Coopering in the MERL collections

Image from the Farmers Weekly Collection at MERL.

Since May I’ve been working on the Reading Engaged project to research content for the new galleries which will form part of MERL’s redevelopment project, Our Country Lives. True to my passions as ever, I’ve been taking the opportunity to focus on researching craft, as we’re hoping to dedicate a large part of one of the galleries to craft. We hope to use different crafts that we have examples of in our collections to highlight key issues affecting the heritage craft sector, bearing in mind that there is no one-size-fits-all story for craft. We also want to ensure that the galleries are up to date and reflect the current state of making and show the many varied and vibrant ways in which these crafts exist today.

One of the crafts I’ve researched so far is coopering. The only things I knew before I started came from the headline ‘only one Master Cooper left in England’ and from watching the fantastic video of a cooper knocking up a cask that we currently have on display in the Museum. When you start to think about it, you realise how incredible coopering really is. Ken Kilby, author of several books on the craft, describes the barrel as ‘the greatest invention of all time’ for without it ‘most goods would have remained right where they were made, or not have been made at all.’

Cooper holding finished cask bound with many hoops (P DX318 PH1/41/83)

Cooper holding finished cask bound with many hoops (P DX318 PH1/41/83)

Casks (the term ‘barrel’ describes a particular size of cask) were used to transport all sorts of goods, wet and dry. Over the centuries, coopering gradually divided itself into three main branches, with an acceptance among coopers that certain branches were more skilled than others. The main categories are dry coopering (least skilled), white coopering and wet coopering (most skilled). When you think about it, it really is quite incredible to be able to make a watertight cask of a specified size which can withstand long years of rough handling with no glue or sealants, and hardly any measurements! Another great Ken Kilby quote: ‘There are no amateur barrel makers.’

By the end of the nineteenth century, the majority of cooperages were found in breweries, when Britain was brewing approximately 37 million gallons of beer. In 1889, Bass’s Brewery at Burton on Trent employed 400 coopers; and circa 1900 Shooters, Chippingdale and Colliers employed 630 coopers! Until World War II, coopering had seemed a secure occupation but by the 1950s most of the independent cooperages in Britain had closed, and during the 1950s–1970s wooden casks were phased out of the larger breweries. By 2010 only 4 breweries still employed a qualified cooper, and today Theakston’s are the only brewery to do so.

We have about 80 coopering tools at MERL, along with various coopered products including cider kegs, butter churns, cheese moulds and buckets. The majority of the tools come from two sets: one from the cooper’s shop at H. & G. Simonds Ltd., known as the Bridge Street Brewery, in Reading; the other from a cooper who served his apprenticeship at Reading Brewery 1948–1952 (we also have his certificate of indenture for his apprenticeship). The first set is currently on display in the Museum galleries. Take a look at the tools on our online database.

I’ve been working to create a ‘content pack’ for each craft I research. This includes reading up on the subject and writing introductory notes, looking at the related objects we have in the collections and identifying particular objects which can be used to illustrate specific points and, with the help of Danni and Caroline, investigating the Archives to see what we have in terms of documents and photographs.  I’ve also been in contact with Alistair Simms, England’s only Master Cooper (to become a Master Cooper you must have successfully trained an apprentice), who I’m hoping to visit in September, and Theakston’s Brewery.

If you want to find out more about coopering, come along to MERL on Saturday 23 August when Marshall Scheetz, historian and Journeyman Cooper at Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia, USA, will be giving ‘An introduction to cooperage’. The talk is free. Details here.

 

Written by Greta Bertram, Project Officer.

MERL Traditional Craft Fair, Nov 9th 2013

Greta Bertram, MERL Project officer and Heritage Crafts Association trustee, explains how our Traditional Craft Fair connects with MERL’s extensive craft-related collections…

It’s nearly time for the annual MERL Traditional Craft Fair, and this year we’ve got fifteen of our most skilled local craftspeople exhibiting (and in some cases demonstrating) throughout the Museum.

As ever, we received more applications than we have room for in the Museum, so we had a tough time during the selection process. It’s really hard to make a decision when all the work is of such high quality.  We decided that we wanted to represent a range of crafts, both hard and soft, and also wanted to choose crafts that reflect some of the Museum’s collections. We also wanted to have a mixture of old and new faces.

In the entrance to the Museum we have a beautiful stained glass window designed by Susan Moxley to commemorate MERL’s move to its present home in 2005. The window is based on Michael O’Connell’s 1951 Festival of Britain Wall hangings. There are some amazing stained glass artists in Reading, and this year Nicola Kantorowicz and Brenda Graham will be joining us at the Craft Fair.

Nicola Kantorowicz FlowerHeads

Nicola Kantorowicz FlowerHeads

Anyone who’s been to MERL will notice that we have a wide selection of wood crafts on display, including greenwood crafts such as bowls, handles, rakes, besoms and walking sticks. Martin Damen, spoon-carver, and David Glover, bowl turner, are two of the makers representing the wood crafts.

Walking round the galleries you’ll notice that there aren’t really any textiles on display but that’s not to say we don’t have any! Textiles are very vulnerable to decay, so our textile collections are kept in storage. They include clothing, bed-coverings, wall-hangings and rugs, and various objects connected to spinning, sewing and knitting. Caroline Marriott, rag-rugger and weaver, Cathy Seal, knitter and felter, and Romilly Sawnn, natural dyer, will be representing the textile crafts.

Martin Damen spoons

Martin Damen spoons

We also have a lot of domestic objects in the MERL collections but, again, many of these are not on display. We have plates, dishes, jugs, cream pots and even a giant teapot! We’ve got three ceramicists at the Craft Fair this year – Philip Miller, Ursula Waechter and Katie Smith – each using very different techniques.

And there’s still a few more craftspeople to mention – Kate&Anna, furniture, Cathy Newell Price and Matthew Hitch, jewellers, R & J Nickless Apiaries, honey and beeswax products, and Fong Wong, handmade accessories and craft kits.

The Craft Fair is taking place on Saturday 9 November 2013 at 11.00–16.00 (admission is £1 for adults and children are free!). Come along to pick up some beautiful and unusual gifts, talk to the makers, watch some craft demonstrations, and even have a go yourself. To find out more about the Craft Fair visit the MERL website, and find out more about the makers on the MERL Facebook page. Also, why not take a look at our online catalogue to find out more about the craft collections at MERL.

The MERL Classification – what it is and why we’re updating it

Project Officer, Greta Bertram, explains more about the work she has been doing to revise the MERL Classification over the last few months.

Classification systems are used by museums to organise data about their collections. The MERL Classification was devised by John Higgs, the first Keeper at MERL, in the 1950s. It was based on the idea that MERL is a folk museum and deals primarily with people and their lives, rather than with objects. As a result, the Classification of an object is driven by its sphere of use. The Classification was initially used for the Object Collections, and later expanded to the Photographic Collections, and was also adopted by other agricultural museums in the UK.

The MERL Classification originally had 24 primary headings, which could be sub-divided into secondary, tertiary and quaternary headings, each with a numerical notation. The Classification was intended to grow and develop with the expansion of the collection, and by 1978 it had expanded to 33 primary headings. A review in the 1990s reduced this down to 31. Today the Classification is only used for objects. Find out more about the history of the Classification here.

Over the past few months we have been revising the MERL Classification as part of the Countryside21 project. One of the aims of the project is to increase the accessibility of the collections by making it easier to search them. We’re intending to do this by improving the range and quality of the keywords we use when cataloguing objects. The MERL Classification will form the basis of a new set of keywords (find out more here), so it seemed sensible to ensure it was fit for current purpose.

MERL-Class-2013

Until now, the Classification has contained a mixture of processes and products (things to which the processes are done). We’ve decided to separate the two out, making the Classification purely process-driven, and to have separate thesauri/vocabularies for the products, e.g. plants, animals, materials etc. The Classification terms and the ‘product’ terms can then be added to the catalogue as keywords.

It took quite a long time and a lot of debate to decide on the primary and secondary terms for the Classification, and we also consulted the Rural Museums Network to find out how the wider sector uses and views the MERL Classification. (You can read more about this process here, here and here.) We have now settled on 19 primary terms. Each primary and secondary term has a scope note which states that the term is part of the MERL Classification and which details its numerical code, how the new term corresponds to the old Classification, definition/explanations about what the term covers, and whether the term should be used in conjunction with a plant/animal/product term list. We are now in the process of confirming the vocabulary lists, which is proving to be equally challenging.

We are hoping to start implementing all of the changes and adding the Classification/vocabulary keywords to Adlib in the very near future. You can read about some of the numerous complications and challenges to do with this here. We will also be publishing the revised Classification once we are sure that it works!

Focus on Collections #3 – Baskets

written by Greta Bertram, Project Officer.

Anybody who’s been following the MERL Projects Blog over the past eighteen months will know that I love all things basket-related. My obsession began three years ago when I was writing my dissertation about craft as heritage, and needed to choose one craft to use as a case study. I’ve always been fascinated by baskets and how they are constructed so it was an easy decision. I interviewed several basketmakers and watched them at work in their studios; a few months later I went on weekend course and made two baskets; and then I was then lucky enough to get a job at MERL, where I’ve been able to bask in baskets!

Basketry and Beyond studying MERL’s collection of baskets from the south west.

Basketry and Beyond studying MERL’s collection of baskets from the south west.

MERL has one of the most significant basketry collections in the UK, with over 600 baskets, basketwork objects and basketmaking tools. The collection includes baskets for agricultural, industrial, fishing and domestic use, mostly from England but also from other parts of the UK. It also includes over 200 objects from Emily Mullins, a Reading basketmaker, who made numerous baskets specifically for the Museum. The collection was studied in the 1960s by Dorothy Wright, author of The Complete Book of Baskets and Basketry and an authority on baskets. She produced detailed catalogue records for the collection, which are available to view online, and also played an important role in acquiring baskets for the Museum.

The basketry collection is one of our most popular and most visited collections at MERL, by basketmakers and non-basketmakers alike – visits since I’ve been here have included Basketry and Beyond researching baskets from the southwest for their festival in May this year, and from the University’s archaeology department to look at fishing baskets. I really enjoy supervising these visits – it’s great to look at the baskets more closely and to have the chance to find out more about them from people who know what they’re talking about, and I always try to feed this information back into the museum catalogue.

We’ve also had very exciting basket news recently – MERL has been awarded a grant from the Radcliffe Trust to run a project, Stakeholders, which will see us working closely with basketmakers to explore the collection and commission pieces to fill gaps in the collections. Click here to find out more.

However, while we have this amazing collection, there are actually very few baskets currently on display in the galleries. This is something that we hope will change as part of the Our Country Lives re-development, and we hope that the Stakeholders project can help inform this.

MERL 2006/54. One of my favourite baskets at MERL, an oak swill basket made by Owen Jones.

MERL 2006/54. One of my favourite baskets at MERL, an oak swill basket made by Owen Jones.

Since being asked to write this post I’ve been thinking long and hard about my favourite baskets at MERL – there are so many to choose from! I think one of my favourites has to be the Owen Jones oak swill basket (MERL 2006/54). Owen is the only person in the country making them professionally. He was featured in MERL’s Rural Crafts Take Ten project, and you can watch a video of him making his basket online and in the Museum. I could watch him working for hours and when I had the chance to meet him in May it took me a while to pluck up the courage to speak to him. There are also some really unusual baskets that have to be on my list – we have a basket that was used as a casing for artillery shells in WWI (MERL 90/43), and a pannier basket that was used  to drop supplies to the troops from the air during WW2 (MERL 60/449 & 63/70).

I hope I’ve managed to convey some of my passion for baskets! When you love baskets, MERL is one of the best places to be – now I just need to find the time to have a few more goes at making baskets myself.

MERL 90/43. An artillery shell basket, used to protect shells during the First World War.

MERL 90/43. An artillery shell basket, used to protect shells during the First World War.