National Museums Liverpool Blog - Tuesday, December 04, 2007

All say 'juicy'. Copyright Juice FM

Yet again the Walker has won an award, this time it was the Visitor Award at the Juice FM Style Awards on Friday night. For the last 6 weeks Liverpool has been voting through street surveys, web votes and focus groups for who they want to see crowned the people's style favourites. The Walker fought off the Tate Liverpool and Albert Dock to claim that accolade. Tracey McGeagh (Director of Marketing and Communications) and Reyahn King (Director of Art Galleries) collected the award which is now on display in the gallery foyer. The image shows Tracey and Reyahn in the centre with Aisleyne Horgan-Wallace from Big Brother on the left and Naomi Mills from Shipwrecked on the right.

Update 06.12.07: Forgot to credit Juice FM for the use of the photo - thanks very much chaps! 

Detail of Stewart Bale Ltd photo of the model Father Christmas in Blackler's department store, 1958. Archive reference SB 581174-1

Did anyone mention that it's almost Christmas? Just a few times so far this year but it is only the first week of December.

This year we've got some brand new Christmas e-cards on the website. The latest selection features images from the fantastic Stewart Bale archive, which is held at Merseyside Maritime Museum.

They're accompanied by a Stewart Bale at Christmas online exhibition, with zoomifiable pages of all the photos. You could for example zoom in even closer to the photo shown here of the giant Father Christmas in Blackler's department store. But be warned, he's quite scary up close. Obviously designed to be seen from much further away...

Christmas is coming the goose is getting fat, but don't go panicing and filling your stockings with tat! I have a much better idea - head down to the shopping night at the Lady Lever Art Gallery tonight and bag yourself a cracking gift instead. There's jewellery, candles, gift stationery, cards and christmas decorations - something for everyone. To make it a totally stress-free experience mince pies, mulled wine and musical refreshment courtesy of Church Drive School choir are on offer to help you on your merry way. Sounds perfect.

I hope one of those presents has my name on it

For the next two weeks, Rina, a Japanese student studying English will be working in the Ethnology department at World Museum. We're really pleased to have her here and we thought it would be nice for her to do a blog about what she is doing.

Rina with the tree in the museum foyer

Hello!

My name is Rina. I am from Tokyo, Japan. I am working in this Museum as a work placement for a month. I usually do computer work and store objects, but my main purpose is to improve my English skills through my work.

I study British and American literature in my university in Japan, and this work placement is a part of my language course studies. Before I came here, I studied English in university of Manchester for two month, and I moved to Liverpool two weeks ago. This work placement is a good experience for me and helps me to know the English work environment and improve my English skills.

I am interested in the exhibition “The Beat Goes On” because I am interested in U.K. rock music very much. However, it will open after I go back to Japan, so I’d like to come back here to see the exhibition!

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 by the museum 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."