a crank handle which operated a series of cogs and paddles in the water tank. Drinking water was then obtained from a tap.

Peacock, a prolific inventor, later became master of several steamships of the Pacific Steam Navigation Company of Liverpool. In later life he received a medal from the Columbian Government for his services in first proposing building the Panama Canal.

The display also focuses on sailors’ diet over the years. A ships’ biscuit dates from about 1914.  They were jokingly known as Liverpool Pantiles (roofing tiles) because of their shape and texture. By 1850 tinned food was readily available for use as ships’ provisions and later became standard. On display are tinned codfish, dried yeast and chicken broth manufactured by Henry Gamble & Co around 1850. Nautical cookery books on display include Cookery for Seamen by Alexander Quinlan and NE Mann (1896) and the Nautical Cookery Book for the Use of Stewards and Cooks of Cargo Vessels by TF Adkins (1916).

Before 1900 most seafarers had little choice but to accept whatever food and drink was provided. Their inadequate diet consisted mainly of poor quality salt meat, hard biscuits and dried peas or oatmeal. This led to widespread health problems, especially on long voyages. Surprisingly, salt meat and ships’ biscuits remained standard provisions for seafarers on British vessels until 1957.

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

A rice-eating porcupine

As you might have guessed we didn't see any tigers in Similipal National Park. However it was a beautiful place to be for a couple of days. We stayed in what was once the Maharaja's hunting lodge (believe me it was not as glamorous as it sounds), which looked out over a clearing and a salt-lick in the otherwise dense forest. At dusk, a herd of spotted deer appeared where they settled for the night and while we didn't see a tiger the deer obviously did, as with night falling anxious barks from the deer on watch alerted the herd to danger. In the absolute pitch black the barks rang out across the clearing, which sent shivers down my spine, and had me heading for the safety of the villa!

Being in the middle of a nature reserve that has no electric light, apart from one solar-powered bulb in the room, when night closed in it really was pitch-black; you literally couldn't see your hand in front of your face. This made for excellent star-gazing. With a pair of good binoculars we could see thousands and thousands of stars and even a planet, but as none of the group are astronomers we couldn't work out which it was. Still it's one of the best night skies I have ever seen.

Apart from the deer we had another visitor, a rice-eating porcupine! Apparently he was a regular visitor to the lodge and the cook there often gave the porcupine left-over rice. On this particular night the porcupine must have been hungry, as he snuck back into the kitchen, pulled the pot of cold rice off a shelf and ran under our jeep to eat it. It meant that we had a small lunch the next day, but hey I wasn't going to argue with those quills. Here's a picture of our rice-stealing friend on his first visit.

So tomorrow we'll be heading to Puri, a major temple town on the Bay of Bengal. On the way we will be stopping at several villages known for their terracottas, wall paintings and stone carving. I hope to find a piece for the Weston Discovery Centre along the way.