National Museums Liverpool Blog - Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Here's an update on prgress with the excavation at Abydos from antiquities curator Carolyn Routledge.

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"We are now half-way through our excavation project at the tomb of the Pharaoh Senwosret III here at Abydos in Middle Egypt. Jen Wegner and I have been working very hard on our drawing and recording of the small objects. The work at the tomb is winding down as Josef Wegner turns to drawing and planning the portions of the tomb that have been cleared. It has been quite a task with around 60 Egyptian workmen breaking up and moving large quantities of stone in extreme temperatures.  During this time we have been experiencing a heatwave with daytime highs consistently in the mid 40 degrees Celsius. At night it has not been getting below 30 degrees Celsius.  

Under these conditions we need to take some breaks. Our first day off we were invited to have a meal with one of the workmen and his family. Josef, Jen, their son Alexander (who turns 5 this month!) and I went to eat lunch made by Umm-Ibrahim. Because of the heat, we sat in the courtyard of their home cooled by fans. Alexander ran around chasing the chickens and searching for lizards. Umm-Ibrahim served us a typical Egyptian meal of chicken, molokhia, and a mix of rice and pasta. Molokhia is a particular favourite here. It is a gelatinous soup made of the leaves of the molokhia plant flavoured with garlic and spices.

The next weekend we took an extra day off and travelled to Luxor. It is about 2½ hour train ride from here. While there are many ancient Egyptian monuments to see in and near Luxor, the main attraction to us was staying in a nice hotel in order to get a rest from the heat through air-conditioning and swimming in the pool. We arrived back at Abydos refreshed and ready to take on the next few weeks of work."

Here's a sight you don't see every day when you're waiting to cross the road! The Edward VII monument returned to Pier Head today after being conserved at the National Conservation Centre's sculpture studio.

The tall sculpture had to be carefully manoeuvred out of the building then lifted onto the back of a lorry with specialist cranes and equipment, watched by staff, the press and a growing crowd of passers-by. The operation went smoothly, despite a bit of rain. You can see photos of the move on our Edward VII monument Flickr slideshow.

It gives me great pleasure to introduce Lucy Cattell, press officer for The Beat Goes On to announce some very special news:

" It’s taken six weeks of campaigning and thousands of votes, but finally the announcement came today that Liverpool has scored the number one spot as the UK’s Most Musical City!

Taking the title in Arts Council England’s Take it Away search, Liverpool took 49 per cent of the public’s vote, pipping other Northern cities Sheffield and Manchester to the post, who claimed second and third places respectfully.

It’s such exciting news for the city, adding yet another musical title to our bow (we’ve also been hailed as the World Capital City of Pop by The Guinness Book of Records) in a Capital of Culture Year which has already drawn so much attention from audiences at home and abroad.

It’s also great news for National Museums Liverpool, confirming our suspicions that it was high time an attraction was put in place to mark the city’s musical history and influence on popular music around the globe.

The Beat Goes On exhibition is due to open at World Museum Liverpool on 12 July, and with only weeks to go this latest announcement is perfect timing to centre all eyes on Liverpool, showing that it still tops the charts in the hearts of the nation.

After seeing Sir Paul McCartney, The Zutons and The Rascals all live recently, it’s a privilege to live in a city where artists are proud to return to their roots, and I’m in no doubt that the title of Most Musical City is completely deserved. Old or new, our city’s sound is second to none! "

We're getting to the business end of the John Moores competition process - judging the paintings that made it through the first round and picking a winner from them. Chair of the judges and director of art galleries, Reyahn King, has the latest.

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Paintings have been arriving from depots all over the UK to our judging venue in Liverpool over the last few weeks. Jurors arrive in the city tomorrow and I am rushing to get back to Liverpool in time myself after a trip to London. Two of our jurors, Jake and Dinos Chapman, have an exhibition on at White Cube which I went to see today - painful and painstaking revisitings of Hell - and appropriately enough new paintings. Their paintings are literal comments upon old bad paintings so I fully expect them to be tough critics in front of all the competition entries tomorrow.

If you're in Liverpool you won't have failed to have noticed that there's been a veritable fall of Superlambananas around town the past few days (apparently 'fall' is the collective noun for lambs). That includes our own colourful trio. Just been sent this snap of the Cloudorama at the Lady Lever being lifted into place outside the gallery. Thankfully the 'fall' noun wasn't appropriate to the operation and it made it to the ground in one piece.

Work has started on the installation of the summer's big exhibition at World Museum, The Beat Goes On, which opens on 12 July 2008. The exhibition will explore Liverpool's musical identity over the last 60 years. As you'd expect, there will be a number of items on display relating to a certain fab four.

Head of furniture conservation Graham Usher is currently putting together one of those items - the very stage that Paul McCartney and John Lennon met on when John's band The Quarrymen played at a garden festival in Woolton in 1957. The Museum of Liverpool acquired the stage a couple of years ago and it was featured on the blog last year but this will be the first time that it has been on display in our venues. I'm sure it'll be a must-see for Beatles fans when the exhibition opens.

I spend a lot of time at the Merseyside Maritime Museum, Albert Dock, in the course of my work but only recently discovered the dock’s role in the Second World War as a corvette base.

Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, at the outbreak of war ordered the building of corvettes – lightly armed warships to escort vital supply convoys crossing the Atlantic. These corvettes – named after flowers – were based on whale catchers and were small and cheap to build.  First coming into service in April 1940, they bore the brunt of British and Canadian naval escort work in the Battle of the Atlantic. Nearly 300 corvettes were built and they sank 38 U-boat submarines with the loss of just 25 of their own number.

Liverpool-born Nicholas Monsarrat, author of best-selling 1951 novel The Cruel Sea, served as a young Lieutenant in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve (RNVR) on the Liverpool-based corvette HMS Campanula. He used his memories from this period as material for The Cruel Sea and his wartime book HM Corvette (1942). In The Cruel Sea he described how the crew of a corvette “looked as if they had been through a tidal wave, emerging in tatters at the end of it” after 22 days at sea.

The RNVR - 6,000-strong in 1939 – was the Royal Navy’s second line of reserves. Unlike the Royal Navy Reserve (RNR), it consisted of volunteers with no professional sea experience or training who learnt their new roles remarkably quickly.

At Merseyside Maritime Museum there is a display featuring Nicholas Monsarrat’s wartime medals, both full-sized and miniature groups. A photograph shows Monsarrat, wearing a duffle coat and holding binoculars, on the bridge of the Campanula based at the Albert Dock.

In command of Campanula at this time was Lt Commander Richard Case RNR. Born and educated in Liverpool, Case was a professional sea officer with Coast Lines before the war. After serving on Campanula, he took charge of the Londonderry-based frigate Rother which he guided safely through some of the fiercest convoy battles of the war. On display are his steel helmet and woollen mittens which evoke those critical days on Atlantic and Arctic escort duties.

There is a 1:96 scale waterline model of one of the corvettes which did not come back. HMS Picotee (shown here), based in Greenock, was torpedoed and sunk by the U-568 while escorting a convoy off southern Ireland. More than 60 crew were lost.

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

 

The sculpture conservation studio has recently had to squeeze in one of the largest sculptures that has ever been cleaned in-house. The equestrian monument to King Edward VII was removed from its plinth at Pier Head for conservation last year and brought to the studio, where it only just cleared the ceiling.

Now fully conserved, the monument will be returned to Pier Head this week. Here's a sneaky peek of how it now looks. You can see more photos, including some of the statue from last year before it was conserved, in our Flickr slideshow of the conservation of King Edward VII. From these pictures you can see that our sculpture conservators have been very busy - compared to its blackened, dirty state last year the monument now looks as good as new.

Every day thousands of cars travel through the Queensway tunnel under the Mersey. However, it is being reclaimed by pedestrians on Sunday when the traffic will be stopped to allow a special walk through the tunnel. 

This picture from the Metropolis exhibition of Stewart Bale photographs captures a rare moment of calm and solitude in the Queensway tunnel when it was still under construction back in 1931. I expect it'll be considerably busier on Sunday with 5,000 people expected to do the walk and the Liverpool Philharmonic Youth Orchestra playing in the middle.

Conservation Technologies are probably best known for the cutting edge work they do using laser technology to clean and replicate sculpture and other precious objects. However for their latest major commission they will mainly be using traditional techniques to hand sculpt missing elements of Sefton Park's monuments.

The memorials to William Rathbone and the Right Honourable Samuel Smith in Sefton Park both originally had four bronze relief sculptures on their bases. Over time the some of the bronze reliefs have been damaged and three of them have gone missing. The only record of the missing bronzes is a small black and white photo of each, so Conservation Technologies will be recreating them from scratch using these pictures as a guide.

The first stage of this process involves sculpting master models of the replicas in clay. As they are quite large pieces the process involved is quite a feat of engineering. The amount of clay used to provide the master models weighs a ton (literally) in weight, so special frames have been built to support that amount of wet clay and then enclose the finished pieces in order to transport them safely to the foundry for casting. The frames are shown below; the first is empty, the second has wooden supports in place to support the clay and the third has a layer of clay in place already.

As this is such a large and ambitious project two members of the team will be working to recreate the missing reliefs. Christopher Dean will be sculpting the two larger pieces, while Sam Sportun works on the third smaller bronze.

You can see further photographs in our Sefton Park monuments Flickr slideshow, which we'll be adding to over the next few weeks. At the moment there are also photographs of the damaged bronze relief of 'Charity' from the base of the memorial to William Rathbone, showing where the arm of a woman kneeling at the front has been broken off. This will be replaced as part of the conservation process.

We'll be bringing you updates as this ambitious project progresses, so watch this space.

Next Tuesday Radio 4's Making History programme features an interview with Sharon Brown, NML’s curator of land, transport and industry. Sharon will be talking about our overhead railway carriage, which is currently undergoing conservation work. Listen out on Tuesday 17 June at 3pm, or 'listen again' over the following week.

Here's one for all you philatelists (that's stamp collectors to you and me) out there.

Bhutan, a beautiful Himalayan kingdom, is this year celebrating 100 years of monarchy. To celebrate Bhutan has just launched the first CD-Rom postage stamp.

You might be wondering how NML fits in to all this? Well, it just so happens that we have a really important collection of objects and photographs from Bhutan acquired by early 20th century Brtitish explorers and Political Officers based in the area. In this collection we have a rare photograph of the 2nd King of Bhutan, Jigme Wangchuk and his wife that you can see here.

The Bhutanese Government asked if they could use the image in their new stamp collection and we were more than happy to see an item from the NML collections virtually returning to Bhutan.

Time to introduce the next few The Beat Goes On Top Ten tracks. Surely at least one of these Merseyside gems is worthy of your vote?

Strawhouses. Who lives in a house like this?  Peering through the keyhole you might possibly find Thom Yorke from Radiohead, very early U2 (like ‘Boy’ and ‘October’ era) or the reincarnation of Jeff Buckley. This is soaring, majestic, indie pop, like they used to make when I was a lass. But if you are too young to remember the good old days then Coldplay might be a safer comparison. You can catch them as part of Streetwaves festival.

Jessica’s Ghost brings a brooding, melodic ballad to the proceedings. Soulful vocals are underpinned by a sweeping cello and piano chords, but there is a folky edge to their overall sound. If these tuneful Corr-alikes are your thing, their TBGO track 'New Shoes' will be the B-Side to their single, ‘Breakdown’, to be released on iTunes on 5th July.

What can we say about The Trestles? This jangly, feelgood, leap-around-with-your-mates type of shenanigan is just the sort of thing you expect from a bunch of lovely Liverpool lads with guitars. God bless ‘em, everyone. I hear they will be playing Oxjam tomorrow (12 June) at 3345 Parr Street.

Have a listen – be amazed – don’t forget to VOTE!

Michelle O'Callaghan, our Youth Arts Officer, writes about a recent Youth Theatre event.

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"May half-term saw National Museums Liverpool’s Youth Theatre take part in an outstanding two days of devising, creating and performing as part of Merseyside Youth Theatre Development Forum’s ‘Big Event’. Bringing together over a hundred young people from Youth Theatres all over Merseyside, the young participants aged 13 to 21 worked for two days with professional artists in disciplines such as Musical Theatre, Stage Combat, Stand-Up Comedy and Physical Theatre.

Day one culminated in ‘The Big Sketch’, a chance to showcase their work. Our Youth Theatre took to the stage for their debut of a section of a performance we have been working on to tie in with the forthcoming Beat Goes On exhibition. This stylised, physical theatre piece tells our interpretation of The Coral’s song ‘Liezah’, set in Liverpool Lime Street Station.

Day two was brought to a spectacular climax by ‘The Big Show’, a chance for the young people to share and show off the work they had been creating over the two days. The standard of performance and the creativity behind the work which was created in just two days was outstanding and the range of talent on show was remarkable!

DJ’s from JuiceFM rounded off a magnificent two days with a ‘Big Party’ celebration for all involved and I think it’s fair to say a fabulous time was had by all!"

There's just a few days left to submit your application for one of the 10 Creative Apprenticeships on offer. A number of Merseyside-based cultural organisations, including National Museums Liverpool, are involved in a project to foster emerging talent and give young hopefuls a solid grounding in the arts and culture industry.

By the end of the year-long apprenticeship you'll have earned a Level 2 Certificate in Creative and Cultural Practice, and a Level 2 National Award in Community Arts Management, but perhaps more importantly you'll have developed the skills and contacts you'll need for a career in the industry.

More details are available on the Creative Partnerships Liverpool website.

Hello there

As usual I have had a very interesting and varied past couple of weeks. I attended the 'Closing of the Slave Trades: Transatlantic Perspectives' conference at Queens University, Belfast, Northern Ireland , co-sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. It was attended by museum professionals, public historians, and scholars from a variety of disciplines and institutions.  My talk focused on Phase 2 of the International Slavery Museum and the opening of the Research and Resource centre.

Even though Belfast City Centre is like many other lively European capital cities, with its grand historic buildings and trendy high street shops it is still a deeply divided city in many respects. This was highlighted when we went on a taxi tour of some of the political murals near the Falls Road, which is a largely nationalist and Catholic area. One of the murals depicted the great African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass. I, like many people from the UK, was brought up on news of the ‘Troubles’ and was happy to see the Northern Ireland peace process progress. But the remembrance gardens, the tone of the murals and most shocking for me, the imposing corrugated iron wall, often called the Peace Line, that divides large swathes of Protestant and Catholic Belfast shows there is still a long way to go before the city is free from sectarianism and intolerance.

There is also a big link, in fact a Titanic one (I could not resist!), between Belfast and Liverpool.  The Titanic was built at Harland & Wolff shipyard in Belfast and even though she never berthed at Liverpool she was owned by White Star Line of Liverpool. Visit the Titanic, Lusitania and the Forgotten Empress gallery at the Merseyside Maritime Museum for more information.

Another important aspect of my job is that of supporting local organizations in various campaigns against forms of injustice, inequality and indeed intolerance.  Along with a colleague I attended the Anthony Walker Foundation Festival 2008 event at Hope University. The International Slavery Museum had a stand there with information about the museum.  It was a lively and indeed poignant event. I watched a number of rappers perform very loud (do I sound old?) but meaningful performances. The aim of the event was to bring young people together from all backgrounds and to focus on positive messages. I only have the utmost respect for the Walker family, who out of the tragic loss of a son and brother has managed to start a movement which promotes togetherness rather than division.  Truly admirable.

Watch this space.

Here's some news from antiquities curator Carolyn Routledge, who has temporarily left her desk at World Museum Liverpool to work at an excavation in Egypt.

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"My time so far in Egypt has been fantastic! We flew into Cairo on 26 May very early in the morning and then set out by car on 28 May for the excavation. It was a 10 hour trip through the desert. It felt like a very long journey as taking the desert road meant the scenery didn't change much. Luckily we had air conditioning in the car. We don't have such luxuries where we are living at Abydos. We are staying in the American dig house set back in the desert along the ancient road that led to the tombs of the First Dynasty kings. The weather is very hot, reaching the low 40s Celsius.  Thank goodness we have fans!

We finally arrived at the dig house very late at night and very tired. The next day it was right to work setting up our desks and getting the objects organised to draw. I am working on the South Abydos project directed by Josef Wegner of the University of Pennsylvania. He is excavating the earliest known hidden subterranean royal tomb, which belonged to the pharaoh Senwosret III of the Middle Kingdom (approx 1850 BC).  Jen Wegner and I are drawing the objects that come from the tomb and the surrounding area.

It is early days yet, so not much has come from the tomb itself. This week we are drawing the mud sealings that were found near the entrance.  These are very small and can be very hard to read. The ancient Egyptians liked to 'lock' their things by tying them up and putting mud on cords marked with a seal, often a scarab seal. This is a lot like sealing a letter with sealing wax. On Thursday we went out to the tomb. I overcame slight feelings of claustrophobia to go down in the tomb and was able to go all the way to the burial chamber.  It was exhilarating to be sitting beside the sarcophagus of the king. 

The other reason it is great being here is that a number of the objects we are preparing for the new Egypt gallery opening in September come from Abydos. I can look out my window and see the area where John Garstang had his house and played golf among the dunes that hide the many ancient Egyptian tombs where he found some of our objects."

Claire Olson summarises National Volunteers Week, and thanks all the willing souls who help out here.

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Last week the Volunteers Team were out and about at different venues and events in the North West promoting volunteering opportunities at NML.

During the week we met with lots of people who are keen ‘volunteers in the making’ and eager to find out more. We also received lots of positive feedback about our museums, with many families telling us how much they enjoyed visiting! We also welcomed the launch of Mersey v’s; our new Young Persons' Steering Group, who will be championing volunteering across NML.

National Volunteers Week may only come once a year, but we would like to take this opportunity to thank our volunteers for all their support and hard work throughout the whole year – their positive involvement is much appreciated – as acknowledged by our director, Dr David Fleming:

“I have nothing but praise for volunteers, who devote their own time to helping make museums more popular and accessible. Volunteer effort is often overlooked, but without volunteers most museums would provide an immeasurably poorer public service.”

If you wish to find out more about becoming a volunteer at NML please contact the Volunteer Team on 0151 478 4775 or volunteerenquiries@liverpoolmuseums.org.uk and keep an eye on the blog for more volunteer updates coming soon!

Secretary of State for Culture Media and Sport, Andy Burnham, dropped into World Museum Liverpool recently to announce funding for Find Your Talent, a new Government initiative encouraging children to experience five hours of culture each week.

While he was here Andy caught a rehearsal by members of our youth theatre who are preparing a performance for our next big exhibition The Beat Goes On. The group have created a physical theatre piece that follows the story of Liezah, a character from a song by Wirral band The Coral.

Admitting he was a Coral fan himself, Andy seemed very impressed by the performance and spent a while talking to the young people to find out what they thought of taking part in more cultural activities.

Liverpool city region, led by National Museums Liverpool and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, is one of ten areas around the country to pilot the Government scheme. The programme has been developed in partnership with The Bluecoat, FACT, Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse, Tate Liverpool and the Unity Theatre. Principal partners include Liverpool Culture Company, Creative Partnerships Merseyside, Liverpool City Council, Knowsley MBC and St Helens MBC.

The Beat Goes On runs at World Museum Liverpool from 12 July 2008 and the youth theatre will be performing Liezah and other short pieces throughout the run of the exhibition.

The answer to last week's Name That Object competition was Salem by Sidney Curnow Vosper which hangs in the Lady Lever Art Gallery. Coincidentally, this year sees the centenary of the painting, and this weekend S4C is showing a programme on the painting. It will be broadcast at 8.30pm on Sunday 15 June (in Welsh with English subtitles).

If you don't know the painting it's really quite a strange piece but one which, I'm told, has hung in many a Welsh home after Lord Leverhulme bought the original and then gave away prints with his soap. It's said to show the Devil's face in the folds of the shawl of the central character, Siân Owen. There's more on the programme on the icWales website.

Few things can rival the bliss of enjoying a pint of tea first thing in the morning – real tea, not tea bags, so you get the full taste of the brew.

The recent disastrous fire which badly damaged the legendary Cutty Sark has highlighted the role played by tea clippers in maritime history.

Designed to carry China tea quickly and efficiently, the glamorous era of these fast, slender sailing ships only lasted between 1850 and 1870 but the clippers left an indelible mark on the history of seafaring.

Pioneered by the Americans, the first true clipper was the Rainbow launched in 1845. She completed the journey from New York to Canton in 102 days – clipping more than two weeks off the previous record for that trip.

This may have been how the ships got their name although the word clipper was originally applied to a fast horse, so this may have been the origin.

American and British ships competed to be fastest in the tea trade and this is how international races started from 1852 when British Challenger beat the US clipper Challenge.

New ports opening in China to feed the tea trade fuelled the races. A winning ship’s cargo of tea could earn a premium of sixpence (two and a half pence) per pound weight.

The most famous clipper race was in 1866 when 10 clippers set out for London from Foochow. They were so equally matched that they were often in sight of each other as they sped across the Indian Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope and north across the Atlantic.

The race was declared a dead heat between Taeping and Ariel – one of the most famous clippers - which both came into the Thames estuary neck-and-neck.

At Merseyside Maritime Museum there is a superb model of a typical tea clipper from about 1865, showing the cross section of the hull. The 1:48 scale model depicts a 186 ft-long three-masted wooden ship, with metal fastenings, similar in size and construction to the Ariel built in Greenock.

By the 1860s iron was increasingly being used to strengthen wooden ships so that they could be built to greater lengths.

There is a painting of the Maiden Queen by an unknown Chinese artist. Owned by T & J Brocklebank and employed in the tea trade, she is shown off the coast of China.

A number of Chinese artists worked in Far Eastern ports producing ship portraits for European captains.

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