Collections & Research

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.

 

 

A Day in the Life of a Natural History Curator

My name is Jennifer Gallichan and I am one of the natural history curators at National Museum Cardiff. I care for the Mollusc (i.e. snails, slugs, mussels, and octopus) and Vertebrate (things with backbones) collections. Just like everybody else, museum curators are adapting to working from home. But what did we use to do on a 'normal' day, before the days of lockdown?

Caring for the National Collections

Most of our specimens are not on display. Amgueddfa Cymru holds 3.5 million natural history specimens and the majority are held behind the scenes in stores. Caring for the collections is an important part of our role as curators. We have to meticulously catalogue the specimens to ensure that all of the specimens are accounted for. As you can imagine, finding one object amongst 3.5 million could take a while.

Harriet Wood (Curator: Mollusca) in the collections

Natural history collections cover a whole range of materials including shells, dried plants, minerals, fossils, stuffed animals, bones, pinned insects and fluid preserved specimens (this includes things in jars).

Cephalopod specimens from the William Evans Hoyle collection

These collections are vital for research, education, exhibitions and display. Some have been in the museum for well over a century, and it is our role to ensure they last into the next century and beyond. We work with specially trained Conservators to monitor the collections and highlight anything that might be at risk, needs cleaning or repair.

Cleaning the skeleton of one of Cardiff famous residents, Billy the Seal

Answering your Questions

We spend a lot of time working with you, our fantastic visitors. Much of our time is spent answering the thousands of enquiries we receive every year from families, school children, amateur scientists, academics of all kinds, journalists and many more. We also host open days and national events throughout the year which are another great opportunity to share the collections. Many of us are STEM (Science, Technology Engineering & Mathematics) ambassadors, so an important part of our role inspiring and engaging the next generation of scientists.

Talking about the collections at the Eisteddfod

Working with Volunteers

Our museums are crammed full of fascinating objects and interesting projects to inspire and enjoy. We spend a lot of time with our excellent volunteers, helping them to catalogue and conserve the collections, guiding them through the often intricate and tricky jobs that it has taken us decades to perfect.

Our fantastic volunteers currently working on transcribing letters from the Tomlin archive of correspondence

Working with Other Museums

Museums across the world are connected by a huge network of curators. We oversee loans of specimens to all parts of the globe so that we can share and learn from each other’s collections. We have to be ready to deal with all manner of tricky scenarios such as organising safe transport of a scientifically valuable shell, or packing up and transporting a full sized Bison for exhibition.

A meeting of mollusc curators as part of a research project at the Natural History Museum, London

Working with Visitors

Despite the fact that a large part of the collections are behind the scenes, they are open to visitors. Researchers from across the globe come to access our fantastic collections to help with their studies. We also host tours of the collections on request.

Working with visitors in the collection, examining Sawfish rostra

Making Collections Bigger and Better

Despite having millions of specimens, museum collections are not static and continue to grow every year. Be it an old egg collection found in an attic, or a prize sawfish bill that has been in the family for generations, it’s an important part of a curator’s job to inspect and assess each and every object that we are offered. Is it a scientifically important collection or rare? Has it been collected legally? Do we know where and when it was collected? Is it in a good condition? Do we have the space?

Bryn, our Sumatran Tiger was donated to us in 2017 from Colwyn Bay Mountain Zoo

Creating New Exhibitions

A fun part of the job is working with our brilliant Exhibitions department to develop and install new exhibitions. We want museums to be exciting and inspiring places for everyone so we spend a lot of time making sure that the information and specimens we exhibit are fun, engaging, inspiring and thought provoking.

Adding specimens to a specially created exhibit called Museum in a House, for Made in Roath festival, 2015

Being Scientists

Last but definitely not least, when we aren’t doing all of the above, we are doing actual science. Museums are places of learning for visitors and staff alike. Many of us are experts in our field and undertake internationally-recognised research. This research might find us observing or collecting specimens out in the field, sorting and identifying back in the lab, describing new species or researching the millions of specimens already in the collections.

Kate Mortimer-Jones (Senior Curator: Marine Invertebrates) hard at work identifying marine worms

Museums from Home?

Despite lockdown, we are working hard to keep the collections accessible. We’re answering queries, engaging with people online, writing research papers and chipping away at collection jobs from home. And like all of you, we are very much looking forward to when the museum opens its doors once again.

If you want to find out more about the things we get up to in the museum, why not check us out on Twitter or follow our blog? You can also find out more about all of the members of the Natural Sciences department here.

Augusta Hall, Lady Llanover (21 March 1802 – 17 January 1896) was a strong advocate and supporter of the Welsh Woollen Industry and Welsh traditions. At the National Eisteddfod in 1834 she submitted an essay titled `The Advantages Resulting from the Preservation of the Welsh Language and the National Costume winning first prize. She took the bardic name "Gwenynen Gwent" 'the bee of Gwent'.

Harpist's Costume from the Llanover Estate

In 1865 she commissioned the building of Gwenffrwd Woollen Mill on the Llanover estate near Abergavenny. The mill carried out all operations for woollen production and produced heavy flannel cloth that was made into clothes for the house and estate workers to wear.

Harpist's Costume from the Llanover Estate

Material from the mill was also made into clothes for lady Llanover and her friends styled on her own ideas of Welsh traditional Costume. The mill continued in production until the 1950s using equipment installed by Lady Llanover.

Worker at Gwenffrwd Woollen Mill

Most gardeners regard horsetails or scouring rushes (Equisetum) as one of their worst enemies – once this invasive weed is in your garden or allotment, it will spread everywhere and is almost impossible to get rid of (Fig. 1). But of course from the plant’s perspective this is a success story – they are doing what is best for them, not for us!

Today, this genus of highly invasive plants consists of only 15 species (Fig. 2), but they are found throughout the world except in Antarctica. They also have an immensely long evolutionary history spanning over 350 million years.

Fossils of horsetails are commonly found in the Carboniferous age coalfields such as in South Wales. The star-shaped leaf whorls (Annularia) are among the iconic fossils found in these rocks. We now know they were parts of tree-sized plants up to 10 metres or more tall – I have often wondered what today’s gardeners would think if they encountered a living one of these giants!

Fig. 3. Fossil horsetail (Annularia paisii) from the uppermost Carboniferous of Portugal, showing insect gall. Insert shows close-up of gall. Specimen in the Museum of Natural History and Science, Porto (UP-MHNFCP-155167).

A couple of years ago, my colleague Pedro Correia sent me a photograph of a fossil Annularia that he had found in Portugal (Fig. 3). In itself, this wouldn’t have been too unusual, but this one had a strange structure attached among the leaves. It almost looked as though it was a seed but of course that was impossible – horsetails do not have seeds, but reproduce by spores, in the same way as ferns. We shared this photograph with other European colleagues and a debate ensued as to what on Earth this could be. For a time it remained a puzzle. But then we showed it to another colleague, Conrad Labandeira from the Smithsonian Institution (Washington DC), who is one of the world’s leading palaeontological experts on insect – plant interactions. He suggested that this was probably a structure known as a gall.  Most galls today are produced when an insect injects chemicals into the plant to produce a swelling, in which it lays an egg. The resulting larva then develops within the gall.

There is evidence of Annularia leaves having been eaten by insects, such a chew-marks around the leaf edge. Conrad had also published evidence some years ago of an insect gall in a Carboniferous tree fern stem. But a gall on a Carboniferous horsetail is most unusual.  For a time we thought this example might be unique. But we then found a paper published back in 1931 by the American palaeobotanist Maxim Elias, who claimed to have found a seed attached to an Annularia. But it is now clear that Elias hadn’t in fact discovered a seed-bearing Annularia, as he had thought, but an insect gall similar to ours.

Fossil galls of this age are extremely rare. What insect produced this one is unknown. The organism was not preserved and most of today’s gall-producing insect groups do not have a fossil record extending this far back in time. All that we can say is that it was probably caused by a member of a now-extinct insect group that presumably produced larvae as part of its life cycle (Fig. 4).

Most horsetails have thick, almost leathery stems and I still find it rather strange that insects produce galls on them. But they do today on at least some horsetails, and it has clearly been of benefit to insects for millions of years. We haven’t yet found one in the Welsh coalfields but, now we know what to look out for, we will be keeping our eyes open!

Correia, P., Bashforth, A.R., Šimůnek, Z., Cleal, C.J., Sá, A.A. & Labandeira, C.C. 2020. The history of herbivory on sphenophytes: a new calamitalean with an insect gall from the Upper Pennsylvanian of Portugal and a review of arthropod herbivory on an ancient lineage. International Journal of Plant Sciences, 181(4).