merl annual rep 2006 #01 - university of readingannual report 2005–2006 1 grand occasions there...

Annual Report 1st October 2005 – 30th September 2006

ContentsGrand Occasions 1Exhibitions 1Learning and Events Programme 3Collections 5Care and Conservation 6Designation Challenge Fund 7The Rural Museums Network 7Undergraduate Teaching 7Research 8Volunteer Programme 9Marketing 9Staff Activities 10 Publications 11

◗ Sir Max Hastings delivering the first Annual MERL Lecture. (Photo Nigel Keene)

The year has seen completion of works on the new Museum and the launch of new programmes of exhibitions and events. There have been significant externally-funded project initiatives for the collections and exciting developments on the Museum’s role in teaching and research.

1Annual Report 2005–2006

Grand OccasionsThere have been two special events in the Museum during the year. Last November, the Chancellor of the University, Lord Carrington, hosted a reception to thank all those organisations and individuals who had donated funds towards the new Museum project. In September 2006, Sir Max Hastings delivered the fi rst Annual MERL Lecture to an audience of over 300 people. His theme was the contribution made to the life of the nation over the last 80 years by the Campaign to Protect Rural England, of which Sir Max is President. The lecture was followed by a reception marking the completion of the new Museum project, at which the Vice Chancellor, Professor Gordon Marshall, presided. The Museum acknowledges the important contribution of the CPRE and of Thames Water to the success of this event.

Exhibitions Phased completion of the exhibition works in the new Museum building has continued. Most notably, the fi nal element looking at the present and the future of the countryside has been installed, additional interpretation and graphics have been introduced, and a number of interactive elements for younger audiences have been added. On the fi rst fl oor, the arrangement of the exploratory area for the rest of the object collection is complete and accessible for accompanied visitors. The exhibition was favourably reviewed in the February 2006 edition of Museums Journal.

◗ Andrew Palmer, member of the MERL Committee, unveiling the portrait of his great grandfather Alfred Palmer that has been moved to the staircase hall of what is now the Museum but which originally was Alfred Palmer’s home.

◗ The Chancellor, Lord Carrington, thanking donors and supporters at a reception in November.


◗ The final section of the new Museum exhibition includes a multi-screen film presentation looking at the past, present and future of the countryside.

◗ MERL holds the archive of Suttons Seeds and this year held an exhibition to mark the firm’s 200th anniversary.

A full programme of temporary exhibitions has been presented under the direction of Will Phillips. Some have come from outside, like the exhibition celebrating 80 years of the CPRE, whilst others, like the recent exhibition on Suttons Seeds have been developed in-house. The summer exhibition featuring the Women’s Institutes involved a collaboration between MERL, The Women’s Library and the Berkshire Federation of the WI.

COMPLETE LIST OF EXHIBITIONS:

Dig for Victory: The Women’s Land Army, 4th October – 22nd December 2005.

Faces of the South Downs, a photographic diary by Anne Purkiss, 10th January – 11th February 2006.

Beckett: John Haynes Photographs, as part of the Samuel Beckett centenary celebrations, 17th March – 18th April 2006.

New Perspectives. An Exhibition of Work by the Reading Guild of Artists using the Museum collections for inspiration. 25th April – 21st May.

Action Women: The Real Story of the Women’s Institutes, an exhibition with The Women’s Library, London Metropolitan University, 30th May – 27th August 2006.

80 Years of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, an exhibition by the CPRE, 8th August – 30th November 2006.

Suttons Seeds, 1806–2006, 12th September – 14th December 2006.

Land Girls – Then and Now, an exhibition of photographic portraits by Rory Carnegie in association with the Museum was held at South Hill Park, Bracknell, from 25th March to 7th May and viewed by approximately 2,500 people.


Learning and Events ProgrammeA series of public and family events was linked to the Museum’s temporary exhibitions. In October, ‘Their Past, Your Future’ Big Lottery funding provided a series of drop-in events to

accompany the ‘Dig for Victory’ exhibition during half term. Families were able to learn to milk using a dummy udder, plant pea, bean and cress seeds and decorate pots, and follow the Land Girls Snakes & Ladders game around the exhibition. The ‘Faces of the South Downs’ exhibition enabled us to do something a little different for February half term and photographer Anne-Katrin Purkiss taught families to take digital photographs and make images using light sensitive paper. At Easter, Setting Up Scheme Artist, Julie Roberts ran egg decorating and Easter card making workshops.

During May half term, the Museum was part of Reading Children’s Festival offering workshops linked to our Women’s Institute exhibition. Members of the WI demonstrated crafts and led workshops on felt making, icing, card making and basket making, which were repeated during the summer holidays.

A lecture series coincided with the WI exhibition and members of the WI and MERL visitors heard about a variety of topics such as ‘The WI & Interwar Drama’ from Dr Caitlin Adams and Dr Philip Kiszely; ‘Women, Work and Welfare in the Interwar Countryside’ from MERL Fellow, Dr Nicola Verdon; and ‘The Acceptable Face of Feminism: the WI as a Social Movement’ from Dr Maggie Andrews.

In June, the Museum took part in the Whiteknights Studio Trail for the fi rst time when artist Julie Roberts showed her work to over 300 people. Julie is a sculptural paper artist who joined us in February on an 18 month Setting Up Scheme placement funded by a bursary from the Arts Council.

During the summer holidays we ran more workshops and introduced the Magic Carpet and activities for families visiting the Museum. This was part of our contribution to a Family Friendly marketing initiative for museums in the Thames Valley region that was funded by MLA South East and Tourism South East.

◗ An Easter egg decorating workshop. (Photo Julie Roberts)


◗ Modelling Magic – even for the very young (above).

◗ Lots of things to do on the Museum’s Magic Carpet (left).

On the formal education side, this year has been a time for planning and piloting sessions for schools and students. In December, we worked with the University’s Widening Participation Offi ce to host 120 Year 10 pupils from Hereford as part of a manufacturing study day. Graeme Lindsell, our new Clerical Assistant who is a former science teacher, has been working on the development of some new science-based programmes for visiting Key Stage 3 groups.

In December, we welcomed PGCE History students to MERL who came to learn about using primary sources and artefacts in the classroom. For National Science Week, we partnered with Widening Participation, School of Continuing Education and the Medical Research Council to deliver a series of exciting Science/Art workshops for Key Stage 3 and VI form pupils. During the summer term, Key Stage 1 and 2 pupils visited the Museum to take part in Science-themed materials sessions based upon felt making, paper making and butter making. Key Stage 1 pupils also piloted the new Three Little Pigs literacy session.

Big Lottery ‘Their Past Your Future’ funding enabled MERL to run an oral history project between October and February focusing on the Women’s Land Army and commemorating the 60th anniversary of the ending of the Second World War. We recruited volunteers through

the Berkshire Federation of Women’s Institutes and interviewed 11 women now living in Berkshire who had played various roles in the WLA. Photographer Rory Carnegie took photographic portraits of the women and these, combined with photographs from the time and oral history transcripts, formed the basis of the exhibition ‘Land Girls: Then and Now’ which was shown at South Hill Park Arts Centre, Bracknell, in the Spring. ◗ This group was involved with a National Science

Week project on colour. (Photo Dr Lizzie Burns)


CollectionsOn the people front, our Archivist, Caroline Gould returned from maternity leave in January with Jen Glanville staying on as Assistant; Peter McShane took over as Librarian, with Lucy Atkinson as Assistant; and Dr Jonathan Brown moved into a new role of Information Offi cer. Activity has covered a great deal of behind the scenes work including an upgrade to the main collections database, a new locations index for the object collections – greatly helped by the work of volunteers – and, most particularly, extensive re-arrangement of the library and archive collections following the completion of a new archive store at the rear of the site and the inauguration of a joint reading room service with the University Library’s Special Collections.

The principal documentation initiative has been The Countryside Archive Project, with funding from the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation that will total £100,000. In the fi rst year, under Project Archivist Zoe Watson, 600 boxes of archives from 43 countryside organisations, including the Council for National Parks, Country Landowners Association, Campaign to Protect Rural England and the Milk Marketing Board, have been fully catalogued. In addition, the project is transferring over 300 reel to reel fi lms from the Ministry of Agriculture and the National Diary Council to a digital format so that their content can be preserved and made more generally accessible. To date, 110 Ministry of Agriculture fi lms have been completed and catalogue descriptions added to the Museum website.

◗ Amongst new acquisitions were photographs from Peter Adams, whose work appeared in leading agricultural periodicals from the 1980s.

◗ First-floor discovery area for the object collections.


At the end of the year, the Heritage Lottery Fund announced an award of £50,000 to a new partnership project between the Museum and the Road Locomotive Society which will enable more agricultural engineering records from the collections of both organisations to be properly catalogued and produce a travelling exhibition that will go to steam fairs and country shows.

Care and ConservationFred van de Geer, the Museum’s fi rst Accredited Conservator, took up his post in April 2006 and has been preparing a new conservation strategy for the object collections. With a grant from the Museum Development Fund of Renaissance South East, he has installed additional conservation equipment in the Museum workshop. A grant has also been received from the PRISM Fund to assist with conservation works on the Clayton & Shuttleworth portable steam engine in the collection.

MERL was commended in the 2005 Conservation Awards for its glass negatives preservation project. A further Collections Conservation Project, funded by a £20,000 grant from the Pilgrim Trust, has provided preservation materials to enable the Museum to undertake the re-packaging and preservation of many thousands of glass and fi lm negatives and photographs from the achives of Sutton Seeds, David Brown Tractors, Farmers Weekly, and the Eric Guy collection. Archive material from The Silsoe Research Institute and the Farm Mangement Survey has also been properly boxed. A team of 10 volunteers provided valuable assistance

throughout. A second element of the project involved the repair and re-binding of many volumes of The Field, The Miller and The Ironmonger, dating back to the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The work has ensured that these volumes are now fully accessible to researchers, thus signifi cantly enhancing the quality of the service we are able to provide.

◗ An image from the archive of the Rural Development Council in the MERL collections.


Designation Challenge FundA two-year £100,000 project, Rural Crafts Today, has been funded by the Designation Challenge Fund and began in April 2006. It is about relating the craft collections in museums to craft activity in the countryside today and includes fi lming rural craftspeople in their places of work. Ten fi lms are due to be made in all and the outcomes will include an exhibition, provision of resource materials to other museums, and online presentations. A professional fi lm crew is being used and so far footage has been compiled of a hayrake maker in Kent, a spale basketmaker in Cumbria, a Surrey potter and a hurdlemaker in Dorset. The project is linked to another similarly-funded and fi lm-based scheme at the Weald & Downland Open Air Museum in Sussex.

The Rural Museums NetworkMERL has successfully managed, on behalf of the Rural Museums Network, the fi rst phase of the Network’s Building Relevance Programme which was funded with a grant of £36,500 from the MLA under its support scheme for Subject Specialist Networks. The Programme is about developing new directions for rural museums and has involved focus group work around the country, pilot studies and continuing progress on collections surveys. The project reports are available on the Network’s website, www.ruralmuseumsnetwork.org.uk

Undergraduate TeachingWith the launch of the HEFCE-funded Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning in Applied Undergraduate Research Skills (CETL-AURS) at the beginning of the academic year, a new post of Undergraduate Learning offi cer was fi lled by Rhianedd Smith. The fi rst year of CETL funding provided the opportunity to research new undergraduate modules, one for fi rst year students and two for third years, to be based at MERL. These are designed to be cross-disciplinary and aim to attract students from a range of academic schools. In addition, the funding has provided resources to enhance teaching facilities and for initiatives to support student volunteering and the establishment of the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Programme. This funds summer bursaries for students at the end of their second year to undertake research-related activity and this year, for example, saw one student cataloguing the archive on the history of MERL.

◗ Like generations of the family before them, Alan and Steve Brown are hurdlemakers in Dorset. They have been filmed as part of the Rural Crafts Today project.


ResearchThe fi rst three MERL Research Fellows, Dr Andrew Godley, Dr Richard Bonser and Dr Nicola Verdon, took up their fellowships in October 2005. Their work covers disciplines as varied as business history, biomimetics and social and economic history. The initiative is already demonstrating exciting results, including the prospect of major external research funding bids and research publications. Two new Research Fellows have been appointed for 2006: David Viner, a museum professional of long standing who will be pursuing his interests in farm wagon collections, and Richard Tranter, from the University’s Centre for Agricultural Strategy, who will be developing his work on the effects of the pre-War agricultural depression.

At the heart of the strategy to promote the academic contribution of MERL’s collections and associated expertise is the work of the Rural Research Forum, established in 2004. Linking around 40 academic colleagues from across the University, the Forum has met three times in the past year and hosted a successful seminar programme.

Two MERL staff, Dr Roy Brigden and Kate Arnold-Forster, have been involved in membership of one of the University’s research themes on the Material Text. This has created opportunities to explore new subject areas linked to the collections, with the potential to open up interdisciplinary approaches to both historical and contemporary research into rural issues. This has led, for example, to contacts being established with colleagues in the Department of Film, Theatre and Television and the development of new areas of research that are currently the subject of research-funding applications. The aim is to draw together academic and curatorial disciplines in an investigation of changes in the English landscape between 1950 and 1980 as represented through documentary fi lm.

◗ Artist Andrew Davidson was commissioned to design a mural comparing the countryside of the 1850s and the 1950s within a single landscape. The completed artwork was enlarged to 8m wide and now hangs in the exhibition space.


Volunteer ProgrammeWith the support of the Higher Education Active Community Fund, together with a separate award from the University of Reading Annual Fund, Sadie Pickup was appointed part-time Volunteer Development Project Offi cer in October 2005.

Her role, which covers volunteers of all kinds but with a particular focus on building up the student volunteer workforce, was established to develop new and more sustainable approaches to developing the contribution made by volunteers across University museums and collections. As envisaged, the aim of this year’s project has been to both develop and trial a management scheme for volunteers, with the objective of putting in place systems that will allow us to increase our volunteer workforce substantially over the next 2–3 years. The project commenced with a survey of current volunteer activity and a needs audit in order to set up appropriate training and schemes of work. Up to 40 volunteers now give up their time weekly to undertake various projects for MERL. Volunteers range from job seekers and retired members of the local community (60%) to students (40%). In addition to their work on the collections, volunteers now act as weekend guides to provide a more personalised experience for visitors and access to storage areas of the Museum. The appointment of a Volunteer Development Project Offi cer has also enabled MERL to welcome ten work experience students over the last academic year.

MarketingThe Museum received 13,109 visitors in the year. In addition, there were 103,279 visitors to the website, making over 2.6 million hits between them, and staff answered 1,047 enquiries.

The Museum has hosted a range of events during the year, from the AGMs of the Rural Museums Network and the University Museums Group, to a seminar on ‘Living History’ by Farming & Countryside Education and a School of Continuing Education one day conference on ‘The Making of the Berkshire Landscape’. In December, Robin Wood’s new book The Wooden Bowl was launched with a reception at the Museum. The meeting room facilities have been used by a wide circle of external organisations including The Heritage Lottery Fund, MLA South East, The Road Locomotive Society, The Berkshire Industrial Archaeology Society and Berkshire Local History Association.

Recent marketing initiatives have included the development of a MERL archives marketing strategy as part of a joint project with Berkshire Record Offi ce, a survey of visitors to the reading room, and the award of a grant from the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council for further analysis of audience data over the coming year. In addition, the fi rst MERL electronic Newsletter, with updates on recent and forthcoming activities, appeared in August and was distributed via email to a long list of visitors, researchers, volunteers and friends of the Museum. It can also be downloaded from the Museum website. Most importantly, Alison Hilton has been appointed to a new post of Marketing Offi cer for the Museum from the beginning of October 2006.


Staff ActivitiesBekky Moran represents MERL at the Thames Valley Museums Marketing and Learning Groups. She is also on the Steering Committee of Reading Museum’s ‘Out of the Box’ project and South Hill Park’s ‘Unravel’ project and attends the ADSE/MLA South East Family Friendly Forum. During the year, she gave a lecture at the Portuguese Museums Association’s ‘Writing Accessible Text’ event in Lisbon; gave the keynote speech and chaired the Museums Association’s national training event ‘Accessible Text for Museums’; ran three training sessions on ‘Family Learning in Museums’ for Thames Valley museums; spoke about the Family Friendly project at the joint South Midlands Museum Federation/Visitor Studies Group event on Audience Development; and spoke at four Arts Council events in the South East region about family learning in museums. She has also participated in teaching PGCE students at the University and MA students in Curating and Contemporary design at Kingston University.

Will Phillips has given 22 talks to a wide variety of groups including an object handling session for a visually impaired group, a talk on museum architecture to an A level History of Art class, training sessions for volunteer museum guides, and talks about the Museum to visiting organisations.

Rhianedd Smith recently became an accredited trainer for the Tourism South East Welcome to Excellence scheme; gave a paper at the UMAC/ ICOM conference in Mexico; gave lectures about museums in the departments of History, Archaeology and Classics; and is undertaking a Post Graduate Certifi cate in Academic Practice at the University of Reading.

◗ The MERL team was not great at dragon boat racing, but it did raise over £500 for a cancer charity!


Kate Arnold-Forster was appointed a member of the Designation panel, as a representative of University Museums, by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council and was a member of the MLA South East Workforce Development Strategy Working Party, 2004–2006. She has continued to serve as a Committee member of Thames Valley Museums Group and as an External Examiner, School of World Art Studies and Museology, University of East Anglia, on the Museums Association Professional Review Panel, and as a Committee member of the University Museums Group. She is a member of the Museums Advisory Group for the Royal College of Surgeons.

Peter McShane is a committee member of the Berkshire Local History Association and Dr Jonathan Brown edits its journal, Berkshire Old and New.

Fred van de Geer attended the annual meeting of assessors for Conservation Accreditation.

Dr Roy Brigden is Chairman of the Rural Museums Network; Praesidium member of the International Association of Agricultural Museums, attending a meeting at the Canadian National Agriculture Museum, Ottawa; President of the Society for Folklife Studies, attending conferences in Cork and Skipton; and Board member of Milton Keynes Museum. He chaired a session on Distributed National Collections at the Museums Association’s Conference and spoke to the annual conference of the Social History Curators Group. He contributed to a sound guide for the exhibition George Stubbs: A Celebration, at Tate Britain.

PublicationsBrigden, Roy, ‘The New Museum of English Rural Life’, Museums & Heritage, 2, 2006, pp.57–59.

Brigden, Roy, ‘Leckford: a case-study of interwar development’ in Brassley, Burchardt, & Thompson (eds) The English Countryside Between The Wars, Boydell Press, 2006, pp 200–211.

Brown, Jonathan, Farming in Lincolnshire 1850-1945, History of Lincolnshire Committee, 2005, 295pp.

Lawrence, Peter, ‘The Museum of English Rural Life, University of Reading: Two projects for engravers to show off their other skills’, Multiples. The Newsletter of the Society of Wood Engravers, vol 6, no.4, July 2006, pp76–79.

McShane, Peter, ‘Annual List of Publications on Agrarian History, 2004’, The Agricultural History Review, vol 54, 2006, pp142–157.

The Museum of English Rural LifeThe University of ReadingRedlands Road, Reading, RG1 5EX

Telephone: 0118 378 8660

Email: [email protected]

www.merl.org.uk

To subscribe to the Newsletter, email [email protected]

The Museum was Accredited in 2006 by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council.

merl annual rep 2006 #01 - university of readingannual report 2005–2006 1 grand occasions there...

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