National Museums Liverpool Blog - Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Snappy suits!

We're cutting it a bit fine with the August 'name that object' competition, but are launching it on Tuesday 26th August (so the final clue will be on Saturday 30th). The prize this month is this fab but vaguely surreal set of Beatles figures. I say surreal because, as you may have noticed, there's a crocodile on stage with them.  The figures are 'straight from the classic Beatles cartoon series' that launched in the US in 1965, and apparently the croc featured in the series. The mind boggles.

Anyhoo, should you wish to give the Fab Four and their crocodilian friend a home you first need to name the object from our collection. It's an artwork, with a new detail being revealed each day for five days. Enter using the link on the competition page.

Should you fail to win I'm reliably informed that you can buy these sets in the World Museum Liverpool giftshop where they are on sale as part of the The Beat Goes On exhibition.

Offerings for the health of the 14th Dalai Lama at a local gompa

For anyone spending time with the Tibetan community here in Boudhanath it is impossible to ignore the ‘Tibet Question’. Around the stupa storeowners sell t-shirts emblazoned with the Tibetan flag (which is banned in China) and the slogans ‘Save Tibet’ or ‘Free Tibet’. Although Tibetans regularly protest against the Olympic Games and Chinese rule in Tibet, freedom of speech here is not unconditional. The Nepal government has banned performances of Tibetan dance and opera and institutes, monasteries and schools have been warned against participating in protests or speaking out against the Chinese government, as this could result in the closing or removal of the organisations.

So with this in mind, I will just make a few observations regarding the Tibetan community’s efforts in the run up to, and during, the Olympics. The first thing to note is that the majority of protests, here in Kathmandu, go unreported, even in the Nepalese press. For the past week, protest, vigils or silent gatherings have been happening every day. The routine is the same, protestors arrive at the Chinese Embassy, in Kathmandu, protests are made, the police control the protestors, sometimes with beatings and nearly always with arrests, protestors (on average between 100 and 300 a day) are arrested, put in jail for the night, released, and then wait for the next day’s rendezvous point to be arranged.

The second thing to note is that the protestors come from every part of the Tibetan community. The protestors aren’t just nuns, monks and students, but young mothers, housewives and shopkeepers. Everyone wants to play a part in keeping Tibet in the World’s thoughts.

On August 8^th major protests took place across Kathmandu with over 1,400 arrests being made. Tibetan shopkeepers closed their stores in protest against the Olympics, some for several days. This is not an empty gesture, with food and fuel shortages in Nepal affecting everyone; this is a major sacrifice and will have a big effect on the incomes of many Tibetan families, especially in Boudhanath.

On my last full day in Nepal - the 14th August - there was another major protest and again young and old gathered in their thousands to remind everyone of the Tibetan cause. Tibetan shops here is Boudhanath closed as people made their way to the Chinese Embassy.

The Watt by William Jackson. image courtesy of Liverpool Daily Post and Echo

This Saturday, 23 August, is Slavery Remembrance Day which I have been involved in since its inception in 1999. It is a very popular and moving occasion which involves commemorations including a church service, lecture, drama, music and dancing.

The transatlantic slave trade involved the notorious Middle Passage between Africa and the New World when many enslaved Africans died in horrific conditions on board ships. Journeys took five weeks or more and the slaves were held in cramped, airless spaces below decks. Food and water were limited, with no fresh provisions available.

An exhibit in the new International Slavery Museum, in the Merseyside Maritime Museum building, represents the journeys of three slave ships called the Brooks, the Bud and the Rose which all sailed out of Liverpool in 1788. It is based on a chilling document called “Printed dimensions and names of ships in Liverpool employed in the slave trade with the details of provisions and mortality rate etc 1788."

The Brooks (297 tons) sailed from the Gold Coast (now Ghana) to the West Indies with 609 slaves on board. The journey took 49 days and 19 Africans died on the voyage. The daily food ration was about 1.5 lbs of beans, 2 oz of bread, 8 oz of yams, 1 oz of dried fish and eight pints of water.There were 351 captive men on the Brooks, confined to a hold measuring about 46 ft by 25 ft. Women and children were held separately in similar conditions.

Disease, brutality and suicide led to between one quarter and one tenth of slaves dying during the Middle Passage voyage. Crew members also died.

The displays also feature exhibits linked to the Watt family who had plantations in Jamaica. As a boy, Richard Watt drove a one-horse carriage around Liverpool. He later went to Jamaica to seek his fortune and when he retired in 1772 he was a wealthy plantation owner. Displays include a fine builder’s model of the sailing ship Watt dating from 1797 along with a painting by William Jackson (shown here). Richard Watt bought Speke Hall, Liverpool, in 1795. His descendant Adelaide Watt was the last member of the family to live at the Hall, which is now cared for by the National Trust.

Next week we look at slave trader James Penny of Penny Lane. In the meantime there is more on the history of the slave ship in a fascinating lecture by Marcus Rediker, available to listen to on our main site. In it he talks about the Brooks and conditions on it and other slave ships.

A new Maritime Tale by Stephen Guy appears every Saturday in the Liverpool Echo. A paperback – Mersey Maritime Tales (£3.99) – is available from the museum, newsagents, bookshops or from www.merseyshop.com (£1.50 p&p UK).

Superlambanana outside World Museum Liverpool

They’re not small, or fluffy, but they have certainly proved to be cute and cuddly.

The Superlambananas, which have taken the city by storm in Culture Capital year, are now approaching their final week on display and I will be sad to see them go.

Here at National Museums Liverpool, we have been watching visitors engage with our own Superlambananas – located at World Museum Liverpool, The Walker Art Gallery, The National Conservation Centre, and the Lady Lever Art Gallery at Port Sunlight. These colourful creatures have been receiving a lot of hugs and will no doubt feature in hundreds of photograph albums and holiday snaps.

If you haven’t been to see our flock, remember they will be going away on August 25 – so we’ll see you soon!

John Masefield. Image courtesy Liverpool Daily Post and Echo

I live in West Derby - an ancient community, now part of Liverpool, with links to the famous White Star line. Near my house is beautiful Broughton Hall, now part of a school, where the company was set up over a game of billiards in 1869. White Star, owners of the Titanic, operated sailing ships before steam triumphed and dominated the seafaring world.

Ironically, the last sailing ships to be built were among the most beautiful ever constructed and marked the high point of the traditional shipbuilders’ powers. The last and largest sailing ship to be owned by White Star was the 318-ft long California, a deep-sea barque built by Harland & Wolff of Belfast in 1890. She belonged to the North Western Shipping Company whose principal shareholders also owned White Star. Possession of the White Star sailing ships was transferred to the new North Western Shipping Co in 1886.

At Merseyside Maritime Museum there is a striking model of the 3,099-ton California, a steel-built four-master. She had relatively small cargo hatches which made freight handling slow but provided better protection from the heavy seas which frequently swept her decks. The California was sold when the North Western Shipping Co was dissolved in 1895. The ship passed through several German firms and was renamed Christel Vinnen in 1912. After the First World War she was allocated to Italy as part of war reparations. In April 1927 she became stranded near Panama and became a total loss.

Among the other last White Star sailing ships was another four-masted barque, the Gilcruix. Built in 1886, her crews included the 16-year-old John Masefield who was Poet Laureate from 1930 until his death in 1967. His wrote Sea Fever which starts with the immortal lines: 

I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking.

Masefield’s voyage on the Gilcruix in 1894 was as an apprentice. It was his first voyage, sailing from Cardiff bound for Iquique, Chile. The ship had to negotiate the notorious Cape Horn and Masefield was so ill that he had to be hospitalised.

A new Maritime Tale by Stephen Guy appears every Saturday in the Liverpool Echo. A paperback – Mersey Maritime Tales (£3.99) – is available from the museum, newsagents, bookshops or from www.merseyshop.com (£1.50 p&p UK).

The Rev Jesse Jackson visiting the museum in 2007. Photograph © Simon Webb

Hello there

Well since my return from Paris I have had a pretty varied couple of weeks which amongst other things included several meetings related to our forthcoming exhibition programme. It also included a visit from two judges for the European Museum of the Year award. This is a very prestigious award and goes to show just how successful ISM has been in its first year.  Hopefully this time we will be successful and I feel that the judges went away really understanding the fact that we are a museum which is at the forefront of a campaign to actively challenge present day racism and discrimination and various other injustices which exist. The shortlist is announced in early 2009.

I mentioned our exhibition programme. The plan is to have a varied range of exhibitions within the current galleries which highlight the broad subject of slavery. We are still in the planning stages but we will be shortly announcing our first exhibition which starts later this month, both a celebration and a reflection on the museum's first year. It will include information about all the milestones we have achieved (to date we have had upwards of 275,000 visitors and some very high profile visitors!) as well as the different types of responses we have had, some challenging, some thought provoking and others which are purely offensive. But we feel it is important to show the entire range of responses, positive and negative, so that we can move forward and really make the museum a tool of social change.

Other exhibitions will highlight various forms of contemporary slavery, as well as African sport and the link between natural history and slavery which uses many of the plant collections we have in National Museums Liverpool. It is an exciting programme so watch this space for further announcements.

The forthcoming week is a very interesting one, for starters I get out of the office on a few occasions (I have a great view of the Albert Dock from my office but when it is sunny it is hard being sat behind my desk!) Tomorrow I am meeting two respected local community historians to look at some archives which might be in need of being rescued from a building due to be renovated and then I go to London to visit the British Film Institute mediatheque to get some ideas for our Phase 2 resource centre. We want the resource centre to include a range of media so visits to established media facilities are really helpful. I'll let you know how it all went in my next blog post.

Remember; drop me a line if you have any comments about the International Slavery Museum.

Bye for now.  

Monks lining up to give khata and receive blessings from the Rinpoche

This week has been a particular special one for the Tibetans living here in Boudhanath.The weekend saw two very good days for gaining extra merit. It had been calculated that on Friday and Sunday just one good deed on these days would be worth 10 thousand, or on Sunday, 10 million good deeds! To take just one round of the stupa, give money to the needy or to just be nice to the people you know would be a very auspicious or fortunate thing to do.

Then on Monday, Chökyi Nyima, the head Rinpoche or teacher of the Ka-Nying Shedrub Ling Monastery, known locally as the White Gompa, (this is the monastery I go to school in) came home. The monks lined the path to the monastery and offered Rinpoche 'khata', the white silk scarf that is such an important part of Tibetan culture. Rinpoche blessed each scarf then placed them over the monks' shoulders. It took him some time to bless each khata offered, but finally he made it to his room - we knew this because his pet dogs barked happily a few moments after he climbed the stairs.

The following day the Rinpoche's first puja since his return took place. This puja also coincided with the date that the Buddha of this era descended from Tushita Heaven to live as the human Siddhartha Gautama. Pujas were held all across Boudhanath, and trumpets, conch shells and chanting could be heard throughout the night.

Of course, the Tibetan community here in Boudhanath is being kept busy with other non Buddhist matters this week. Today the Olympic Games opens in China and this week has seen an increase in the protests and vigils happening across the city.

Sam Sportun putting the finishing touches to one of the clay master panels

As you are probably aware, our conservators - and talented sculptors - Chris Dean and Sam Sportun have been involved in a major project to recreate three missing bronze relief plaques from Sefton Park's monuments. We have been following their progress on the blog as they have recreated clay masters for the missing bronzes using traditional techniques.

Today I was fortunate to get to see them at work while they finish off the fine details - such as adding fingernails - on the clay masters before they are taken to the foundry to be cast in bronze. Photos of them at work and some of the details of the clay masters are on our Sefton Park monuments Flickr slideshow, which has pictures from the very beginning of the project right up to date.

As I mentioned yesterday, the fantastic Metropolis exhibition closes this week. The exhibition is packed full of incredibly detailed photographs of recognisable Liverpool landmarks and some unfamiliar places.

The project team for the exhibition had the difficult task of selecting just 60 photographs for display from almost 200,000 negatives in the Stewart Bale collection. Here Nicky Lewis from Paper Conservation explains a bit about this process and chooses her favourite Metropolis shot:

"Picking a favourite Stewart Bale photograph is not an easy task.

During the image selection process for Metropolis: capturing modern Liverpool I spent time, as part of the project team, weighing up the merits of many of Bale’s photographs. We searched the archive for striking images that best portrayed Liverpool as a developing, modern metropolis- a reflection of the city today. The most difficult part was choosing only 60.

To me Abbey Cinema exterior is a stunning photograph - much more Hollywood than Wavertree. By taking the image at night the photographer could exploit the building’s illuminated architecture. You can see why we chose this as an image to enlarge for the exhibition.

I‘m also captivated by Crowds at the launch of Mauretania II. The launch of a ship was obviously a very popular event in those days, something we no longer experience. The amount of detail in the photograph is exceptional. Take a look at the extent people will go to for a good view. Some are perched on top of shed roofs and cars, whilst other dare-devils cling to steel work. 

That brings me to my favourite Metropolis image. It is not a highly iconic shot and does not depict a famous event or landmark architecture. It is Anglia Vans on the Assembly Line. Obviously Ford played an important role in Liverpool’s history and the image shows cutting edge technology of the time but my reason for picking it is much more personal. We always wanted to include ‘never-seen-before’ images from the Bale archive in the exhibition, not an easy task considering that our film negatives are frozen to stop them deteriorating (see How have the photographs survived? for more detail).

Using the order books from the Bale company combined with documentation from the storage process we were able to pinpoint a box (out of just over 1300), that contained images commissioned by Ford - we had no idea what they would look like however. The box was removed from its freezer and transferred to an insulated bag, where it would defrost at a slow rate. Twenty-four hours later, after removing the protective packaging layers I had a bundle of film negatives. It’s so thrilling to be the first person to look at these images since they were originally commissioned- you just never know what you may find.

As you look through them on the light box, the anticipation builds and you fear the image you are hoping for isn’t there... Then in a eureka moment it appears. The image stood out instantly as fitting the Metropolis theme and had all of the expected high qualities of a Stewart Bale work. Its composition is striking, with the assembly belt giving a great line of perspective. Not only is it satisfying to have brought this image into public view but I also see it as a symbol of how much hidden potential the Stewart Bale archive has.

NML’s long term aim is to digitise the Stewart Bale collection, to allow the public to view them more easily."

Detail of Anglia vans on assembly line at Halewood factory, 1965

This morning I saw an article on the BBC site on the megalodon - a giant prehistoric shark - and the strength of its bite. It seems its jaws exerted something between 10.8 and 18.2 tonnes of pressure as it bit down which is pretty impressive for an animal that had a cartilege jaw.

It reminded me of a quiz we did a good few years ago now where a fossilised megalodon tooth was one of our exhibits (the quiz is here if you want a go, or just skip to the megalodon bit and see the tooth). It was pretty awesome handling that tooth.

Something that did strike a chord in the article was the bit about your average house cat. Apparently pound for pound the cat has the stronger bite, which if you've ever tried to push a pill down your cat's throat you'll know full well.

You might remember a while ago I mentioned a rather large painting that was about to undergo conservation, 'Flower Sellers of London'. A few people commented on it, thought it was an interesting piece. Conservation work has now begun and painting conservator, Rebecca Kench, has the latest.

This image shows a detail from the flowers section of the painting. Before consolidation is on the left and after on the right. You can see that the section on the right is noticeably cleaner and smoother.

The painting came into the Conservation Centre for treatment at the end of last year. It's been in need of treatment for a while and we have finally been able to fit it into our schedule.  The painting was bought from the artist shortly after it was painted in 1875 by Henry Thompson. He gave it to the Walker in 1880.  "The Flower Sellers" is painted on canvas attached to a stretcher and the figures are a little larger than life size.  Treating this painting presents me with several problems. Firstly I need to deal with anything which could lead to paint loss. When the painting arrived in the studio, the paint was flaking and needed to be consolidated, or reattached, to the canvas.  This mainly affected the area of the flowers where there is damaged and broken impasto (thick brush strokes of paint), and old paint losses down to the canvas.   Although this area has been consolidated (stuck back down to the canvas) in the past, there are still some areas which are loose and fragile.  In order to fix this, I laid the painting flat on a table, with a support behind the canvas, and any flaking areas of the painting were laid flat and consolidated using a water based fish glue.