National Museums Liverpool Blog - Friday, May 02, 2008

Vikky Evans-Hubbard plays the role of Diane Nash

As usual our museums are packed with things to keep you busy this bank holiday weekend, but a new performance at the International Slavery Museum on Monday 5 May is definitely worth a special trip.

Keep your eyes on the prize tells the inspiring story of Diane Nash and her involvement in the civil rights movement in America during the 1960s. There are two performances at 2 and 3pm.

Or if like me you are planning a very lazy long weekend then let BBC's Woman's Hour bring highlights of the performance to you. They are doing a series on the treasures of National Museums Liverpool as picked by female members of staff. Watch this space for the others to follow throughout 2008.

Director of art galleries, Reyahn King, is in London at the moment, presiding over the judging of the 25th John Moores Contemporary Painting Prize. Here's her report from the end of day one (yesterday).

Dinos (left) and Jake Chapman. Image courtesy Mike Marsland Photos

Today, 1 May 2008, the John Moores Contemporary Painting Prize jurors started stage 1 of judging the exhibition and prize. The jurors are artists Jake and Dinos Chapman (shown), Paul Morrison, Graham Crowley and critic Sacha Craddock. Jake and Dinos are in the midst of preparing for a big show, Paul Morrison's work is on currently in lots of places including Liverpool, London and Japan, Graham Crowley has been on the news commenting on the state of art teaching in London and Sacha Craddock is a legend for her longstanding reputation as a critic and Chair of another competition, New Contemporaries. Given all this it is wonderful to me that these five will come together to spend two days in a darkened room selecting work for our exhibition in Liverpool.

At the beginning of the day over breakfast I stressed the sheer volume of art to see. With 3,448 entries I was worried that the process might run beyond the two long days everyone had set aside. Judging started at 9:30am and went on to 7pm with food breaks. Incredibly we finished ahead of schedule - the jurors were really keen, taking only short breaks before itching to get back to it.

My role is to keep the jury on schedule and coordinate with the technical team. In the main this means checking that all five jurors have agreed whether a work is to be selected or are they still pondering? Yesterday they were focused on a first sift, and if any one person liked a work it got put to one side without much debate. Already though you can see preferences for kinds of work emerging and I expect debate to really get going when we revisit the first sift.

Today we'll finish looking at all the entries and then go back to all those put on one side and reconsider them.

By the end of tomorrow, 2 May, we need to have decided which 250 or so artists will be invited to send their work to Liverpool to be judged at stage 2 in June. Watch this space!  

Our trading arm, NML Trading, is holding a Recruitment Open Day on Saturday 10th May. They're looking to recruit Team Leaders, Catering Assistants, Venue Supervisors, Chefs and Banqueting staff. They're looking for people who are passionate about catering for their daytime operation plus occasional evening work. You'll be working in Liverpool’s world class museums, providing high quality food and refreshments to over two million visitors each year.

To find out more about the roles on offer, bring your CV to World Museum Liverpool, William Brown Street, Liverpool between 10.30am and 4.30pm.

On this day in 1915 the Lusitania left New York on what would be her last voyage across the Atlantic. As the liner approached southern Ireland on 7 May 1915 she was torpedoed by the German submarine U-20. She sank in under twenty minutes with the loss of 1,201 of the 1,962 people on board.

To commemorate the tragedy the Merseyside Maritime Museum have added a lifebuoy (or ring lifebelt) from the liner to the displays in the Titanic, Lusitania  and the Forgotten Empress gallery.

The lifebuoy was found by the skipper of a fishing boat from Kinsale who helped to rescue Lusitania survivors. He gave it to a visiting fish merchant, Arthur Miller, who displayed it in his office. It is now on long term loan to Merseyside Maritime Museum courtesy of Arthur Miller's grandson Dr Arthur Neiland.

There will be an act of remembrance for those lost in the sinking of the Lusitania led by the Rev Steven Brookes, Rector of Liverpool, on the 93rd anniversary of the tragedy. Everyone is welcome to the event, which will take place at 1.30pm Wednesday 7 May on the quayside outside the Piermaster's House - see this handy city centre map for the location.

Update: please note that the remembrance event will now be led by Father Robert Mackley.

Over the past six months staff and volunteers in the Ethnology department have been unpacking, re-storing, documenting and photographing NML's little known Islamic collection.

This fascinating collection ranges from 12th century painted dishes from Iran, to 15th centruy pottery sherds from Fostat, an important trading centre in Egypt, to modern day tourist souvenirs. To whet your appetite here's an image of a wonderful dish from 12th - 13th century Iran showing a huntsman riding his sturdy horse.

12th - 13th century dish from Iran, showing a hunting scene.

Having unpacked the collection it was clear that it needed more attention and research. With the help of the Museum Partnerships department we have secured a grant from the Museums Association's Effective Collections scheme. This grant will pay for an Islamic specialist to come and review the collection and make recomendations as to how we can best use the collection, which might include new displays at NML, loans to other organisations or possibly more research into the collection's history.

I'll keep you posted on how the review goes and what we plan to do next.

The Hesperous, 1942. Image courtesy Liverpool Daily Post and Echo

I’m told duffle coats are coming back into fashion – as they were when I was at school in the 1960s – but little did I realise that they came to the fore on the convoys of the Second World War. The convoys which brought vital supplies across the Atlantic to Britain were constantly threatened by German submarines bent on sinking as many ships as possible.

Once at sea, merchant seafarers were always involved in the daily routine of watches (two and four-hour working shifts). Off-duty time was mostly spent sleeping, playing cards or on other similar pastimes

Whenever a convoy was under attack it took great discipline and nerve to remain at your post. Engine room staff lived closer to death than those on deck, since the engine room was a prime target for U-boat torpedoes and was often a difficult place from which to escape.

Iron ore cargo ships, once torpedoed, were often known to sink literally like stones. The crews of oil tankers knew that they could be burnt alive if their ship was attacked.

In 1942, 8,400 British and Commonwealth merchant seafarers lost their lives in the Atlantic. Nearly a third of the crews died on British ships that were sunk. Government reports said that morale within the merchant navy remained remarkably high. Most of the people involved, however, felt they were just doing their jobs, like millions of others.

Among exhibits on display at the Merseyside Maritime Museum are tiny models of the warships which escorted the convoys. These miniature waterline models, scale 1:1200, show how small Royal Navy ships were compared to capital ships. There are models of the destroyers Montgomery and Vanoc (both built1918) and Fame (1934), sloop Pelican (1939), corvette Abelia (1943) and frigate Allington Castle (1944). By way of comparison, there is a same scale model of one of the Royal Navy’s largest capital ships of the war, the battleship King George V.

There is the commissioning pennant of the destroyer Hesperus which was based in Liverpool for much of the war. A photo shows Hesperus entering the Gladstone Dock in December 1942, her bow crumpled after ramming and sinking the U-357.

An iconic duffle coat is of the type worn by Royal Naval and merchant seafarers on the Atlantic convoys throughout the war. Another iconic item is a Mae West lifejacket as worn by British and allied personnel during the war. It was named after the buxom Hollywood star who was a pin-up of the time.

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

Terry standing next to his painting RS Thomas Triptych.

Standing Stones, a display of work by Liverpool-artist Terry Duffy, opened today at the Walker Art Gallery.

The display consists of two diptychs and a triptych, forms that work really well with the symmetry and the classic architecture of the gallery.

Standing Stones is on show at the Walker Art Gallery until 8 June 2008 and will be followed by further exhibitions of Terry's work in various locations throughout the city during Capital of Culture.

Living Memorial to Ken Sara-Wiwa outside the International Slavery Museum

Today is the last day to catch the Living Memorial to Ken Saro-Wiwa outside the International Slavery Museum.

The 12ft high and 18ft long Nigerian steel bus, created by artist Sokari Douglas-Camp CBE, is carved with a direct quotation from Ken Saro-Wiwa. The quotation ‘I ACCUSE THE OIL COMPANIES OF PRACTISING GENOCIDE AGAINST THE OGONI’ is accompanied by the names of Saro-Wiwa and his eight colleagues who were executed on 10 November 1995 following their campaign to stop the environmental devastation of the Ogoni area of the Niger Delta in Nigeria by multinational oil companies.

Dance the Guns to Silence, an evening of poetry, music and activism will be held at the Sara-Wiwa bar in the Liverpool Guild of Students from 8pm tonight.

Some objects in our collection are so large that conserving them is a two-person job. A good example is the 'All you need is love' bedspread, which is currently being prepared for display is the upcoming exhibition The beat goes on - opening on 12 July 2008 at World Museum Liverpool.

To prepare it for display the bedspread has been stitched to a backing sheet on wooden stretchers, which support it and keep it in place. Today textiles and organics conservators Vivien Chapman and Anne-Marie Hughes have been strengthening the bedspread with supporting stitches to key areas - a delicate process which involves passing the needle through the fabric from one person to the other, without being ever able to see each other. These stitches are so small that you wouldn't know they were there when you look at the bedspread but they play an important role in supporting it when it's on display.

The bedspread was originally used in John Lennon and Yoko Ono's Montreal 'Bed-In For Peace' in room 1742 of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel, Montreal in 1969. It is just one of the fascinating pieces of memorabilia that will be on display in the exhibition.

There are more pictures in a Flickr slideshow of the bedspread being conserved.

Paul and friend

If like me you need cheering up after Riise-nt events cast your eyes on this cute fella currently being prepared for his new home at the Lady Lever Art Gallery. We’ve been lucky enough to get local artist Paul Cousins to paint our SuperLambBanana as part of the Go SuperLambBananas project which will give birth to herds of them around the city.

Paul has christened his creation ‘Cloudorama’ and it is a reflection of a series of sky paintings he has produced that highlight the threat pollution poses to the earth’s atmosphere. After Paul has put the finishing touches to the piece Cloudarama will be welcoming visitors to the Lady Lever from 16 June – 25 August. Let’s hope having him there in his blue-skied splendour will be a good weather omen for the summer. 

Rachel Porter from the Aquarium at World Museum Liverpool has exciting news about nine youngsters who have made their first public appearance this week. As she's the expert I'll let her tell you all about them:

"These adorable little babies were born in July 2007 and are now big enough to go on display on our Aquarium gallery.  They are only about 4cm long but will grow to be 20cm long and are being fed little shrimp called Brineshrimp or Sea Monkeys. 

The Seahorses were bred here at the museum from the parents who we keep in our quarantine area.  The male actually gives birth to the babies after brooding them in a pouch for only 2 weeks."

Today is day one in April's Name That Object competition and here is today's clue. To win a copy of the rather nice catalogue that accompanies the Art In The Age of Steam exhibition all you have to do is identify the object in question (it's an artwork this month) from the clues given every day this week, and email us your answer using the link on the competition page. Best of British.

Several of my friends emigrated but now, with the arrival of cheap air travel, they quite frequently return on visits. One comes every year from New Zealand. In the past emigration usually meant, for those left behind, that you were unlikely to see loved ones again. It was a drastic step.

Model of the Berengaria, which took many emigrants to new lives. Image courtesy Liverpool Daily Post and Echo

Liverpool was well-placed on the west coat of Britain to cater for the huge growth in the emigrant trade to the United States and Canada by the early 19th century. It became Britain’s most important international passenger port and probably the greatest emigrant port in world history, with some nine million people passing through in the period 1830 to 1930. Not until 1927, when transatlantic emigration was in decline, did Southampton finally surpass Liverpool for international passenger traffic.

From 1800 until the 1920s the busiest ocean travel route in the world was between the British Isles and North America. Most of the millions of passengers on this route were emigrants to the USA and Canada. Many came from as far away as Scandinavia and Russia to set off from Liverpool. From 1850 many emigrants also sailed to Australasia and other British colonies around the world.

As the 20th century dawned, however, more and more people became tourists and travelled the oceans for pleasure rather than need. The main short-sea routes to and from Britain are to Europe and Ireland. In recent years, business and pleasure have been the main reasons for travel.

Despite the successes of Cunard’s paddle steamer Britannia and other British steam packets in the 1840s, most passengers to and from Britain still travelled by sailing ship. This was because until the 1860s travel under sail, although slower, remained cheaper. By 1870 steamships were becoming larger and more powerful and were carrying many more passengers than ever before.

There are many displays at Merseyside Maritime Museum illustrating the era of sea passenger travel. There are displays about the passenger liners, how people lived on board, what they took with them and what they ate. The Britannia, a wooden paddle steamer, took 14 days to cross the Atlantic. The Queen Mary, five times as long and nearly 70 times larger in tonnage, took just four days.

Liverpool-based shipping companies had regular passenger services to every continent until the 1960s. Competition from air travel ended the era of the passenger liners but in the recent years there has been a huge growth in cruise holidays.

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

Here's some great news to start the week with, the International Slavery Museum has been shortlisted in the 'Large Visitor Attraction of the Year' category in The Mersey Partnership Annual Tourism Awards 2008. The winner will be announced at the end of May.

If you haven't made it over to the museum yet to see what all the fuss is about this is a great week to go, as the Living Memorial to Nigerian activist and writer Ken Saro-Wiwa will be visiting from 23 to 25 April as part of Celebrate Earth Week 2008. There's also a talk at the museum with the artist who created the memorial, Sokari Douglas Camp, on Thursday 24 April at 2pm.

On Monday night at 9pm Channel Four are featuring a Time Team special - The Lost Dock of Liverpool. It focuses on arachaeological excavations of what's known as Old Dock - the first commercial wet dock in Liverpool and the world - plus other sites at the waterfront as they've been cleared for the canal extension, Museum of Liverpool etc. The programme will be looking at the growth of Liverpool as the world's first global city, and will feature several members of the museum archaeological staff. Quite looking forward to it.