Rachel:
(upbeat music) Welcome to talking into a podcast by five trainee curators, working in museums and galleries across Cornwall.
Sarah:
So if you're thinking about getting started as a museum professional, we're here to share with you some of our experiences and lessons learned, setbacks and successes, from the early stages of our careers.
Katie:
So join us, Sian from Wheal Martyn Clay Works, a Victorian China clay works in mid Cornwall.
Sarah:
Sarah from Bodmin Keep, Cornwall's Army museum.
Katie:
Katie also from Bodmin Keep.
Lizzy:
Lizzy from Falmouth Art Gallery.
Rachel:
And Rachel from the Museum of Cornish life.
Sian:
As we make a daring attempt to break into the museum...
Rachel: Industry.
Sian:
Yes, industry, that's what I meant.
Sarah:
Coming up on today's episode. For me, it felt like one of the most genuinely inclusive exhibitions I've ever been to.
Katie:
One of the first things that our director at Bodmin Keep ever said to me was that "military history is social history".
Rachel:
It kind of reminds me of that song from little shop of horrors about the dentist every time I walk past it. (music ends)
Rachel:
Welcome back to Talking intern, a podcast where five trainee curators from across museums and galleries in Cornwall, discuss all things, culture and heritage. My name is Rachel. I'm the trainee curator at the Museum of Cornish Life. And I'm joined as always by Katie and Sarah from Bodmin Keep: Cornwall's Army museum, Lizzy from Falmouth art gallery and Sian from Wheal Martyn Clay Works. Now tell me team, are we feeling refreshed after the weekend, Sian, what have you been up to, apart from feeding your dog pasty meat?
Sian:
Driving the lovely Cornish country lanes and having the suspension spring, just pop out of my car. So just a normal weekend, really.
Rachel:
(laughs) Average Saturday on the Cornish roads. I like it.
Sian:
(laughs) Absolutely, yep!.
Rachel:
Sarah. What's going on with you in London?
Sarah:
Oh, it was a very exciting weekend. Had my first socially distant pint at my local pub.
Rachel:
Fantastic. And Lizzy, what have you been up to?
Lizzy:
I just finished making a coffee cake. I've yet to ice it but looks good so far.
Katie:
Very jealous.
Rachel:
Fantastic (laughs). We were just saying, if you could email us a slice, that would be hugely appreciated (laughs). And finally, Katie, how about you?
Katie:
I saw four adorable kittens that I could fit in the palm of my hand this weekend. So I'm very happy.
Rachel:
How many in your pockets?
Katie:
Yep, one in each hand, one in each pocket, set (laughter).
Rachel:
Amazing. Today we are going to be discussing social history, a term which is used widely to describe museum collections. But what does it actually mean? I'm interested to know team, what the term social history means to you. So Katie let's come to you first.
Katie:
Yeah. Social history is a really odd thing to define. And before I started working in museums, I had absolutely no idea what it was. And, at its core, now I would define it as it's about people, and it's about stories in the past. One of the first things that our director at Bodmin Keep ever said to me was that "military history is social history". I'm not a military historian. I never planned to work in a military museum. So it's really helpful for me to reframe our collection as about stories and people, rather than getting bogged down in cap badges or types of weapons or when a particular battle happened, it should be about people and groups of people and their stories.
Sarah:
Yeah, I totally agree. Katie. I think personally I find the term social history a bit misleading because you know, all history has social impact. So therefore all history, whether that be history of science, history of art, political, economic, military history, all of it is social history. However, I mean, in a museum context, just for ease of reference, social history, collections and displays will be emphasizing human stories, how particular people and communities shaped and were shaped by history. I'm really interested in how social history, collections reveal, powerful narratives of inclusion and exclusion and reflect the evolving relationships between different groups.
Sian:
See, I do agree with you, Sarah. I do agree that you could call all bits of history, social history, but I do think even though the term could be misleading, I do kind of think that it's important to make that distinction just because historically we haven't always centered the narratives of, you know, ordinary, everyday people. We've not been interested in them really. We've been interested in, you know, kings and lofty, I don't know, Barons or whatever (laughs). I think, it is quite important to make the distinction for social history, to me personally, to answer the question, I think social history is kind of focusing on everyday people and trying to tell the stories of the majority, I suppose, would be how I would describe it.
Rachel:
Lizzy, what's your concept of social history?
Lizzy:
Being at the art gallery, it's kind of different. Generally I think of objects that belonged to everyday people. So we don't have a lot of those kinds of items actually in the art gallery stuff that you'd classify as social history, but I guess you could count the artwork as social history. We've got other stuff like artists' sketchbooks as well. So actual kind of more personal items than a finished painting on a massive canvas. So you see how they've kind of developed their artwork, what's going on in their brain kind of thing. Yeah. So it makes me mostly think of personal items from someone's life that tell a story or describe a certain moment in time that are worth preserving.
Rachel:
Yeah, I'd absolutely agree with that. And personally, I feel very lucky to work at the Museum of Cornish Life in Helston because it houses one of the largest social history collections in the Southwest. So the collection ranges from archaeological finds from some of the earliest settlers to the Lizard Peninsula, to musical instruments used by Helston town band, local school photographs from the 1930s, a fully stocked 1950 shop. The common thread between these things for me anyway, is people. And I think social history provides a historical lens through which to examine ourselves and essentially our connectivity to one another. You might remember when we went on a study trip to London, we met Hazel Forsyth, who is the senior curator of the medieval and post medieval collections at the Museum of London. And she told me afterwards, don't lose sight of the fact that history is fundamentally about people, us. I think the inwardly interrogative nature of history is particularly true for social history collections.
Rachel:
So this brings me on to our next question. And I know in the past we've talked amongst ourselves about inclusivity and museums. Do you think people will be more likely to engage with social history collections if they see themselves reflected in the collections in some way? So in essence, if social history museums invested in more diverse narratives within their collections, would people be more likely to visit and how as curators can we ensure that social history collections are made more inclusive and reflective of whole communities? Sarah, let's start with you.
Sarah:
So museums are powerful shapers of society and they can reinforce the power dynamics that exist within society. So to see yourself and your identity represented in a museum is incredibly validating. I think that the curator and founder of the Museum of Transology, E. J Scott, captures really emotively, just how important inclusion is. He writes, "to not be included on the walls of a museum is to be rendered historically homeless.It is to be told that your existence is meaningless, that you are the unspeakable that you are destined to be forgotten." So you know, why would you want to visit a space where you feel forgotten, where your experience of the world isn't acknowledged? So, absolutely, I totally believe that representation within museum collections and displays can be one really good way to encourage diverse people through the doors. And it's something that we as curators actually have the power to do, to influence. In terms of ensuring that this representation is actually authentic and not tokenistic, the Museum of Transology is a brilliant case study. Scott gathered everyday items and stories from the local trans community in Brighton and built a collection of over 250 objects from 108 trans people. And in the exhibition, the interpretive labels for each object were written by whoever donated it. So for me, it felt like one of the most genuinely inclusive exhibitions I've ever been to, it was really enlightening. And I can only imagine what that experience must have been like for any trans museum visitors. How about you, Sian? What's your experience with this been like?
Sian:
Yeah, I completely agree with Sarah. And I think that was a really nice case study that you pointed out as well, because what I wanted to add was that, as curators often we're seen as kind of back of house, we're seen as looking after the collections, but not really having much to do with engagement. And I think that's actually quite a positive change that I notice in museums lately, is that collections and engagement work seems to be not only merging and blurring together, but even if it isn't doing that, there seems to be more work and collaboration between the departments, even if they are completely
separate. Because I think we really do need to engage with the community and with people. It's all well and good trying to tick off a box and think, Oh, I need to do this because this will look good. You know, that's just kind of cold. And I think it's sort of empty as well. If museums really want to make sure that they are reflecting the stories of their community and they are capturing everyone in the community, they actually need to make the effort of engaging the community, of asking people of doing public engagement work. So I think that's probably a really important thing to do. And my case study would probably be the Museum of Ordinary people. It might be a pretty easy one to pick, but it's really great. You know, it's using a collection of things that people have just chucked away in the past. So obviously things that weren't kind of important to them at the time, like diaries, love letters, things like that, but because they belonged to people, because they are important in that way and were reclaimed. Now they make up the bulk of the collection. And I think that's so interesting. We think of social history as just, when you need to define it, it's every single thing about our lives. And often things that we don't even think are very important, you know, or worth reflecting. But if we had those pieces of history that were reflecting different people's lives and stories from different backgrounds, then it would draw more people in. One thing that is a barrier to visiting museums, and not only to visiting museums, but to working and volunteering in museums, is the feeling that museums aren't for you wherever, for whatever reason. And it is the responsibility of museums to make sure that people don't feel that way. I don't think that it's the responsibility of individual people to kind of force themselves into a museum space, if it's not making them comfortable. It's the museum that really has the responsibility of making sure that they are bringing people in by making sure that they are telling everyone's story, that they are reflecting back everyone's narrative. Or they are at least making the effort to engage with people outside of, just back of house collections work.
Lizzy:
I think if you want to increase inclusivity, you should start with visiting actual marginalized communities in your area, working with charities and such, before actually starting working with your collections. So bringing people in and collaborating with them. You need to go out and meet people where they are at their level and open a discussion, to actually build the relationships with these people. So they trust you enough to work with them. And then you need to think about what they have to say. Are we hearing their stories clearly and actually representing them in a way that they want to be perceived, rather than just the first thing we think about. Co-curation is a little daunting at first, but collaborating with people just brings in new eyes and new perspectives and it opens a lot more doors to you. We also need to go back through all of our documentation and interpretation, really assess our collections, whether we are being inclusive, especially in our choice of language, which is a massive task, but it's the talks that will ensure longevity and relevance of our collections in the future.
Katie:
I absolutely agree Lizzy, that you've got to start with relationships and you've got to build trust because otherwise these communities are not going to come. They're not going to feel welcome. So thinking about inclusivity, there was a great webinar recently on bias by the Inclusivity Project who are based in Cornwall. And they talked a lot about affinity bias, which is that people are attracted to people who look like them or think like them. So if you're making your collections more diverse or you're bringing out those diverse stories, then you can use affinity bias in a really like sneaky, positive way, because you can attract everyone to the museum. As we've said before, I think often people feel that museum spaces aren't for them, because they've been marginalized because historically museums were for rich white men who took objects from the colonies. And we know this from marketing, that if you only show, say a white nuclear family on your website, then anyone else is not going to think that the museum is for
them. Whereas if your collections, your advertising, your staff, if everything is more diverse, then everyone is going to feel more welcome.
Rachel:
Yeah. That reminds me Katie of a fantastic social history seminar we had recently with Dr. Tehmina Goskar from the Curatorial Research Centre, and she was talking about inclusivity and social history. I think social history collections especially have a responsibility to represent society as inclusively as they can. But I also think it's important that this isn't done as a tick box activity. I think Sarah touched on this briefly early on when she was talking about it becoming tokenistic. It can't be done as a tick activity and interpretation really needs to be considered fully and thoughtfully. And I think consulting various community groups as suggested by Lizzy, about aspects like interpretation can be incredibly, incredibly helpful. So for my final question for you all, I would just like you to tell me about an object within a social history collection, which you found particularly engaging, and it's okay to plug objects from your own museums here, because I certainly will be. Lizzy. What you want to tell us about?
Lizzy:
I love the sketchbooks we have in our collection, especially the ones from Marjorie Williams that we've got so many of them. And for the exhibition we had just before we closed for lockdown, I was allowed to rifle through them all and pick out sketchbooks and open them to pages, to display in a vitrine, which is easily the best thing I've done so far. It's amazing. It's like picking the artist's brain and seeing how they see the world basically before, like I've said before, before it goes up onto a finished thing, like a canvas or in a sculpture.
Rachel :
Amazing. And what about you, Sian?
Sian:
If I'm going to be honest, it's got to be the photograph collection that we've got. So Wheal Martyn Clay works is a china clay museum. Obviously I've mentioned it before, but ECC, the English China Clay's company basically set up the museum in the seventies for the miners, for the China clay workers and their families. So we've got this amazing archive and this brilliant photograph collection, the English China Clay's photograph collection. And it's not just kind of groups of workers setting and looking at the camera, although those are really great. And I do love them, especially when it's a big photograph of lots of people, and some people look like they really want to be there. Some are absolute posers, they're proper giving it smiles and all that. And some people are grumpy as anything. I think it's great, but there are also loads of photographs that we have of local festivals, local dances, things that you just, you don't, I don't know about. And it's so fascinating to see all these tiny little clay villages. And they each had a brass band connected to them and they each had their own dance and their own parade. And I think that's such a cool way of just tapping into kind of like folk culture and, you know, pieces of what people were doing in the past, like what people actually doing in their free time, what they were excited about, what they were spend their money on, you know, learning an instrument, you know, being part of the brass band, being part of the community in that way. So I love the photographs I really do. And I think that with all industrial museums because it's such hard physical work. And because a lot of the time, the villages around industrial centres were basically, their genesis was to, you know, accommodate the workers in that industry and their families. People need to let off steam in their free
time. So it's fascinating to me just to see what people choose to do with their free time and what makes them happy. So I love those photographs. They really do bring me joy.
Katie:
My absolute favorite object is the Lucknow quilt, because as you all know, I'm a massive textiles nerd. So it was made during the siege of Lucknow in 1857, which is when 3000 soldiers and civilians barricaded themselves into the Governor's residency for six months, because they were under attack from Indian troops, which is not a period of history I knew anything about before working at a military museum. And the name of the war itself is really interesting from a social history point of view because the British call it, the Indian Mutiny, implying that the Indian population had like broken the rules, you know, as if they were serving on a ship or in an army, whereas in India, it's called the First War of Independence. So breaking away from Britain. And the quilt itself is made out of dead soldiers uniforms. So thinking about what you do in your spare time, Sian, it's white, blue and red, and then the green sections of it are made from the top of a billiards table, that like green fuzzy, fuzzy fabric.
Sian:
Oh wow.
Rachel: Amazing
Katie:
Because they couldn't leave the building to go and get more fabric. So they just had to use what they had. And another interesting thing is that initially we were assuming that the quilt had been made by a woman, but actually military quilts in this period were made by male soldiers. We don't know his name and we don't know who he is, which makes it even more intriguing. So in just that one object, you've got colonial bias in how you think about the physical name of a conflict and how different nations view that conflict. And you've also got a really interesting conversation about gender roles and assuming that all textiles in the past were made by women, which is just not true.
Rachel:
Sarah, which social history object do you feel like sharing with us today?
Sarah:
So Bodmin Keep has this amazing collection of trench art, which is something I've not heard of before coming to work at army museum, but it's sort of an umbrella term for these decorative objects or little trinkets fashioned out of battlefield debris. So that's empty shell or bullet casings. And they're all such like amazingly detailed pieces. But my favorite is this tiny little airplane with a moving propeller. And it's actually made out of bullets. Trench art was usually made by soldiers just behind the front lines, prisoners of war and civilians, many of whom whose towns and livelihoods were destroyed by war time, shellfire, and battle. And so the pieces were made to pass time, to be a memento of the war, to be bartered for other goods, and to help people get through economic deprivation. For me, these objects are so fascinating because they perfectly embody the resilience of people in horrendous situations and the sort of human ability to make something beautiful from such ugliness and terror. So yeah, I think they're really poetic even though they're just little sort of trinkets, I suppose. They're not considered a part of a serious collection of more serious army museums, I guess.
Rachel:
I find it really difficult to choose one object from the Museum of Cornish Life because I'm surrounded by such amazingly diverse social history, every time I walk through the door to go to work. But perhaps this one is a little macabre. I really like this dentist drill from I'd say the early 20th century, which is actually operated by a foot pedal. So it was used by a dentist on Meneage Street, in Helston, who was known for his uncompromising attitude towards patients whilst extracting their teeth (others exclaim). It kind of reminds me of that song from Little Shop of Horrors about the dentist every time I walk past it (laughs) It's such a characterful piece of equipment and it really must have seen and heard a lot I would expect. So yeah, I would absolutely choose the dentist drill. Thank you team for another very thought provoking discussion. (cheerful background music starts) I look forward to the next, so Katie, you're going to be chairing that one. What will we be talking about?
Katie:
Next time, we're going to be looking at disability and accessibility in museums.
Rachel:
Fantastic. And thanks also to everyone listening and bye for now.
Katie:
This podcast has been kindly supported by Cornwall Museums partnership, Cornwall Council, the John Ellerman Foundation, Cultivator, European Structural and Investment funds and Arts council England.
Lizzy:
You can listen to this podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever else you find your podcasts.
Rachel:
Make sure you subscribe so you can be notified as soon as it's released.
Sian:
You can also follow us on Twitter @CornwallInterns, all one word, to keep up to date on what we're doing in the museums around Cornwall. See you soon (music ends).