National Museums Liverpool Blog - Friday, February 29, 2008

You can now see a Flickr slide show of photos of the School Champions documentary team in action earlier this week. They've taken some fantastic shots, including some really good views of the Museum of Liverpool construction site from the ferry. I really like their description of the mixture of old and new building styles on the waterfront as, which they've called 'architexture'.

The QE2 visited Liverpool last year and I was among the thousands of people who trudged through the rain to see her moored at the waterfront.

The QE2 served as a troopship during the Falklands war in 1982 when she carried 3,000 troops to the south Atlantic.

The original Queen Elizabeth and her sister ship Queen Mary were two of the most famous converted troopships of the Second World War, ferrying many thousands of military personnel to different areas of battle.

At Merseyside Maritime Museum there is an oil painting by Norman Wilkinson showing the Queen Mary and other ships on the Clyde.

Although vast numbers of troops and military supplies sailed to and from Liverpool and other west coast ports, during the war the two huge Queens always used the Clyde Anchorage, off Greenock, Scotland. This was Britain’s main trooping port during the war.

Also on display is an exhibition model of the 8,000-ton Marwarri of 1935. She was owned by T & J Brocklebank Ltd, managers for the Ministry of War transport.

Marwarri, like other British cargo liners, was requisitioned by the British Government soon after the outbreak of war.

After doing sterling service as a cargo carrier, she later carried both troops and equipment to support the invasion of Europe. The 1:192 model shows Marwarri in wartime grey.

In 1944 she made seven return passages to the Normandy beaches, carrying thousands of troops and vehicles for the invasion.

An oil painting of Marwarri was done by Sybil Rimmer in 1940 when she was working as a secretary with the Brocklebank Line. It shows the ship on a dull day in the Mersey, seen from the first floor of the Cunard Building at Liverpool’s Pier Head where Miss Rimmer worked.

A photograph shows the Marwarri preparing to join a convoy taking men and supplies across the English Channel to support the Normandy landings. Another shows British troops resting in hammocks below decks en route to Normandy.

Troopships, unlike landing ships, could not land troops directly on to the shore so had to use a seaport.

Regular naval ships were originally used to carry troops overseas. As part of their plan to invade Britain, the French built a fleet of 2,000 barges during the Napoleonic Wars but they were never used.

With the arrival of huge ocean liners in the 19th and 20th centuries, navies recognised their troop-carrying potential and began to charter them. The liners were painted grey and armed.

Merseyside Maritime Museum is open seven days a week, admission free. A new Maritime Tale by Stephen Guy appears every Saturday in the Liverpool Echo.

Weatherhead pupils on their first visit to the Museum of Liverpool construction site back in January

It's a few weeks since the last update on the School Champions project, which offers pupils from local schools the opportunity to get involved with the development of the Museum of Liverpool. In that time the budding Spielbergs who are filming a documentary about the construction of the new museum have been busy. Yesterday pupils from Weatherhead Media College and St Margaret Mary's RC Junior School took a ferry across the Mersey to film and photograph the Museum of Liverpool build. Afterwards Weatherhead pupils were also allowed onto the construction site to film.

Below is a report on the day's activities from Champion Libby Brunskill. Photographs from the day will be available on our Flickr page soon.

After this we went onto the construction site of the new Museum of Liverpool. We spent roughly an hour taking shots of the museum and came up with some really creative images of the reflection of the sun’s light on the pillars. Also cranes, the size comparison between the old museum and new one, workmen in action, skips and tyre tracks were very interesting. The best shot was probably the JCB, which we filmed at different angles with the Liver Buildings in the background.

Next we went back to the Maritime Museum and took various shots of the anchor and spiral outside it. We were able to capture the new museum and the Liver Buildings through the hole in the anchor, which looked really effective when zoomed out. Then, we finally took shots of the celebrity wall in the Maritime museum."

Make sure you check out 'The Pool' show with Dave Monks on BBC Radio Merseyside, from 8pm this Sunday 2 March! I'm going to be on choosing my top three favourite Liverpool tracks of the moment and talking about 'The Beat Goes On'.

So tune in to hear my choices...a bit of eighties, a bit of punk and some wooly-hat-wearing-Velvet-Underground- meets-psychedelic sounds. I once did a similar thing choosing some tracks on the fantastic Halton FM a few years ago (yes, the dizzy heights of stardom) but at the BBC you get free coffee and the microphones are bigger.

If you miss the show you can also listen online for a week after it has aired by going to the BBC Liverpool website.

BBC Radio Merseyside – 'The Pool'

Every Sunday evening from 8-10pm

BBC Radio Merseyside 95.8 FM, 1485 AM and on digital

Botanical print of 'Narcissus jonquilla'

Any Welsh mothers out there should be spoilt rotten this weekend, for not only is it Mother's Day on Sunday but it's also St David's Day on Saturday.

E-cards for both occasions are available online, including a host of golden daffodils (well, 3 daffodils including a white one, but they're all very beautiful botanical prints from the fantastic collections at World Museum Liverpool) in the brand new St David's Day e-card selection.

Then for Sunday you can choose from a painting or an Egyptian mummy in the Mother's Day e-card selection.

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.