National Museums Liverpool Blog - Tuesday, February 02, 2010

This week is a bumper week for our memories of the World Museum as we continue to pull out historic gems from the museum's archives from the last 150 years. We have two interesting tales for this week in history. Firstly a report of 'rowdyism and almost unimaginable crowds' from 2 February 1935, when the Liverpool Post quoted museum director Dr. Douglas Allan complaining that the museum was overcrowded and disorderly on Sundays:

Dr. Douglas Allan: preferred promenading to hide-and-seek.

"...according to Dr. Allan, the number of people who crowd into the museum on Sundays is becoming unmanageable.  Many of the visitors are very young children, who occupy their time mainly in games of hide-and-seek… It is proposed, therefore, that children must be accompanied by guardians.  The limitation of the total attendance at any one time to a figure  consistent with both convenience and safety is also apparently desirable.  Is this thronging of the museum an indication that there are not sufficient facilities in other directions for indoor and outdoor relaxation on Sundays?"

and there was more...

" Disorder at the museum. Sunday Crowds of nearly 7,000: 'Hide and seek' round cases. Following complaints of rowdyism and almost unimaginable crowds at the Liverpool Museums on Sundays, Liverpool Libraries, Museums, Arts and Music Committee yesterday decided to make recommendations to the Council. There was only one door by which exit to the street could be obtained, and the fact that it took twenty to twenty-five minutes to clear the building raised a serious position if any accident occurred.

Answering questions, Dr. Allan said that of these 7,000 persons more than 3,000 were children whose ages ranged from three to twelve years.  Many of them played hide-and-seek round the cases.  A large number of young men and women used the museum for promenading, and the number of people who were visiting the museum for the purpose of inspecting the exhibits was less than 4,000.

The committee decided to recommend to the Council that children should not be admitted to the museums on Sunday afternoons unless accompanied by adults, and that when the attendance reached 5,000, further admissions should be regulated according to the numbers leaving."

Fun and games preventing promenading at the museum? That would never do! It would have been great to see what Dr. Allan would have thought of all the children who will no doubt come along to enjoy our new science exhibition, Plantastic!, opening next week!

Image courtesy of the Liverpool Daily Post and Echo

I don’t hold with the saying that you have to be a comedian to live in Liverpool, although there are probably more here than anywhere else.

I’m convinced much of this is down to our seafaring tradition – mariners tend to have a strong sense of humour to help deal with the many challenges faced on the briny.

Ships’ crews carried out bizarre rituals at sea such as the Crossing the Line ceremony for passengers and crew going over the equator for the first time. Initiates appear before King Neptune and his court and are plunged into water and subjected to other indignities.

Two lesser-known rituals are examined in the Life at Sea gallery in Merseyside Maritime Museum. Life on sailing ships left crews with little time for recreation. Despite this, sailors developed various customs that reflected their way of life.

The ceremony of Dropping the Dead Horse originated in the 19th century when seafarers were allowed their first month’s wages in advance to pay for gear and clothing. During this month they felt they were working for nothing or 'flogging a dead horse'.

The end of the month was marked by dragging a canvas horse stuffed with wood shavings and stones along the deck before hoisting it up the main mast and dropping it into the sea to cheers and raucous laughter.

On display is a picture of the Dead Horse being prepared for dropping overboard. It was on the John O’Gaunt while sailing to Melbourne, Australia, in 1889.

Music has always been popular at sea and crews often formed small Foo-Foo bands as a way of relaxing. These enabled musicians to disturb everyone else by making an appalling din while dressed up in ridiculous clothes.

A photograph shows a Foo-Foo band (pictured) on a British sailing ship in 1900 with members dressed in funny hats and playing an assortment of instruments including mouth organs and a squeeze box.

Once ashore fun could turn to fear for sailors on a spree. Sea ports around the world have a reputation for being violent and dangerous places. Mariners often took steps to protect themselves.

Crews paid at the end of voyages could get several months of back pay. There were many people in port ready to separate seafarers from their cash once they got ashore.

Another display features a switchback knife and leather cosh carried by sailor Robert Bruce when he was in the Merchant Navy in the early 1940s.

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 p&p UK).

I'm not very green fingered (I have accidentally killed a few cacti, it's true) but luckily we have a number of expert botanists here at the World Museum! This week they got together with staff from the horticulture and botanical team of Liverpool City Council Parks and Greenspaces to create a lovely display in the atrium of the museum.

Here is Donna Young, our Botany Collections Manager, to tell us more about the display:

The plant display in World Museum

The plants in the display are from all over the world and are from Liverpool’s famous living collection which dates back to the opening of the city’s first botanical garden in 1803. Through the 19th century, the garden’s unrivalled collection grew. Plant collectors, exploring new lands, brought back plants of great economic and scientific value. Plants were also sent around the world, including plants for the imperial gardens in Russia.

Many of the plants were preserved as dried specimens for scientific research and now form part of World Museum’s natural history collection. There have been many ups and downs in the history of the living collection. It closed to the public in the 1980s when greenhouses fell into disrepair – but the plants lived on. You can now see some of these plants in Sefton Park’s Palm House and at Croxteth Park."

We are also gearing up for the opening of our massive science exhibition, 'Plantastic!', which will come to life on 13 February 2010. The exhibition will have 40 fascinating interactive exhibits and games, which will help to uncover the secrets of the amazing world of plants.

You will be able to enter a magical realm with giant leafy canopies, massive seed pods, huge root systems and strange man-made trees. There will be areas where you can relax and be inspired by nature or find out more about topical issues and their effects on plants such as biodiversity and climate change.

So look out for the exhibition next month and come along to have a Plantastic time!

Interior of the museum in 1956

This week's blog for the World Museum's 150th anniversary year, is focussing a very important event in the museum's history; the day it reopened to the public for the first time after World War Two. Our Executive Director of Collections Management, John Millard, has been digging around in the archives and he's found an interesting anecdote about this day:

On the 26 January 1956, the museum reopened for the first time since war damage in 1941.  Writer, heiress and political activist, Nancy Cunard was visiting the museum and left a note for the director;

"Today, Saturday, 2 days after ceremonial opening and one day after public opening of "Lower Horseshoe" your attendant was counting the people as they came in: by 4pm – (when I arrived) the number was 2,419 – By 5, when the Museum shut, 2,892.  So well over 400 came in the last hour! A very good sale of booklets too."

We'd still like to hear from you if you have happy memories of visiting the museum. Can you remember the first time you ever went? Was it the first time you'd ever seen an Egyptian mummy? Did any artefacts from the museum inspire you in later life?

Leave your memories as a comment below...

'A view of Liverpool' by Henry Freeman James from Merseyside Maritime Museum

I find the subject of slavery deeply disturbing and the more we find out about its workings, the greater the sense of disbelief.

It is astonishing that misery, disease and death could be imposed upon other human beings on such a vast scale. There are many important lessons to be learnt from the slave trade.  

The native peoples of the Americas and Caribbean were profoundly affected or exterminated and their cultures largely destroyed following the arrival of Europeans.

As colonies were set up and plantations established, there was a chronic shortage of labour because the local people had died in vast numbers.

The transatlantic slave trade happened because Europeans needed workers for their colonial enterprises. This resulted in the largest forced migration in human history as Africans were enslaved in their millions and transported across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas.

When European explorers arrived in the 15th and 16th centuries, they exploited the riches of the new lands. Initially Spain and Portugal took the lead and were followed by England, France and the Netherlands.

These were the countries that developed the transatlantic slave trade. The Portuguese began growing sugar in Brazil in the 1540s. As Europeans acquired a taste for sweetened food and drink, the demand grew and plantations were established in Caribbean colonies.

Other profitable commodities also entered the plantation system including coffee, tobacco and particularly cotton which was later to play a big part in the growth of Liverpool, Manchester and other Lancashire towns.

On display in the International Slavery Museum, in the Merseyside Maritime Museum building, are two stone implements from the Taino culture  - rare survivals of the original inhabitants of the Caribbean.

Europeans looked to Africa for a new supply of labour. Liverpool was not involved in early English slaving but came to dominate the transatlantic slave trade by the closing decades of the 18th century.

On display is an oil painting by Henry F James showing Liverpool in 1811 (pictured) just four years after the abolition of the slave trade. During this latter period of the trade, dealings with the West Indies generated about 40 per cent of Liverpool’s wealth.

A Wedgwood creamware bowl of 1786 features a hand-painted view of a sailing ship called the Lord Stanley. It was almost certainly made for presentation to John Smale, the ship’s captain, prior to his departure to West Africa on a slaving voyage.

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 p&p UK).

Copyright Stephen Shakeshaft

The winner this month, who gets a signed copy of Stephen's book 'No Illusions', is Valerie for her topical caption 'Doctor Who seems to get younger each time he regenerates'.

You can see all of the entries by clicking on the Comments on the original blog post.

Don't forget there's just a couple of days left to see the fantastic exhibition that this picture is taken from, Liverpool People by Stephen Shakeshaft, which closes on Sunday.

And look out for a new caption competition on the blog in February.

Today's object featured on Radio Merseyside for the BBC's 'A History of the World' project, is the Ince Athena statue from our Classical collections. You will be able to hear Gina Muskett, curator of classical antiquities, talking about the statue on 'listen again' here. Here is Gina to tell us more about this beautiful and statuesque sculpture!

The Ince Athena statue

The statue has brilliant links with the local area, as it used to belong to Henry Blundell, who lived at Ince Blundell Hall. Many of you will have seen the entrance to the hall when travelling by road from Liverpool to Southport. We’ve just had an anniversary too – in 2009 it was 50 years since the statues came to the then Liverpool Museum, as a gift.

I’m so lucky to be the curator of the ‘Ince Athena’ statue. I knew about her (yes, I know the statue’s not a real human!) even before I worked at World Museum. I visited the museum a lot when I was a student, and can remember seeing Athena in the old Ancient World gallery, and am really pleased that she’s going back on display again.

As you can imagine, statues get quite grubby when they’re on display without cases, and Athena has spent quite a bit of time in the National Conservation Centre, being cleaned up. She looks wonderful again now, as I’m sure you’ll agree when you see her again – she’ll be on display from the middle of February, greeting visitors at the main entrance to World Museum.

Dr Clem Fisher and the Dodo skeleton

I’m not a great pigeon fancier but I do have a soft spot for the biggest of this breed – the long-dead Dodo. Depending on what you believe, the flightless bird waddled or strutted into history around 1693 when it was wiped off the face of the earth.

There is a very rare skeleton of a Dodo temporarily on display at World Museum. It is going to be featured on Radio Merseyside at 8.20 am on Monday 25 January 2010 as part of the BBC’s exciting series, A History of the World. Our picture shows curator of vertebrate zoology Dr Clem Fisher, who was recently interviewed for the show, with the incomplete composite skeleton. It has been in our collection since 1866 and has not been on display for at least 40 years.

Clem will tell listeners how specimens continue to reveal secrets: “The skeleton was made up from various Dodo bones found in a bog and is quite complete. However, we recently discovered that the foot bones had been skilfully carved from wood – probably in Victorian times.”

I have discovered that there is quite a controversy over what the Dodo actually looked like when alive. Live ones were brought to Europe from its only home, the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. These captive specimens grew fat and waddled about their cages. One was painted by Jan Savery and his depiction led to the popular perception of the creature as a bird buffoon.

We now know the reality was rather different and that Dodos were more likely lithe birds that strutted around. Being flightless, they must have been pretty agile to find food in competition with other species. This interpretation is backed up by the 1991 rediscovery of long-lost drawings showing a slightly plump but alert bird. 

Then there is the theory about how Dodos became extinct. The popular story is that they were killed by the crews of passing ships. The Dutch, however, thought the Dodo tasted loathsome. I suppose it would depend how hungry you were. Some people said Dodo meat was tough but good to eat. There were other birds and animals on Mauritius to tempt the palate. Looking at the World Museum skeleton, I am reminded of the turkey after Christmas dinner so perhaps seafarers had the same idea. Turkeys were discovered in North America by the Spanish more than 400 years ago during the time Dodos were being hunted.

The name is probably of Dutch origin, shortened from dodaars meaning knot-arse, referring to the knot or tuft of feathers making up its tail. The Dodo had a relation on the neighbouring island of Réunion called the Solitaire. Sometimes known as the White Dodo, it became extinct some time after 1705.

St Peter's Church Hall Stage where John Lennon and Paul McCartney met in 1957

As we highlighted on yesterday’s blog, National Museums Liverpool is part of 350 museums and institutions across the country to have teamed up with the BBC for A History of the World project.

The BBC revealed yesterday a list of 10 objects chosen to tell a history of Merseyside and its place in the world. Five of these objects are part of National Museums Liverpool’s collection, and each will be featured on BBC Radio Merseyside over the next two weeks.

Tony Snell’s breakfast programme yesterday revealed the first object to be St Peter’s Church Hall Stage, and our curator of contemporary collecting Paul Gallagher, can be heard telling the story of the stage and its place in history.

Who’d have thought that in 1957, the stage would provide the meeting point for the world’s greatest song writing team, and signal the beginnings of the ‘Fab Four’?

The stage was most recently on display in The Beat Goes On exhibition which told the story of Liverpool’s musical heritage at World Museum, and will be on display at the new Museum of Liverpool when it opens in Spring 2011.