Annual report 2008–2009 - University of Reading · PDF file · 2009-11-24The Museum of English Rural Life is part of the ... a new ADLIB database acquired for the archive and

Annual report2008–2009A review of MERL activity, October 2008 – September 2009

The Museum of English Rural Life is part of the University Museums and Special Collections Service

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MERL Annual Report 2008–2009

ContentsExhibitions 4Projects 5Research 6Publications 6MERL Research Seminars 6Undergraduate teaching 7Collections 7Documentation and conservation 8Volunteers 8Learning and public programmes 9Audience development 10Audience figures 10Staff activities 11

Above Undergraduates getting to grips with the collections.

Front cover ‘A Cotswold Alley’, a Chad Valley jigsaw from the 1920s, acquired as part of the Collecting 20th Century Rural Culture project.


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Annual reportOctober 2008 – September 2009

It has been a good year for progress across the board. The collections continue to attract and inspire researchers from far and wide and a new kind of collecting project has been moving forward successfully.

The building has been humming with students engaged on museum-based courses and there have been some important new developments with the volunteer programmes. The figures for visitors, school groups and users are up all round and the combination of worthwhile events and skilful marketing has kept the museum in the public eye. Only the weather that accompanied our Summer Spectacular in the garden was a dampener, although even that didn’t keep the crowds from coming and everyone – we think! – went home happy.

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ExhibitionsOctober – December 2008 100 Years of the National Farmers UnionIn conjunction with the NFU, whose archive is held at MERL

January – May 2009 People of the Thames – a photographic journeyHighlighting the work of contemporary photographer Jill Orpen

June – September 2009 Grow your own!The summer exhibition using material from MERL and other collections across the University to consider the history and the role of gardening in English culture. It was accompanied by a programme of garden-themed activities and events grant-aided by the Designation Challenge Fund.

September – December 2009 The children’s war: evacuees in the countryside 1939–1945Marking the 70th anniversary of WWII evacuation and a collaboration with Dr Martin Parsons of the University whose evacuee research archive is now part of the MERL collections.

Top left Ken Nelson, one of the subjects in the exhibition People of the Thames – a photographic journey. Related events included a public debate on the future of the Thames. Photograph © Jil Orpen

Top right From the summer exhibition Grow your own!, old boiler suit finding use as a bird scarer on an allotment at Purley, Berkshire. Photograph © Dave Tassinini

Below left Mrs Joan Johnson, a Land Girl in WWII, visits the MERL exhibition at the ceremony led by the Lord Lieutenant of Berkshire to honour former members of the Womens Land Army.

Below right The Vice Chancellor of the University joins five former evacuees (seated front row) to mark the September opening of the exhibition The children’s war.


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ProjectsCollecting 20th century Rural Culture is a bold new initiative made possible by a grant of £95,000 from the Heritage Lottery Fund that is enabling the Museum to explore, particularly through the purchase of new material for the collections, the place of the countryside in national life over the course of the last century. This is the first time that we have had the opportunity to mount a planned and resourced programme of targeted collecting. A blog and a regularly changing display in the Museum are charting progress with the project and an academic conference on some of the issues arising is being held in November.

The JISC-funded Digitisation of Countryside Images project has now completed its task of cataloguing and digitising 13,000 glass negatives from the Farmers Weekly and Farmer & Stockbreeder collections, dating from 1920-65. Two online exhibitions using images from the project are accessible from the MERL website and a launch event took place at the Royal Berkshire Show. An online group has been established on the popular Flickr website to enable members of the public to display their own images of the countryside, and two podcasts have been created to promote the images.

The Hugh Sinclair Archive Project has made progress in sorting and appraising the papers of Dr Hugh Macdonald Sinclair, the pioneering nutritionist whose work on wartime nutrition and on the value of essential fatty acids to human health is well known. A great deal of support has been received from the Hugh Sinclair Unit of Human Nutrition in the Department of Food Biosciences. The project will enable the cataloguing and wider promotion of the collection from 2010, which will mark the centenary of Sinclair’s birth.

Top Harvesting wheat on a farm near Guildford, Surrey, 1937. One of the Farmer & Stockbreeder images included in the Digitisation of Countryside Images Project, funded by JISC as part of the Enriching Digital Resources programme, a strand of the Digitisation programme.

Above Wartime poster by Abram Games, acquired as part of the Collecting 20th Century Rural Culture project.

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ResearchExternal funding is continuing to stimulate significant new research based on the museum’s collections. Dr Clare Griffiths, senior lecturer in History at the University of Sheffield, has been using her Sir John Higgs MERL Fellowship to look at the image of farmers in the twentieth century as represented through the press and photographs. An exhibition will be amongst the outcomes. A Fellowship for the coming year – to be called the West Berkshire MERL Fellowship – has been awarded to Hilary Crowe, who recently completed a doctorate at the University of Sussex. Her project will use statistical data in the official Farm Management Survey material at MERL to examine the profitability of farming in England and Wales in the period from the 1930s to the 1970s. A PhD research studentship on the steam engine and agricultural mechanisation, made possible through generous private sponsorship, has been awarded to Jane McCutchan and comes on stream in the autumn.

Dr Jonathan Brown’s one year Monument Fellowship, funded via the Museums Association, has been facilitating the transfer of his many years of experience of the collections to colleagues and others. As well as presenting a number of seminars, he has also been producing new subject guides and enquiry procedures.

PublicationsBrigden, R, ‘Rural Museums in an Urban and Multicultural Society’, Folklife: Journal of Ethnological Studies, vol 47, 2009, pp 97–105.

McShane, P. ‘Annual list of publications on agrarian history, 2007’, The Agricultural History Review, vol. 57, 2009, pp. 109–123.

MERL Research SeminarsAutumn 2008Professor Sir Peter HallEco-towns: a new urban golden age?

John LettsThe history of thatching methods and materials

Dr John WilsonBooks on farming and rural life in the 19th and 20th centuries

Spring 2009Professor Philip JohnIndigo from woad producton: its past and future

Dr Gavin Parker60 years of the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949

Dr Maurice BichardBaskets in Europe

Dr Clare GriffithsHeroes of the reconstruction? Images of farmers and farming in war and peace

Dr Jeremy BurchardtWhy Wiltshire? Early allotment provision in England 1795–1830

Dame Fiona Reynolds, Director General of The National Trust, delivered the 2008 Annual MERL Lecture on the subject ‘Farming and a sustainable countryside: how do we meet the challenge?’


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Undergraduate teachingModules on museums, material culture and understanding of the countryside have been run again through the CETL-AURS programme, drawing extensively upon the collections and deploying this year a more structured enquiry-based approach with student research groups working on tasks in seminars.

A new development, working with the University’s Centre for Career Management Skills and the Students Union, has seen the successful piloting of a project to formally accredit the experience gained by students from programmes of voluntary work on the collections.

Above One of the recently acquired original cartoons – this one is for the county of Kent – for Michael O’Connell’s Festival of Britain wallhangings.

Left The new storage racks for the Festival of Britain wallhangings

Collections Notable recent donations have included, from the artist’s son, the original cartoons from which Michael O’Connell created his wallhangings – already in the MERL collection – for the 1951 Festival of Britain Country Pavilion. The wallhangings themselves have now been installed in a new purpose-designed storage unit in the Museum.

To the farm record collections has been added material from farms in Berkshire, Wiltshire, East Sussex and Hampshire whilst new photographic acquisitions include images of windmills from the 1930s to the 1960s.

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Documentation and conservationWith the help of a student bursary from the

University’s Joint Standing Committee on the Arts, the

extensive documentation on the Museum’s important

collection of agricultural labourers’ smocks has been

transferred to electronic format and thereby made

much more accessible for researchers.

The many hundreds of printing blocks which the

Museum has accumulated over the years, usually as

an adjunct to the archives of agricultural machinery

manufacturers, have now been properly sorted and

recorded, with volunteer assistance. As well as their

agricultural significance, they are evidence of the

historical complexities of a now superseded printing

technology. A representative display of them has been

mounted in the gallery and conservator Fred van de

Geer has posted an illustrated article about them on

the MERL website.

Following a programme of investigation and tendering,

a general overhaul and upgrading of the IT side of

collections management has seen the library records

transfer to the University Library’s Unicorn system and

a new ADLIB database acquired for the archive and

object collections. Full migration of data into the new

system will be completed in the coming months and

a significant amount of additional documentation will

be available online for the first time.

VolunteersThe contribution made by volunteers, whether they

be students or members of the wider public, is keenly

felt and appreciated throughout from helping with the

collections and conducting guided tours to assisting

with the planning and operation of events. Significant

progress is being made by volunteers in listing and

processing archive collections, including engineering

drawings from Allen of Oxford, records of the

International Harvester Company, and the Evacuee and

War Child archive. They have also made significant

contributions to the Digitisation of Countryside Images

and Hugh Sinclair Archive projects.

Heritage Open Days in September took visitors behind the scenes of the historic MERL buildings.

From the collections of printing blocks – one for a shepherd’s hut which the manufacturers, the Wiltshire firm of Reeves, used to illustrate their catalogues.


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Learning and public programmesA total of 1,688 pupils visited the Museum during the last academic year to participate in schools sessions linked to a seasonal theme or to the exhibition programme. ‘Mr Palmer’s Victorian Christmas’ went down well with Key Stage 2 (7-11 year olds) in the autumn term, while a literacy and science session, ‘The 3 Little Pigs’, was popular for Key Stage 1 in the spring and ‘Where Does Food Come From?’ for Key Stage 1 & 2 in the summer. Toddler Time, a weekly get together for under 5s and their parents, is well supported and celebrated its first birthday in April.

The summer exhibition provided a platform for a series of garden-related events and initiatives with an audience development focus, all assisted financially by the MLA Designation Challenge Fund. Links were forged with local horticultural and allotment societies, and a variety of groups, including a special needs school, a nursery and an adult learners group, came to the Museum to learn some gardening skills and help plant up the external part of the display. Plots in the garden, ably tended by volunteers, helped

illustrate how trends in domestic vegetable growing have changed over the years. The Summer Spectacular in June took up the gardening theme in its stalls and activities and likewise there were 18 family events over the summer holiday period. By working with a museum-theatre company we were also able to introduce some live interpretation into the gallery, in the form of Mr Edwin Beard Budding, the 19th century inventor of the lawnmower! Mr Budding proved popular with the public, providing an alternative to the more traditional labels or guided tours and also attracting the interest of the local media.

Partnership with other providers to run and cross-market events throughout the year remains important and has included: a joint Rural Crafts Day with Bracknell Forest Borough Council; a successful Folk Concert series in association with Simon Mayor and Hilary James; the Whiteknights Studio Trail showcasing the work of local artists; the National Gardens ‘Yellow Book’ scheme; and ‘Poetry in the Garden’ with the Two Rivers Press.

The Lunchtime Network meetings continued to offer insights into collections at MERL and elsewhere and provided updates on professional issues for staff and members of the public alike.

Top left A basketmaking workshop at this year’s Summer Spectacular in the garden.

Top right Owl mosaic made at the Mosaic Madness workshop in July, one of many group activities organised during the year.

Bottom left Encountering a melodeon at the Summer Spectacular

Bottom right Waiting for the cake to celebrate one year of Toddler Time at MERL.

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Audience development This year has seen MERL complementing traditional print marketing with networking and profile raising activities. This has included maximising PR opportunities and attending networking events organised by Tourism South East and Audiences South, as well as embracing the use of social media, such as Twitter and Flickr to drive traffic to our website.

We have had notable PR successes, with the help of the University Press Office, including the broadcasting of a Radio Berkshire Breakfast Show from the Museum this summer, and excellent local coverage of our temporary exhibitions, particularly on the BBC Berkshire website.

This year has seen a number of collaborative marketing opportunities with high-profile institutions such as the NFU and the National Trust, local

organisations such as the Newbury and District Agricultural Society, and University departments, including a seminar organised in conjunction with the School of Real Estate & Planning. We have also participated in University-wide initiatives such as providing audio and visual content for the new iTunes-U site and being part of the University’s stand at the Royal Berkshire Show.

The What’s On guide remains the mainstay of MERL’s promotional activity, and is now commercially distributed throughout Berkshire, as well as to the MERL mailing list, schools in targeted postcodes and other organisations. This has lead to steadily increasing visitor numbers throughout our established target audiences.

Images from the collections are widely used under licence in books, journals and exhibitions, and there is increasing website and television usage. A MERL image has even appeared recently on a range of potato crisp packaging.

Audience figuresThe Museum received 25,581 visitors in the year, compared to the figure of 19,640 in the previous period, thereby continuing an upward trend in recent years of over 25% per annum. In addition, more than 2,700 people visited the University’s stand at the Royal Berkshire Show in September which included a MERL exhibition and activities. Over the year, 331 new researchers were registered to use the MERL library and archives, and this generated 778 individual visits. Website usage and the numbers of enquiries continue to grow.

Maggie Philbin of BBC Radio Berkshire talking with Dr Martin Parsons, Director of the University’s Research Centre for Evacuee and War Child Studies, for a live broadcast from the Museum in the summer.

Taking up the gardening theme, a gnome trail around the Museum raised some smiles in the summer.

A steam engine formed the centre piece of the stand at the Royal Berkshire Show in September.


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Staff activitiesKate Arnold-Forster is a Fellow of the University’s Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning in Applied Undergraduate Research Skills, a member of the Museums Association Professional Review panel, the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) Designation Panel and the MLA Advisory Panel for the development of Accreditation. She is on the committee of the UK University Museums Group and is a board member of the International Council for Museums Committee for University Museums and Collections (UMAC). She is a committee member of the Women Leaders in Museums network supported by the Cultural Leadership programme and continues as a member of the Royal College of Surgeons Museums & Special Collections Committee and the Museum Committee for the Museum of Domestic Art and Design at the University of Middlesex. In 2009 she has been invited to join the UCL Museums and Heritage Committee and the Museum Advisory Group for Langley Academy, a new city academy in Slough. She attended the UMAC 2009, 9th International Conference, UC Berkeley, ‘Putting University Collections to Work in Research and Teaching’.

Guy Baxter is a member of the Council of SIBMAS, the International Association of Performing Arts Libraries and Museums, and is Editor of the International Directory of Performing Arts Collections. He is a consultant to a joint AHRC-funded project between the University and the Victoria and Albert Museum, and served on the Advisory Panel of the JISC-funded East London Theatre Archive Project.

Dr Roy Brigden served as immediate past President and council member of the Society for Folklife Studies, praesidium member of the International Association of Agricultural Museums, and committee member of the Rural Museums Network. He is a mentor for the Museums Association’s AMA scheme. He was an assessor for a successful ESRC research grant proposal. Talks given during the year included ‘Farm buildings and agricultural change’ to a weekend conference on Buildings and Farming: Past, Present and Future at Oxford University and ‘Collecting Twentieth Century Rural Culture’ to the annual conference of the Social History Curators Group.

Dr Jonathan Brown is editor of Berkshire Old and New, the journal of the Berkshire Local History Association.

Oliver Douglas contributed papers to the Material and Visual Anthropology Research Seminar at the Pitt Rivers Museum (PRM), University of Oxford, and the annual conference of the Folklore Society, London. Together with Dr Mike Broers of the Modern European History Research Centre, University of Oxford, he organized a two-day John Fell OUP-funded workshop on ‘Empires and Communities’ in nineteenth century Europe. He retained a research affiliation with the PRM in relation to their ESRC-funded ‘Englishness’ research project until its completion in April. He finished writing and submitted his AHRC-funded doctoral thesis in September. He was co-opted onto the Committee of the Museum Ethnographers’ Group and is responsible for organizing their annual conference to be held at MERL in April 2010. He also attended the annual conferences of the Oxford University Anthropological Society and Museums and Galleries History Group, in Oxford and London respectively.

Peter McShane is a co-opted member of the executive committee of the Berkshire Local History Association

Rhi Smith was awarded the Associateship of the Museums Association and delivered a paper ‘Students as producers of research’ at the 2009 9th International Conference of UMAC, UC Berkeley.

Fred van de Geer is a member of the South East Collections Emergency Response Unit, an assessor for the Professional Accreditation of Conservator-Restorers Scheme operated by the Institute of Conservation and a member of its Metals Section.

The MERL garden in summer looking at its best. Gardening was a recurring theme for the year’s programme.

Annual report 2008–2009

For more information, please contact:

Museum of English Rural Life University of Reading Redlands Road Reading, RG1 5EX

[email protected] Tel (0118) 378 8660

www.reading.ac.uk/merl

Documents

Annual report 2008–2009 - University of Reading · PDF file · 2009-11-24The Museum of English Rural Life is part of the ... a new ADLIB database acquired for the archive and