National Museums Liverpool Blog - Thursday, February 26, 2009

Calling all part time art and craft students - how would you like to have your artwork displayed in our venues during Adult Learner's Week in May 2009? You could if you win the 'Inspired by...' competition.

Entrants in this year's competition must submit a piece of artwork inspired by the collections, exhibitions or displays in either Sudley House, World Museum Liverpool or the National Conservation Centre. You may submit any art, craft, multi-media, digital work, video or animation. Participants must be over 18 and studying arts or crafts part time. Full entry criteria and downloadable application forms are on the Inspired by... web page.

Do not adjust your sets! A different view of the now familiar museum building reflected in the dock

As you will have seen if you've been down to Liverpool's waterfront recently, the structure of the new Museum of Liverpool building is really taking shape now. But what is going on inside those stone-clad walls? And how are staff preparing for the monumental task of fitting out the enormous galleries inside?

If you want the inside story there are two new ways to find out what's going on. Our quarterly e-newsletter has a summary of all the big news -  you can see the February 2009 e-newsletter online. To sign up for future editions complete the register with us form, remembering to tick the Museum of Liverpool box under 'Interests' and choose email updates under 'Contact options'.

You can now also follow the Museum of Liverpool on Twitter, for all the latest news about progress with the construction.

Don't forget, we'd like to hear from you as well if you have any photos of the museum building taking shape. You can add them to our Building the Museum of Liverpool group on Flickr.

We've just published a cute little pocket guide to many of the fab happenings at NML in 2008. It's good to revisit highlights like Ben Johnson's residency, the Superlambananas, the opening of Seized! and exhibitions like Art In The Age of Steam and The Beat Goes On.

You can download your copy of The Little Book of Big Highlights here (pdf 6mb).

Miss Francatelli's apron

I have an open mind about psychic happenings and the alleged auras that surround people and things. A simple apron from a distant time has a profound effect on me. Whenever I stand next to it I feel the icy blast of the sea, hear the cries of people in distress and experience a sense of despair.

The starched white apron bears silent witness to the terrible night when the luxury White Star liner Titanic hit an iceberg and sank with the loss of more than 1,500 lives.

It is among exhibits in the Merseyside Maritime Museum’s exhibition Titanic, Lusitania and the Forgotten Empress which looks at three great shipping tragedies. The Empress was the Empress of Ireland whose loss was overshadowed by the others.

The full-length cotton apron, with lace-trimmed top, was worn by survivor Laura Francatelli on the night of the disaster. It may be the only item of such clothing on display in a public collection.

Miss Francatelli was personal maid and social secretary to the fashion designer Lady Lucile Duff-Gordon. Miss Francatelli was travelling First Class with her employer and Sir Cosmo Duff-Gordon, baronet, a champion fencer who represented Britain in the 1908 Olympics. They boarded the ship at Cherbourg travelling under the names Mr and Mrs Morgan, presumably to prevent them being pestered by social climbers.

Miss Francatelli and the Duff-Gordons were among the first to escape from Titanic. They boarded Lifeboat No 1 which had just two male passengers and seven crewmen although it was built to hold many more people. On board the rescue ship Carpathia, Sir Cosmo asked Miss Francatelli to write out £5 cheques to each of the seamen who were in the lifeboat. This led to allegations of bribery.

However, the British inquiry stated that the nature of the Duff-Gordons’ departure from Titanic was “within the acceptable bounds of civilised behaviour”. Also on display is a photograph of the occupants of Lifeboat No 1 taken on board Carpathia. Miss Francatelli, who later married and lived until1967, is pictured standing between Sir Cosmo and Lady Duff-Gordon. There's more on the apron, the Duff-Gordons and Miss Francatelli on our main website.

Most of the Titanic’s crew from the Liverpool area were lost in the sinking. On display are personal items linked to local crew members who died. A Bible, pipes and smoking accessories belonged to junior second engineer John Henry Hesketh, a 33-year-old single man from Kirkdale, Liverpool.

A poignant letter was written by a young girl called May Louise McMurray to her dad William McMurray, a bedroom steward from the city’s Kensington district. You can see the letter here.

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).

We billed The Beat Goes on exhibition ‘from The Beatles to the Zutons’, but has anyone heard of 'from The Hollies to the Happy Mondays'? That’s what you’ll find if you take a trip to the other end of the East Lancs Road, to Salford Museum & Art Gallery. They’re currently showing Quiffs, Riffs and Tiffs – a small but perfectly formed exhibition about the music scene in Salford.

I spent a happy hour there a few weeks ago and thought there were a few gems to be seen. Top of the list for me were notes by Morrissey and Johnny Marr – with Salford Lads Club getting its rightful mention. There’s also handwritten lyrics to Crosby, Stills & Nash’s Teach Your Children, signed by one of my all time idols,  Graham Nash. There are some childhood pictures of Graham at his home in Salford, before his success with The Hollies and later with CS&N stole him from these shores.

The Beat Goes On exhibition

Other items featured in the exhibition relate to Joy Division, Happy Mondays, Anthony Wilson including The Hacienda , The Ting Tings, and even The Salford Jets - former band of Rock Radio 106.1 DJ Mike Sweeney (yes, he's still going on radio, and very good he is too). 

On the other hand, if you are reading this from the outskirts of Manchester, hop on the train to World Museum Liverpool where you’ll find The Beat Goes On exhibition covering Liverpool’s finest music. Morrissey fans will be thrilled by the Billy Fury display. Old Hacienda heads will feel at home in the Cream and Quad sections, while first generation punks and indie kids will be bowled over by memories of  Eric's, The Las and other such legends. Oh, and then there’s that other band from Liverpool. You may well need more than one trip to take it all in.

The crowd applaud as Wally Brown, Richard LeBaron and Simon Woolley (not shown) unveil three new plaques for the Black Achievers Wall

As Richard Benjamin explained in his last blog post, February is Black History Month in America (unlike the UK, where we celebrate it in October). So as befits an International Slavery Museum, we held our own programme of US Black History Month events, culminating in the unveiling of three new American plaques for the Black Achievers Wall.

The smiling face of President Obama on the middle plaque surely needs no introduction. On the left is Fannie Lou Hamer, the civil rights movement pioneer from Mississippi who famously described herself as being "sick and tired of being sick and tired". Completing the trio on the right is Dr Mae Jemison, who has the honour of being the first African American woman to travel in space after completing a mission on the Space Shuttle Endeavour in 1992.

In a short ceremony yesterday afternoon the plaques were officially unveiled by Richard LeBaron, Chargé d'Affaires at the United States Embassy in London, Simon Woolley, the national co-ordinator of Operation Black Vote in the UK, and Wally Brown CBE, former Principal of Liverpool Community College. You can see more photos of the ceremony in our US Black History Month Flickr photo set.

The Malancha with her guns at her stern

I love studying photographs, drawings and plans of the mighty Dreadnought battleships that dominated navies about 100 years ago. I admire the high-quality engineering which combined with great design to produce beautiful fighting machines gleaming from end-to-end with polished brass and steel armour plating.

However, submarine technology advanced during the First World War when undersea warfare became a reality and, along with the development of bomber and fighter aircraft, marked the beginning of the end of battleships.

Dreadnoughts and other huge warships bristling with guns that marked the arms race in Edwardian Europe were sitting ducks to much smaller war machines swooping from the skies or lurking beneath the waves.

Upon the declaration of war in 1914 Britain had around 50 submarines while her allies the French had more than 70. The Imperial German Navy, under Kaiser Wilhelm II, had between 30 and 40 diesel and petrol-powered U-boats.

By the end of the war the UK had 137 submarines in service with another 78 being built, having lost 54 subs during hostilities. The German Navy had more than 170 operational U-boats which were surrendered to the Allies.

In the First World War submarines were slow, fragile and only capable of staying under water for about two hours at a stretch. Early submarines had five or six torpedo tubes and deck-mounted guns, making them also dangerous on the surface.

Around 5,000 ships were sunk during the First World War by U-boats. The most famous was the Cunard liner Lusitania, torpedoed off Ireland in 1915 with the loss of 1,200 lives. There are a number of exhibits from the Lusitania in the Merseyside Maritime Museum exhibition Titanic, Lusitania and the Forgotten Empress.

The most famous victim of a U-boat was probably British general Lord Kitchener, whose face graced the recruiting poster with the slogan “Your Country Needs You”. He died on a mission to Russia in 1916 when the cruiser HMS Hampshire hit a mine laid by the U-75 off the Orkney Islands.

The Maritime Museum’s display Liverpool: World Gateway has two models of ships linked to submarine warfare in the Great War, as it was also known. One is a superbly-detailed model of the cargo liner Malancha, (shown here) built in 1918 for the Brocklebank Line. It has two quick-firing guns mounted near the ship’s stern as protection against submarines.

The other is the Johnson Line’s cargo liner Barnesmore of 1905. After being sold and renamed Whitehall, she was torpedoed and sunk in the North Atlantic in 1917.

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).

To celebrate the opening of our new Fashion V Sport exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery, I've put together a Flickr gallery of some of the cool and stylish outfits worn by some of our private view guests.

Part of the exhibition examines street style and the variety of styles I saw in one evening was certainly varied and creative. Damian Quinn, the man responsible for the gold topped ‘Onthamike’ trainers from the 'Play' section, was wearing a similar pair on the night from his Supremebeing brand. On the other end of the scale, self-confessed trainer obsessive 'Mookie' told me about her Nike Air Force 1 trainers that she had customised using multi-coloured paint spatters. She had worn them on her Duke of Edinburgh hike, before giving them a new lease of life with her own design! Mookie is a creative apprentice at the moment so who knows, she might be a Footwear Director like Damian one day.

Some of my favourite outfits of the evening included; Olivia's bowler hat, shoe-boot and vintage satchel ensemble and Amina's Camden/Indian mash-up including a sports top, shawl and gold belt. Have a look through the slideshow and pick your favourite fashionistas!

Nope, not a band featuring in The Beat Goes On exhibition but a couple of World Museum Liverpool-related pieces on the Guardian site today.

There's a short video shot in Saqqara, south of Cairo, where archaeologists are excavating ancient Egyptian tombs and unearthing mummies. You can see the video here. 

Also, today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. The Guardian has created a multimedia guide that looks at the social and historical context of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection (I didn't know that Darwin was born on the same day as Abraham Lincoln).

We've our own Darwin-related events organised to coincide with Darwin200 - a national programme of events celebrating Charles Darwin’s scientific ideas and their impact on our lives. More on them on our main site.

'Dante and Beatrice' by Henry Holiday

I have long been fascinated by artists’ preoccupations with all aspects of love in works at the Walker Art Gallery. Radio Merseyside asked me to talk about some of my favourites so I took a walk around the gallery with presenter Claire Hamilton for a Valentine's Day feature.

Creative artists often smoulder with passions that spill out on to their canvases or through their chisels. They can choose equally passionate subjects, being drawn to affairs of the heart in all its forms.

I have been intrigued by Henry Holiday's 'Dante and Beatrice' (pictured) since I was a child. My father took great pleasure in telling how he walked over the Santa Trinità Bridge in Florence, seen in the painting. Poet Dante loved Beatrice from afar and it remained a platonic love - he married someone else. Here Beatrice cuts him in the street following some misunderstanding, although her two girl companions look knowingly at Dante who dramatically clutches his heart.  

Over on the other side of the room is Rossetti's famous symbol-strewn picture 'Dante's Dream'. Love leads Dante to Beatrice's death bed. Flowers, depicting purity and virginity, are scattered about - a flickering lamp depicts Death.

Next we are on our way to the Tudors and the era of courtly love but pause at 'The Betrothal' from Rembrandt's studio. This well-dressed couple do not really look very happy. It is a gloomy canvas full of sombre hues - not the ideal engagement present. Perhaps this was an arranged, dynastic marriage. He gazes at her with some semblance of affection, she looks out at us as if to cry 'Help!'

Standing by the massive portrait of 'Henry VIII', we muse on the romantic tastes of this most kingly of kings. Standing at about 6 ft 2 inches, he was hugely successful with the ladies and famously made a habit of getting married. Henry certainly took huge risks in breaking with Rome so he could marry Anne Boleyn before moving on to four other wives. Holbein, who did the original version of this painting, captures the king in his awe-inspiring majesty.

Next to it hangs 'Portrait of a Man of the Delves Family' painted by an unknown British Tudor artist 40 years later. This courtly gentleman in orange tights stands in a Garden of Love holding hands with his late wife (her face symbolically covered with leafy fronds). Armour piled at Delves' feet indicates that not only was he proficient in the art of love and had good legs but he could fight as well.

We end with 'TheTinted Venus' by John Gibson, a flesh-tinted marble goddess denounced by the Victorians as "a naked impudent English woman". Pygmalion-like, Gibson loved his statue so much that he refused to part from it for years.