Muntaka Musa comments on Leeds Hausa Hats

Muntaka Musa is a graduate of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria, who is studying for an MSc in Design at the University of Leeds this year. Following a conversation during an Islamic display at Parkinson Court he kindly agreed to comment on Leeds Museums' Hausa collections. The Hausa people live in northern Nigeria. Muntaka Musa is himself from Katsina, capital of Katsina state. These photographs show Muntaka with his own hat, a hat with geometric hand embroidery of high quality, the sort of hat which is known by a local name that translates as 'See You at the Bank'. The textile design with sharks is his own work.

Amongst the museum's Hausa collection is one hat similar to Muntaka's, with blue on yellow hand embroidery, and another of even finer more detailed stitching of three bands of geometric design topped by a cream silk thread bound knob.

The rest of the Leeds Hausa hats are of lesser quality. The knitted hat, with bright mauve diamonds and triangles on a green ground, would have been made with a circular needle and a smaller hooked needle. Tha Hausa name for this type of knitting is Kwarashi. The museum's hat is made of cotton, but they are often made from wool, and are popular urban wear for poorer people, being very cheap to buy. A machine embroidered one, with a design of elephants and camels, would definitely have had the design pencil sketched onto the fabric first. The plain cream cotton stitched hat, with several different stitching patterns, would be made without a preparatory sketch, and the design is known by a Hausa phrase which translates as a 'thousand punches'. A very new looking hat, unworn, made from deep blue silk velvet with rows of elephants, is probably an experiment with a left over piece of fabric, an experiment which went wrong, as the elephants are all upside down.

Just as dead as a Dodo...

In 2008, I was rummaging through a box of Dodo bones when I came across something I hadn't expected. I was looking for material to use in an articulated Dodo skeleton for the displays at Leeds City Museum.

The box was marked 'Dodo bones' but half its contents clearly wasn't Dodo - the bones were slimmer and of a different colour. I was very disappointed, it appeared that we didn't have quite as large a collection of Dodo material as we'd thought. What I'd come across however, was something just as special: an unknown cache of Great Auk bones.

Great Auks are extinct seabirds that lived across the north Atlantic - for more information see http://tinyurl.com/3k4kmxy . Their skins, eggs and bones have been popular with collectors for centuries but Leeds - up until now - did not have any Great Auk material in its collections (we did have a mount at the end of the 19th century but sadly that was only a loan and so finally ended up being sold to Edinburgh).

Great Auk bones are relatively common in museums but what was surprising in this case was that no one knew Leeds had any. A photograph of a display in Leeds c.1930, clearly shows Great Auk bones lying behind a 'Bones of the extinct DODO' label. The chunky Dodo bones lie behind the slender Auks at the front:



So there we are - a new species to add to the record books in Leeds. If you would like to visit the bones then please make an appointment to see them (for free) at Leeds Museum Discovery Centre.

Great Auk Pinguinus impennis
LEEDM.C.2010.179

The biggest objects in the collections

The historic buildings under Leeds Museums and Galleries care are the biggest objects in the collections. They are an assemblage of an almost countless number of separate objects of course, but their care needs to be looked at in the round. Listed Buildings, like Temple Newsam House, Grade One listing, are protected by legislation and their care, repair, modification etc. need to be done in prescribed ways. Reactive maintenance, planned programmed maintenance, periodic surveys by building experts, housekeeping inside and out are all typical actions. William Morris advocated a drip, drip "little and often" approach to the care of old buildings, an approach which the Society for Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) also advocates. Our visitor assistants contribute to this cycle in a quiet way that is perhaps not appreciated enough, and they take a lot of pride in helping to look after what they know to be a very special building.



















Here Les is renewing the oil finish that protects the oak North Hall door. First he has rubbed down, with an abrasive pad, the previous year's coat, which also cleans the door and prepares it for the oil. After a thorough rub down and dusting off Les applied diluted tung oil, a drying oil that is highly effective in protecting wood outdoors, and dries to a matt finish. The wood is protected, the colour is saturated, and the whole appearance of the door is given a lift.


Here Lynne and Louise are weeding and clearing up leaves in the coal cellar area, just outside the north cellars. Exposed to the elements, and sheltered, makes it an area that is prone to plant growth. Unsightly, but also potentially damaging to pointing, and possible harbourages for rodents. These might all seem like minor tasks but someone has got to do them and, taken in the round, these sorts of tasks make a huge difference to care, presentation, and service delivery.

Even seemingly minor details are important to get right in the context of a Listed building, down to the correct repair of the exterior door handle of North Hall door. After decades of wear the pin, holding the wonderful Victorian handle, had worn close to the point where it would fall out, with the consequential loss of the handle. An effective repair was specified to a suitably skilled metalworker, who has a long-standing working relationship with Temple Newsam's metalworking needs. Continuity of care is of paramount importance when looking after heritage assets.

Posted by Ian Fraser

Yippeee!!! Hinton House state bed tester is installed!

The steel bracket installed and bolted to a joist and RSJ in the ceiling void for the suspension hook, being fitted in this picture.

The suspension hook.

The tester about to be raised to height on Genie lifts.

On its way up.

Connected to the ceiling with the "angel rods".

The tester is supported also by a substantial wall bracket.

The stunning damask and ribbon within the tester.

A big thank you to Tim Martin of Context Engineering for the manufacture of the suspension metalwork and curtain rail and help with the installation.

The bed frame has been assembled under the tester. Decisions need to be made about the next stages of the project, such as specifics as the height of the headboard. I think we had better get on with fitting a mattress and support so that Adrian here can have a proper kip. Helping to assemble the frame must have left him a bit cream crackered.

Posted by Ian Fraser

Hinton House state bed re-construction project update

Copy of the cornice, delivered and it looks fantastic. The carving and carved curves of the original cornices has been faithfully copied by carver Mike Howden. Jon Wray, joiner, undertook the manufacture of the structural works, to which the carvings are attached, and mouldings such as the very bold cove, technically quite a challenge to make. As with the tester, whose original construction left rather a lot to be desired, so it is with the original cornices. Brilliant carving, but rickety structural work. Jon Wray, working with Mike Howden, devised an understructure that is very light, but rigid. Like the consolidation work on the tester the new constructional design is essential for rigidity, but unseen.

Meannwhile, work progresses on the construction of the oak bed frame. State beds of this era follow a standard pattern, and it is the state bed at Dyrham Park that has been used as the example to follow.

Conserving the textiles involves, in part, careful cleaning to remove years of dust.

The tester has been turned over so that the textile conservator can undertake consolidation and cleaning of the surviving textiles, and disguise areas of loss.

The ceiling void above where the tester is to be suspended has been assessed, and the requisite support structure designed. There is a massive RSJ steel beam to attach to, a beam that was added years ago to support the weight of the showcases in the room above the Crimson Bedroom. The pilot hole is being marked in the picture left. The RSJ is on the left side of the picture on the right. The drill bit can just be seen between the tape measure and the RSJ.

And one very dead bird near the point of tester suspension. Poor thing must have found its way in through a disused sealed up chimney in the room, with a gap down in the void, and gotten trapped. All chimneys were capped when Temple Newsam was re-roofed in the late 1990s. Not the first dead bird I have come across in Leeds' historic houses, I hope it is the last.

Posted by Ian Fraser

Willow Pattern Take Two

As a ceramics graduate I was somewhat surprised to discover my ignorance of the story of the Willow Pattern. I stumbled across the tale whilst carrying out my internship on the documentation of the pearlware collection at Temple Newsam. The now familiar blue and white Chinese scene, created by Josiah Spode in the late 18th century to imitate Oriental porcelain, proceeded to flood the market and appeared on a whole host of earthenware, from egg cups to potted meat dishes. The legend of the pattern had passed me by but fear not, I shall fill you in..

Willow Pattern PLate, Spode, Late 1700s, LEEAG. 1969.11.86

A Mandarin customs officer, who lived in the large two storey temple centre-right of the image, grew rich whilst his secretary Chang did all the work. Amongst rumours of bribery and corruption, the officer was granted retirement by the emperor, and he withdrew to his lovely house taking with him his secretary and Koong-se, his beautiful daughter. Chang and the Mandarin's daughter soon fell in love and continued to meet in secret after Chang had finished the work and been dismissed. They knew their love could never be as they were from different classes and her father had forbidden their relationship.

The Mandarin imprisoned his daughter in the smaller house next to the main building, enforcing the separation with a fence to keep them apart, and then betrothed her to his wealthy duke friend Ta-Jin who came bearing a box of wedding jewels. Obviously ancient Chinese grooms and fathers-of-the-bride are no different from their modern Western counterparts, and they set about getting drunk before the nuptials. Taking their chance, Chang and Koong-se raced across the bridge to freedom, pursued by her whip-brandishing father. Evading him, they sailed on a boat to a far off island and settled there happily.

Luckily they had remembered to grab the box of jewels before their escape, which they sold, using the money to buy the island and build a home. Chang wrote a book on agriculture and gained a great reputation which sounds lovely, but unfortunately this success was to be his downfall. His fame led the angry jilted Ta-Jin straight to his door, who then had him arrested and killed. Koong-se was so distraught at the death of her partner that she ran to her home and set it alight, dying in the flames. Koong-se and Chang were reunited in death, transformed into the two doves which make the Willow pattern so distinctive, the fated lovers flying together for eternity; the willow tree at the heart of the pattern signifying sadness.

Blue and white transfer printed Chinoiserie was hugely popular from the moment it was manufactured, and though it may flit in and out of fashion it won't go away. The Willow pattern has come to symbolise an entire era of British ceramic production. It still continues to inform and inspire. As in all contemporary art mediums, ceramicists draw inspiration from the past. Two relatively recent Leeds Museums and Galleries acquisitions which clearly demonstrate this are Robert Dawson's plates, 'Bridge' and 'Border', from the After Willow series designed for Wedgwood in 1995.

Bridge and Border by Robert Dawson for Wedgewood, LEEAG.2006.13.1&2

These plates, which directly reference the pattern, reinterpret the familiar design and present it back to us in a fresh way, encouraging us to look again at the 18th century ware side by side with the new. Skewed and slanted, they could be dismissed as mere copies of an original, but is that not what the first Willow pattern itself was created for - imitation and suggestion? To me, these pieces represent the importance of adding modern work to museum collections, they have such value in moving collections forward, challenging us to create new connections and references. Seeing them in the pottery store cabinets placed next to the 200 year old earthenware is so much more rewarding than only viewing them in a contemporary gallery setting with no reference to their origin.

I love the sentiment of the Willow and its enduring imagery, the timeless story. Once I knew its history, I connected to it and got so much more from it than taking it for face value. Now I know this tragic story, its easy to distinguish the pattern from other similar variants. Imagine my delight upon finding my own small piece of ceramic history in an antiques shop; a marked Middlesbrough Pottery Willow pattern plate, cracked and unwanted and mine for 25p. A real bargain.

By Helen Pickles, Ceramics Intern, Temple Newsam House