'Cabinets of Wonder': Royal Albert Memorial Museum

'Cabinets of Wonder'

Perhaps you were wondering,

"where did this museum thing begin?"

If so, the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, RAMM, in Exeter

has answers for you. 

Around 500 years ago,

'rulers and nobles', wanting to 'possess the wonders of the world',

collected unusual and exotic objects,

creating 'Cabinets of Wonder'.

A couple of centuries on, collectors began to be more systematic,

focussing on types of objects.

Their collections were often donated to public museums,

to contribute to scientific knowledge,

as objects for earnest learning.

Museums were serious business,

promoting proper learning and self improvement.

These collectors brought us...

...butterflies

...and more butterflies

very specifically from Bishopsteignton, Devon,

displayed in drawers.

...spiders

and flint tools.

I've shown you these before, in a previous post, here,

about things 'lost'

in the vicinity of Exeter.

Some collections appear slightly less thematic,

a bit random

and need more than a glass cabinet or drawer in which to display them.

Such as this Italian harpsichord and Kilimanjaro Giraffe.

Nowadays, collecting is not the preserve of rulers and nobles.

The RAMM invites you to become a collector.

Anyone can start a collection,

don't be put off by Giraffes and harpsichords.

Head to the beach.

Get out and about in the countryside.

Have a dig around in your garden.

 One day your collection

might be the beginnings of a museum.

 And when you have opened that museum,

you can invite visitors to say what they think.

 They'll be interested and amazed.

And tell you what they like about your collection.

And you might find out that you've made a space for people to connect,

and spend time together,

making museums more than serious learning and self improvement.

It's amazing what inspires people to start collecting.

Some things you just have to keep, and add to,

creating your own 'Cabinets of Wonder'.

Antlers found in Scotland,

sheep's ribs found on Dartmoor,

teeny tiny shells scooped up in your hands from a beach in Brittany,

coloured shards of sandblasted glass picked up on the beach in Teignmouth,

a gecko's skull,

bottle tops, all 357 of them,

stones from the beach, that always look better wet,

and a current seasonal occupation, conkers,
all litter the shelves of our house.

Get collecting,
and perhaps take your 'nana' to see what others have collected,
to the RAMM in Exeter.
A brilliant place to spend time,
both with objects and grandparents.

Details on the RAMM website, here.

The Norfolk Broads, it's not all about boats.

We have just come back from an extended family holiday on the Norfolk Broads.

Here are some of my family, the ones who love sailing,

including the teenagers in their own tiny dinghy (on the right).

You sail, sleep & eat on those boats,

a bit like caravanning on water.

To ensure we had enough crew for three yatchs and a dinghy,

combined with my slightly irrational fear of sailing,

we hired a cruiser.

A beautiful vintage wooden 1950s cruiser.

I don't love sailing (too much leaning) but I do love museums.

So we had to,

we went,

to the Museum of the Broads.

 I really did try and get a thing for the boats.

As impressive as they are

they are just not my thing,

either in water or on dry land.

Boats might not be my thing

but I do love textiles and a bit of 'crafts'.

 And as I discovered there's a lot more to the Norfolk Broads.

Many traditional crafts.

Such as Rushwork

It is beautiful.

East Anglia's oldest recorded industry dating back to Anglo Saxon times.

This was all made by Dorothy Baker.

To help preserve the art of rushwork,

Dorothy Baker travelled around Norfolk in the late 1930s

demonstating how to work with rushes.

It requires working with 3ply or 9ply braids, using a sail makers needle.

Not for delicate hands. 

Dorothy Baker was obviously very proficient.

The Women's Institute awarded her an A grade,

95 out of 100,

in July 1938.

More crafts,

(of a sort)

Knots.

Knots with names,

shapes,

patterns,

for different uses.

You could have a go for yourself.

As someone not impartial to working with yarn,

I did.

Knotting is a skill.

Up high in one of the old boat sheds,

I spotted these cross-stitch pictures.

Intrigued,

I asked a volunteer about them.

"They're done by one of our old boys,

he's had both hips replaced."

said a volunteer who had just turned eighty the Saturday before.

The beautiful craftsmanship of an eighty-four year old.

Shame he can't join the Women's Institute,

he deserves a certificate for proficiency in 'Home Crafts'.

As for me,

I did manage a spot of sailing

in a very gentle wind,

then straight back to the crochet and rum.

Here's our cruiser, Judith 5

with a nephew,

moored at Horsey.

 And just prove I was really there...

That's me driving!

Visit Museum of the Broads

Stalham Staithe, Norfolk.

Details on their website.

I might not have taken to sailing

but the Broads have surely captured my heart.

Your Place at Bromley Museum

Local Museums tell local stories,

and what could be more local than objects from your own home.

Bromley Museum invite us to look at objects from homes in the 1930s through to the 1950s

and see how many we can identify from our own homes.

Not much guessing needed,
but a lovely look at design from different decades.

To help us connect with the past

(with the Twentieth century),

Bromley Museum has a gallery called 'Your Place'

where you might recognise a few things.

If you're too young to remember these particular objects,

you can definitely make comparisons with them as they exist today

and listen to your mum reminiscing about her own childhood

and what her grand-parents used to have.

 Particularly the polyester dressing gown,

which if you took it off in the dark,
lit up your bedroom with static in a sci-fi kind of way.
This also rang true for polyester jumpers from C&A.

My youngest two,

having just finished primary school only the week before,

completely got the vase with school leavers names on it.

For them it was a white T-shirt and fabric pens.

They all signed each other's T-shirt and wrote messages.

Memories are not all about objects.

Sometimes it's smells.

Clove oil, smelling salts, mint, lavender, coal-tar soap and baby powder.

We discussed smells we like;

"That pink cream, Germoline"

"Mowed grass"

"Warm just-photocopied paper"

and...?

"Damp towels"

The smell of "warm just photocopied paper" has probably got to wait a few more years 

before it becomes nostalgic.

Mind you, I was pleased to see that photocopying had been used by Bromley Museum

for all the best reasons.

"I bought that magazine when I was at school!" I exclaimed excitedly.

Three eleven year olds were totally nonplussed.

Bromley Museum invite you find out about some of its famous residents.

Charles Darwin.

Napoleon.

Enid Blyton.

Imagine, exploring all this whilst dressed as a Saxon and a Tudor!

Sometimes we forget how far technology has come.

In 1708 Queen Anne passed a law saying that
each parish had to provide and maintain a fire-engine.

This is the "Squirt."
"But it's made of wood!?!"

The novelty value of dialing a telephone,

dressed as a Tudor in the Twenty-first century.

Bromley Museum is open Mondays to Saturdays,

closed for lunch each day between 12.30-1.30pm.

There's much more to see at Bromley Museum.
I haven't mentioned the displays from Pre-historic, Roman, Tudor, Saxon and Victorian times.
Visit and see for yourself. 

Big and small in the V&A

Differences in scale can serve to highlight just how extraordinary some objects in museums actually are.

On a visit to the V&A,
we saw the very big and the very small.

We began with the very big.

Just because something was big,

it did not put the Victorians off collecting,

and bringing things back to display.

This is not the original

Trajans Column, AD113, from Rome,

but a cast made in plaster, now in the Cast Courts.

The original column is 38 meters high.

The cast has been cut in half to fit into the V&A.

There is a continuous frieze running around it,

depicting over 2,500 figures.

As we considered the enormity of making plaster casts of such huge feats of architecture,

we asked ourselves whether the V&A did this themselves.

They did.

This 'remarkable Victorian phenomenon' of collecting casts

was embraced by the V&A in the nineteenth century

and is now one of the few cast collections around the world to survive.

Here's how casts were made.

It's brilliant how you can walk amongst these huge objects,

close up to replicas of architecture from all over Europe,
close enough to see even the smallest of details.

Like this tomb of St Sebaldus 1529,

from Germany,

originally in bronze.

 Supported by giant snails.

We liked the snails, they "looked grumpy."
But why snails?

And the front of this cathedral from Spain.

The Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, 1188. 

My only experience with plaster, was making Beatrix Potter characters as a child
using kits with rubber moulds.
These casts put mine to shame, and I can still remember
that, "I never really got round to painting them",
I tell my fifteen year old.
Her knowledge of plaster:
"did you know the wands in Harry Potter are made of plaster."

On to the very small.
This is why we had come to the V&A,
to revisit the Silver Galleries.

Remembered from six years ago,
the dolls house furniture.

Tea sets on trays.

 Pots and pans.

Place settings.

Games.

Excuse the chipped nails.
But look how small that teapot actually is.

Sugar shakers, cutlery canteens and candle sticks.

Teeny, tiny plates.

It was all there,

just as it had been six years ago.

We still want it.

Perhaps you never really grow out of wanting a dolls house

and all the possibilities of the furniture required to fill it.

Not until you're old enough to know how much polishing all that silver requires, you don't.

Big and small in the V&A.

Cast Courts and Silver Galleries.

Details on the V&A website.

The dolls house furniture was 

a teeny, tiny part of their huge collection of silver.

Have a look at the Silvery Galleries website page here.

Bromley Museum: What the label doesn't tell you.

Local museums attract local people
and if you're really lucky you get to chat to them,

because they "pop in every now and then to see what has changed".

Who better to talk to about the objects in Bromley Museum

than the locals.

Whatever the labels say,

you can't beat hearing someones personal experience with objects in museums.

It's a bit like looking at laundry labels with all those washing symbols,

you sometimes learn more from personal experience,

surely you really don't have to hand wash?

Take the Victorian washing Dolly.

As Bromley Museum tells us,

"was still in use in some areas well into the 20th century".

 Well according to the couple I was chatting to,
it still is in use,
in the 21st century.

Her: "Our neighbour in her early 80s still uses one of those for her sheets."

Him: "Mind you he might be doing it now because she's not so good on her feet."

I was full of admiration for their neighbour,

I can hardly keep up with washing our family's bedding
with a fully automatic washing machine,

and I'm half her age.

The Mangle, 1910.

Not immediately obvious as to what it is when you have been born in the 21st century.

"An iron?"

"Something you use to dry things?"

They had deduced that it was to help with the laundry...

...but no-one could have guessed that the mangle meant status.

"You used to show off if you had a mangle.

If you were rich you had a mangle,

you'd go to school and tell everyone, 'we've got a mangle'.

We might have lived in a council house in Green Street Green,

but we were rich because we had a mangle."

Her mother's mangle was scrubbed weekly to keep those rollers spotless

and the pressing saved on ironing.

"See, I was right, it was to do with ironing."

That put me in my place.

Bromley Museum is open Mondays to Saturdays,

closed for lunch each day between 12.30-1.30pm.

Nowadays the laundry can be done at the same time as visiting a museum.

If you put on a load before you leave the house,

it might be ready to hang out when you get home.