: Museums, Exhibitions and Events

While I enjoy going to the Youth Forum very much, I have to say a once-in-a-lifetime experience was not what I was expecting when I turned up last week. But there we were, in the art conservation room, a few feet away from an original Van Gogh, out of its frame on the next table, having just come back from being loaned to an American museum. I could have actually touched it (and I was quite tempted, though of course I didn’t).

Now, I’m not exactly an art aficionado, as you can properly tell by the way I haven’t included the name of the painting because I don’t know it, but I have to say it was pretty amazing. 

However, the focus of the meeting was actually the imposing The Welsh at Mametz Wood by war artist Christopher Williams, which is going to be part of a new exhibition focusing on the First World War battle at Mametz in a few months time.

This is a battle where hundreds of men from the Welsh Division were killed in July 1916, and thousands more were injured, something that the painting certainly doesn’t shy away from. It’s big, bloody, and quite brutal. While war sketches of poppies blooming among the trenches and beleaguered soldiers limping through mud evoke the tragedy of the slaughter that took place, they arguably don’t capture the fighting itself, but the aftermath, the few moments of calm in a four-year storm.

Christopher Williams (1873-1934), The Welsh Division at Mametz Wood, 1916 © National Museum of Wales

Williams’ painting does the opposite. The desperate struggle of the hand-to-hand slaughter was immediately obvious. It felt almost claustrophobic, the way the soldiers were almost piling on top of each other, climbing over their fallen comrades to try and take out the machine gunner. It was certainly a world away, as we discussed, from the posters bearing Lord Kitchener encouraging young men to enlist. We also talked about the way the painting is quite beautifully composed, almost in a Renaissance style.

It was hard to look at, but at the same time it was something you wanted to look at. 

After this, we went to the archives to look at some sketches made by Williams and other artists while at the trenches. I was about to get goosebumps for the second time that evening - one of them still had mud from the trenches staining the edges!

In any other context, 100-year-old mud probably wouldn’t have been very exciting, but this mud is so strongly linked in people’s minds with images of the First World War.

Think of the trenches, and you think of mud. People slept, ate and died surrounded by this mud; it seems to be inextricably bound up with the nightmare of having to live and fight in that environment, and made looking at the sketches even more powerful.

Another document we looked at was a sort of manual given to recruits of the Royal Welsh Division, containing poems, stories and pictures that the soldiers would have submitted themselves. It was touching to see one of the ways they would have injected moments of humour into their lives as soldiers, and also their own perspectives on their experiences. All in all, I’m really looking forward to seeing how this exhibition comes together, and learning more about Mametz, a part of the war I hadn’t even heard of until a couple of weeks ago. 

Holly Morgan Davies, 

National Museum Cardiff Youth Forum

St Fagans: National History Museum in the past 60 years has played an important role in collecting and recording the experiences of women in Wales. The Archive collections at St Fagans reflects the work done by several members of research staff to document the many facets that contributed to the lives of past generations of women in Wales, and continues to document their experiences. This blog focuses particularly on the work of one woman researcher, namely S. Minwel Tibbott, and her legacy, and on International Women’s Day looks at her invaluable contribution to document the lives of her fellow sisters in Wales.

S. Minwel Tibbott began working in St Fagans in the early 1960’s and later became Assistant Keeper. Her research work mainly focused on women’s everyday domestic lives collected via oral testimony, photography and film, and was set against a post Second World War Wales that was rapidly transforming, but for a number of women, life had stayed relatively unchanged for generations. Domestic appliances and labour saving devices were emerging and available, but out of the economic reach of many Welsh women at this time, however, as the 1960’s progressed and disposable income more commonplace this began to change.  Many of the images shown here therefore capture domestic rituals that may have been lost had it not been for the foresight of S. Minwel Tibbott to record them. St Fagans continues to record and document the lives of women in Wales via the #Creu Hanes #Making History project. Recent donations have included an archive collection relating to one Welsh woman’s experience at Greenham Common for example.

Miss Jones, Llanuwchllyn, Merionethshire making bread.

Here at St Fagans, many of our curators have been travelling the length and breadth of Wales co- producing audio-visual content for the new galleries.

Last week, my colleague Dafydd Wiliam and I began work on a new and exciting task, this time a little closer to home, a stone throw away in Tremorfa.

Over the next few months, our focus will be the Vulcan pub. We’ll be conducting oral histories with former customers and landlords of the former Adamsdown pub, recording and filming their experiences and memories. The completed interviews will be edited into a short film which will be displayed in one of the redeveloped galleries. But also we hope these memories will give us as curators, a clearer picture of life at the Vulcan, its culture and its community.

Our first interviewees were Rhona and Mel Rees, landlords of the Vulcan pub between 1983 and 1985. From the very beginning, it was clear that they were extremely fond of the pub and its customers, and that they thoroughly enjoyed their time there. They described the pub as their living room, and the words cosy, friendly, and fun, were said regularly. They had plenty of amusing and comic tales from the pub to tell, but they also touched on deeper themes, such as raising a family in a pub and also the economic side of things and the decline of the trade. All in all it was an eye-opening interview, and we learnt so much about their daily lives as landlords of the Vulcan in the 80’s.

My personal highlight of the interview was a story about a prank played on Mel’s 50^th birthday involving a kissogram visiting the Vulcan, but I won’t give too much away now!

Mel and Rhona truly captured the atmosphere and character of the pub and its people, and I can’t wait to go out again to meet and interview the people who knew this very special pub.

If you or somebody you know have stories or objects related to the Vulcan, we’d love to hear from you – please leave a message in the comments box below.

#MakingHistory #CreuHanes

John Roberts, 'Telynor Cymru, from Newtown, 1816-1894  

The Photographic Archive at St. Fagans: National History Museum has over 200,000 images in its collection and reflects Welsh Social and Cultural History. It documents people’s everyday life over the last few hundred years. The images capture the Welsh as they work, rest and play. The collection includes photographs from rural and industrial Wales of subjects such as: costume and dress; textiles; work and trades; domestic life; cultural life including music and sport; traditional craft; vernacular architecture; furniture and interiors. To celebrate St. David’s Day here are a few examples of the more steryotypical images from the collection! Dydd Gwyl Dewi Hapus I Bawb!

First Welsh Schoolboys team, 15 players and 12 officials, 1904.

Hello. Here is what has been happening play area wise in St Fagans!

Our artists have been talking to curators and visiting our stores. They now know all about the themes covered in the new galleries and are thinking of ways in which they can incorporate them into the play area design. Some of the themes are food, work, fun - which also covers toys and games (that one might work), customs and folklore, childhood, as well as the perhaps not so appropriate - sleep and death.

We have also been talking about language - having text in the play area, maybe incorporating lullabies and sound into it (or is that too horror film?), sound, music, pigsties, beds and enclosed spaces, gates! (we have a collection of photographs of lots of different gates in the collection, all with different names) roofs! washing.... so much we could do, so many things...

Fern Thomas (supporting artist) has been managing to do research into folk remedies for her own art work - she has been looking at remedies for physical ailments from all around Wales which all seem to say 'wrap a piece of bacon round it' whatever the problem is.

Imogen Higgins (supporting artist) has started documenting all the different play areas in Cardiff and has also started blogging about it. If you know of any interesting ones, perhaps you could let us know?

I went to talk to Woodlands Special Secondary School a couple of weeks ago and some of the students there are going to help us with the design. We have our first meeting this week, so I will let you know how it goes. Meanwhile, please share, comment, and let me know stuff you've come across. Will be updating again soon.