The working life of Museum of London

Our Recorded Media Project Assistant, Hilary Young, introduces the research work recently undertaken by author, Harriet Salisbury.

Over the last year author Harriet Salisbury has been regularly visiting the Museum of London. You’ll normally find her burrowed away in a corner of the History Collections department. Her headphones and stack of tapes are the only giveaway to what she is doing: listening to Londoner’s life stories.

Harriet has been working with the Museum’s oral history collection to research her new book on how people’s lives changed in the East End after the Blitz. The War on Our Doorstep: London’s East End and how the Blitz Changed it Forever charts people’s everyday experiences of life before, during and after the Second World War. Her notion of the East End has been defined through listening to people’s memories of their individual connection to place through, community, family, work and location.

Harriet focused on some of the unique audio material in our oral history collections. We’ve been collecting audio visual memories and footage of Londoners since the 1980s. We have around 3,000 hours of recorded life story interviews in our collection. A dynamic source of stories about the city, the audio and video oral history interviews vividly reflect the lives and perspectives of Londoners over more than a century. It’s a rich collection of first hand accounts of people’s ordinary lives and experiences that may otherwise not be represented in the historical record. Oral testimony provides memories of how life in the city has changed or even stayed the same. By listening to someone’s stories you get an idea of their feelings, their emotions and reactions about what happened in the past.

Factory girls outside a “hot joint” shop c.1910. Unknown photographer © Museum of London

One of the collections Harriet used was from a project that in 1985 set out to record the attitudes and experiences of those who worked in London’s Docks, only a few years after the last of London’s upstream docks closed. The bulk of the recording for the Port and River oral history project was undertaken by a small team of museum staff and volunteers who interviewed almost 200 people creating approximately 500 hours of audio material. The collection features interviews with people who worked in a range of jobs associated with the port and river – dockers, engineers, stevedores, lightermen, watermen, machine operators, river pilots, typists, porters, crane drivers, customs officers, policemen, even a pie & mash shop owner. The time frame covered by the interviews extends as far back as the early 1900s and brings us up to date with people’s feelings about the closure of the docks in the 1980s.

Harriet’s use of the oral history collection unpicks the layers of experiences and memories associated with the East End. For example, here Herbert Hollingsbee (born 1899) recalls the Silvertown explosion in 1917 while Anne Griffiths (born 1918) recalls going dancing in Silvertown after her shift at Tate & Lyle during the Second World War:

Flourmills after the Silvertown Explosion in 1917. John H. Avery © PLA collection/Museum of London

‘My first year at the PLA in the Albert Dock, we were working till seven and one evening, there was a jolly loud bang and it was the Silvertown explosion and we lost three of our staff who were working. As far as I know, there was quite a number of casualties in the civilian population. We were lucky really because between us and the explosion, there was a large ship on the north side of the Albert Dock and also on the south side, and they were both loaded, which stopped the blast. Even so, our tank in the office burst and there was quite a flood. We all packed up work, caught the tram to East Ham, and home. It was quite exciting.’Herbert Hollingsbee, PLA Audit Clerk (DK87.81)

‘I liked working at Tate & Lyle’s because I could look over the docks from my window where my machine is. I used to look into the docks and see the ships coming in and going and the dockers all coming out at various times. We used to have little social evenings, dancing. We used to be two till ten, and at ten o’clock then we all used to rush up and have a little last hour in the dance. And when we was six till two, we could go early.’
Anne Griffiths, Machine Operator Tate & Lyle (DK88.66)

Look out for Harriet’s upcoming blog posts about her experiences of using the oral history collection to write her book and selecting images from the museum’s collection to illustrate the book.

It’s been a month since a very busy February half term, and although everyone is back to school, there is no let-down in our work as Visitor Services Hosts.

The Dickens and London exhibition is proving to be extremely popular and with just three months to go until it runs its course in June, tickets are still high in demand. To avoid disappointment and make use of our advance ticket discount, book your tickets at least one day in advance!

Remember, admission to the Museum of London and the permanent galleries are free, and so are all our Host-led activities such as our daily gallery tours, as well as interesting, on-the-spot short talks on objects within our collections.

Our free gallery tours are every day at 11am, 12pm, 3pm and 4pm and last approximately 45 minutes – perfect if you are in the City and looking for something to do during your lunch break!

From ancient archaeological artefacts discovered on the Thames foreshores to Roman Londinium and Anglo-Saxon Lundenwich, and from the Great Fire and Newgate Prison to the Victorian shops, Suffragettes and the Poll Tax Riots, the tours will leave you with knowledge and a new-found passion for this World City that is London.

If you don’t have time to join one of our tours, you don’t have to miss out! Every day we offer short, 10 minute talks on some of the most interesting objects within our galleries. You can also support the museum by purchasing a Museum Higlights book for £5. This is not only a great souvenir but also excellent accompaniment to your visit to our Museum.

At the Museum of London, we strive very hard to make our collections accessible to everyone, and have therefore started to offer tours to visually impaired visitors. Should you know someone who could benefit from one of our VisualEyes tours, please call the Museum of London box office on 020 7001 9844 to arrange a free tour.

Giusy

Our Collections online team reveal the latest group of Henry Grant photographs to be released online, including images of protest and of working life in the Capital in the 1950s.

Annual rally of the National Federation of Old Pensioners Association

On 11th November 1954, the annual rally of the National Federation of Old Pensioners Association, was held at the Central Methodist Hall. The Guardian newspaper interestingly wrote a rather derogatory report stating that there were more women than men at the meeting “among them very old ones; and true that there were cups of tea continually being sipped and bars of ice cream sucked and a lot of deaf-aids being twiddled.”

Club Row Market

Club Row was the only weekly animal street market in London during the 1950s. Every Sunday morning traders would bring hundreds of dogs and puppies to Club Row, off Bethnal Green Road where they were sold. From 1951 all animal sellers were required to hold licences however there were of course many disreputable traders. In 1982 the local council banned the sale of animals in Club Row Market.

Demonstrators at the eviction of a tenant

In May 1959 the Conservative Council in St Pancras introduced a new means tested rate scheme which increased rents dramatically for the majority of tenants, most were doubled and some even tripled. 35 separate tenants associations were set up and there were regular protest meetings, rallies and demonstrations. As many as 8,000 tenants withheld their rent in protest. This photograph depicts demonstrators at the eviction of tenant Don Cooke who had withheld his rent in protest.

Policemen in the canal

By the 1960s there were only a small number of boats using the London canals for trade and by the 1970s the use of canals for leisure had begun. A large crowd has gathered to watch police divers search the canal; unfortunately Henry Grant hasn’t left any notes about this photograph so we don’t know why they were in the water or where exactly they were.

Peace Rally

Protestors in Trafalgar Square on the final day of the Aldermaston Peace March in 1960. The marches were anti nuclear weapons protests taking place on Easter weekend which took the form of a march from the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston to Trafalgar Square in London. As can be seen from this photograph the marches were attended by thousands of people.

As Anna from our Collections online team continues to work to bring 1,000 images by renowned photo journalist Henry Grant to our website. We share some of her favourite photographs from the collection now available to view online:

The first group of our Henry Grant photographs have gone live – they are all education related and cover teaching and learning in the Capital from nursery age through schools and exams to university and apprenticeships.

There are some fantastic images – I have posted some of my favourite here…

This little girl, who attended the Coram Gardens Day Nursery is being weighed and checked by the district nurse.

This young boy is having fun in a carpentry class at the George Eliot Primary School in Westminster. I love the fact that he has some wood and a saw and is just being left to create his masterpiece… not sure what Health and Safety officials would have to say about that now a days though!

My next picture is of a nun choosing jigsaws for her pupils at the London County Council Schools Equipment Centre. I don’t know anything more about the resources centre or who this teacher was but just had to include it!

The Old Kent Road School for the Deaf was first established in 1792 in Bermondsey but due to demand for places a purpose build school opened on the Old Kent Road in 1809. Here Mrs Johnson Rod, a teacher at the school, is working with a toddler. I love the expression on the little girl’s face showing how much she was enjoying herself.

The Evelina School at Guys Hospital was established to provide education for children on extended stays in hospital. It was not only about keeping the children up to date with their education but was also a way of increasing their morale and providing educational therapy. Most of the teaching took place at the children’s bedsides on the ward. Here the child’s hospital treatment meant that he had to remain lying on his back so the teachers devised a series of pulleys and strings so that he could use the schools resources.

Anna will be adding more images by Henry Grant to Collections online over the coming month which will continue the educational theme and move on to work related images as well. Look out for a blog post of Anna’s favourites from this next batch soon.

To view the collection of Henry Grant photographs currently available on our website click here.

The Museum has a collection of over 4,000 17th century trade tokens, which Verity, one of our team of Project Assistants , has been working with to make available online.

The first batch of over 1,700 tokens are now available to view as part of our collections online project here.

Trade tokens were issued between 1648 and 1673 at a time when there was little low denomination coinage being issued by the crown.

As a result traders and business proprietors began issuing tokens as an alternate coinage with equivalent denominations of usually of a farthing, half penny or penny.

On rare occasions higher denominations were issued, in the collection we have two-penny tokens and a sixpence.

On the token could be represented a variety of things including, the issuers name, business (written or depicted as a sign- buildings didn’t have numbers, so signs were used to recognise them), and the date of issue.

Tokens would be accepted by other businesses in the area which would be collected and then exchanged for the equivalent silver coinage from the issuer.

Part of the process of getting the collections online included having all the trade tokens scanned. We were lucky enough to have an excellent team of volunteers that scanned the trade tokens, as well as weighing and measuring them. This has allowed us to gather and display a lot more information about them than we otherwise would.

It left me free to update the records, which involved using existing catalogues, as well as re-examining the tokens to check inscriptions and signs to provide the correct information about a token; it also gave me the time to do some additional research into issuers and the places of issue which provided some fascinating contextual information.

The location of issue for the tokens has involved some interesting research using a variety of sources; mainly the changing names of streets and areas around London over the past few hundred years. Whilst many street names have remained for centuries, some have changed to reflect the changing trades and ownership apparent in some areas. These need to be researched to allow us to place the location of issue of a token as accurately as possible.

The Museum already had a small amount of trade tokens online, in The Great Fire of London 1666 collection. These are perhaps some of the most insightful tokens in the collection, as they give a glimpse in to the lives of traders both before and after the Great Fire. The issuers of the tokens, all held businesses in one area of the City of London, for which they issued tokens, before the Great Fire, and when that area was destroyed in the fire, they moved their premises elsewhere, and issued a new token from there; such as Robert Hayes, who owned a coffee house, in Panyer Alley, near St Paul’s, from which he issued a trade token:

When the area burnt down, on the third day of the Great Fire, Tuesday 4th September 1666, Robert Hayes relocated his business to the Barbican:

The Great Fire of London, was a pivotal time in the development of London, with the destruction of some areas and the development of others, and the trade tokens offer a glimpse of this.

For instance, the Moorfields, was one of the last open pieces of land in the City of London, however after the Fire, many refugees moved there, and set up homes for themselves. The area was supposed to be a temporary solution to the destruction, however it is not known how many people chose to remain there permanently.

We have a number of trade tokens issued from streets which developed on the Moorfields, including one from a baker in Long Alley, and one from a cake-shop in New Cheapside.

The range of tokens gives an idea of the multitude of businesses that were established by those who settled there, whether temporarily after the Great Fire, or later as a more permanent settlement.

Of all the tokens, I find the ones that show the development of the City and of London the most interesting, they provide a new way of looking at the modern city around us, in thinking of how it have changed over time.

Later in the year, the rest of the museum’s collection of 17th century trade tokens will be made available online, including some more unusual leather tokens. In the meantime why not explore the museum’s collections currently available through our collections online here.

As part of our collections online programme bringing greater online access to our collections over the next three years, including the addition of over 90,000 objects. Project Assistant, Ellie, talks us through her work with the Museum’s collection of leap year proposal cards:

                           (To see more of this card visit our collections online page here).

In my previous Valentine’s blog posts I mentioned the London stationer Jonathan King, whose comprehensive card collection was estimated to include at least a million cards.

Leap year legend suggests the 29th is a day when women may propose to men, and London’s valentine makers sold cards for the purpose.

After all, they sold valentine cards for far less romantic reasons.

As you can imagine, King included leap year cards in his collection, and some of these have made it to the museum.

                           (To see more of this card visit our collections online page here).

                          (To see more of this card visit our collections online page here).

King was keen on valentine puns, and when this card was opened the leap-year match revealed the message ‘Ready and willing to strike it with you, dear’.

If these cards weren’t to your tastes then perhaps a marriage-minded frog would prove more suitable. Who could resist?

                          (To see more of this card visit our collections online page here).

The cards reads:

‘An opportunity not to be lost.
I ask you with all love sincere
If this Leap-year
You’ll have me Dear?’

With the frog adding:

‘Leap here!’

Do let us know if these cards inspire you today!

As of today the whole of the Museum’s collection of  Victorian Valentine cards  is available online, so be sure to take a look and find your favourites via this link . 

Collection online project assistant Ellie, who will be talking about some of her favourites at the Museum’s Pleasure Garden Ball tonight, continues her blog posts focusing on the collection with a look at the more unusual cards in the collection…

As everywhere seems festooned with cards and hearts today, I thought it might be refreshing to share some of the more unusual valentine’s in the museum’s collection in more detail. Today I’m going to tell you about the insulting and comic valentine’s cards which are now online.

As well as the romantic cards, King’s shop sold a wide selection of less affectionate valentines. These ranged from gentle teasing and novelty valentines to some with really spiteful messages. This example, featuring a wooden leg, is at the gentler end of the spectrum. The paper used in this card suggests it was produced in a similar style to the sentimental cards and with a similar purpose in mind.

There are a range of these novelty cards, and many, like the ‘lobster in love’, are lift-the-flap cards. When the lobster is raised it reveals the message ‘I have a lady in my head’. These were produced between 1860 and 1880, by which time the symbols of valentines cards were quickly becoming established. There was still space for invention so these would have been an alternative and experimental range of cards. Sadly for me, the lobster experiment did not take off and failed to last through the years as a romantic motif.

As the cards were collected from shop stock, we don’t know quite how many of these were sold – the wooden leg card, for example, must have had a fairly finite market. The entrepreneurial spirit of these early valentine merchants evidently identified a gap in the market: why limit valentine purchases to your one and only sweetheart when you could send cards to all the people you disliked as well?

The spiteful cards certainly look striking, a lively contrast to the romantic cards which tended to be rather repetitive. Unlike the sentimental cards, the insulting cards are not ornate and they certainly weren’t made of expensive, embossed lace papers. On the whole, the insulting cards are cheaply printed and crudely hand-coloured. As well as a caricature they include mocking rhymes, explaining in no uncertain terms why the recipient can never hope for romantic feelings from the sender. In the museum’s collection the majority were designed to be sent to men, as they mock specific trades and work. For example the poem in the card above end with the lines: ‘You may cut people’s lips but you’ll never kiss mine/ I’ll not have a shaver for my Valentine’. There are also some designed to be sent to women; these tend to mock the recipient’s appearance or behaviour. It is possible that they were sent with flirtatious intent, although it’s hard to imagine any recipient being forgiving enough for that plan to work.

Be they silly, rude, spiteful or menacing these strange cards reveal much about Victorian relationships.

Catch up on Ellie’s previous blog posts here.

Following on from collections online project assistant Ellie’s first blog post about the Museum’s collection of 19th century valentine cards (which can be read here) and in advance of the collection being made available on our website soon – Ellie now turns to how these cards were made…

The Museum of London’s collection holds almost 1800 cards produced in the city, in the workshops of Islington stationer Jonathan King and his contemporaries. King ran his workshop with his mother, where staff would assemble cards from parts of paper lace and printed scrap motifs. If the cards met with King’s approval they would be sold in his shop on the Essex road, alongside a selection of cards produced by others.

Not all of the cards were to King’s satisfaction. King kept bound albums of card designs and annotated them with notes on their design. Often these notes relate to improvements to arrangements or suggestions for re-working a message, providing a detailed insight into the ways the conventions and clichés of sentimental stationery were composed and marketed.

One card design bears a markedly different annotation. The front of the card, shown below, depicts a sailing ship with portholes, behind a lace paper border of trees and foliage. The museum has two versions of this card and inside each is a handwritten message. King has recorded that: “Painted by Ross who married a woman who sold walking sticks in the gutter & could not read or w living about Yourk [sic] Rd or Agar towns.  He brought this pattern in to show me I did not like the combination of ship & trees & did not tell him to do any.  He went right off & drow [ned] himself.  His Daughter workd for me up to 1900’.

In the other King has written: ’Ross Artist he went off  & drownd himself because I did not find out that the port holes opened.  He thought so much of the idea’.

There are happier stories too, and King records the cards he chose to send to his sweetheart, Miss Emily Ashford. From all of the designs in his shop, he chose this solemn and poetic card. Evidently it was effective, as Ashford and King married the following year.

I’ll be talking about the cards at the Museum’s Pleasure Garden Ball tomorrow night, hopefully see you there!

Ellie’s final blog post focusing on the more unusual cards in the collection will be avilable tomorrow ahead of the launch of the full collection online.

Over the last few weeks in between pouring over the carefully timed, actioned packed programme for our Pleasure Garden Ball, our Adult Events team have been enjoying themselves preparing for what has become our annual Valentine’s Day Late event.

They have mulled over serious quandaries such has how many people will want to decorate and wear their own masquerade mask? How can we help spark some new romances on the night? And just how many bars do we need?

Last year’s Valentine Late – part of the Adult Events informal learning programme – saw the Museum full with visitors, who learnt seductive Latin dance steps and sampled a new age aphrodisiac.

This year we’ve decided to mark the special day Georgian style, by hosting a Pleasure Garden Ball with a modern twist.

So what makes this year’s Late worth a visit? Well…where to start? There’ll be 18th century music and dance lessons, masterfully overseen by Lady Georgianna and the Covent Garden Minuet Company; pop-up theatrical performances courtesy of The Mask of Joy; love/lust poetry with the good people of Write Queer London; intriguing talks about Georgian fashion, playbills and pleasure; historic Valentine cards on show and the chance to meet that special someone in speed dating sessions hosted by cabaret darling Steve Nice, in the shadows of the majestically gilded Georgian Lord Mayor’s Coach. Oh, and there will be two bars…

One vital part of any 18th century ball in the public imagination is masquerade masks. We anticipate that some of you will come along with your own elaborate facial attire probably similar to those in this image from our collections online resource linked to here.

But just in case you don’t have a spare one of those…we’ll be encouraging visitors to design and don their own mask at the Museum. Therefore over the last month the desks in the Adult Events team office have been cluttered with glitter, sequins, feathers and different shaped mask templates. A couple of weeks ago the team had a bit of a craft afternoon and made up some pretty lurid and shocking sample masks…

It was quickly established that craft may not be the team’s forte and so the help of the Museum’s wonderful Design team was sought. They came up with some much more fitting and elegant – masks that visitors can decorate and spend the evening with their face beautifully concealed, and chose to be whoever they want to be this Valentine’s!

So in the build up to Tuesday night the Adults event team will be cutting 800 or so identically sized pieces of elastic for the masks – never a dull moment!

To book tickets to attend Tuesday’s Pleasure Garden Ball visit the Museum’s website here.

Next week the Museum’s 19th century valentine card collection will be available to view on our website as part of our collections online project and this is the first of a series of three blog posts about the cards – the other two will go out next week in the lead up to Valentines Day.

Collections online project Assistant, Ellie, will be talking about the cards as one of the activities at the Museum’s Pleasure Garden Ball on Valentine’s Night. There will be a stall where Ellie will be talking about the cards and bringing some of them out of the stores for the evening, so come along and say hello if you’re coming to the ball.

Here, Ellie talks about working with the museum’s Valentine card collection…

At this time of year Valentine’s Day can either feel like a touching celebration of love, or a highly commercial, sentimental enterprise. If it seems that the shops are full of Valentine’s cards at the moment, it’s certainly not for the first time. For the last few months I’ve been working with the Museum of London’s collection of almost 1,800 nineteenth-century valentine cards, and now it seems the commercial and the romantic functions of Valentine’s cards aren’t anything new!

London’s relationship with valentines cards goes back at least two hundred years – by the mid 1820s, an estimated 200,000 valentines circulated annually within London. With the advent of the standardised penny postal service they really took off – by the late 1840s the number was reported to have doubled, and had doubled again by the 1860s. London-made valentine cards were even exported to America, where they were sold advertised as the latest London fashions. The other parts of this card collection are now in the archives of the Hallmark card company.

The sending of cards through the penny post provided a means to maintain the playful aspects of formal courtship, allowing the sender to decide whether to aspire to anonymity or provide clues to their identity. By the mid nineteenth century some valentine traditions had already been established and card makers adapted these to their designs. Springtime rebirth, flowers, birds and rhymes were already popular valentine motifs by this time, and the sentimental Victorian image of cupid was not far behind. Paper scraps were collaged with hand-painted illustration and lace paper to build up the cards, some of which are several centimetres deep. Birds were such a favourite motif that some of cards in the collection went as far as integrating stuffed birds into their collages.

Many of the cards are built up with layers of lace paper and ornamented with scraps and cut out sheets. The museum has some of the sample sheets in his collection, such as this translucent sheet. It includes a number of duplicate affectionate lines, printed onto transparent paper ready to personalise dozens of cards.

Perhaps as a way to alleviate the anxiety of articulating affectionate desire, many of the cards integrate proposals of marriage. Valentine makers sought to extend the market throughout February, so there is even a group of cards intended for the 29th of February, so that women could use them to propose to their sweethearts in the leap year tradition.

Of all the engagement cards I find this the most striking. It reads ‘I am ready to face you at any time respecting our engagement’. If that wasn’t convincing enough, the head of the boar’s head folds down to reveal the message: ‘You are a darling’.

Our collections online programme aims to bring greater online access to our collections over the next three years, including the addition of over 90,000 objects to our website. To discover more about the work involved in bringing the collection to you follow our Project Assistant blogs here.