Museums

The men-at-arms came clanking down the street amid the swirls of acrid smoke. Visors down, brandishing their swords and pikes, they strode past the Clock Tower and with ferocious cries, disappeared up the narrow street between the timber-framed tenements.

“Quick, get those fires out!”

…said the museum manager, who was standing beside me clasping two buckets of water, and watching in an agony of apprehension as the heaps of smouldering straw blew across the street and up against the nearby shop fronts. We ran about dousing the flames. Wrapping the parking meters with hessian didn’t exactly make them look medieval so lots of smoke was required to obscure their presence, but setting fire to a bicycle shop would not have made us popular. The men-at-arms reappeared grinning, their visors up.

“OK that time?” asked their leader cheerfully. He and his men were happy to play the scene over and over again, until everyone was quite satisfied. They were professional re-enactors and their hourly rate reflected it. Worth every penny.

Half an hour later, the street cleaned scrupulously in time for the shops opening, I was over at the cathedral, once a famous abbey, gulping mouthfuls of coffee between smearing my colleagues’ ragged costumes with a mixture of mud and strawberry jam to make them look like beggars come to pray for healing at the shrine of the saint. Though I say it myself (a colleague and I made the costumes), they looked most authentic. The jam was so cheap and horrible that it was better used externally anyway. They went off to huddle pathetically around a rusty cast-iron barbecue, among more artistic swirls of smoke.

When I signed up for a career in museums I didn’t foresee that one day I would be credited as co-Assistant Director and co-Executive Producer of a historical film, to say nothing of co-wardrobe and props mistress. One of the museum’s two sites had the standard short introductory film on the history of the site but the second museum, which dealt with the post-Roman history of the town, hadn’t got one. So we teamed up with the film studies unit at the local college to make an extremely low-budget ten-minute film summarising 1500 years of stirring events, including a famous 15^th century battle which featured in one of Shakespeare’s plays.

This project began with a bunch of curators spending many an hour arguing with the director of the film studies unit, a forceful lady with a well-deserved reputation in her own field, as she tried to keep the script short enough to fit into 10 minutes and snappy enough to engage the public, while we tried to stop it being oversimplified to the point of total inaccuracy.

Curators, front of house staff and film students were co-opted as actors. The film studies students practiced their skills as makeup artists, hairdressers, caterers etc. A small amount of money was allowed to pay for a few professionals like the soldiers, a real actor for the narrator, and the musician who provided the background music. A number of local groups like the lace-makers society and a men’s choir donated their services for free. We had to get permission from the various locations, from the police if we were going to hold up the traffic; find out where parking and toilets were available, and so on.  I became lost in admiration of the director’s ability to wheedle reluctant people into giving her what she wanted for nothing, especially when they had refused my request three times already.

I really had fun with that film. I enjoyed all the background research with my colleagues for the script, the locations, the costumes and props. We all pooled our knowledge of different aspects of different historical periods. It was a great feeling to see local events which I had known about for years come to life. But I also found pure pleasure in watching people with real expertise in a different profession do their job. The director and her camera-woman would quietly discuss the scene they were about to film, and then get everything and everyone organised to produce just the effect they wanted. One occasion I remember particularly was an evening when, after filming a scene which was supposed to be set in a 15th century shop in a small square room in a historic building, they proceeded to record another scene in the same room, but this time set in the 17th century, simply by turning the camera around to face the other way and altering the lighting so that it looked like a completely different place. It was extraordinarily effective.

The scenes I have described so far were perhaps my favourites, but they were run a close third by the totally incongruous scene which was supposed to represent a visit by Elizabeth I to a local manor owned by one of her courtiers. At the time of her most famous visit she was thirty-seven years old. The sight of a teenaged Gloriana sitting on a purple carpet on the steps of the now totally ruined manor, forking up sweetmeats (made by me) from a pewter platter held on her lap, was enjoyably ludicrous.

And finally, there was the men’s choir from a local church who sang plainsong for us one evening as a background to our monastery scenes. It was the most beautiful end to a long day’s filming.

Looking back on it, I still think that the script was pretty good, although some of the scenes, costumes and props were not quite what I would wish. But overall, it was an experience I shall always enjoy revisiting.

Title from William Shakespeare, Second part of King Henry VI, Act V, Scene II

Archaeology is a very badly paid profession for all but the very lucky. It is also very insecure, with many short –term contracts. It is regarded as non-essential to the well-being of society in many countries, although there are others so fiercely proud of their national heritage that they will put you in jail for picking up stones in the river bed in case they were prehistoric tools. In 2010, as the recession bit and redundancy loomed, some of us in the archaeology curators’ office at the museum where I worked had a discussion about possible alternative jobs…

One of my colleagues suggested becoming a private detective. As he pointed out, this would involve spending a lot of time sorting through the contents of people’s dustbins, analysing what they have thrown away and what it tells you about them. Perfect! As archaeologists we have all spent ages digging out people’s rubbish pits, the pre-modern equivalent of the dustbin, and drawing deductions from the contents, so we have loads of relevant experience. Well, sort of. As the museum’s specialist in medieval pottery my deductions tended to be along the lines of how much local as opposed to imported pottery the household was using, as a very rough guide to what date the site was, and an even rougher guide to how rich the household was and who the town was trading with. I yearned to get someone to do a chemical analysis of the cooking pots to see what they were boiling up in them, but there was never enough money.

Another colleague suggested becoming an undertaker, since we have all spent plenty of time exhuming corpses, albeit usually reduced to skeletons.  I dug up my first skeleton when I was still at school. Subsequent years of work in a museum involved caring for many boxfuls of human bones and crunchy bags of cremated ones. The latter contributed to the education of my son’s class in infant school. I was asked to talk to twenty five-year-olds about being an archaeologist. We all sat in a big circle on the carpet and solemnly passed round a selection of objects I had brought in. Before we started I had asked the teacher privately if she thought the children would be upset by a small bag of cremated dead Roman. Beaming, she said that would solve a problem for her, as they were supposed to “do death” that term, and she would now be able to tick the topic off quite painlessly. The weeny ones didn’t seem at all upset, although I’m not sure how many of them really understood that what was in the bag was the remains of a 2000-year-old person.

Sewage worker would also be appropriate. There is nothing like a really good cesspit. I had been working on the contents of a sixteenth century cesspit at the time. The pottery had wonderful green stains from the cess (sewage), and the soil samples contained things like blackberry pips and the eggs of parasitic worms that had gone right through the people who had used the loo. Most cesspits in the medieval town produced traces of parasitic worms; those poor medieval guys were full of them. But my favourite was one amazing latrine which produced a whole jar of 14^th century plum stones that someone had tipped down the loo.

Well, today’s job market is all about transferable skills….

No, I don’t mean insect killer or Rentokil fluid put there by the curators. Though of course those may be there too. Woodworm in the Lord Mayor’s Chair, moths in the 18^th century sampler, beetles crunching that trendy piece of artwork made entirely from dried peas and lentils glued to a piece of cardboard, all need to be seen to. No, I mean poisonous, or otherwise hazardous, museum objects.

One day a member of the public brought in two World War II gas masks to a museum down south. Two staff members, who had not met these before, were about to try them on, when somebody (me actually) noticed and stopped them just in time. World War II gas masks usually contain asbestos, which is now recognised as a dangerous carcinogen. They either have to be sent away for decontamination by experts before you use them in your wartime handling sessions for schools, or they have to be sealed in airtight plastic with big red hazard warnings all over them and kept in the store.

But that is only the start. Do you remember the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland? This is thought to be a reference to the mercury poisoning suffered by makers of men’s hats in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, when mercurous nitrate was used in the process of making felt for hats. If your collection has any Victorian top hats in it, you need to be careful handling them.

I once worked in a museum that had a fine collection of old stuffed birds. Museum curators have been known to become ill from handling such specimens, as arsenic was once widely used in taxidermy.  Surgical gloves on, please.

And of course the collection may contain old watches with radium dials, or even geological samples which are mildly radioactive. Even the store itself may have radon leaking out of the walls at levels which are hazardous to humans. This I have also met.

There are more things to beware of in a museum store than falling off a stepladder because you have forgotten your ladder training, or hurting your back lifting boxes because you skipped your manual handling course. Still, look on the bright side. If you have a few boxes of Victorian matches, they may spontaneously combust and burn the whole store down, thus solving all the problems!

Reader, have you ever met a museum curator? Have you ever penetrated to the dark rooms where they lurk? Do you know what they do for the money that you, the taxpayer, spends on them? I think it was when I was made redundant in 2011 that I realised how few people know what a museum curator does. When most people visit a museum, they encounter the ‘front of house’ staff. These are the people who are responsible for taking their money, showing them where the toilets are, telling them how to get to a particular exhibit, vacuuming the carpets, and so on. Some of them are very knowledgeable and can answer many of the visitors’ questions. Visitors, and indeed district councillors, won’t meet the “back of house” staff, i.e. the curators unless they come to an open day or evening lecture. 

So, what was a typical day as a curator like, when I was doing it? I have worked in three museums and volunteered in a fourth, as well as swapping anecdotes with curators from many others. The following is not an actual day, it’s a composite made of the sort of tasks that museum curators have to do in the average local authority museum. It also refers to a generic local authority museum, not any one in particular. So here goes…

…Having spent half an hour in a traffic jam, I sit down at my desk and log onto my computer. While it warms up, I wash up a coffee cup from the festering heap in the sink in the curator’s office and make myself a cup of coffee. I then attack my emails. I delete several dozen which have come from the council offices to all staff, but have nothing to do with the museum. I forward two advertisements for Viagra to the council’s  IT department with a rude note complaining that their firewall needs attention as a respectable middle-aged female staff member shouldn’t have to field inappropriate stuff like this. This is not really because I am shocked, but to get my own back for all the perfectly respectable websites that I need to consult for my work, but which they have blocked in their “one size fits all” campaign against staff wasting time, thus seriously holding up my research.

I then deal with simple enquiries, like, “will you give the Lacemakers a lecture on the 27^th March after their AGM,” (yes; I like the Lacemakers and they gave us a lovely demo for free at one of our open days and anyway I like sounding off for 45 minutes about my favourite topics); or “will you tell me which sites in the Roman town were the most important during the 1^st century AD and why”, (no; I’m not writing your undergraduate thesis for you).

I then proceed to the difficult ones. Like, “approximately how many Palaeolithic handaxes found in the XXXshire area do you have in the museum?”. How on earth do you admit to a researcher from the university of Cambridge that your accessions register has never been fully digitised, because you haven’t got the staff to do it,  and you therefore have no way of finding out, except by going through the paper records page by page, which you certainly don’t have the staff to do?

Somebody wants to come and look at all the Roman tiles from three sites in the town centre. Your eyes brighten, because you know that you only have to go to the store, where the boxes are stacked in alphabetical order of sites, and get them. So you get into your car, carefully noting your mileage for the claim form, and drive through another traffic jam to the out of town store, a disused warehouse.  Sites A and B are fine, you load them into the back of your car (did I mention that the council does NOT pay for the Business/Light Goods insurance necessary?) and go back for the tiles from Site C. They are not there. There is no Movement Ticket in the space on the shelf to tell you who has taken them and where to, let alone why. Fortunately it has to be someone inside the museum, because only museum staff are allowed keys to the store. You spend nearly half an hour searching the store just in case some idiot has moved them to a different shelf for some reason, and you still can’t find them.

Back to the museum, where you explode to the other four curators who share the office with you. One of them suggests that a certain senior person was giving a lecture on Roman tiles the day before yesterday. This person is out, but in their office are the missing boxes. You remove them, secure in the knowledge that they won’t give them another thought. Why do people always think they are entitled to disregard the rules they probably made themselves? If they needed six boxes of artefacts for a piece of research themself and couldn’t find out where they had gone, they wouldn’t be very pleased, would they? 

After a sandwich and a cup of horrible coffee at your desk, followed by a brisk walk, the afternoon is spent looking at the contents of the plastic bags which are cluttering up your desk. Some of them are enquiries from members of the public who have dug them up in their back gardens, or picked them up when they were having a country walk. They can be anything from a genuine Neolithic leaf-shaped arrowhead to a piece of Georgian chamber pot. These are a delight. Tact and diplomacy are sometimes required, however, when telling members of the public that their fascinating piece of flint which fits the hand so well is actually a perfectly natural frost-shattered pebble.  Other plastic bags hold collections of broken potsherds dug up by the museum’s field archaeologist. They are singularly unexciting as they are all smashed into very small pieces. The field archaeologist wants to know how old they are so he can date the layer they came from, in the (all too frequent) absence of coins or preserved timbers for dendrochronology. If I’m not sure of the date I just pass them round the room and the conclave of curators pronounce on them. A short report is typed up.

Towards the end of the day some time is spent Googling the names of various fossils, because the fossils in our natural history collection were catalogued a long time ago, and the nomenclature has changed. It is therefore a little difficult to match the notes just given to us by a visiting expert with the records in the catalogue. If the museum still had a natural history curator, the thing would be easy, but the post was abolished long ago, so an archaeologist or a social historian has to do it.

On and off all day you try to get hold of the local police firearms officer. The museum needs a firearms certificate, because it hold a number of antiquated but technically usable guns that have to be kept securely, and the officer needs to visit to approve the security arrangements. He is difficult to get hold of. Try again tomorrow, before the emails.

Time to go home. And as you wander through the empty galleries to the exit you think “How lucky I am to work here!” And you really really mean it. 

Recently, my current employers, whose services to tourism have been massive, were invited to meet Princess Anne at a garden party in Edinburgh. Alas, the nearest I have ever come to royalty was accidentally walking on the queen’s red carpet at a public event. The Egyptian government had lent some of the treasures from Tutankhamen’s tomb to the British Museum, and the queen was going to open the exhibition. I was at that time a student at the Institute of Archaeology, now part of University College London, and the BM was my second home, so to speak. The Institute is located in Gordon Square, a few minutes’ walk away from the museum. We were always being sent round to look at the displays in the public galleries, and occasionally got to work in the stores.

The morning of the royal visit, I was working as usual on some stone age tools in the depths of the massive warren of underground passages and storage rooms below the public galleries. Those were the days before the war on terror; nowadays they wouldn’t have let any students in for a week before a VIP visit. The member of staff responsible for me had promised to come and warn me when I had to get out. However, as it approached lunchtime, there was no sign of him, and I thought I had probably better get going. The way out from my particular part of the underground maze opened onto one of the public galleries. I took my usual route and emerged from a door in the panelling of a gallery full of printed books to find myself standing on a red carpet in the middle of a roped-off area, with about a hundred people staring at me. Scandalised attendants leapt out from all sides and hustled me and my battered briefcase out of the way. As I looked back over my shoulder, someone had got out a carpet sweeper and was running it over the area my plebeian feet had polluted!