National Museums Liverpool Blog - Monday, September 26, 2011

Politician, Harrison Line, leaving dock in Liverpool (reference McR/38/142).

Ok it's a poor link, but as we don't have any photographs of politicians, apart from ex-merchant seafarer John Prescot, I thought I'd throw in this photograph of the Harrison Line vessel Politician while the Labour Party Conference is on in Liverpool. 

T & J Harrison, like many shipping companies, used a theme when naming their vessels.  In their case it was professions, which are slightly easier to remember than Blue Funnel's(Ocean Steamship Company) use of characters from Greek mythology.  Harrison Line never named a ship Archivist, but they did have 3 vessels named Custodian, which is pretty close to my job description. 

The Politician is more famous as the ship that ran aground in 1941 off Eriskay in Scotland with a cargo that included a large amount of whisky and inspired the book and film Whisky Galore.  There is possibly some joke to be made involving politicians, whisky and running into rocks, but I'm not going to risk it.

Glazed composition frog amulet (about 3350 years old)

This week World Museum has been hosting two curators from the British Museum who have been cataloguing items from our Egyptology collections. Between 1883-4 the English Egyptologist Flinders Petrie excavated the ancient city of Naukratis, a Greek trading post in Egypt. Liverpool was one of over 60 museums that sponsored his work and was rewarded with a small share of the finds that were not kept by the Egyptian authorities. The British Museum is now tracing all of the 13,000 or more artefacts as part of a research and publication project - more details on can be found on their Naukratis website.

At the same time myself and volunteers are also busy cataloguing other artefacts from Flinders Petrie's excavations that are now part of our collections of over 16,000 Egyptian items. Trillion Attwood has spent the summer helping me catalogue over 2000 tiny amulets from the ancient city of Akehenaten at Tell el Amarna, such as the handsome frog in this blog photo. Meanwhile Anna Garnett is carefully sorting through our material from the cemeteries of Abydos, Esna and Hierakonopolis that were excavated by Flinders Petrie's Liverpool contemporary John Garstang, who was trained by Petrie. Eventually all of this work will be available to view an online museum database that National Museums Liverpool is creating.   

Here's another blog in our run-up to the opening of the 'Age of the Dinosaur' exhibition at World Museum. This week our curator and dino-expert Geoff Tresise tells us about a mysterious dinosaur surrounded by myths!

In 1929, an American Museum sent an expedition to the Gobi Desert of Mongolia.  They found the desert floor strewn with dinosaur bones along with nests of their eggs - the first ever found. 

They also solved an age-old mystery. In the 6th century B.C., traders from central Asia came to Greece selling gold.  Gold, they claimed, was plentiful in their homeland but was dangerous to collect.  It was guarded by griffins, fierce animals with the bodies of lions and the heads of giant eagles.  Griffins were said to lay eggs and nest on the ground.  For the next thousand years griffins, shown with eagle's wings as well as eagle's heads, were popular subjects in Greek and Roman art.

The American expedition of 1929 found the most common Mongolian dinosaur was Protoceratops, which had a beaked and crested skull resembling a giant eagle.  It was easy to understand how the living animal could be imagined to be half eagle, half lion.  The nests of dinosaur eggs supported the myth although hoards of gold were sadly lacking.

We're lucky that in the 'Age of Dinosaur'  exhibition we'll have on show a Protoceratops guarding, not gold, but its nest of eggs threatened by a hungry Velociraptor! I'll be blogging about Velociraptors soon, so watch this space.

My name is Rebecca Watkin and I am curator of maritime collections (ship models and paintings). I will be updating you about displays and the fantastic collections we have here at the Merseyside Maritime Museum.

The main project I’m working on at the moment is next year’s Titanic and Liverpool: the untold story exhibition but I’m also involved in different aspects of work at the museum.

To mark the 150th anniversary of the issue of the first licence to mine gold in Australia on 21 September 1851, the Goldfinder bell is now on display. The Goldfinder was built in Canada and owned by Jones & Co. of Liverpool. When gold was discovered in New South Wales there was an increased demand for vessels like the Goldfinder. Many Liverpool emigrants joined the gold rush to seek their fortune. The Merseyside Maritime Museum acquired the bell which is available to view for the first time in the Emigrants to a New World gallery at Merseyside Maritime Museum.

Bye for now.

Jigsaw of RMS Queen Mary, issued to mark her launch in 1934. Accession number MMM.2010.26

"We've created a new display in the Life at Sea gallery to mark the arrival of two Cunard liners to Liverpool this month. Cunard's new flagship the Queen Elizabeth arrived in Liverpool last Thursday, and the Queen Mary 2 is due this Thursday. 

It's great to see Cunard Liners back in Liverpool, and the new display looks back at some of the older Cunard Liners, depicted in five spectacular jigsaws, including the one shown above. These unusual objects are rarely displayed due to their sensitivity to light.

The display also features a pennant from the QE2, one of a number made to mark the end of QE2's service. It was presented to the Lord Mayor of Liverpool by John Prescott, on behalf of Cunard, at a special concert at the Anglican Cathedral on 3rd October 2008.

On the Merseyside Maritime Museum's website you can also see the Cunard Queens online exhibition, featuring material from the Maritime Archives and Library."

On Friday, we were lucky enough to welcome a special visitor to the Wondrous Place Gallery at the Museum of Liverpool.

Curator Paul Gallagher met wrestler Henry Cejudo from the USA, who won a gold medal at the 2008 Olympic Games in Bejing. He is the youngest American wrestler to ever win gold for his country.

Olympic Gold medallist wrestler Henry Cejudo from the USA meets Wondrous Place curator Paul Gallagher

Henry is currently touring the North of the UK to get a taste of the country ahead of the London Olympics next year.

Looking round the gallery, Henry was particularly inspired by Liverpool’s sporting achievements, and spent some time looking round the Boxing Clever exhibition, exploring the history of boxing in the city.

Dinosaur fever is never far away at World Museum. Our curators are currently gearing up for the forthcoming exhibition 'Age of the Dinosaur', which will be roaring its way into the building on 22 October.

Here's one of our curators (and top dino-expert!) Geoff Tresise to give us the lowdown on another dinosaur you can expect to see in the exhibition... 

Image courtesy of Natural History Museum

In 1861 a fossil found in Germany caused a sensation.  Named Archaeopteryx, it had the skeleton of a reptile but the wings and feathers of a bird.  It caused a stir - was this one of the 'missing links' predicted by Charles Darwin's theory of evolution?  Richard Owen, who opposed Darwin's views, nevertheless bought the fossil for London's Natural History Museum.  A second specimen, found 10 years later, went to a Berlin museum.

No other fossils have caused so much controversy, but did they prove Darwin's theory?  Could Archaeopteryx fly or only glide from tree to tree?  There was even a suggestion, quickly disproved, that the first specimen was a fake.  Then in the 1990s new fossils were found in China, covered in feathers but clearly dinosaurs.  It was back to square one: was Archaeopteryx just another feathered dinosaur or did its wings prove it was a bird?

In the 'Age of Dinosaur' exhibition, you can see and hear Archaeopteryx in the Jurassic forest.  Then visit the our permanent dinosaur gallery at the museum, to see a cast of the Berlin Museum fossil.  A feathered dinosaur or an early bird?  Come along and judge for yourself. 

In the run up to the blockbuster exhibition, Age of the Dinosaur, our curator Geoff Tresise is going to tell us some interesting facts about the different species of dinosaurs you will be able to see. This week he tells us about dinosaurs from the deep:

During the Jurassic period, 180 million years ago, England was covered by warm tropical seas.  The fossil remains of the giant reptiles that swam in these seas have made Dorset's "Dinosaur coast"  famous.  When these fossils were first found, early in the Nineteenth century, scientists wondered if these strange creatures might still be living deep in the world's oceans.  We now know that these reptiles, along with the land-living dinosaurs, became extinct 65 million years ago.

In the 'Age of Dinosaurs' exhibition, you can visit the Jurassic seas to see how these reptiles looked and lived.  Some were Plesiosaurs with bodies like turtles but with long tails and even longer necks.  Ichthyosaurs looked much like modern dolphins and, like dolphins, gave birth to live young.  Thus they could spend their whole lives at sea, unlike the Plesiosaurs which may have laid eggs on land.  However there were also Pliosaurs, the Jurassic equivalent of Killer Whales and the top predators of these oceans.  Be warned - if there are Pliosaurs around, the Jurassic sea is a dangerous place to be.

World Museum's exhibition is the first chance to see the dinosaurs outside of London

'Age of the Dinosaur' opens on 22 October at World Museum – you can watch our video trailer and buy advance tickets now.

My name is Gemma and I am a conservation intern at the National Museums Liverpool. I am here on a year long internship in Ship and Historic Model Conservation, funded by ICON (Institute of Conservation) and the Heritage Lottery Fund. As I am now nearly half way through my internship, I have had many interesting and exciting projects to work on which I would like to share, so I will put regular updates on the blog.

Unsurprisingly, model conservation is a very specialist branch of conservation and so far I have learnt many new conservation treatments and crafts skills to conserve and repair models, as well as getting the chance to make some of my own boat models. Historic models, far from being similar objects, can be made from a huge range of materials, which makes each project fascinating and exciting to uncover the models history!

One of my recent projects was the conservation of a ship model of a fishing boat from Rye, the “Water Lily” (Accession number: L1963.17.4). It is a beautifully made model, complete with a planked deck, fittings, fully rigged and with silk sails.  It was in relatively good condition, but it was a little dirty and some of the green paint on the hull had flaked off. I began the treatment by vacuuming the surface using a Museum vac over mesh; gently brushing the sails to dislodge dirt. To remove the dried on dirt a small amount of detergent in deionised water was effective, applied with a cotton wool swab. I decided not to wet clean the sails, as this can have repercussions with shrinkage etc, so I used a smoke sponge (vulcanized natural rubber) to gently lift the dirt off the surface. Then all that was left to do was retouch the losses in paint using acrylic paint, which can be easily detectable and removed.

The model is not required for display at the moment, but it has been carefully wrapped to be placed back into storage, where it will remain clean and happy for many years to come.