National Museums Liverpool Blog - Tuesday, June 24, 2008

We're cranking it up for the final run down of The Beat Goes On Top Ten. There's only a week left to vote for your favourite band in June's poll, so there's no time to lose.

The Howls are an awesome three-piece combo that crop up somewhere between The Strokes and Wolfmother. They will be shaking the walls of the Barfly on 4th July.

The Queen Tantrum track is deceptively chilled, but hang on in there –she can really let those vocals rip. The self-proclaimed first lady of Liverpool is a fusion of power and soul – like Chaka Khan meets Audioslave. Impressive stuff.  

If you're recovering from Download Fest and waiting for Leeds / Reading, then maybe Eighth Day Army can fill the gap. Kaleidoscopic swirly guitars build into a full on metal outburst à la Napalm Death or Megadeth. Bourgeois thrash.

Not much to report on Jewel Thief because they split up the day we launched the poll. But they certainly rocked. RIP Jewel Thief.

And that's it for June.

TBGO needs your vote: visit www.myspace.com/thebeatgoesonliverpool

Stewardesses on the White Star Line's 'Teutonic'. Image courtesy Liverpool Daily Post and Echo

Seafarers from all over the world were a familiar sight on the streets of Liverpool and I always enjoyed watching the different personalities and characters. Some would head for local markets while others would congregate around the dock road area. It was the advent of container ships which concentrated activity at the Freeport and changed this way of life for mariners for ever.

Porters who handled luggage from the liners at the Prince’s Stage wore uniforms. The mix was further enhanced when a Royal Navy warship docked and the crew were ‘on the town’ in their bellbottom trousers and broad collars.

The worldwide success of British steamships in Victorian times greatly boosted seafaring jobs in the UK. It also provided most seafarers with greater continuity of work because steamships, unlike sailing vessels, could undertake reliable, scheduled services between ports.

This led to greater job security and company loyalty among mariners. Despite this, by the 1890s ship owners were finding it increasingly difficult – because of the low wages and poor conditions afloat – to staff their ships with good-quality British ratings. They therefore began to employ growing numbers of foreign seafarers on their ocean-going ships. From 1890, the Brocklebank shipping company hired lascars from Singapore and Malaya as deck, engine room and saloon crews. Chinese crews were a feature of the Blue Funnel Line.

At Merseyside Maritime Museum there are displays about the working lives of seafarers. A lascar crew is pictured on the Brocklebank ship Pindari in 1891.

Kroo deckhands from Freetown, Sierra Leone, are pictured on the Palm Line’s Kamasi Palm in 1954. Krooboys, as they were called, were employed to handle cargo between coastal ports in West Africa. A Chinese certificate of merit was awarded to Chinese crew members by Blue Funnel during the Second World War.

The spectacular growth in the number and size of passenger steamers in the late 19th century created thousands of new seafaring jobs. These ranged from engine room staff to stewards, stewardesses and other hotel-style staff providing services for passengers.

Photographs on display include this one showing stewardesses in starched aprons and caps pictured on White Star Line’s Teutonic in 1889.

Three women who worked as a hairdresser, shop assistant and stenographer are seen on the Empress of France in 1956.

A fascinating model depicts the No 3 boiler room on the Aquitania of 1913. A total of 304 firemen, trimmers and greasers worked in the four boiler rooms on this luxury liner.

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

Boudha stupa

Hello or Tashi Delek!

As some of you may know from the World Museum displays and the website pages, National Museums Liverpool has one of the great collections of Tibetan objects.

I'm here in Boudhanath, an area just outside Kathmandu, Nepal, which is home to a large Tibetan community. I'll be living here in Boudhanath for the next two months with a Tibetan family, as I begin to learn the Tibetan language.

Over the next couple of months I be blogging about my classes at Rangjung Yeshe Institute, my (slow) progress with the language classes and about life here in Boudhanath.

So as a quick introduction. The first thing you see as you come into Boudhanath is the stupa. This massive stupa is the centre of Buddhist life here in Boudhanath, with Tibetans, both laypeople and monks, Nepalis and Western Tourists all walking around the base of the stupa throughout the day, turning the prayer wheels found within the walls, visiting the gombas (monastery/place of learning) or giving offerings, particularly for the health of the 14th Dalai Lama. I've added an image of the stupa here.

I'm hoping to do a couple of blogs a week on things that I've learnt, or about events happening within the Tibetan community.

Before I sign of here's your first word of the day: 'Key'. Key means Dog.

Director of art galleries Reyahn King has this update from the end of the judging process for this year's John Moores competition:

"Friday was the last day of judging and the jurors came in to review the 41 paintings selected for the exhibition. Interesting that the competition with the most entries ever is going to become the exhibition with the fewest exhibits to date. The exhibition is going to be clearly about painting today and reflects an approach from the jurors that amongst them was coherent and much considered. As Sacha Craddock put it "We've argued a lot in the first stage but we found now we had a coherent sense of what we had got". All the jurors, Sacha Craddock, both Chapmans, Graham Crowley and Paul Morrison, agreed that the works selected all reflect a self conscious and sophisticated approach to painting that has absorbed and moved on from earlier debates. Jake Chapman put it well "All paintings have to emerge from conceptual rules. You can talk about pictorial art but not figurative".

The day finished up at lunchtime with a barbecue with guests from Tate Liverpool and Liverpool Biennial in A Foundation next to the paintings' warehouse – and despite their pleas, our lovely colleagues were not allowed in for a sneak preview! The art handlers had a well earned break over lunch – without their behind-the-scenes moving around of paintings and their flexibility – bringing out some paintings, taking them back, bringing them out again – the process could not have been so smooth or so well considered.

The next big dates are 8 and 9 September for the exhibition layout and hang. Between then and now we need to plan the exhibition, catalogue and so on and we'll keep you posted."

Here's the latest update from director of art galleries Reyahn King, who has had a busy couple of days at the critical final stages of selection process for this year's John Moores competition:

"After sifting to make a first selection yesterday the judges looked again at their choices which our art handlers had set out around the warehouse so all were visible. Wandering around they then all pointed out works they wanted to discuss again and confirm whether they should stay in the exhibition or not and I had my work cut out as they moved about sometimes together sometimes separately marking the works to be reconsidered.  They decided to discuss about 15 in more detail.

As each work selected was brought before the panel back in the viewing area the discussions were almost always excited and occasionally sparks flew if only for a moment. Early on it had been agreed that critical distance was important and discussions were frequently about what could be understood about the intention of the artist when viewing the painting. Be prepared for an exhibition likely to challenge older concerns about painting. In relation to definitions, one juror commented "the competition's not about whether or not it's a painting, it's about whether or not it's good." And on those criteria, the judges selected the final show and with a surprising degree of agreement the prizewinners!"

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

At our lunch Umm-Ibrahim showed us two of her young pigeons. In Egypt pigeons are kept for eating like we keep chickens.

"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.

Sooo much love for Liverpool music

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.

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.

© Paul Cousins 2008

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.

The corvette, HMS Picotee. Image courtesy Liverpool Daily Post and Echo

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.

Mary from Cleaning Services with the sculpture of King Edward VII

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.

The specially built wooden frames in the sculpture conservation studio

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.

2nd King and Queen of Bhutan

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.