: Collections & Research

It’s really important that we continue to stay at home and stay safe here in Wales. During this Whitsun week many of you are getting creative and camping in the garden or enjoying a staycation in the caravan on the drive. Some of you might be reminded of camping or caravanning trips to the Urdd Eisteddfod over the years, or to some of your favourite holiday spots along our coast. So, to help us all with a little holiday nostalgia as we stay at home, here’s Ian Smith, Curator at the National Waterfront Museum with a little of the history behind this picture:

This image was taken about 1951 and features the Dodds family who lived in Cardiff. Mr Dodds commissioned the caravan in 1950 to be built and fitted out by Louis Blow & Co in Canton, Cardiff. The van cost £600.00 which was a small fortune in those days. The family toured all over South Wales, eventually though the van was left permanently on a farmer’s field near Newport in Pembrokeshire. There, the family had all their summer holidays until 2009.

The family planned the layout and it included such things as a special cupboard top that the baby’s carry cot would fit perfectly; a fold down double bed for Mother and Father and a sliding oak dividing screen which effectively formed two bedrooms. There was a small kitchen with a gas stove and a sink with a footpump tap to provide washing water. Drinking water had to be colleced in big aluminium containers – a good job for the children if they needed tiring out. The awning doubled the size of the living space and provided an area to keep things dry.

In 2009 the museum was offered the caravan by Michael Dodds, then in his 70s. Mike is the older boy at the back of the group in the picture. The caravan is on display in St Fagans National Museum of History in the ‘Life Is …’ Gallery.

Last week, we launched an online questionnaire asking for your experiences and feelings of living in Wales during the coronavirus pandemic. From the responses we’ve received so far, it seems that a number of you are finding comfort and peace of mind through making – from quilts to facemasks, scrub bags to small embroideries. The connection between making and improved mental health is of course widely-known, with studies showing that craft and the visual arts can help to alleviate anxiety and stress in some people.

The textile collection at St Fagans includes several pieces which reveal the historic interplay between craft and mental health. These include needlework stitched by sailors on long voyages away from home, to more formal forms of occupational therapy made by convalescing patients. In all cases, we can only assume that the repetitive rhythm of the making process, and the focus required to complete the task, must have benefitted the makers in some way. I say ‘assume’ because the voices of these makers are usually missing from the narrative, which makes documenting current experiences of crafting through the pandemic even more important.

One of the most poignant pieces in the collection is a tablecloth made at Whitchurch Hospital, embroidered with the signatures of a group of soldier-patients and staff in 1917. During the First World War, the Cardiff City Mental Hospital (as Whitchurch was then called) was ceded to the military and became known as the Welsh Metropolitan War Hospital (1915-19). Civilian psychiatric patients were moved to other institutions, while injured soldiers returning from the frontline occupied their beds. From 1917 until 1919, the hospital specialized in both orthopaedic and mental health conditions.   

The signatures embroidered on the tablecloth include two important figures in the history of psychiatric care in Wales – Dr Edwin Goodall and Matron Florence Raynes. Goodall, an eminent psychiatrist who trained at Guy’s Hospital in London, was appointed the first Medical Superintendent of Whitchurch in 1906, two years before the hospital opened. He was awarded a CBE in 1919 for his pioneering treatment of shell-shock. Florence Raynes was also a trailblazer in her own right, being the first woman to have overall responsibility for the hospital's entire nursing staff. 

The exact reasons for creating the tablecloth are unknown. Was it made as a form of occupational or diversional therapy for the soldiers? Could it have been an exhibition piece or a fund-raiser? Or perhaps initiated as a memento for a patient, nurse or doctor? Despite several attempts in recent years to unravel its history, the tablecloth remains a mystery. 

In general, the feelings and intentions of makers are frustratingly absent from our records, and we know very little about the emotions of the people who crafted the historic objects in our care. How did they feel about making in times of crisis, ill-health or confinement? What did the creative process give them? If you're finding solace in your sewing machine or knitting needles during these difficult days, please consider sharing your lockdown crafting experience with us through the questionnaire. We want to hear your story to ensure that the wellbeing benefits of making in the present do not go untold. 

 

Before the invention of the railway locomotive, the speed and pulling power of horses represented the maximum that land transport could achieve. Steam-hauled railways introduced entirely new concepts of speed; vastly more goods and people could be transported further, faster and more cheaply.

Steam-hauled railways revolutionised many aspects of peoples’ lives. Within less than a single lifetime, steam-hauled railways went from remarkable novelties to being mainstays of everyday life.

The railway revolution began in Merthyr Tydfil on 21 February 1804 with the first recorded steam-hauled journey on rails. The key personalities were the talented Cornish engineer Richard Trevithick and Samuel Homfray, owner of the Penydarren Iron Works.

The forges and rolling mills at Penydarren Iron Works, with the blast furnaces in the left background. In front of the buildings at the right is a horse pulling three loads of bar iron at the start of the journey to Abercynon where it would be transferred onto a boat on the Glamorganshire Canal for transport to Cardiff and loading onto a ship. It was just such a consignment of iron that Trevithick’s locomotive successfully transported. Etching by John George Wood for his book “The Principal Rivers of Wales”, 1812.

Trevithick had developed a compact high pressure stationary steam engine that could be built more cheaply and produce more power that pre-existing designs of similar size. Homfray formed a partnership with Trevithick to manufacture the stationary engines. In 1801 and in 1803 Trevithick had built and demonstrated experimental steam-powered road vehicles but had failed to arouse public enthusiasm. In south Wales he encountered a dense network of tramroads serving the ironworks, quarries and mines – all horse drawn and all built with iron rails. He hoped there might be an additional market for his high pressure steam engines if he could demonstrate their usefulness on railways. Homfray, seeking to widen demand for the engines he was beginning to build and market, agreed to fund the construction of a railway locomotive.

The pioneering locomotive was designed and built at Penydarren Iron Works over the winter of 1803-04.

The locomotive successfully pulled five wagons loaded with ten tons of iron and 70 men who had hitched a ride on the wagons for the 9¾ mile journey. Over the following weeks the locomotive made a number of further journeys the length of the tramroad.

The locomotive was widely reported at home and abroad.

Frequent breakages of the brittle cast iron track by the unsprung locomotive resulted in it being converted into a stationary engine within a few months. Two further Trevithick-designed locomotives were built in England in 1805 and 1808 but he found no commercial backers.

“The Miners’ Express”, Saundersfoot Railway, 1900s. This primitive service harked back to early 19^th century practices and may capture something of the atmosphere of the Penydarren locomotive’s trial run in 1804 when 70 men hitched a ride on the five wagons. This Saundersfoot Railway service was introduced in 1900 to enable coal miners from Kilgetty to travel to Bonville’s Court Colliery. The ironic name was created by the postcard publisher.

Despite Trevithick’s failure to commercially develop his locomotives, a seed had been planted. Engineers in the North East of England, notably Timothy Hackworth and George Stephenson, built a succession of viable locomotives in the 1810s that reliably hauled coal wagons from collieries to shipping places. These developments enabled the Stockton & Darlington Railway to use steam locomotives from its opening in 1825, and lead to the first long distance steam-hauled railway opening between Liverpool and Manchester in 1830.

In 25 years steam-haulage had progressed from experimental to reliable. Within a few decades more, railways employing steam locomotives were in use on every continent.

The conjectural reconstruction of the Penydarren locomotive on display in the  Networks gallery at the National Waterfront Museum at Swansea.      

A conjectural reconstruction of Richard Trevithick’s pioneering Penydarren locomotive is displayed in the National Waterfront Museum at Swansea, where it is periodically demonstrated in-steam.

You may also be interested in this short film about Richard Trevithicks Steam Locomotive:

https://museum.wales/articles/2008-12-15/Richard-Trevithicks-steam-locomotive  

 

At this moment in time, museums across the world are launching initiatives to collect objects and personal stories relating to COVID-19.

This pandemic has raised a raft of questions for all museums, especially in relation to how they collect the current crisis in meaningful, ethical and sensitive ways. At Amgueddfa Cymru, we routinely collect the here and now (think Brexit, the Women's March etc.), but the enormity of this pandemic – its impact on individuals and communities across Wales – is unlike any other national event we have documented in recent decades.

Today, we launched a digital questionnaire as a first step towards creating a national COVID-19 collection at Amgueddfa Cymru, to be archived at St Fagans National Museum of History. With your help, through the questionnaire, we hope to collect personal stories (written testimony, photographs and films) from across the country to create a comprehensive picture of life in Wales during the lockdown and beyond. We will also use the responses to identify and collect objects which could, in the future, represent the 3D memory of COVID-19 in Wales.

By doing this, we are revisiting a collecting methodology which is rooted in the Museum’s history, and is indicative of the early collecting practices of Dr Iorwerth Peate – the first curator of St Fagans. In December 1937, Dr Peate, who at the time was based at the National Museum of Wales in Cathays Park, published a questionnaire which was sent to 493 respondents across Wales. Launched in a decade largely defined by economic hardship and unemployment, it asked participants to provide information about the domestic, public and cultural life of their local area. Although developed by Iorwerth Peate, the questionnaire’s introduction was penned by the Museum’s Director, Cyril Fox:

This questionnaire has been prepared in the hope that persons in each parish in Wales will study the life of that parish on the lines indicated therein… The pamphlet indicates the direction in which the Welsh public can help in the work of this Department and its National Museum… Photographs and drawings will be gladly received… It is hoped, moreover, that correspondents, once they have established contact, will keep in constant touch with the Museum so that the Department is kept well-informed of any developments which are relevant to its work.

In preparing the questionnaire, the Museum was effectively asking the people taking part to become regular informants, to use their community knowledge to assist with developing a collection which would later form the basis for the creation of the Welsh Folk Museum at St Fagans in 1948. 

Questionnaires and blank ‘answer books’ requesting information on a range of subject areas were in regular use by the Museum up until the 1980s, and today the responses received (almost 800 in total) form a significant part of the archive collection at St Fagans.

Another collecting method pioneered by the Museum under the direction of Iorwerth Peate was the collecting of oral testimony. Following a public appeal launched on BBC radio in March 1958, St Fagans embarked on the systematic collecting of oral traditions and dialects. The funds raised allowed the Museum to buy recording equipment to undertake the work, including an EMI TR51 portable recorder, and a DC/AC converter, with two acid batteries and yards of cable, to record people in remote areas without electricity. A Land Rover was also purchased, fitted-out with wooden units made by the Museum’s carpenter to house the recording equipment.

Today, we have over 12,000 recordings in the archive, and in recent years we have become a repository for oral histories collected by community groups and organisations across Wales – from Mencap Cymru to Merched y Wawr.

The Land Rover may be long gone, but recording people’s lived experiences is still an important part of the collecting work we do, now more than ever. We very much hope that the COVID-19 questionnaire, the first to be launched by the Museum in the digital age, will enable people experiencing the pandemic in Wales to share their own stories in their own words, and provide future generations with personal, first-hand accounts of this chapter in our history.

 

While Wales is working hard to drive forward a positive climate agenda, with a target of 100% renewable electricity by 2035, our industrial past casts a long environmental shadow. Here Jennifer Protheroe-Jones, Principal Curator – Industry looks at our industrial history and its impact.

Wales was an early and unwitting contributor to climate change.

The 1851 Census showed that Wales was the first nation to have more people employed in industry than in agriculture, the important switch having probably occurred in the mid to late 1840s.

Wales was a notable international centre of industry in the mid 19^th century, being one of the most important iron producing nations, and the centre of both the world copper and tinplate industries. Plentiful easily worked coal underpinned all these industries – to fuel furnaces, to power steam engines that drove machinery and locomotives that hauled raw materials and finished products.

An ocean of railway wagons loaded with coal in sidings adjacent to Roath Dock, Cardiff, awaiting shipment in March 1927. The initials on the wagons identify a range of major colliery companies: Burnyeat, Brown & Co Ltd; D.Davis & Sons Ltd; Nixon’s Navigation Coal Co Ltd; United National Collieries Ltd.

Welsh steam coal is ideally suited to steam-raising. It burns with relatively little smoke, produces limited amounts of ash and produces a great deal of heat. As it burns, steam coal fissures but does not crack into small pieces. The fissures allow the coal to burn from the inside as well as from the outside, considerably increasing the heat output and so increasing the steam-raising properties of the fuel. Because steam coal does not break into small pieces as it burns, it sits on top of the fire bars and burns, rather than trickling through the bars as small fragments of unburnt coal which would go to waste amongst the ash. This property of not breaking into small pieces is specially relevant to fuel used in locomotives, because the vibration of the locomotive as it moves along the track tends to make poorer quality fuels break into small pieces which are wasted when they trickle through the fire bars into the ash pit. These properties made Welsh steam coal a premium fuel in wide demand.      

A few decades later, exports of Welsh coal would outstrip the large amounts being used by industries within Wales. By the start of the twentieth century, south Wales was the most important coal exporting coalfield in the world, supplying diverse countries with steam coal. In energy terms, the Bristol Channel was at this time the equivalent of the Persian Gulf a hundred years later. If high quality fuel capable of powering the widest range of machinery was required, then the coal-exporting ports of south Wales were key places to obtain it.

Aerial view looking south east over Cardiff (East Moors) Steel Works around 1960.

In the 19^th century the sight of smoke from works’ chimney stacks was regarded as a sign of prosperity. By the early 20^th century smoke from burning coal was increasingly recognised as a nuisance but regarded as unavoidable. It was not until after the second world war that serious efforts began to be made to reduce the volumes of smoke from industries and from coal fires in houses – and by this time oil was globally becoming a more important energy source than coal.

The burning of coal, oil and natural gas releases carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses that cause climate change. Internationally, today the largest uses of coal are in electricity generation, cement manufacture and in steel making. Coal ceased to be used to generate electricity in Wales in March 2020; coal continues to be used in the steel and cement industries. 

Tipping a railway wagon of coal at Cardiff Docks, early 20^th century. Some coals tended to break up so, instead of tipping the wagons directly into ships’ holds from a considerable height, the coal was tipped into a Lewis Hunter patent ‘coaling box’ (just visible below the copious coal dust) which was picked up by the dockside crane on the left and lowered into the ship’s hold, minimising the height that the coal was dropped.

The Welsh coalfields were intensively mined in the 19^th century and output peaked in 1913, declining thereafter due to exhaustion of accessible reserves of coal. Output in 1913 was 60 million tons, half of which was exported; in 2018 output was down to 1.1 million tons. Welsh coal output was in steep decline by the time climate change was widely recognised as a major global issue. Each year the world now produces over a hundred times as much coal as Wales did in 1913, when the Welsh coal industry was at its peak. Even back in 1913, Wales was only producing around 5% of world coal output – its importance at the time was that half of it was exported and that it was regarded as the premium fuel of its time.   

The complex web of communications that enabled Welsh coal to be traded internationally is explained in the Coal gallery at the National Waterfront Museum at Swansea.