National Museums Liverpool Blog - Friday, February 06, 2009

At the end of February, Earth will receive a visitor named Lulin. This is not an alien, but a comet that astronomers say may have never visited this corner of the solar system before and should be visible to the naked eye. Our resident expert in all things celestial, Planetarium Operator John Moran, is here to tell us how to spot it…

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If you were to scoop up a handful of snow, shape it into a rough spherical shape and add some dirt to it, you would basically be holding in your hand the ingredients that make up a comet. These mountain-sized dirty snowballs are some of the most intriguing objects there are in space. That's why during February and beyond, millions of eyes will be eagerly looking towards the constellation Leo to try and catch a glimpse of Comet Lulin.

From roughly the 16th of the month, not only will we be able to see Comet Lulin with the naked eye but also within two degrees of it you will find the ringed planet Saturn. This should be a beautiful sight through binoculars, all you need to do is find it. Look for the constellation Ursa Major, often called The Plough, which most people are familiar with, then find the two pointers which show us the way to the Pole star. If you follow the pointers in the opposite direction of Polaris and continue until you come to the first big constellation, this will be Leo, identified by the back-to-front question mark. Look down and slightly to the left for the brightest object in this constellation, which at the moment is Saturn, and just below this will be Comet Lulin. As the days pass so the comet will start moving upwards and to the right.
 
Comets originate in a vast region of space which borders our solar system called the Oort Cloud. As they swirl around, some smash into each other and like snooker balls on a table get fired off in a different direction and this starts their long cold journey into our solar system. As they near the sun the ice starts to melt and gas and vapour start streaming out through evaporation; this is how the tail forms, which clearly identifies a comet.

Most Comets that enter our solar system get caught by the gravitational pull of the sun and end up making the same journey back into space. Eventually they come back some time in the future, like the most famous of them all; Halley's Comet, which makes this journey every 76 years. But some comets just fly straight through our system and are never seen again. Comet Lulin looks like it may well be one of these comets.

So if we are fortunate to have clear skies at the end of February, try and catch a glimpse of one of mother nature’s most remarkable phenomena.

Lots more snaps in our Flickr set including this one of the sun on the south window.

The build continues to progress really well. The vertical limestone cladding is nearing completion, the main roof is finished, and the windows are almost all in. Internally, the staircase structure is complete, internal walls are making good progress, and innards like the electrics, plumbing and air handling units are well on their way.

It's all really exciting, and judging by the number of people taking photos of the building (there's just a few of them here in the public Flickr group) lots of people feel the same. If you'd like to add your snaps to the group please do.

Des Newton, who has died after a long illness aged 67, was one of the world’s leading ship bottlers and I, Stephen Guy, admired him for his astonishing dexterity and well as his cheerful personality.

Des made ship models with amazing skill and precision and it was a delight watching his hands daintily getting things to work.  He could also talk at great length about the history of ship bottling, dealing with the most difficult questions effortlessly. I asked him how seafarers kept the bottle steady as sailing ships pitched and tossed on rough seas. He immediately produced an ancient photograph illustrating the answer – they rested the bottle on a stick.
Des, who also made ship models for the Royal family, was one of the best-known personalities at the Merseyside Maritime Museum where he had a ship bottling and model workshop for 20 years.

He was born in Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, the son of a seafarer. After his apprenticeship, Des became a welder working on submarines in the Vickers shipyard. He later became a professional entertainer and musician learning his trade on the nightclub circuit.

This was time well spent because anyone seeing Des demonstrating his ship bottling skills knew they were in the presence of a great entertainer. He always jokingly referred to himself as a Glass Receptacle Miniature Artefact Inserter.

Des - who lived in Bootle, Liverpool - appeared on television several times, most notably on Blue Peter and the panel game What’s My Line?

He supported Merseyside Maritime Museum at many exhibitions and events and this led to him demonstrating his skills at maritime festivals around the country. Even after retirement in 2004, Des was still in demand demonstrating his knowledge and skills on cruise ships as well as back at the Maritime Museum where he held his last workshop in September 2008.
Des was passionate about lifeboats and was a former crew member of the Barrow lifeboat and a RNLI life governor. He raised thousands of pounds towards the purchase of a lifeboat through running the annual Southport Model Lifeboat Rally.

Des made a model of the Royal Yacht and presented it to the Queen when she visited Merseyside on board the Britannia in 1993.

There's more on the world's smallest ship in a bottle, created by Des in 1990, and on making ships in bottles in general on this website.

Did we get a visit from Darwin himself today? Our Treasure House Theatre Coordinator, Jo Connor, gave us all the details to clear up the mystery...

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You may have been forgiven for thinking you’d travelled back in time if you had been at the World Museum Liverpool atrium this morning, as you would have bumped into Mr Charles Darwin, aka Treasure House Theatre Demonstrator Paul Netterfield.

Paul was in role as the great naturalist complete with costume and beard to highlight the museum’s upcoming events to commemorate Darwin’s centenary year.

Our Mr Darwin greeted the press and visitors as they entered and pointed out his own specimen (now in our collections), an Oven Bird from the Straits of Magellan. The specimen is complete with hand written tags and is now in the Hidden Treasures Case in the museum’s atrium.

To celebrate all things Darwin this year, you will find discovery trails, performances, exhibits, poetry readings and further events at the museum. Visit our Darwin200 page for more information.

This may be the closest I will get to a piece of Chanel clothing, but our curators of decorative arts are used to getting their hands on clothes from big names such as Vivienne Westwood and Stella McCartney in their everyday work!

Curator of Costume and Textiles, Pauline Rushton, has been working on our forthcoming 'Fashion V Sport' exhibition organised by the V&A, London, which opens on Friday 13 February at the Walker Art Gallery. You can see Pauline (below) unpacking some trainers from a huge collection featured in the exhibition, all belonging to an obsessive collector called Kish.

If you've ever wondered what it's like to be a curator, as I discovered, it's a very varied job! Pauline works on the styling and interpretation of touring exhibitions like this, dressing the mannequins, taking care of the clothes throughout the exhibition and also giving tailored gallery tours. She has dealt with the display of many pieces of historic costume in the past, which can involve carefully putting delicate outfits onto custom made mannequins. Luckily most of the clothes in 'Fashion V Sport' are far more sturdy and durable due to being sportswear.

The 'Play' section gives you a taste of the creative street-style of customised sportswear. I particularly like the slightly scary Ronald McDonald themed outfit (above), designed by Walter van Beirendonck, with its stars and stripes trousers. Slightly political perhaps?!

If you want to get a more in-depth look at some of the highlights of 'Fashion V Sport', you can go on one of the free guided tours with Pauline, happening throughout the exhibition. Check our what's on listings for all Fashion V Sport related events and activities.

The metal rings in the huge walls took on a menacing aspect when my father pointed to them with the chilling words: “The slaves were chained to those before being sold”. This was the Goree warehouse near the Liverpool waterfront. I was little more than a toddler when we would explore its colonnades with the sinister rings. Later I learnt that the rings were probably for tying up horses rather than people and that comparatively few enslaved Africans came to Liverpool.

However, Liverpool was the European capital of the slave trade from the 1780s to British abolition in 1807. Mersey ships transported nearly 1.5 million Africans into slavery – more than 10% of all known slaves transported by Europeans to the Americas and Caribbean.

Liverpool was not involved in early English slaving. Merchants from London and Bristol were the first to be involved but from the 1740s Liverpool had overtaken them. Liverpool merchants were sharp and successfully undercut their rivals’ costs, reduced turnaround times and increased the flexibility of operations.

Trade goods on display at the International Slavery Museum, in the Merseyside Maritime Museum building, include horseshoe-shaped pieces of metal known as manillas. They were used as a source of metal for casting in Africa and also as currency, particularly on the Niger delta.

Colourful trade beads, like those shown here, were imported mainly from Venice, Prague and Silesia (Germany) and were much in demand for necklaces and bracelets. Among those displayed is a string of agate beads recovered from the wreck of a ship which sank off the Isles of Scilly.

Preparing a ship for a slave voyage was complex and expensive. Vessels had to be equipped and loaded with goods carefully chosen to appeal to African traders. Ships were usually fitted out by a single merchant on behalf of the owners – fellow merchants, bankers, politicians, landowners and other investors. The average cost of sending out a ship in 1790 was the colossal sum of about £10,000 – roughly £550,000 in today’s money.

Goods to buy enslaved Africans were selected to appeal to particular African traders. The trade was conducted formally at forts on the African coast run by Europeans. There were two such forts on the island of Goree, south of Cape Verde, West Africa. It gave its name to the huge vanished Liverpool warehouse still commemorated by a stretch of road called Goree which runs parallel to The Strand.

Elsewhere captains negotiated directly with Africans and generally had to pay customs and dues for trading rights. There's more on the history of slave trading on our main site.

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).

It has been another busy and varied week for the handling and transport team, who have been taking a lot of different objects from storage to the National Conservation Centre for routine condition checking to prevent deterioration. One item in particular caught their eye, as handling technician driver Paul Kelly explains below. You can see more of Paul's photos of this and other objects in our Moving Stories set on Flickr.

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"Way back in the mists of time in the 1960s lots of chaps built model buildings for their model railway layouts using Bayko building blocks. Some chaps obviously got into it in a very big way and produced a very large building - none other than the Empire State Building - which is now in the Museum of Liverpool's collections. It must have taken them weeks to do this and the cost would have been enormous - Grandma must have had a deep pocket money wallet.

This week the handling and transport team delivered the model from storage to the National Conservation Centre for conservation treatment. Naturally the urge to imitate King Kong could not be resisted, although due care and attention was of course paid to ensure the safe handling of the model. Happily the model made it safely to National Conservation Centre in the correct number of components. Afterwards though we had a big problem trying to get handling technician Danny John out of King Kong mode..."

Hello there.

Well unless you have been living on another planet recently who could not have been gripped by the momentous events when Barack Hussein Obama was elected as the 44th President of the United States. First he is a loving father, a skilled politician, an inspirational leader and role model, who is married to a strong successful and supportive partner, he also happens to be the first African American President. A truly great achievement, especially in a nation that less than 60 years ago had separate seating on buses - white people who boarded the bus took seats in the front rows, whereas Black people who boarded the bus had to sit on the back rows (a certain Rosa Parks disagreed) and where the Jim Crow Laws were in place which segregated everything from schools to public parks and transportation, with a "separate but equal" status for Black Americans.

I could go on, but I think you get the message. As a result unsurprisingly, many people have suggested President Obama go on our Black Achievers Wall and I am sure that he will once we add new achievers to that exhibit. As a museum we are actively collecting Obama related material for our own collections: ranging from campaign badges to a plethora of magazines and newspaper articles. We are planning to have some of this material on display at the first ever US Black History Month event we are holding on 17 February called 'From Lincoln to Obama: a look at the progress of civil rights'.  We have a number of noted speakers such as Simon Woolley from Operation Black Vote and Wally Brown, the ex-principle of Liverpool Community College. See our website for full details.  

Most people in the UK associate Black History Month with October but it actually developed out of BHM events in the US in February founded by Dr Carter G Woodson, a great historian, author and educator. In 1926 Woodson pioneered a week long celebration of African American history and culture, the second week in February, to coincide with the birthdays of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. The week of celebration eventually became Black History Month.

It is a particularly good time to visit the museum as we have two exhibitions to see, Shoot Nations and My Life, My Words, opening on Monday, which explores the lives and experiences of people from Liverpool's Black communities and their relationships with the ever-changing city. We had a visitor from the US looking around earlier today and they were blown away at just how much information we have on various aspects of slavery as well as thinking both exhibitions were very interesting and visually stimulating. I have shown many people around the museum but it does not matter how many times I walk through it I always find something to look at or listen to in a new way. Most of the time I am sure people think I am just a visitor like them but I always have an eye on how they react to an exhibit or display, that is my job!

Bye for now. 

Volunteer Tom Hawley came along with me to a talk by our Antiquities Curator, Carolyn Routledge, and has written this blog to tell you all about it. You also can see the photos of Carolyn's trip to the 'Sacred City of Abydos' on Flickr, including her exciting journey into a tomb.

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The most recent talk by Dr. Carolyn Routledge at the Treasure House Theatre, World Museum Liverpool, was filled with tales of gore and splendour. The talk was accompanied by photographs of Dr. Routledge herself, exploring ancient tombs in the Egyptian desert.

During her time on the archaeological site in Upper Egypt, Dr. Routledge worked alongside different institutions, mainly from the United States. Dr. Routledge took us on a historical tour of some of the oldest tombs in Egypt, located in the ancient city of Abydos, about six miles west of the River Nile.

Many of the larger knives on display in the Ancient Egypt gallery and the World Museum, were thought to have been used for ritual killings. One of the bodies found in Abydos is believed to have been a male servant. It was the favourite servants who were ritually killed, buried alongside their pharaoh and taken with him to the afterlife. Some compliment indeed! The name found with this dead servant was ‘Nefer’, who also happened to be a dwarf. There is evidence to suggest that dwarves were very highly respected in ancient Egypt, holding important responsibilities. In fact, the name Nefer translates into English as beautiful, or good.

Another exhibit on display at the Ancient Egypt gallery is a red necklace, moulded from metal into the shape of an oyster shell. Dr. Routledge told us that the necklace could be made of electrum (a naturally occurring combination of gold and silver) that has corroded to a red colour, or it could be made of a gold alloy containing some copper, which is a rare ‘red gold’. They hope to find out in the future whether it is made from red gold, which would make this necklace a rare treasure!

It was interesting to discover the stories behind some of the museum’s exhibits. They’re not just beautiful, but they have remarkable tales attached to them. Make sure you check out World Museum Liverpool's events and activities page for future and upcoming events. And don’t forget… they’re all free!

How far would you go to get a good view of an important event? Curator of photographic archives Anne Gleave has spotted one mystery figure who went to extraordinary lengths to see King George V and Queen Mary at the official opening ceremony of the Queensway Mersey Tunnel in July 1934.

The man appears in a series of photographs from the Stewart Bale collection recording the historic event. In the background behind the royal stand the photographs show him climbing above the crowds, then clinging precariously onto the wall above their heads.

Have a look on a page of details showing the mystery climber, in the web feature about the official souvenir album of the opening of the Queensway Mersey Tunnel. The only thing that isn't recorded is how he got back down again, so we hope he made it safely back to terra firma.