Happy Halloween

As it's Halloween today it seemed liks a great opportunity to show you pictures of a couple of our modern related objects in the museum.

The first one is a Halloween edition of the Care Bears comic from 1985.  For those of you that remember the Care Bears, it has cartoons featuring the various Bears, a haunted forest maze puzzle, information on the Care Bears club and even a competition to design a witch.

The second is a plastic pumpkin mask that could be worn as part of a Halloween costume, which dates to around 2001.

Happy haunting!

Nicola Pullan

Assistant Curator of Leeds and Social History

The Chapeltown Cauldron

At Abbey House, preparations are in full swing for next year’s temporary exhibition – ‘Fate & Fickle Fortune’,  Kitty has been sourcing objects, finalising themes and getting everything ready for the start of next year. Often, for temporary exhibitions, there may be one or two items that we don’t have in our collection already that we would love to be able to display. Sometimes we are very lucky and have people coming forward with the offer of a donation or a loan.

Miriam standing on the back steps - directly above where the concealed object was found.

At the end of August, by sheer coincidence, I took a call from a lady called Miriam. She wanted to offer us something that she had found in her basement, sealed up behind a brick wall. One of the themes we will be looking at in the exhibition is protection of the home, and often objects sealed behind false walls relate to this idea. Objects that were concealed in houses were usually used as a form of protection from evil spirits, or to carry the spirit of a deceased relative into the life of the house. Objects including mummified cats, children’s shoes and witch bottles have been found bricked up inside old houses. Children’s shoes were even found to have been concealed in the original construction of the Sydney Opera House.

The (now re-built) wall that had been concealing the cauldron in the basement.

The object Miriam had found turned out to be a cauldron. She very kindly came in to the museum with her daughter Namibia, to give us a bit more information about how she had found it. There had been a dripping sound in her basement for some time, but no one could work out where it was coming from. A workman came in to investigate, and realised that one of the walls was false. They opened it up, and found a large pile of solidified material, resembling ash and grit. On top of this was a rusty old object.  The workman carried it out into the garden, where it soon became obvious it was a cauldron. A scrap dealer was picking up some other items from the house when he offered to take it away for Miriam. However, she didn’t feel that sending it off for scrap was an appropriate end for something that had been concealed carefully and deliberately. That is when she had decided to call us – hoping that the previous owners of the cauldron would be more appeased by it finding a home in the museum collection.

The Chapeltown Cauldron - LEEDM.E.2012.0518



I tried to do some research into the origins of Miriam’s house to see if this shed any light on how the cauldron had arrived. The first part was to get a date for the building of the house. Thanks to some help from the staff at the Local Studies Library I was able to get a date of between 1890 and 1910, based on old maps and at what point the house started to appear on them. Then I tried to look up former occupants of the house using trade directories – but this quickly proved to be a fruitless task as they kept changing the house numbers! The first directory had listed the street starting at house no.7, and over the years it eventually began at no.1. Further confusion was added by the same people being listed at different properties on the street in different years, making it very difficult to work out who lived where and when. Hopefully in the future I’ll have another attempt and uncover more of the story of the Chapeltown Cauldron!

Miriam and Namibia at Abbey House Museum, September 2012

If you want to come and see the cauldron, it will be on display as part of 'Fate & Fickle Fortune' running from the end of January 2013 until the end of 2013.

Nicola Pullan,

Assistant Curator of Leeds and Social History

Why we serve

Cultural identity, the collective memory, is something that helps bind societies together. Professional staff within museums provide their service delivery to visitors out of commitment to public service, education, and because of their belief that they can make a difference to people's lives. Children, quite rightly, get a lot of attention from the education and curatorial teams of museums, whether the subject is art, history, science, natural history, etc. I feel very privileged to support my curatorial and education colleagues in teaching roles.

Today two groups of school children, from Temple Newsam Halton Primary School, visited Temple Newsam House for a workshop about chair design and construction, part of their Design Technology studies. Back at school they will be designing chairs having been inspired (hopefully!) by what they have seen and learned. Here I am comparing and contrasting the construction of Windsor type chairs, with frame construction using both examples from the collections at Temple Newsam House, and items I have made. The materials and tools used were included too. Afterwards the children went around the house looking at chairs, drawing and thinking about chair design. I am looking forward to seeing their ideas and designs!

Ian Fraser
Conservator, Furniture and Woodwork, Temple Newsam House

'All You Need Is Love' a celebration of love & commitment

The Community History Team has been working on a film project with a selection of local couples from different backgrounds to explore the theme of love and commitment. The project has focused on the rituals and traditions associated with different unions, faiths and cultures. Our five couples have been interviewed and filmed at home talking about their individual stories of 'courtship' and ‘tying the knot’.

Kate & Helen
(personal image from their wedding album)

This has included couples who are already married, those planning to get married in the very near future and one couple who have entered into a Civil Partnership. The couples all have a connection to Leeds and shared their tales of how they met, when and how they decided to make a long term commitment, their hopes for the ‘big day’ and their life together afterwards – what makes for a happy marriage. 

Our co-curated display to accompany the film will include the wedding attire borrowed from the five couples, ephemera from the day and some of the Leeds Museums and Galleries collections connected to the theme, from Greek wedding bread to Thai silk given as a gift to the wedding guests. All the footage was shot between July and September of this year.

Here are a couple of images from the five film shoots we did with Digifish Media Productions:

Julia & Stephen
(behind the scenes image of film shoot with Paul and Ollie) 



Zofia & Kieran
(behind the scenes image of film shoot with Paul and Ollie) 



All of the objects collected and footage captured will be on display in the Leeds City Museum (The Leeds Story Gallery - Community History Cases) from mid December 2012 until mid July 2013.

There will also be a display of paintings on the community corridor on the theme of ‘Enduring Love’ curated by local artist Marcia Brown and her students.

Author: Marek Romaniszyn (Assistant Curator of Community History)

Curatorial and conservation support for Keeping Time exhibition at Fairfax House, York

Fairfax House, York, is holding an exhibition, Keeping Time. This exhibition focuses on and celebrates the excellence and innovation of clock and scientific instrument makers from Yorkshire. Centrepiece of the exhibition is the John Harrison precision pendulum clock No. 2, on which Harrison began his precision timekeeping research in response to the Longitude Act of 1714. Harrison's research eventually led to the practical solution to determining longitude. Not knowing one's longitude was a major navigational problem, and had often spelt disaster for mariners, either getting lost, or running into obstacles, running out of sea room, and ending up on lee shores. This Harrison clock has been written about in earlier blogs, under History of Science. Loaned from Leeds Museums and Galleries, the exhibition opens on 5 October, 2012 and runs through to the end of December. Following on from suggestions from LMG staff, Fairfax House has also borrowed the Harrison brothers sundial made for Holy Trinity Church, Barrow-upon-Humber, and the highly signficant equatorially mounted telescope, made by Henry Hindley of York, and which is part of the scientific instruments and specimens collection at Burton Constable Hall.

http://www.fairfaxhouse.co.uk/?idno=687&id=132

http://www.burtonconstable.com

Caribbean postcards in a Leeds album 1906-1915

In response to the UK National Archives 'Caribbean Through a Lens Project' we have started to look again through a Leeds postcard album with 396 postcards, mainly from Trinidad (312), from the early 1900s. You can find the National Archives photographs on Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/nationalarchives/collections/72157630635006206/

The Leeds album has 132 pages with 3 postcards per page, and the images range from famous buildings, studio images of local personalities (see 'Bad John' and J. Scrusher-Chamberlain in the page open here), and popular images of 'East Indians', who had come to Trinidad as indentured labourers.

They also include fruit, trees and birds, and local industries like digging for pitch at La Brea. The dull green paper has become so acidic we are taking the postcards out, and storing them from now on in a secol pocket system in binders. We will keep the album too though.

A few of the postcards are locally made photographs, printed onto postcard card, and some are photographs on photographic paper (see above).  The photogtraph of the couple sitting in the waves on Huevos Island are probably members of the Leeds family who put the album together (the Tomlinsons, see below). The house photograph has a hand-written caption on the back: "This is part of the front of Aunt Modie's house". The end of the album includes cards from Barbados (21), Tobago (15), Venezuala (18), Colombia (8), Panama (19), and the Azores. We have no donor listed for the album, but examining the 36 postcards that have been posted they were all sent to various members of the Tomlinson family, at The Beeches, Colton, nr Leeds. Some are from an 'Auntie', and some are from an E. Tomlinson.  The dates on these posted cards range from 1906 to 1915. The album has obviously been completed with care, maybe by one or more of the family once they returned from their time in Trinidad. If only we knew why they had stayed there for these few years, and if they stayed with other relatives who might still be there.

The plan is to do work with Leeds West Indian Centre, and Leeds Black Elders, to get input and comments on a selection of these postcards, during joint workshops next year (2013) when a selection of photographs from the National Archives project will also be shown. Meanwhile we will hopefuly have time to scan the Leeds album postcards individually, compare them with ones already available on line, and do some in-depth research where possible, on the places and people shown. This is a great group of postcards because of the sheer number and variety of them, from the same time period. It is going to be a treat to work on them.