National Museums Liverpool Blog - Monday, February 25, 2008

Black achievers wall, International Slavery Museum © Redman Design/ International Slavery Museum

Judges from The Art Fund Prize visited the International Slavery Museum today. The panel have the tricky job of deciding which of the ten nominated UK museums and galleries demonstrate the most originality, imagination and excellence.

Fingers crossed they have enjoyed their visit today and that we are shortlisted to the final four (to be announced in early April). The winner will be announced on Thursday 22 May at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London during Museum and Galleries Month 2008.

If you are one of the thousands of visitors who have visited the International Slavery Museum since it opened in August and think it deserves this prize then add your comment on The Art Fund Prize website.

Let's see what's through the round window...

If like me you grew up on a diet of Big Ted, Little Ted and Jemima the rag doll then you might be interested to know that the multi-talented legend that is Dr Floella Benjamin, will be coming to the International Slavery Museum! To celebrate International Women’s Day, Floella, who is Chancellor of the University of Exeter as well as being an actress, writer and children’s campaigner, will give an inspirational talk introduced by Dorothy Kuya.

This special free event will take place on Saturday 8 March 2008 at 7pm. Please contact Lizzy Rodgers to reserve a place on 0151 478 4543 or online here.  

Creamfields 06 UK (2006) © Cream

Just to let you know that Merseyside bands will get the chance to be part of the massive music exhibition, 'The Beat Goes On', if they join our new Myspace page at: http://www.myspace.com/thebeatgoesonliverpool !

It doesn't matter what kind of music you're into, just join us as a friend and you will be in with a chance to become part of the exhibition, alongside bands such as The Zutons, The Wombats, Echo and The Bunnymen and OMD.

'The Beat Goes On' exhibition will start this summer at the World Museum and will celebrate the city’s music venues, bands and creativity. 

On the Myspace page each month, we will choose ten tracks from bands on the friends list. These tracks will be featured on the Myspace page as a monthly top ten chart, where the public will be able to vote for their favourite online.

Top ten bands will have their band and track name displayed on a wall in the exhibition to show the top ten for each month. The number one track at the end of each month will be added to a ‘digital jukebox’ in the exhibition and will become part of 'The Beat Goes On', giving bands great exposure for their music and the chance to reach a larger audience.

Voting will begin at the start of June when the first top ten chart will be displayed on the exhibition’s Myspace page.

If you’re not in band, but you love Liverpool music, you can still join The Beat Goes On as a Myspace friend to get the latest updates from regular news bulletins.

So what are you waiting for? There's already some tracks up on the site to keep your ears occupied until the voting starts, so check out some new music today!

Thursday saw the 2008 Academy Ambassador Awards which celebrate excellence in customer care in Liverpool. Three members of staff were nominated: Emma Calver from the Weston Discovery Centre in World Museum, Ros Appleby from the Learning team at the Walker, and Eddie Harvey from Gallery Services at World Museum. Emma fills us in on the night's events.
 

R-L, Ros, Emma and Emma's husband

We all had a fantastic night. The awards ceremony was at the Crowne Plaza hotel in the city centre, and as it was Valentines night there were lots of hearts decorating the ceremony, and the theme of people leaving their hearts in the city when they come to visit.
 
Several NML staff attended plus the nominees and their partners, and we were treated to a lovely three course meal.
 
Ros won the Family Friendly Award, and I won in the Arts and Culture category. It was a real surprise to win - I was over the moon.
 
Edwin was highly commended in the Visitor/Event award, and judges commented that the quality was so high in his category that any of the nominees could have won.
 
After the awards we all danced along to the Merseybeatles band.

Emma

'Just another sailor' by J Hanstock. Image courtesy of the Liverpool Daily Post & Echo

It came as a surprise when I learnt that hospital ships had their origins in the American Civil War. Serving a vital role in theatres of war, an early example was the Red Rover which aided soldiers from both the Union and Confederate armies.

Both world wars saw passenger liners being converted to hospital ships. Titanic’s sister ship Britannic was being used for this purpose when she was sunk by a mine off the Greek island of Kea on 21 November 1916. She was heading for Moudros in Greece to pick up injured military personnel. A total of 30 men died - 21 crew and nine members of the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) - but 1,036 people were saved. Britannic was the largest British ship lost in the First World War and remains the largest sunken ocean liner in the world (she was slightly bigger than Titanic).

There is a sailor-made model of the hospital ship Atlantis, which served in the Second World War, in Merseyside Maritime Museum. Formerly a cruise liner with the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, the 15,000-ton Atlantis was converted into a hospital ship in 1939. She carried up to 615 patients and 130 medical staff, including many female nurses provided by the RAMC. Crewed by Royal Mail merchant seamen, during and after the war she was constantly at work on missions of mercy. Atlantis was twice bombed off Norway. She steamed some 280,000 miles and carried 35,000 wounded from a variety of war zones. She later repatriated prisoners of many nationalities and carried soldiers’ brides to Australia. Atlantis docked in Liverpool several times during the war.

The wartime model was made by medical orderlies on board ship. She is painted white with large red crosses on her funnel, decks and hull. 

A photo shows Atlantis arriving at the Prince’s Landing Stage, Liverpool, in October 1943. She was carrying 764 badly-injured allied servicemen repatriated after being released from German prison camps. A moving water colour is called Just Another Sailor, showing an anonymous  patient with his face swathed in bandages, revealing only his eyes. It was painted by his ship mate J Hanstock. It graphically shows the suffering of the Royal Navy rating, his face severely burned after the bombing of the British battleship Warspite at Salerno, Italy, in 1943.

Today the British Royal Fleet Auxiliary ship Argus performs a medical role but is designated a “primary casualty receiving ship”.

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

MP Andy Burnham and family in Walker Art Gallery

Even the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport gets time off to enjoy a family day out. I got this photograph while Andy Burnham visited the Walker Art Gallery with his wife and three children. They had already been to Big Art where the girls had been fitted out with fairy costumes. When I found them the family were absorbed by Ben Johnson’s Liverpool Cityscape and trying to spot Everton’s football ground.

View from the top of Liverpool Cathedral

Chris from the learning team at the National Conservation Centre has been to the top of Liverpool Cathedral (featured in the previous post oddly enough) and taken this snap of the view east-ish, out over the river to the Wirral and the Irish Sea beyond in the haze. You can see a larger version on our Flickr page (I've linked to the large version so you can see the detail but there are other sizes to view as well).

The taller red cranes mark the site of the Grosvenor/Liverpool One development, then to the left and towards the river you can see more red cranes around the emerging Museum of Liverpool. The Liverpool Echo are planning to do a month-by-month video update on the museum's building progress, with the first on the Echo website now.

If you've not been to the top of the cathedral it's well worth going on a nice day, if a bit windy. The view is fabulous. There's a lift part of the way up.

The Anglican Cathedral as it was in the cityscape in Sept 07

Well, the proportion who have visited the Walker in the past few weeks have. We've been asking visitors to the Ben Johnson residency to tell us their favourite building in the Ben Johnson cityscape of Liverpool. The winner, if you hadn't guess by the image, is Liverpool Cathedral (that's the Anglican Cathedral) with the other buildings we love on this Valentines Day being:

1. Liverpool Cathedral
2. The Liver Building
3. St George's Hall
4. The Metropolitan Cathedral of Liverpool
5. Port of Liverpool Building
6. St. John's Beacon
7. St. Nicholas Church
8. Albert Dock
9. White Star Building
10. Walker Art Gallery

Despite asking visitors for their favourite in the painting we got several strange suggestions including the Pilgrim Pub, which if you know Liverpool you'll know is difficult to see from the end of Pilgrim Street never mind on the artwork. It amused me though.

Today we've launched what will hopefully become a regular feature on the site - our 'Name that Object' competition. We'll be revealing a new detail of an object (it's an artwork this time - bit of a clue for you there) every day for a week with the answer at the end. This is today's clue. There's a prize of a miniature Superlambanana to the first person to correctly identify the piece and to email us the answer using the form on the competition page.

If you're as forgetful as me you can always subscribe to the rss feed to get updates, or just click backwards to see previous clues. And as a final hint I'll tell you that the object is somewhere on our website. There, I've said too much already...

The first clue in the name that object competition

Graveyards and cemeteries have fascinated me since childhood because of the stories each stone tells – some simple, some complex, all emotionally moving. Jesse Hartley, a colossus in the history of the Port of Liverpool, lies under a simple stone next to his wife at a desolate churchyard in Bootle’s docklands.

Canada Timber Docks, Liverpool. Towards close of day by Robert Dudley (active 1865-1891)

A bustling scene is captured by Robert Dudley in his painting 'Canada Timber Docks, Liverpool, Towards Close of Day' in the collection of Merseyside Maritime Museum. Sailing ships crowd a dock as hordes of workers unload tons of wood which is carted away by horses and stacked neatly on the quaysides. The atmospheric 1872 view of Canada Dock vividly captures the hustle and bustle of the port. The number of horses in the painting underlines the importance of horse-drawn carts in carrying goods from docks to warehouses.

Canada Dock, opened in 1859 when Canada was Britain’s major source of timber, was the last dock designed and built by Hartley (1780 – 1860). He was the Port of Liverpool’s most prolific and famous engineer. Hartley’s greatest single achievement was the Albert Dock (1846) which now houses the Maritime Museum. He was the world’s first full-time professional dock engineer.

Hartley’s appointment was characteristic of the many risks taken in Liverpool during its history. He had no experience in building docks and beat 13 rival applicants, several of whom were well-known engineers. No doubt the port authorities were impressed by Yorkshireman Hartley’s strong personality, grit and determination which later paid great dividends.

Sir James Picton - the renowned Liverpool historian, architect and contemporary of Hartley – described him as: “A man of large build and powerful frame, rough in manner and occasionally rude, using expletives which the angel of mercy would not like to record”.

During his 36 years as Liverpool dock engineer, Hartley added 140 acres of wet docks and 10 miles of quay space. He either altered or constructed every Liverpool dock and during his career worked on other projects including the Liverpool end of the Leeds-Liverpool Canal and the Bolton to Manchester rail and canal system.

Hartley and his wife Ellen lie buried in St Mary’s churchyard, off Irlam Road, near where they lived. St Mary’s was flattened during the 1941 Blitz which devastated Bootle, with hundreds of lives lost and thousands of buildings destroyed or damaged. The graveyard, containing the mortal remains of nearly 19,000 people, was made into a park in 1960 but many of the tombstones were preserved.

A new Maritime Tale by Stephen Guy appears every Saturday in the Liverpool Echo. More on Hartley and his construction of the Albert Dock can be found on our main site.

Alan Bowden, curator of Earth Sciences, told us a good few months ago now about a palm frond we'd acquired (more here). Now it's finally on display he tells us about its journey from subtropical Wyoming to the wall of World Museum.
Images from its conservation are on our Flickr page.

The conserved frond in its shiny new case in World Museum

The story of the greening of the Earth - the flora of our planet and how it has evolved to achieve the wonderful diversity of today - is a bigger story than that of the animals as it contains a record of all the changes that have occurred with our atmosphere and climate, and has the potential of demonstrating where our future lies. 

The newcomer to the museum is a frond of the extinct fan palm Sabalites sp belonging to the family Arecaceae.  This fossil leaf is 50 million years old and was found in Folly Quarry on the Lewis Ranch, near Kemmerer Wyoming, Western Lincoln County, Wyoming, USA. At that time Wyoming was a warm subtropical area with lush and exotic vegetation at the edge of a series of large fresh water lakes which were larger than the Great Lakes Region of Canada.  This is very different from the Wyoming of today, which has a high mountain desert with long winter snows and freezing temperatures.

It was found in a limestone rock known as the Fossil Butte Member of the Green River Formation.  During the Eocene (50 million years ago) this formed as sediment that was being deposited in the fresh water lakes.  A lack of oxygen in the water caused many of the lake’s animals and plants to die, and also stopped bacterial action on the bottom of the lake. This meant that the dead animals and plants which would normally have rotted away were preserved in exceptional detail.  Complete fronds like our specimen are extremely rare.

The fossil shows numerous rays with bifurcating tips branching out from a sturdy woody petiole.  The petiole is well preserved showing a fibrous structure.  The basal attachment of the frond is of an unusual shape which indicates that this specimen may belong to a new, previously un-described, tribe.

The palm frond has spent a year being prepared by members of our conservation team and earth sciences staff. When it arrived it had been crudely covered with an acrylic based paint to ‘enhance detail’ with car body filler to hide cracks. The acrylic, body filler and some rock was very carefully removed to reveal extra details such as the natural colour of the specimen, extensions to the leaves, fragmentary remains of fossil fish beneath the leaf, the fibrous nature of the petiole and unusual features of the basal attachment. The fossil is now displayed on the 4th floor of World Museum and serves as a reminder of climate change over geological timescales.

If you haven't seen the Hello Sailor! exhibition yet, here's a great video by our friends at Homotopia TV to show you what you're missing. The short clip features Jo Stanley, whose research formed the basis of the exhibition, talking about the background to the whole project and showing some of her favourite things inthe displays, including some very bling shoes.

I just wanted to wish a Happy Chinese New Year to everybody out there, as today is the start of the best year in Chinese astrology (in my completely unbiased opinion) - the Year of the Rat. Anyone lucky enough to be born in the Year of the Rat like myself will appreciate that we are charming, quick witted and generally fantastic people. So now that it's our year I think that's something to celebrate.

If you're in town at the weekend for the festivities you can see some Martial Arts demonstrations at World Museum Liverpool on Saturday or make colourful Chinese dragons, lanterns or fans in workshops at the Maritime Museum on Sunday - check out the What's on listings for further details.

I haven't got a picture of a Chinese rat from our collections, so instead here's a piece of 19th century netsuke which does at least demonstrate the sociable nature of us rats. Sharp eyed visitors to the Magical History Tour exhibition may also spot some hidden amongst the displays in a trail for children (don't worry, they are soft toys, not real rats...)