Coopering in the MERL collections

Posted on August 8, 2014 by

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)

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 Village Fete: MERL Toddlers take the biscuit!

Posted on April 2, 2014 by merl

This is the first of a series of posts from the Village Fete team on the run-up to this year’s event, by Alison Hilton, MERL Marketing Officer.

Preparations for the 2014 MERL Village Fete are well underway and it’s exciting to be able to start sharing some of the new features of the event, which will focus on food this year!

Last Friday, the Village Fete team hijacked the regular Friday Toddler Time session to launch the ‘MERL Biscuit Bake-off’ which will be judged at the Fete on May 31^st. One of Reading’s famous 3Bs, biscuits are part of the town’s – and MERL’s – heritage. Our beautiful Victorian building is the former family home of the Palmer family of Huntley & Palmer’s, and we hold their archive in the University’s Special Collections. Introducing a ‘Biscuit Bake-off’ competition to the Fete seems the perfect way to encourage the people of Reading to get baking biscuits!

Regular Toddler Time attendees were invited to bring in their favourite homemade biscuits to be tasted by long-term MERL supporter and descendant of the Palmer family, Andrew Palmer and his wife Davina. Despite the chaos as families arrived armed with plates of biscuits, Andrew and Davina had a great time trying out everyone’s delicious offerings!

Andrew Palmer trying Anzac biscuits baked by Leo

Everyone was also very interested to try the biscuits baked by Deiniol Pritchard, a Food Science student at the University. These were inspired by a recipe for ‘University Rusks’ from the records of ‘Huntley & Palmers’.

Deiniol with his biscuits, the Huntley & Palmer recipe for University Rusks and an image from the archive of Tea Rusks.

After a photo session (look out for pictures in the local press!) and the usual sing-along on the carpet, the toddlers enjoyed the rest of the session decorating biscuits in the Studio, where they were joined not only by the Palmers, but also by the University’s Vice-Chancellor, Sir David Bell, who happened to be at the Museum for a meeting, and called in to investigate the commotion!

The University’s Vice-Chancellor, Sir David Bell, joined in the biscuit-decorating activity

Everyone is welcome to enter the ‘Biscuit Bake-off’ at the Fete. There will be ‘traditional’ and ‘freestyle’ categories, and several age groups – from Under 5s to adults! Just bring your favourite homemade biscuits to the event on the day. You can find details of how to enter on our website.

In the meantime, we’re going to be posting a different biscuit recipe on the blog each week, so watch this space for inspiration and start practising!

Picture(s) of the month #8: Eric Guy’s working horses

Posted on February 18, 2014 by merl

I noticed earlier this month that the Royal Mail has just issued a Working Horses stamp set featuring “six contemporary photographs of Working Horses performing therapeutic, ceremonial, environmental, draught and police duties” They’re beautiful stamps which immediately brought to mind the stunning photographs by Eric Guy in the MERL collections.

Eric Guy (1892-1966) was a commercial photographer based in Basingstoke and later in Reading. The MERL collection consists of 2000 glass negatives and some original prints, showing agriculture in central southern England from the 1920s to 50s. Our Honorary Fellow, Dr Jonathan Brown, has written a book about his work – ‘The Rural World of Eric Guy (Old Pond Publishing, 2008) so perhaps I should ask him to blog about this collection in more detail at some point!

Caroline Benson, MERL Photographic Assistant, has selected her favourite images of working horses from the Eric Guy collection.

Here horses are being used to transport felled trees. It is interesting to see that forestry is still included in the roles of contemporary working horses.

Click here for further details of the Eric Guy Collection and to explore our online catalogue.

by Alison Hilton, MERL Marketing Officer

Pictures of the month #6 – Canal life

Posted on December 16, 2013 by merl

Photographic Assistant, Caroline Benson has resisted the temptation to select a festive image this month, instead sharing images she discovered whilst preparing materials for an education session last month…

The photographs this month are from a collection depicting canals & canal life. The two I have chosen were amongst a selection used by Philippa Heath, our Public Programmes Manager, in a school workshop held last month. The primary school children visited MERL as part of Takeover Day and used pictures from our collection to create mini exhibitions (see an online version here) about life on the canals.

Unfortunately we don’t know the names of the people nor the location of the canal in these particular pictures but the date is August 1965.

The collection includes a variety of activities but here we have crocheting and painting.

Crochet on the canal

Painting on the canal

MERL at the Museums Association conference #1: Our Curator’s view

Posted on November 21, 2013 by merl

In the first of a series of posts from our colleagues who attended the MA conference recently, Isabel Hughes, Curator of Collections and Engagement, summarises her talk on ‘Collecting Cultures’ and reflects on the conference as a whole…

The Museums Association Conference is the biggest gathering of museums people in the country. Despite the cutbacks in the sector, this year there were 800 people in attendance. The bulk of the sessions were divided between the themes of The Emotional Museum, The Therapeutic Museum and Tomorrow’s People. Day one was rather taken up for me by the emotions involved in chairing one session, led with aplomb by our Volunteer Co-ordinator, Rob Davies, then dashing into the room next door to speak at a second one that was part of a formal announcement of a new round of Heritage Lottery Funds‘ Collecting Cultures programme which MERL has been part of for the last five years. I had been asked to share our experience of the programme, which has allowed MERL curatorial staff to acquire over 400 artefacts ranging from the clothes of a Newbury bypass protester to a Series 1 Land Rover!

MERL’s Series 1 Landrover

Our project, Collecting 20th Century Rural Cultures, involved a number of us learning how to acquire through conventional means such as auctions, dealers and existing contacts but also to get acquainted with ebay and other online auction sites. We had to think laterally about how to collect to show themes of the twentieth century such as the growth of the suburbs and the technology of intensive farming. Through collecting more printed ephemera we were able to address protest including those at Greenham Common as well as those led by the Countryside Alliance. Our project has heavily influenced how we think about collecting today – what was once seen as outside our remit, has often been reconsidered as we look more at the cultural and social significance of artefacts from the late 20th century.

Greenham Common poster 1982

My presentation was sandwiched between a rounding up of the first phase of Collecting Cultures and an announcement of a new round being open for applications. Delegates were keen to know how our project had been conceived and developed. One questioner from the floor was disappointed that he had not seen innovation in collecting. This was puzzling for us, as we feel that we have been able to think anew about this, not least in the way we consulted in the galleries and via our blog on what visitors would like us to collect. However, we also were clear that responsible collecting must be linked to an overall policy and we did not see this programme as being designed to ‘break the mould’ of that document. When collecting, curators must always have an eye on the past as well as the future.

My speaking duties out of the way, I was able to sample the main themes properly which included a session on how different parts of the UK are planning to commemorate the First World War. In Ireland the anniversaries will include the Easter Rising and the arrival of the Black and Tans. There will definitely be a challenge in terms of therapeutic truth and reconciliation here. I also attended a session that looked at what the future museums profession might look like. All the panellists felt that the term ‘profession’ might not be needed and that we would be looking at a far wider range of skills. The curators of the future would be truly international, very possibly trained in China, highly mobile with a working life consisting entirely of fixed term contracts.

MA Conference is always a good time to renew museum acquaintances, share the museum gossip and gather free stationery from the exhibition stands. At an early evening reception I was told by one company that their prize of a mini ipad was definitely worth going for. If I could just think of a suitable icon for my museum, the odds were strong for me to win it. In the event, I went out for a meal instead. The Conference also offers great opportunities to visit sites out of normal hours. I managed to fit in a breakfast viewing of the powerful exhibition at the Open Eye Gallery of work by photojournalist, Tim Hetherton. “You Never See Them Like This” was a remarkable set of images taken whilst he was lived alongside American soldiers stationed in the Korengal valley in Afghanistan. Captured asleep, the soldiers looked like small, vulnerable boys, instantly recognisable to their mothers. Hetherington was killed in Misrata, Libya in 2011.

Volunteers’ Voice #7 – Tour guides

Posted on November 13, 2013 by merl

Volunteer Coordinator, Rob Davies, talks about working with volunteer tour guides to make guided tours at MERL more interactive and engaging…

I had a meeting with my volunteer tour guide team last week which prompted me to dedicate this post to volunteer tour guides. Tours are an excellent way in which museums engage with visitors, bringing the collections alive and making the visitor experience all the more memorable. MERL has an excellent volunteer tour guide team who really are an asset to the museum. Volunteer tour guides are students, graduates, post graduates and members of the local community.

The team provides general 40 minute tours around the museum on weekends and for booked groups during the week. A special part of the weekend tours is a visit to the object store on the mezzanine floor, which is otherwise closed to visitors. This is where we keep all the objects that are not on open display and it’s a great opportunity for visitors to see behind the scenes. When I joined MERL in July 2010 there were only three guides who were providing all the weekend tours and they were using a set script. The small team was struggling and needed support. I set up bi-monthly meetings with the team which still continue. I recruited new volunteers from the student body and the local community to boost the withering numbers of the team. At these meetings we discuss any problems, organise the rotas and it is a good excuse for a bit of socialising between the team.

The script had originally been devised by a consultant to highlight the main themes of the new galleries when MERL moved to new premises, and was designed to provide background information about the collections. From talking to the tour guides I realised the script was no longer working for training purposes or for the visitor experience. It was hard to allow for interaction between the tour guide and their group, or to tailor a tour to the interests of the group. So we decided to take a new approach. In order to personalise the experience, new volunteers are now encouraged to choose objects they would like to talk about within their tour. The Museum is divided into sections and they choose a set number of objects from each section. They then research the stories behind their chosen objects. Each guide gives a slightly different tour but this means that the tour guide is interested in the objects they are talking about and that translates into enthusiasm and passion which hopefully rubs off onto the visitors.

The tour guide team on a CREW training day

To assist with the facilitation of training new guides and the implementation of the new tours, we used CREW who helped us to explore new ideas, increase our confidence, mould us as a team and think about where we as a team are going. Since then we haven’t looked back; the team has continued to grow with new guides being trained at the start every academic year, which continues to boost the team bringing new life, ideas and providing visitors with more exciting tours.

MERL Traditional Craft Fair, Nov 9th 2013

Posted on November 1, 2013 by

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

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

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.

Hot off the lorry: the Landscape Institute archive and library has arrived!

Posted on October 31, 2013 by merl

written by Nancy Fulford, Project Archivist.

We are really excited to welcome the archive, library and associated architect’s collections of the Landscape Institute at MERL. Earlier this year the Institute decided that we would be the new home for these collections which have largely been in storage and inaccessible since 2008.

The Landscape Institute Archive arriving at our Store

The Landscape Institute was founded in 1929 with a formal library established in 1967 and archive collections in the 1990s. The archive collections include architectural drawings, photographs, slides, project files, notebooks and scrapbooks and include the drawings and personal realia (such as drawing equipment) of founder member of the Institute and landscape architect Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe. The library contains over 15,000 books, journals and pamphlets which we will be starting to catalogue and make accessible over the coming months alongside archive cataloguing. The archive boxes are on the shelves and we’re making our way through the 75+ crates of books before moving on to the drawings.

These collections are an invaluable resource for researchers, landscape architects, picture researchers and those with an interest in landscape design, gardens and gardening. In our redevelopment we’re hoping to be able to show off the richness of our Archive collections, so look out for regular updates on the MERL blog which will include current research, cataloguing updates and highlights from the collections.

Project news: Rural images discovered: Colin Shaw

Posted on October 25, 2013 by merl

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Posted on October 23, 2013 by

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.

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!

Our Country Lives – the new MERL blog

Sharing insights into the activities of MERL staff, volunteers and visitors during a period of change and transformation…

Tag Archives: Museum of English Rural Life