The working life of Museum of London

Most of our objects tell a good story. But not all are as fabulous as these snakeskin shoes, very recent additions to the dress collection.

You would think we’d bought them hot off one of London Fashion Week’s runways. But no, they were worn in 1945 by Gladys Sandford on the day of her wedding to Charles “Arthur” White. I will tell you more about Gladys and Charles in a future blog, today I want to concentrate on the shoes.

Looking inside the shoes, you can see a stamp looking a bit like two Pac-Men (Mans?) about to devour a ‘41′.

Clothing, like food, was rationed during and after the Second World War, from 1 June 1941 to 15 March 1949, to be precise, and the sign stands for ‘Civilian Clothing 1941′.

Let me try to explain. To buy clothes you not only had to have money but also coupons, which were provided in a ration book. You did not get receive many coupons, 66 per year at first, and later only 48. To put this in perspective, to buy a coat you had to spend 18 coupons. If you want to know the number of coupons for other items of clothing, have a look at these pages from a ‘Clothing Coupon Quiz’ published in August 1941, also from our collection (click on the image and you should be able to read it).

Not every item of clothing sold during the war had a CC41 stamp. This was only applied to so-called ‘Utility’ clothing, which was produced to strict guidelines. Skirts, for instance, could only have a certain number of pleats, buttons and so on, to save material. Below is a detail from the ‘Making of Civilian Clothing (Restrictions) (No. 6) Order from 1 May 1942′, which lists the ‘restrictions on making’ of women’s dresses (and maids’ dresses!):

We have a number of shoes with the CC41 stamp in the collection. Some were made with wooden soles to save leather. None of the shoes are made of snakeskin, but I guess there were not many other uses for this material during the war.

Gladys’ shoes were donated by her daughter Pat, together with a lot of other, beautifully presented material. Amazingly Gladys’ diaries from the period have survived and she noticed the purchase of her shoes on 18 October 1945. Pat told me that Gladys’ always said that the shoes were bough second-hand and had once belonged to an actress!

The last entry on these two pages is for 20 October 1945, the day of the wedding. As was her custom, Gladys was very matter of fact: ‘Arthur and I got married / went home tonight’.

Sadly, there is no wedding picture but there is an undated photo of Gladys, which I reckon was taken at about the time she met Arthur, in 1941/42  (I might just be hopelessly romantic). Charles was a lucky man and this as well as other photos of Gladys show that she certainly had a good eye for fashion.

Gladys and Charles White were happily married for almost 50 years, until Gladys’ death in 1995. There will be more of Charles and Gladys’ moving story in the future.

I have developed a new obsession: cane ribbons. We are putting the finishing touches to three 18th century gentlemen who are going to be photographed before being installed in the Pleasure Garden display in our new galleries. Their suits are from the 1770s, so the gentlemen absolutely had to have canes (walking sticks to you and me). Thankfully we have a really good collection of sticks, but they have all lost their ribbons (that seems to be a common fate).

Ribbons, or cane strings, as they seem to have been called, were attached to small holes either in the head of the cane or slightly further down. They were mainly ornamental but you could also wrap them around your wrist to let your cane dangle in a laissez-faire fashion.

Once I discovered cane strings, I saw them everywhere. Have a look at this 1777 fashion plate from our collection.

Another good one is here (you have to zoom in on the gentleman on the left – don’t get distracted by the doll!). And if you are really, really interested, try searching for ‘macaroni’ on this website (I know this sounds weird, but trust me …).

Apparently, the ribbons were bought from milliners. In the 18th century, milliners were a bit like haberdashers, selling flowers and pompons and such like as well as gloves and caps:

‘The Milliner deals in a great variety of articles principally for ladies wear … but this trade is not wholly confined to women, since the beau and fine gentleman has his solitaire or stock, his watch or cane-string from the pretty milliner … (The Monthly Review, 1761)

I guess VV Rouleaux is a modern equivalent and I knew I was going to end up there eventually. However, my first stop was Hand & Lock, one of my favourite places in London. I showed the very nice lady in charge of military adornments my pictures and she found a beautiful sword knot in one of her many drawers. It would have been perfect for one of the sticks, but it cost more than I wanted to spend. So I bought some Russia braid and some tassels instead.

One of the gentleman wears a wool suit with silver embroidery and I thought he would have accessorised it with a silver string and tassel. As you can see, this is still a work in progress but I will have to finish it by the end of today.

For the second cane I will probably go with a striped ribbon and gold tassels.

And I am thinking green and pink for cane no. 3. The tassels are not perfect (they could be bigger) but the really good ones just cost too much and I don’t think I could make one myself.

I wish canes, or even better, swagger sticks would make a comeback. They would be so useful in situations in which one is required to strike a pose. It seems they were also useful in other ways.

In 1800, a certain Gambado (slightly stupid ‘nom de plume’, I think) composed ‘Instructions for the Lounge in Bond Street’:

‘Let it be a fixed rule, never to be seen in the LOUNGE without a stick or cane; this, dangling in a string, may accidentally get between the feet of any female passing: if she falls, in consequence, that can be no fault of yours …’.

If so, we would like to hear from you!

Over at the Museum of London Docklands, Lynda (Community Access Officer) and I have been working in partnership with students and staff from Newham Community Links to prepare a programme of video interviews. This project forms part of a series of community involvement projects that are currently underway.

The young people involved in this project have been commissioned to research, organise and film interviews on the theme of ‘the Children of the Windrush Generation’. This will explore the experiences of London-born adults with Caribbean parents, documenting their memories of childhood, attending school and growing up in London during the 1960s,1970s and 1980s.

The final interviews will be installed into a permanent touch-screen display in our ‘London, Sugar and Slavery’ Gallery. We currently have some great people lined up to interview, but are still looking for more interviewees. If you would like to take part, please contact us here: crossingtheseas@museumoflondon.org.uk.

So who is our project production team and what have they been up to so far?

Meet Shona, Grant, Tola, Freddie, Charley and Jason.

We have been working together since January, when Lynda and I went over the the Newham Community Links Centre to introduce ourselves and explain the project brief. We discussed the ways we would be working, what we needed to research and film, and a rough timetable of the project. It was a chance for the group to decide whether they wanted to get involved, to ask questions and to let us know if there was a particular aspect of the project they were most interested in (for example music/soundtrack production). It was also a great opportunity to catch up with Sophie, who is one of the Centre Managers, and who has been extremely patient with us whilst we got the project brief together (Hello Sophie! and thank you!) 

For the first week, the group came over to the Museum of London Docklands to get acquainted with the Museum space, and to take a look at the touch screen interactive in the LSS Gallery that their final work will go into. We had some great discussions in reaction to the Gallery, and followed this up with a look at the film ‘500 years later’ by Owen ‘Alik Shahadah – we have shown this film to previous project groups at the Museum, and find it always serves as serious food for thought.

The second week was all about getting our head round the periods of the 60s-80s, and in particular, focusing on what was happening in London. Using the timeline produced by the Roots to Reckoning team (Neil Kenlock, Armet Francis, and Charlie Phillips), each group member selected a particular event or issue from each respective decade, and used the wonder of Internet connections to research related articles and photos. The information collated made up the beginnings of idea/mood boards for each decade, which we will continue to build on over the project. From these boards we also drew up four working categories: Education, Entertainment, Career and Ambition, and Lifestyle. These will be developed into the final themes the interviews will go into on the touch-screen installation.

Last week we were joined by Rib Davis from the Oral History Society, who led an introductory workshop on recording Oral History and practical interview techniques. Rib has worked on a series of fantastic Oral History projects over at The Lightbox, and has a wealth of experience having carried out hundreds of interviews. It was great to pick his brains regarding interview etiquette, finding the right questions to get people talking, and of course, the art of laughing without making a sound (essential for audio-only interviews).

I particularly enjoyed listening to the practice interviews, when our young people took up the interviewer roles. It was a sly opportunity to earwig into the teenage lives of Lynda, Shona, Jason and Rib – I heard snippets of disgruntled trumpet practice, football matches vs. live music, and the inevitability of growing old and relying on Lucozade, it was pretty fascinating!

And so, the project continues on this week, which I hope to update you with in the not-too-distant future. Major kudos must be given to our group (both staff and students), who have kindly volunteered to come in during their half-term break (which Lynda and I are really very happy about, otherwise I will eat all the biscuits). I am also hoping that we will actually get some of our young people on here to update the project blog, and I do believe we have a mix-tape in the works……..  

Skeleton suit boy is still being mended so I thought I’d tell you what I’ve been doing last weekend.

For some time now I’m obsessed with vertically striped socks because we had to find some for one of our Pleasure Garden gents. Meet William Oxtoby, 23 years of age, dandy on the make, trying to find love, preferably with a rich heiress. He is wearing his best suit: blue-green shot silk suit with silk embroidery from the 1770s, which no doubt he would have accessorised with vertically striped hosiery.

This type of fancy stocking seem to have been particularly fashionable in the 1770s and 1780s, check out the fashion plates below and also Charles James Fox in this print of 1788 (one of my favourite Museum of London objects).

They have also been mentioned on fashion blogs for a while now and even appeared in Alexander McQueen’s 2009 autumn RTW collection (that’s probablywhy they’re so hot at the moment). Nevertheless the only stockings we found that would have worked well with the colouring of the suit were from a re-enactment site in the US and … they were out of stock (haha).

So I turned to the dress curator’s best friend: ebay. Thankfully Emos and Goths also seem to be fond of vertical strips and I found two pairs for only £3.50 each with high cotton content. The last bit was important because I thought we might have to do some customisation.

The black stripes turned out to be too harsh for the suit and the fuchsia was just ludicrous and too 21^st century. Hilary heard that theatrical costumiers sometimes use bleach to get different colours so I thought I’d have a go.

Apparently thin bleach without additives is best, which is actually not that easy to find but I eventually got lucky in Waitrose. So on Saturday I assembled my bleaching kit. I am actually quite scared of bleach (well, one should be) so I wasn’t looking forward to this. HEALTH WARNING: bleach can be dangerous so do not try this at home without following the guidelines on the bottle.

I took all the necessary precautions: I had gloves (never do washing up without my Marygolds), a poking stick (well, a cooking utensil, really) and I kept my bathroom well ventilated, not much fun in this kind of weather.

According to one website, the recommended mix is 4 parts water and 1 part bleach, which seemed a bit excessive, so I started with a much lower dose. Apparently things were supposed to happen within 15 minutes but I poked and poked and watched and watched but the black stripes stubbornly stayed black (I started with the b/w pair, didn’t want to ruin them both). After 30 minutes or so and after increasing the bleach content several times, I just left the stockings to their own devices, occasionally checking up on them and doing a pit more poking.

After more than an hour the black seemed to slowly turn into brown and once the process started the socks lightened up quite quickly. After a good wash we now have stockings with medium brown and white stripes, still not ideal, but an improvement. After another trip to Waitrose the next day (the glamour!), I had a go with the fuchsia ones, but the dark pink dye was even more difficult. Have a look at the result.

I think the stockings are still too bright but I have not yet held them against the suit yet. If it doesn’t work we might have to dye the brown/white ones, maybe purple, or blue-green-ish to match the suit but I think I will spare you the description of that process.

So, when you come to the Pleasure Garden display in our new gallery (open from the end of May), look out for fancy hosiery and, if you like, tell me what you think.

That was the general reaction when we tried out one of the dress objects for the pleasure garden display last week. The object is a so-called ‘skeleton suit’ from the late 1780s.

In 1839 Charles Dickens remembered the skeleton suit as ‘an ingenious contrivance for displaying the full symmetry of a boy’s figure, by fastening him into a very tight jacket, with an ornamental row of buttons over each shoulder, and then buttoning his trousers over it, so as to give his legs the appearance of being hooked on, just under the armpits.’

Well, our suit is not quite like that, but you can see his points about the buttons. If you look closely, you can see a boy wearing such a suit on the right of this painting. Our suit is made from printed cotton, which has now much faded, but originally might have looked a little bit like denim.

Before I go on, I should introduce myself. My name is Beatrice and I am one of two curators responsible for the Museum’s large fashion collection. For the last two years we have been working on preparing the 70 outfits and more than 150 accessories that will go on display in our new galleries. Most will be displayed on ‘cut-outs’ (more about that some other time) but for the pleasure garden we have decided to use full-figure mannequins.

Pleasure Gardens were a bit like amusement grounds today, and were particularly popular in the second half of the 18th and early 19th centuries. The most famous gardens in London were Vauxhall and Ranelagh.

We will show 16 outfits from the 1740s to the 1840s in two cases in the new display. Of course you would never have seen them together originally, but we wanted to highlight particular gems from our collection. The main outfits, suits and dresses, will be original and so will be many of the accessories. To help us put together the right objects we invented a character for each figure. Our little boy is the three-year old Charles Winter, who has come to the gardens with his sister and father, Captain Winter.  Charles is very excited, has even suffered his hair to be curled because the gardens are so fun but is keen to get rid of his starched collar.

Speaking of which, we did not have an appropriate shirt for Charles in the collection, so we asked Amy, who is studying Costume Interpretation at Wimbledon School of Art to make us one. That’s what you see in the photo. It works perfectly and Charles will look even cuter once he is wearing his read shoes. In case you are wondering why he has a plastic bag over his head, we are worried the paint will scratch so are protecting it until installation.

Unfortunately we found that Charles’ arms were a little short (maybe not, what do you think?) so they have now gone back our mannequin makers for a quick fix. I will show you pictures of the finished Charles in a few weeks and I will write about some of the other figures we are working on.

Many of you will be aware that the Museum of London is undergoing a huge redevelopment and some spectacular new galleries will open in May 2010. However, although many of the Museum of London employees have seen how the redevelopment is going, the web team didn’t get a chance to see the latest developments.

So we decided to have a bit of an adventurer last Friday afternoon after the builders had ‘shut up shop’. Yes, we finally went to see the new galleries and I managed to sneak my handy camera in with me and took a few photos to share with you.

I must warn you that I am no professional photographer and my very slim digital camera does not deal well with poor lighting, but the photos below will still give you an insight into some of the fascinating things that await your visits in May.

The head of communications, Antony Robbins, gave us an excellent tour. We explored the new Galleries of Modern London, starting with checking out some really cool chill-out areas where visitors can surf the net and perhaps even sneak in a coffee or two!

What looked like a ghostly figure shrouded beneath plastic appeared to watch us as we made our way through the galleries. I found that we are being very eco-friendly and have recycled many of our display cases from the previous galleries.

I was much taken with one of the exhibits of an 18th century printing press that spews reams and reams of papers, notices, and posters on to over 20 plasma screens to show the 18th century version of the white heat of technology. Wow, I thought, I can’t wait to see this in action!

I finally discovered what the back of the glass display cases look like (they actually look like the back of normal cases to me!), and I was able to look up closely into what the inside of the Wellclose prison was like in its original form. I didn’t have time to read all the names and see all the pictures etched on the walls, but it was fascinating none the less.

For the first time ever, Museum of London will have display cases under the floor and I was told that the glass will be bullet proof (no, please don’t bring your gun in to check!).

I ‘accidentally’ stumbled into the power room behind the gallery and decided to take a photo as I was already there.

The pleasure garden was next and how pretty and peaceful it was! One of my colleagues was playing around with the different sounds that would be played in the background and I could have just stayed there for a very long time. There were real trees in the middle, and the garden has the ability to change from day to night, with the music reflecting the different mood.

We were lucky to see the Selfridges lift all lit up and my colleagues and I marvelled at the detail.

We toured the galleries that had maps and interactives, and what I thought were sails but weren’t sails at all (it was just sheets to protect the new galleries from dust and keep it private from visitors visiting the galleries on the upper floors). It turned out that we were keeping the development sites very clean because I even saw a very happy, smiling ‘Mr Henry’, vacuum cleaner.

I was interested to learn that an unexploded insidious bomb recovered in the early 1940s in the East End will loom large on top of a glass case. You and I will have to find out by visiting the gallery when it opens exactly what this looks like.

I found out that the largest glass case in the gallery will host the Tom Hunter ghetto (recreation of groups of streets in Hackney, home to squatters, including Tom himself) and that there will be an interactive river Thames (it was not installed fully yet so I couldn’t really get my hands on it and test the interactivity, all in the line of duty of course).

We were unable to see some parts of the gallery but as I did not want to disappoint you, my colleague and I raised the zip up a little and I took the photo of the Lord Mayor’s Coach (which you can see below).

The timeline for ‘a London year’ had not been installed yet but Antony did suggest that the web team may want to buy a year and I said that as soon as he gives us a pay rise, we would be more than happy to contribute. I’m sure we can expect a pay rise very soon. (If you haven’t yet bought a year, and wish to do so, why not visit our website at www.museumoflondon.org.uk/English/SupportUs/Year-of-London-History/availableyears.htm for more information)

The Clore Centre was the last thing we saw. It opened recently and has hosted many events already. In the Centre, I’ve learned that learning continues, even if you go to the toilets!

Photographs of developments

Below are thumbnail images showing parts of the things I saw on my tour. Click on each image to see the full, larger image:

After a successful Lord Mayor’s Show this weekend, the spectacular coach arrived back yesterday to its home at The Museum of London. The three tonne carriage was transported by police escort from the Guildhall to the Museum.

As traffic stopped to marvel at the dramatic sight, the coach was lifted onto specially designed skates to manoeuvre it into its resting place inside the new Galleries of Modern London opening spring 2010. The Lord Mayor’s coach will be on display for all to see both inside the Museum and for the first time from street level, after the installation of brand new windows along London Wall that allow people to gaze into the galleries.

See more photos on The Museum of London website

Yes, it’s that time of year again when we can sip mulled wine, listen to carols and stuff ourselves with mince pies! Of course, the most exciting way to do all that was at our annual Festive Christmas Fair last Thursday evening at Museum of London.
 
We had scores of stalls lined up for you to take your pick from, including the fabulous jewellery designer Yuki Mitsuyasu with a beautiful new range of necklaces, rings and bracelets all glittering in the festive glow of the Museum. As well as the craft stalls we had the seasonal sounds of live Klezmer music and Advent carols and even workshops where you could knit your own winter woolly scarf or make your own badge for a fantastically original stocking present.
                                                                                                                                                       

As with all our late events, the rest of the museum was open for people to explore including the new exhibition Homeless in the Capital that offers insights into the everyday lives of people who are or have been homeless in central London.

Check back here for details of future Lates which are taking a well earned Christmas break but will be back in February 2009, see you then!

Some of you may remember from my last blog that I mentioned that the Museum of London websites were changing inline with our rebranding to bring together our  venues and values, with new names and logos. We have now completed phase one of redesigning and moving around content on our websites. You can check out our striking new logos and our redesigned websites at:

• www.museumoflondon.org.uk
• www.museumoflondon.org.uk/docklands
• www.museumoflondon.org.uk/archaeology

In phase two and three, we will be auditing all our websites, holding audience evaluations to find out what our visitors think, and planning and implementing the migration of all our websites into one single site. This will involve analysis of our current website structures and planning the future architecture and redesigning of all the templates within our websites, including our microsites.

We would love to find out what you think of the websites and how it might develop in the future. So tell us what you think of the sites and the new ‘tabs’ that combine all our three venues together by sending me your comments to: webmanager@museumoflondon.org.uk.

Please note that we are aware some things may not display properly or some links may be broken, but please bear with us while we go through this transition period.

Thank you for all your continued support.

I’m really excited to be able to tell you about a new project that’s recently gone live – ‘Podcasts from the past‘. It’s a series of ten audio descriptions of objects in the London before London and Medieval galleries at the Museum of London.

You can find Podcasts from the Past on iTunes with this link (or search for “podcasts from the past” or for artist “museum of london”), or point your browser at the RSS feed. You can also find out more about the individual podcasts and download the files directly at Podcasts from the past.
This project is part of the Museum’s Community & Audience Development Inclusion programme, and is managed by Inclusion Officer Lucie Fitton. I’ll let Lucie, our Inclusion Officer, introduce it in her own words:

Here at the Museum of London we wanted to do two things through this projects. One, make a step towards providing more resources for our visually impaired visitors (existing and potential). Two, by working with a group of real Londoners (by that we mean normal people living in this city, and not museum staff or specialists) to create them, we would be offering an interpretation of the collections that would be relevant and interesting to more people. Yes, these podcasts aim to describe museum objects to people who may not be able to see them clearly, but by opening your ears everyone can understand London’s story in a new way.

It was a huge task for anyone, let alone a group of people who hadn’t met, hadn’t visited the Museum before, hadn’t created audio description and hadn’t used recording and editing technology. The 10 podcasts were created in eight weeks, with just one day of workshop time each week.

Luckily we had some fantastic help from the experts. A couple of our curators showed the group around the galleries and provided invaluable advice about the objects. We then had training with Vocaleyes who showed us the basics of describing for visually impaired people. We also got the chance to meet Kirin, who is visually impaired and helped dispel myths around what it is like. Once the scripts were written we then worked with podcast producers from SoundDelivery to record and edit the final podcast. It was lots of hard work, but great fun.

The seven participants of this project come from a wide variety of backgrounds and had many skills and talents to add to this project. We hope they walk away with many more. Thanks to Charles Clark, Ivan Bello, James Kelly, Keith Allen, Liam McAtamney, Simon Allen and Warren Thompson. Also a big thank you to Tony and Kirin from Vocaleyes, and Jude, Mark and Lee from SoundDelivery.

Lucie’s also previously written about her role as Inclusion Officer and Community projects at the Museum of London. You can also see photos from the podcast workshops, including photos of the objects, on our Flickr page.

I think it’s a lovely way to find out more about some objects you can visit in our galleries, so check them out and let us know what you think.