National Museums Liverpool Blog - Tuesday, January 13, 2009

I've always believed that practice makes perfect and I'm sure time spent making things at sea for pleasure made countless crew members very happy. I particularly enjoy looking at scrimshaw work evoking the sailing ship era with depictions of graceful ships set on strange seascapes or anchored off exotic shores. I love those spouting whales.

The crews of sailing ships turned their seafaring skills to making many different kinds of gifts and ornaments. Work on board sailing ships was physically hard and often very dangerous. Team work was vital for keeping the ship on course and afloat in all weather conditions.

Any crew member who did not "know the ropes" or could not work aloft was of little use. The able (or experienced) seaman had the pick of berths and food. They expected the lower grades to sweep decks and tar rigging.

"Idlers" were the cook, steward and carpenter who, except on small ships, worked daylight hours. The seaman on watch was always occupied, except at night or on Sundays, setting or furling (rolling up) sails, at the wheel, washing and holystoning (scrubbing) decks, replacing or repairing sails and rigging.

Seafarers on sailing ships often used their working tools and skills during their brief periods of leisure. They used knives and other tools to make gifts and ornaments out of wood, bone, rope, canvas, twine and similar materials. The skills and materials used in producing these items were distinctively those of the sailing ship seaman. The products concerned are among the most appealing relics of life under sail.

In the Life at Sea gallery at Merseyside Maritime Museum there are examples of what were produced, including remarkable scrimshaw work on horns. They are pieces of art that originated on sailing vessels but became a popular pastime among many sailors. Traditionally, teeth and bones from whales were engraved with decorative images. The outline of the engraving was emphasised using black ink, tar, soot and lampblack.

Another exhibit is a painted toolbox lid from about 1898. It shows a three-masted sailing ship called the Hugh and Mary in full sail passing a lighthouse and two steam ships. The image is flanked by pictures of two saucy young women.

For many seafarers handicrafts became a lifelong hobby. There are examples of the work of Arthur "Jo" Dashwood-Howard (he's shown here and you can see his work on our main site) who perfected the craft of ships in bottles. He left seafaring in 1936 but continued his interest in the sea right up to his death in 1998.

You may remember that my post from last week concerned the Athenia, a passenger ship that was controversially sunk by a German U-boat in the first hours of World War II. Antiques Roadshow on Sunday featured an SOS Marconigram (basically a telegram) sent from the sinking ship at 22.10 on 3 September 1939. There was also a shore to ship message notifying ships of the outbreak of war. If you missed the programme you can catch it on the BBC iplayer - the Marconigram feature begins at 41 mins 19 secs.

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 the Mersey Shop website(£1.50 p&p UK).

The 1911 census records for England and Wales have been made public, two years earlier than the 100 year embargo. The returns contain more information than previous years including length of marriage, the number of children in the household, any guests on the night in question and more occupational information. For the first time you can see the actual form your ancestor filled in, complete with crossings out, mistakes and any additional notes not transfered to the official enumerator's summary. You can search them on the 1911 census website.

It's thought that several thousand women boycotted the census in protest at women being denied the vote. Some of these refused to fill in the form but submitted a protest statement, so their presence will be registered although without details. The women who stayed away from home for the night and so evaded the count will not feature at all.

Hello there

Well I hope you all had a happy holiday period and managed to relax. I certainly did. I spent several days back home in dear old Yorkshire. Always nice to catch up with the family.

The International Slavery Museum has an exciting series of events and programmes throughout the year, from a US Black History Month event in February to Slavery Remembrance Day in August. We also have Shoot Nations, an exciting new photographic exhibition focusing on global environmental issues through the eyes of young people, starting on 17 January. This is one of a series of exhibitions which highlight issues in the museum galleries – from global inequalities to racism, discrimination and identity. So watch this space for news about upcoming exhibitions.

Ii is now full steam ahead with our planning for phase two of the museum. We are working closely with the architects who will shortly be coming back to me and the team with their initial plans and thoughts. This is an incredibly exciting time to be working at this museum as it offers me and my colleagues the opportunity to have some input into what really could be the world’s leading educational and research centre on the subject of slavery. We are not doing this alone though. I am regularly in contact with international partners who also to some degree focus on slavery. One such institution is the Nantes History Museum.

In December we were visited by Bertrand Guillet, chief heritage curator for the museum. Bertrand was very impressed with the International Slavery Museum and we are looking at how our two institutions can work together, particularly in the field of educational resources. Staying on a French theme I also got to see the magazine article written about Lilian Thuram’s visit to the museum. Hopefully we can take things forward with him and his new organisation.

I have also been in contact with several Polish colleagues whose institutions focus on the many atrocities which took place in Poland during WWII such as the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum and the Galicia Jewish Museum in Krakow, both of which I have visited. One way we are looking to strengthen links with institutions such as these is to develop a forum for museum professionals who work in this area and other forms of genocide and human rights abuses and issues. I will keep you updated on this challenging and progressive venture.

I visited both Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau with a colleague when we stayed in Krakow last year and we were not only moved by the exhibitions and displays in the museum but by the sheer size of Auschwitz II-Birkenau. It was hard to comprehend on a bright sunny day just what happened and it only really hit me on my return. I took many photos, some quite distressing, of the trip which I feel need to be shown. I might include these in a future blog. What it did do was make me even more determined that our museum will not be a neutral one but take a stance on contemporary issues and challenge attitudes and injustices that still exist today.  

Bye for now.

You may have seen on the news that the Prime Minister, the Rt Honourable Gordon Brown MP was in town yesterday for the first ever Cabinet meeting in Liverpool, which took place at the BT Convention Centre. The Prime Minister had a busy day but found time to come and look around the site of the new Museum of Liverpool which is currently under construction on the waterfront.  

Accompanied by Culture Secretary Andy Burnham MP, the Prime Minister took time out to talk to museum curators about the sort of objects going in the museum, as well as meeting some members of the construction team who are creating the iconic building. I’m told he really enjoyed his visit and was very interested to see our future plans.

What you may not have seen on the news is that Mr Brown also spent some time with young people who have been involved with the museum. On first arriving at the docks by boat (which coincidentally had the youthful name ‘Groove Armada’), he was greeted by young people who have worked on the 'Portrait of a Nation' project and Museum of Liverpool's youth champions. At Museum of Liverpool he met two Creative Apprentices who are currently working on the project – they will be telling you more about their involvement at a later date. 

Outside the Merseyside Maritime Museum the ministerial party paused to admire the ‘The Orrery’ – a colourful community sculpture commissioned by Liverpool Culture Company. He also took time out to speak to pupils from Pleasant Street Primary School about their involvement in Liverpool 08, before moving on to his next engagements. A journalist recently commented that the Prime Minister is looking very well and incredibly youthful these days - perhaps it’s down to the company he is keeping. 

While many of us were embroiled in the orgy of excess that is the modern Christmas, certain hardy souls were installing the final glazing units at the Museum of Liverpool. It's cold enough at the moment without spending your days up a cherry picker, fitting windows on an exposed riverbank. Glazers, we salute you! On the up side they'll have seen a fair few beautiful sunsets lately, what with the clear skies and low winter sun.

Anyhoo, the fruits of their labours can be seen in the Museum of Liverpool flickr group. And, as we've come to expect, the general public have been producing a few gems of their own. They can be seen in the public group.

If you've yet to see the building yourself the evening of 10 January would be a good time to visit. The area around the building is the stage for 'Transition: The People's Celebration', a public event to mark the end of Liverpool's reign as European Capital of Culture. The north window is being used as a projection screen, part of the 'sound, light and visual review of Liverpool's history from 7,000,000,000BC to the present day'.  That all kicks off at 6.15pm with fireworks at 7pm. The Merseyside Maritime Museum and International Slavery Museum will both be open until 10pm, with activities for the kids, a new menu in the cafe and music from The Fourmost - more than enough to make an evening of it. More on our main site. 

Today the last Woolworths shops will close their doors for the last time. The loss of this familiar household name from the high street marks the end of an era that actually started in Liverpool a century ago. The first British shop of the famous chain opened in this city in 1909.

I don't have a picture of that particular store, but for anyone who has been saddened to see the empty shelves of their favourite Woolies shop over the last few weeks, here's a photo of the Wavertree Road Woolworths during better times from the Stewart Bale collection, which was recently shown in the Metropolis exhibition. There's also a picture of the window display of the London Road Woolworths in 1931 from the same exhibition, advertising a 'Household week' sale with 'Nothing over 6D'.

There’s a lot to be said for having old heads on young shoulders but I think the terrible tragedy of the Athenia underlines the error of giving major responsibilities to inexperienced individuals.

Scores of innocent people died when a young U-boat submarine captain sent a passenger ship to the bottom. The Second World War was just eight hours old when 26-year-old Kapitauleutnant Fritz-Julius Lemp sank the 13,581-ton liner Athenia with the loss of 112 lives.

Outrage was caused on both sides of the Atlantic by the sinking. The Athenia, operated by the Donaldson Atlantic Line, sailed from Liverpool for Montreal on 2 September 1939. She was torpedoed, without warning, by the U-30 at 7.39 pm the following day about 250 miles north west of Ireland. Of her 1,103 passengers and 315 crew, 93 passengers – including 22 Americans – and 19 crew members were lost.

Britain had declared war on Germany just eight hours earlier and the Battle of the Atlantic had begun (our main site has more on the campaign).

Lemp wrongly assumed from the Athenia’s lone, zig-zag course that she was an armed auxiliary cruiser. He then attacked and sank her, an unarmed passenger ship, contrary to both international law and the strict instructions of U-boat Command. Lemp also broke a pre-war international agreement by not offering help to survivors. When the U-30 arrived back in Germany, Lemp and his crew were sworn to absolute secrecy.

However, the sub arrived in port with victory pennants flying on her conning tower - one showed 14,000 tons, representing the Athenia. Lemp was ordered to falsify his war diary, re-writing two complete pages so there was no mention of the Athenia sinking.

At Merseyside Maritime Museum there is a display of illustrations about the Athenia including photographs of survivors of the tragedy. News cuttings from the time reflect the horror caused by the sinking. One headline screams: “The Monster Strikes Again!”, referring to the Lusitania sinking by a U-boat in 1915 (more on the Lusitania on our main site).

In 1939 the German Navy (Kriegsmarine) was not strong enough to risk a major battle with the Royal Navy, still the largest navy in the world. Instead, Germany aimed to defeat Britain by ruthlessly attacking her merchant ships and those of other countries that supported her. This long and bitter campaign was fought worldwide but was at its most relentless in the north Atlantic. The Germans used submarines, mines, surface warships, armed merchant ships and aircraft. Winston Churchill later wrote: “The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril.”

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 the Mersey Shop website (£1.50 p&p UK).

I know you will be truly excited about finding out the result of our poll to find out your favourite exhibition from our venues in 2008, so I will put you out of your misery. With an admirable 52.75% of all the votes, our monster music exhibition The Beat Goes On came out on top. But don't fret if you haven't been to this exhibition yet as it is staying at the World Museum until 1 November 2009. You can also check out our listings page to find out about any events going on that are related to this exhibition.

There was an interesting profile piece in the Sunday Mail this week about England manager Fabio Capello. Reading between the lines, you get the distinct impression that football and cultural pursuits are deemed mutually exclusive - that it is somehow surprising that a man into his football should also enjoy a bit of modern art. But then Fabio Capello is Italian, and an appreciation of the arts is central to his national identity, we surmise. 

This really got me thinking. It’s difficult to accept that football and art don’t mix when you are in a city where football is art.  In Liverpool we have put football at the centre of Capital of Culture year through UEFA’s Only A Game? exhibition at World Museum Liverpool. Football is one of the city’s key assets - part of the currency, the vocabulary, the mythology, the identity - full stop. To omit it would be a nonsense. Football can create as much passion and drama, and elicit the same heightened emotions as a great piece of theatre, an imposing painting or a rousing music recital.  It brings an aesthetic quality to the sports field that requires elegance, balance and poise – infact, as a rugby league fan, I have often joked that football has more in common with ballet than rugby. Isn’t that why it’s called ‘the beautiful game’? (The introduction video for Only A Game? is worth a look - it's fun and light-hearted look at football in a European cultural context).

Capello is reported to be a big fan of Scottish painter Peter Doig, who won the Walker Art Gallery’s John Moores Painting Prize in 1993 with Blotter. Blotter is currently featured in a major solo show in Frankfurt,  but you can still see Pelican (Stag) which was loaned by the artist in exchange. The current John Moores Contemporary Painting Prize ends this Sunday 4 January, so if you share Fabio’s passion for modern art, seize the moment. If on the other hand you prefer his penchant for football, then you've got until 1 March to see Only A Game? at World Museum Liverpool.

The relationship between sport and culture will be further scrutinised in a new exhibition, Fashion Vs Sport that opens 13 February at the Walker Art Gallery. It ends its run at the V&A this Sunday.

It's new year's eve tomorrow and we've got a host of new stars to look forward to in January 2009. No, I don't mean the start of Celebrity Big Brother, I'm talking about the night sky and its numerous stars to spot over the next few weeks. Although, reading the mythological stories behind the constellations, you could be forgiven for thinking that they had come out of a celebrity gossip mag - plenty of betrayals and lost love. The Brad/Angelina/Jennifer debacle is nothing compared to this lot!

Our Planetarium Co-ordinator and resident night sky expert, John Moran, has brought us January's Nightwatch report about Orion the Hunter and Perseus the great Greek hero...

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The true winter constellations are on show in January with the Hunter Orion dominating the mythological cast of characters. Orion was a boastful hunter who claimed he could hunt and kill any animal, but met his match with a lowly scorpion as he couldn’t penetrate its armour. Orion fled into the sea and as he was swimming away, Apollo tricked his sister Artemis, who was in love with Orion, into firing an arrow at the far away object swimming in the sea. The arrow hit its mark and when Artemis found out what she had done, she begged Zeus to place Orion among the stars for all eternity and placed the scorpion on the opposite side of the sky.

Another constellation on show this month is Perseus named after the handsome Greek hero who saved the life of Andromeda by defeating the evil sea monster Cetus. Perseus had just slain the Gorgon Medusa and was carrying her head back as a trophy, because even in death Medusa’s head was still capable of turning any creature that looked upon her into stone and this is how he defeated Cetus.

On the 4th of the month look out for the first meteor shower of 2009, the Quantadrids, which have a high rate of 60 meteors per hour. Look out also for the ringed planet Saturn, which you will find in the constellation Leo around 9pm onwards. Don’t forget that 2009 is the international year of astronomy, so there should be plenty of interesting things to do and see to keep your imagination fired over the coming year.