Category Archives: MERL project news

Project news: Rural images discovered: Colin Shaw

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written by Nancy Fulford, Project Archivist.

A couple of weeks ago marked the end of the Rural Images Discovered Project which has seen over 15,000 prints digitised, and many more negatives and prints catalogued from the John Tarlton, Farmers Weekly, Peter Adams and Colin Shaw photographic collections.

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I came to the Colin Shaw collection towards the end of the project and (in my opinion) we saved the best ‘til last! Colin Shaw has worked as both photographer and lecturer for over thirty years and has recently embarked on a new project looking at the use of the rural myth to promote national parks. His collection contains negatives and prints for two of his photographic projects: Farmwork and M40 Warwickshire.

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The Farmwork project was undertaken in the mid-1980s. Shaw’s aim was to document the everyday lives of those working the landscape and in doing so dispel the myths of the peaceful rural idyll of the past and show the intensive labour and people needed in modern farming. From potato pickers, to pea swathe operators, a farm worker feeding calves to farmers inspecting hundreds of sheep at market, every black and white picture tells a story of farm workers and modern farming practice. You can see a selection of images on our online gallery.

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M40 focused on village communities and rural practices and pastimes before and during the construction of the Warwickshire stretch of the M40 motorway in 1988. A family outing rabbit hunting with ferrets, bingo at the village hall and coffin building are just some of the activities documented in this collection.

Having these images now available to view on our online database will help visitors to gain a deeper level of access to our archives whether they are sitting in our Reading Room or at home on their laptop in Australia. They highlight the different stories that can be told by our Archives, and we hope to be bringing more of these stories out in our redevelopment of the Museum.

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

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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!

Craft Collections and Craft Connections

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Written by Greta Bertram, Project Officer for A Sense of Place and Countryside21.

 

MERL has a fantastic array of traditional craft products and tools in its collections, from such crafts as blacksmithing, wood turning, carpentry, lacemaking, leatherwork, pottery, stonemasonry, straw crafts, and wheelwrighting (plus many many more!). Many of these objects are on display in the Museum’s gallery, and visitors to MERL can also watch videos from a project called Rural Crafts Today, showing ten contemporary traditional craftspeople at work (short versions of these films are also available online).

The craft collections are one of the things that first attracted me to the MERL, and my first visit to the Museum was to interview the former Keeper, Roy Brigden, about craft and intangible heritage in museums. In my life outside MERL I’m a trustee of the Heritage Crafts Association (HCA), the advocacy body for traditional heritage crafts. The HCA aims to support and promote traditional crafts as a fundamental part of living heritage in the UK and to ensure that those craft skills are carried on into the future. I’m always on the look out for potential collaborations between MERL and the HCA, and there are a lot of crossovers in the work that I do. During the sixteen months I’ve been working at MERL I’ve catalogued a good proportion of the craft objects, and undertaken engagement activities with basketmakers in my MERL-HCA capacity. You can find out more on the Sense of Place blog.

Photo: James Fletcher

Prince Charles and Kirstie Allsopp at the Craft Skills Awards.

Last Thursday I attended the inaugural Craft Skills Awards, a national suite of awards to recognise best practice in passing on craft skills. The awards were set up by Creative & Cultural Skills and partner organisations, including the HCA. The prizes were awarded by His Royal Highness, The Prince of Wales – Patron of MERL, and President of the HCA. The categories included ‘Encouraging Craft Skills in the Workplace’, ‘Encouraging Craft Skills in an Educational Setting’, ‘Encouraging Craft Skills in an Informal Setting’ and ‘Engaging New and Diverse Audiences in Craft Skills’. You can find out more about the awards and the winners, and watch a great video about why we should support craft, here. I was lucky enough to meet the Prince and to say thank you for giving a wonderful speech in which he quoted some of the findings from a new piece of research which I’ve been involved in, Mapping Heritage Craft, highlighting the issues faced in skills transmission. Both the Craft Skills Awards and Mapping Heritage Craft also highlight the vibrancy of the traditional crafts sector, as there is a mistaken tendency to think that these crafts are dying out and are no longer part of our contemporary rural (and urban) landscape. We’re hoping to be able to reflect this is in the new displays at MERL, and I think it would be great if we could find a way to present some of the more ‘intangible’ elements of traditional craftsmanship as well as the tangible objects.

I will also be running the HCA stand at the MERL Village Fete on Saturday 1st June, with the help of a local spoon carver. This year’s fete has a traditional crafts theme and there will be several craftspeople demonstrating their skills on the day. Come along for a great day, a look round the museum and to find out more about the HCA!

MERL project news #1 – Hugh Sinclair papers now available

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written by Hayley Whiting, Hugh Sinclair Project Archivist

 

The papers of Dr Hugh Macdonald Sinclair DM, DSc, FRCP (1910-90) are now available at MERL.  This marks the end of nearly five years of work by me, the Hugh Sinclair Project Archivist. It has been a very interesting, challenging, and rewarding project funded by the Hugh Sinclair Trust at the University of Reading and I’m going to give an overview of the archive and the work I have done.

First a quick look at the career of Dr Sinclair, as many of you will not have heard of him but may have benefited from his ideas. Dr Sinclair was an academic and pioneer in human nutrition who is best known for his theories on Essential Fatty Acids (EFAs), pioneering the link between Omegas 3 and 6 and human health. In 1979 he took this idea to extremes and undertook his “Eskimo Diet Experiment”. Dr Sinclair consumed only seal meat and fish for 100 days and tested his blood clotting times each day. This was not funded as the ethics committees consulted were not convinced this self-experimentation was a good idea!  Dr Sinclair even had seal meat cooked for him at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was a fellow, which was not popular with the other diners.

Hugh Sinclair teaching

Hugh Sinclair teaching

The Hugh Sinclair Archive covers this work on EFAs as and all areas of his life and career. The most significant part of the collection are the papers of the Oxford Nutrition Survey. Sinclair was asked by the government to set up the survey which worked throughout the Second World War carrying out nutrition surveys on many different groups for the Government to ensure the health of the nation. This work was also carried out in Germany and the Netherlands after the war and was vital in assisting the starving people there.

Hugh Sinclair

Hugh Sinclair at work

After his time at Oxford Sinclair set up the International Institute of Human Nutrition at his home in Sutton Courtenay and spent the rest of his life trying to raise funds for what he saw as a key research institute for the study of nutrition. The IHN never became what he had hoped for but research continued there until the early 1990s. As I mentioned earlier, Dr Sinclair was a fellow at Magdalen College and taught many students there. He is also remembered by staff and students at the University of Reading where he was a visiting fellow during the 1970s and 80s.

Dr Sinclair’s career never fulfilled its potential and when he wrote about his theories on EFA’s he was often ridiculed. However, towards the end of his life, he began to receive the recognition he deserved and many conferences were held in his honour.

After that whistle-stop tour of Sinclair’s career let me briefly outline the work I have done on the archive, In 2008 I began work on this project and was presented with over 1100 office storage boxes of papers with no list or real sense of what they might contain. So began the long process of going through every box and writing a list of their contents. Every day would bring a new surprise and my favourites have to be a large plastic mackerel, photographs of Dr Sinclair’s time overseas in the 1940s and a diary kept by Sinclair’s mother detailing his first few years with all the baby and toddler milestones described. My least favourite would be envelopes of hair and a half-full container of 30 year old mackerel oil!

Once the listing was completed I moved on to cataloguing material identified for permanent preservation and disposing of the rest. There were boxes of material to return to originating institutions such as Magdalen College and the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries, and a great deal of routine material as Dr Sinclair was quite a hoarder. Now this work is done the papers are catalogued and stored in archivally sound folders and boxes.

Hugh Sinclair's office

Hugh Sinclair’s office

It is rewarding to know that these papers are finally available and I’m excited to see what research will be done using them.

Professor Ian Rowland, Head of the Hugh Sinclair Unit of Human Nutrition at the University of Reading, said: “The archive of Dr Sinclair is potentially an extremely valuable, untapped source of data for researchers in the field of nutrition. The ONS surveys were of contemporary importance in ensuring adequate nutrition of the population, but may be of equal significance in the present day.”

The papers can be viewed in the reading room at MERL.  Please note that restrictions may apply to some records.  The full catalogue can be found on the University’s online catalogue  Select the ‘Archives – Museum of English Rural Life’  box and search for the catalogue reference D HS.

All enquiries relating to the papers should be sent to merl@reading.ac.uk or visit our website for details of visiting the reading room