National Museums Liverpool Blog - Wednesday, July 23, 2008

You may well have seen that the Tall Ships visited Liverpool over the weekend. I paid a visit to Wellington Dock on Friday evening while there was still room to swing a cat, but missed the Parade of Sail on Monday as I was here in work (boo!) Luckily (and lucky) other staff saw it though and took plenty of fab snaps. There's a selection on our flickr page (the slide show is here), taken from the old pilot's platform at the Pilotage on Liverpool's waterfront, including this one of a helicopter over the Brazilian entry with Cammell Laird's in the background.

My colourful new paperback Mersey Maritime Tales – True Stories of Shipwrecks, Heroism

and Human Endeavour is out now price just £3.99. Although I say it myself, it’s a great read with amazing stories packed with all sorts of entertaining and inspiring things.

It’s available at Merseyside Maritime Museum as well as newsagents and bookshops in the Liverpool and north Wales areas. In addition you can order it through www.merseyshop.com or by calling 0845 143 0001 (plus £1.50 P&P UK).

Here’s an extract from my Foreword to the 92-page book containing 40 Tales plus a cargo of Did You Know facts and figures:

People tell me: ‘You are clever, knowing all those stories with so many dates and facts’. However, the Tales owe their existence to the outstanding displays at Merseyside Maritime Museum.

There is an amazing array of exhibits which prove a constant inspiration to me. The museum houses some of the finest ship models as well as the rarest historical objects. For example, the 20 ft long original builder’s model of the Titanic is probably the most popular single exhibit among the many thousands of objects on display.

Next to it in the Titanic, Lusitania and the Forgotten Empress gallery is an apron worn by a passenger, possibly the only item of clothing worn on the night of the disaster in a public collection.

This gallery alone has inspired several Tales, the Titanic story continues to fascinate succeeding generations of visitors.

I have to confess there is a trick in writing the Tales. I write four at a time and the drafts are checked for factual errors by Merseyside Maritime Museum curators and other staff. The Tales are done as part of my job as press officer for National Museums Liverpool.

I was a newspaper reporter for many years and am a proficient writer in Pitman’s shorthand. I can write down large amounts of information in a relatively short time using those peculiar phonetic symbols and short-forms. This particular skill is very handy in preparing the Tales. Sometimes I have an idea in my head before I make my monthly visit to the museum to do Tales research. More often than not it is quick flashes of inspiration which will see the birth of a Tale.

Many of the Tales involve my own research and in this area the Internet has opened whole new areas to countless people, myself included.

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

Sorry to those of you who won't have seen the answer to July's Name That Object competition - slight technical hitch. The answer was 'Waiting for Legal Advice' by James Campbell, and the winner of the exhibition catalogue was A Porter of Liverpool. Another competition and another prize next month.

Lauren Gould, Learning Officer at the Lady Lever Art Gallery writes to invite artistic young people to join a summer course...

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We still have a few vacancies on this year's week-long course for young people who want to explore their artistic side.  There will be plenty of sketching, outdoor painting, art history, and photography during the week of activities.  The course is free, although participants will need to bring a packed lunch. It is suitable for all 11-16 year olds.

The course runs from Monday to Friday, 28 July to 1 August, 10.30am-4pm at the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, Bebington, Wirral. Contact 0151 475 4143 to book a place.

Basically, we need you to help us to help you. We're developing a new feature for our main site and need to understand how teachers - one of our biggest user groups - would use the system.

We've got well over a million objects in our care, ranging from microscoping plants to ships. Of these collections we currently have about 1,500 objects on our website but want to increase this number substantially. We also want to make our collections more easily searched and to provide much more in depth information, so are creating a single, comprehensive online collections system. We already know that teachers use our website in their work and want the new system to meet their needs as closely as possible.

The questionnaire, which you will find here http://www.surveygizmo.com/s/57097/online-collections, basically asks teachers how they are currently using the site and what features they would like to see. We've given you a bit of a shopping list to chose from plus the option to mention anything we've missed. There are eight questions which should take about 5 minutes. Any feedback teachers, or other learning professionals, could give will help us enormously and will in turn allow us to support you as best we can. I realise we're right at the end of term so any feedback would be doubly welcome.

Any questions just email me using the link below this post.

On Sunday I went with my host Mother, Kalsang, to Swayambhunath, an important Buddhist site to the south of Kathmandu. Unlike Boudhanath, Swayambhunath sits on a hill overlooking the city, so for the first time in a few weeks I got to look up from my text books and have a really good look at the cityscape. Swayambhunath is affectionately known as the Monkey Temple, due to the many monkeys who live in and around the stupa. I’d been warned that these monkeys could be pretty mean and vicious, but the monsoon rains seemed to have dampened their spirits as they just watched as we climbed the steps to the smaller hill that sits to the west of the main stupa. This site holds a smaller shrine to Saraswati, the Goddess of Learning, and while Kalsang had her reasons for visiting the shrine I also had high hopes that Saraswati would give me a little helping hand with my Tibetan studies.

We were there for a very particular reason: Kalsang had read the Tibetan calendar and consulted her Lama, and Sunday the 13th was a very good day for dedicating a series of prayer flags that she had bought. As the rain started to pour, Kalsang wrote her family's names (including mine) on a series of white silk scarves called Khatas. The khata is an important part of Tibetan culture, given as offerings in the gompas and stupas and also as gifts between people. Once all the names were written, each scarf had a small prayer said when it was placed on the forehead and then each was tied to a series of prayer flags.

Once the prayer flags were ready, the boys and men working at the stupa nimbley climbed the many trees to find a good place to attach the flags, so that their prayers could be sent out into the world. Kalsang gave offerings of juniper twigs to the stupa fire and recited a small mantra, to ensure the prayer flags' success. Finally, handfuls of tsampa (roasted and ground barley flour) were offered and thrown into the air.

Athough, the rain poured down, and it was unusually cold, Kalsang was happy with the day and was sure the prayer flags had been successful. I think she was right as my reading has really improved this week.

As regular readers of this blog will know, I like my food – good traditional English grub boiled, grilled, roasted or fried. If there’s one thing that puts me off it’s tainted food: the awful aroma and taste of the processed ready-meal or tinned scouse, to name just two.

German propaganda films of the Second World War depict the crews of U-boat submarines as swashbuckling marauders trawling the vast oceans for enemy ships to attack and destroy. In reality, the lives of the 40,000 men who served in the U-boat fleet bore little relation to this glamorous image which their activities inspired in the German public mind. The U-boats were cramped, smelly, unhygienic and also almost unbearably claustrophobic.

A typical U-boat bow (front) compartment measuring just 12 feet across, housed some 25 men, several 22 ft torpedoes and equipment. Each bunk bed was used by two or three people on a shift system.

The diet of U-boat crews was mainly tinned food. But, fresh or tinned, it always “tasted of U-boat – diesel oil with a flavour of mould,” according to Heinz Schaeffer, commander of U977.

A German war photographer on board U96 in 1941 wrote: “The heat. The stench of oil.  Lead in my skull from the engine fumes. I feel like Jonah inside some huge shellfish sheathed in armour.”

Included in the Merseyside Maritime Museum’s Battle of the Atlantic gallery is an exhibition model of the notorious U99 (shown here) which sank 40 British and Allied merchant ships (about 250,000 tons) in under nine months’ active service from July 1940. She was under the command of Otto Kretschmer, one of Germany’s most successful U-boat aces. U99’s luck, however, ran out on 17 March 1941 when she was sunk south west of the Faroe Islands between Iceland and north Scotland by the destroyer HMS Walker. Kretschmer and most of the crew were rescued and became prisoners-of-war.

U-boat medals on display include an Iron Cross second class 1939-45, which was awarded to large numbers of U-boat men, and a U-boat patrol badge. 

Towards the end of 1940 Admiral Karl Donitz, Officer Commanding U-boats, introduced the wolf pack system of using several U-boats to attack a convoy at night on the surface. A detailed model shows a wolf pack gathering beneath the waves for a surface attack on an Allied convoy in the north Atlantic at night.

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

Today two halves of a medieval ivory diptych will be reunited thanks to a special collaboration between the Walker Art Gallery and National Museums Wales.

The diptych, which was made in the 14th century, portrays the birth of Christ, with the Virgin and Child flanked by Saints Peter and Paul, on the left-hand panel, while the right-hand side shows Christ on the cross flanked by Mary and John. Originally the leaves would have been joined together - you can see the holes for the hinges in the image above. However, over time they were separated and now the left hand panel is in the collections of the Walker Art Gallery, while the right hand one belongs to National Museums Wales.

The Walker's panel has been lent to National Museum Cardiff for a year-long display with the other half of the diptych, which starts today as part of National Archaeology Week.

When the original is returned to Liverpool visitors to Cardiff will still be able to see what the complete diptych would have looked thanks to a highly accurate copy of the left panel made by the Conservation Technologies team at the National Conservation Centre. Laser technology research scientist Annemarie La Pensee told me all about it:

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"Last year Conservation Technologies was commissioned by Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales - to make a replica of the left-hand leaf of the diptych that we have here at National Museums Liverpool. Using 3D laser scanning and CNC machining we made an accurate replica from polyurethane resin that was patinated to make it look like the original.

Here in the laser technology team, we found the project really great to work on. The leaves are quite small, only 10cm in height. However, because of the highly carved surface we used our most accurate scanner to record the sub-millimetre details and the resulting dataset was as big as those we create for much larger objects. It is also interesting to see how different the two original leaves are in colour and texture because they have been apart and have been exposed to different environments."

Here's a quick update on the project to recreate missing bronzes for two of the Sefton Park monuments.

The clay models that Conservation Technologies are making for the reconstruction of the three missing relief panels from the Sefton Park memorials are now really taking shape. They will be used to produce the foundry cast bronze panels that form part of the memorials to William Rathbone and the Right Honourable Samuel Smith. Two of the panels have reached the stage where the fine detail is being sculpted and the third panel has been blocked out. Blocking out is the term the sculptors use to say that the main body of the clay shape is in place, before being fashioned into a more accurate form.

The sculptors are off at the moment so the clay panels have been wrapped in damp flannelette sheeting and are being sprayed everyday to keep them moist until work starts again. It's best not to disturb them while they are wrapped up like this so we don't have any updated photos to show at the moment.

Here's a reminder of what one of the clay plaques looked like a couple of weeks ago. You can see the rough shape of one of the figures sketched into the clay on the right, while other figures are starting to be 'fleshed out' in three dimensions. Further pictures of the early stages of the process are on our Sefton Park monuments Flickr slideshow and we will be adding more when they are available, so do check back in a couple of weeks to see the progress.