: Collections & Research

A few years ago the chemical works BP Baglan Bay called me and said they were clearing out the offices as the site was closing and would I like to see if the museum wanted any objects for our Modern Industry collection?

I couldn’t wait to go and have a look, and as there was quite a lot to go through I took our museum van in the hope of a few accessions.

There were lots of photographs, some in frames, some big aerial photos too. There were overalls, hats and jackets with logos on them – just the sort of things that tell a great story when exhibited for displays.

There were tools specific to the industry and other bits and pieces like signs and gauges.

I loaded a few things in the van to take back to the museum so I could go through them to decide what we would like to keep and what should be returned.

But as I was about to leave they called me back and asked if I wanted the paintings? I hadn’t noticed these as they were covered in bubble wrap and stood against a wall.

One of the paintings was quite big, about 4’6”x 6’ (1.5 x 2.1m) and I couldn’t see the subject for the wrapping. The other was much smaller about 2’ x 2’6” (0.6 x 0.76m). I was told the bigger one was an oil painting of Baglan Bay at Night and the smaller one a watercolour of a power station. I put them in the van, got the paperwork signed and left for our stores in Nantgarw where I could spread things out and examine them properly.

About a week went by and I still hadn’t looked at the paintings as I had been going through all the other objects first.

When I did take the bubble wrap off I was really surprised by the quality of both paintings. The oil painting was really striking and the BP staff had told me that it had hung in the office since the 1960s.

I looked for a painter’s signature and then the real surprise hit me! In the bottom corner was ‘Vicari’.

Bells rang deep in my head, where did I know that name from? A quick internet search answered that. The richest living artist in the world. The official Gulf War artist. Artist to the Saudi Royal family. And born in Port Talbot. This fitted my collecting policy perfectly, being an industrial scene in Wales painted by a Welsh artist. The only snag from my point of view was that it could be quite valuable and BP might want to keep it.

I contacted them straight away and told them about the artist and its possible value. One of their directors, David, called me and told me that they were happy it would be going to the National Museum of Wales and he couldn’t think of a better place for it.  This generosity meant that we could save a national treasure for future generations.

So far we had treated the painting as if it were a genuine ‘Vicari’, but was it really?

I contacted the ‘Vicari’ website and sent them an image of our painting asking them if they could confirm if Andrew had painted it.

I checked my email every day. No replies. How else could we confirm this if they didn’t get back to us?

One sunny morning about three weeks later my phone rang. I could tell from the number it was someone in France calling. This was not unusual as we have many visits from French schools and as my schoolboy French is just about good enough to get by, my number was very often given to schools as a contact.

After answering with who I was, a deep, rich voice said:

‘Ah, Andrew here, I hear you’ve found the lost Vicari’

I couldn’t believe it! Andrew Vicari calling me from his home in France! To say I was flabbergasted is an understatement!

Andrew told me he had painted Baglan in the early 1960s and was really glad of the commission at the time (when he wasn’t so well known). We spoke for about half an hour about all sorts of things and he went on to tell me an incredible  story from 1966.

Andrew had painted a picture that was to be auctioned for the Aberfan Disaster Appeal and went along to the auction in Cardiff. Before it got underway, two burly men approached Andrew and said someone needed to talk to him in private. He was shown to a room and waiting there were two more men in sharp suits, looking a bit ‘dodgy’ (his words). These two told him they wanted to buy the painting, and asked how much did he want for it? He told them that it wasn’t his to sell as he’d given to the appeal and it was out of his hands. They kept on that they wanted it and he needed to get it for them. They were getting more and more insistent. After repeating that he couldn’t a number of times, they finally left, to Andrew’s relief.

It turned out that they were the Kray twins! He laughed ‘I’m one of the few people to have said ‘no’ to the Kray twins and lived to tell the tale!’

He told me that he was very happy his painting was going to be in the National collection and that he would do anything for Wales!

We never had the chance to speak again; sadly Andrew died in Swansea, in 2016 aged 84. It’s lovely that we have such incredible paintings to remember him by.

This story happened in 2009 and the painting has been in our stores in Nantgarw where is has been conserved and a new glazed frame made. We’ve been waiting for a chance to exhibit it and finally it will happen.

You can see the painting as part of an Andrew Vicari exhibition from 13^th July to 3^rd November 2019 at the National Waterfront Museum, Swansea.

Into June and we have selected silicon as our element of the month. This element might not be instantly recognisable as of significance to Wales, but it does have an interesting history.

Silicon (chemical symbol – Si), atomic number 14, is a hard but brittle crystalline solid, with a blue-grey metallic lustre. Silicon is the second most abundant element (about 28% by mass) in the Earth’s crust after oxygen with which it has a strong affinity. Consequently, it took until 1823 for a scientist - Jöns Jakob Berzelius – to prepare it in pure form.

In Wales, silicon is present virtually everywhere in one form or another: from quartz (silicon dioxide, SiO₂) in sedimentary siltstones, sandstones and conglomerates; complex silicates in igneous and metamorphic rocks; to sediments in soils.

Silica (silicon dioxide, or quartz) was mined extensively in the Pontneddfechan area, in South Wales, from the late 18^th century until 1964 for the manufacturing of firebricks for kilns and furnaces. It occurs as a very pure material highly concentrated in quartzite within a geological unit known as the Basal Grit. Weathering and erosion of the quartzite has produced deposits of silica sand and this was extensively quarried for the production of refractory fire bricks for the smelting industries.

In North Wales, a little-known trade in rock crystal – a colourless, glassy variety of quartz crystal – took place in Snowdonia during the 18^th and 19^th centuries centred upon the village of Beddgelert. T. H. Parry-Williams refers to this in one of his writings. Miners and mountain guides searched for veins of quartz in the mountains and collected crystals to sell to tourists as curios and some were possibly used to make crystal chandeliers. Later, crystals were occasionally discovered in the vast slate quarries, or during the large-scale construction of forestry tracks during the 1960s.

Silicon, as silica (another name for silicon dioxide) is also important to certain organisms. In particular diatoms and sponges.

Diatoms are single-celled microscopic algae with a complex cell wall made of silica. They are abundant in all waters, produce oxygen and are food for other aquatic organisms. Diatoms are also frequently used to monitor water quality.

Sponges build their skeletons from a framework of tiny elements called spicules, which are made of silica in most sponge groups.  One of the most beautiful examples is the Venus’ Flower Basket glass sponge, which lives anchored to the deep ocean floor near the Philippines.  A pair of shrimps lives inside this sponge, breeding inside it and spending their whole lives protected within its delicate glass walls.  Thanks to this unusual symbiotic relationship, the dead skeletons of Venus’ Flower Baskets are a popular wedding gift in Japan.

Sponges are the most primitive kind of animal on Earth, and their resistant spicules are found as fossils from as far back as 580 million years ago. Silica is also important in the preservation of other types of fossil.  When dead animals or plants are buried, silica from groundwater can fill in the pores and other empty spaces in wood, bone or shells, and/or it can replace the original remains as they decay or dissolve.  This is most common in areas where the groundwater has high silica levels, due to volcanic activity or erosion of silica-rich rocks.  The organic remains act as a focal point for silica formation, and often the rock surrounding the fossils is made of different minerals.  For example, shells that were originally made of calcium carbonate can dissolve and be replaced by silica, whilst being fossilised within limestone (calcium carbonate).  Extracting the fossils is a simple process of putting the rock in some acid and waiting for it to dissolve, leaving behind the silicified fossils.  The Museum’s fossil collections include many silicified shells of brachiopods, ammonites, bryozoans and other sea creatures.

One of the most spectacular types of fossil preserved in silica is ‘petrified wood’.  Silica replaced the original cells of the wood as it decayed and also filled in any gaps, literally ‘turning it to stone’.  In some places, including Patagonia and the USA, whole tree trunks replaced by silica are found in so called ‘petrified forests’.  Other plant fossils, such as cones, can also be fossilised in this way.

Chert is a rock made of very small crystals of silica.  Many major chert deposits formed at the bottom of ancient oceans from ‘siliceous ooze’, which is made of the skeletal remains of millions of tiny organisms including diatoms and radiolarians (single-celled plankton).  Chert nodules can also form within other rocks through chemical processes. 

Chert found within chalk is known as flint, and was a very important material for making tools throughout Prehistory. Tools are made by knapping, that is striking a prepared flint edge, or striking platform, with a harder stone to detach pieces called flakes or blades. These flakes, blades, and indeed the core from which they are struck can then be modified with secondary working into fine tool forms. Amongst the most skilful are fine arrowheads, including these from a Bronze Age grave at Breach Farm, Vale of Glamorgan, Wales. Flint was generally the material of choice for making sharp cutting tools as it is so fine-grained and fractures conchoidally and cleanly it gives a really sharp cutting edge. Indeed, so much so, that anecdotally eye-surgeons are reported to occasionally use a freshly struck flint blade in the operating theatre!

Because it is very fine-grained and hard, chert can preserve fossils of very small things from far back in our planet’s history.  The oldest potential fossils on Earth are found in cherts, and include the possible remains of bacteria from over 3 billion years ago.  Younger fossils, from the Rhynie Chert of northern Scotland, provide a glimpse of one of the earliest land communities, 400 million years ago.  Simple plants, and animals including primitive spider-like creatures and scorpions, were preserved in fine detail thanks to silica-rich water from volcanic hot springs.

Opal is a hydrated form of silica, meaning that it contains between 3 and 21% water.  Unlike standard silica, it does not have a set crystal form, but some of its forms diffract light, creating a beautiful iridescent effect in a variety of different colours.  For this reason, opal has been prized for centuries as a gemstone for making pendants, rings and other jewellery.  Australia produces a lot of the world’s opal, and is also a source of rare and spectacular opalised fossils.  The shells of invertebrates such as belemnites (prehistoric squid-like creatures), and even dinosaur bones, have been replaced by opal, creating very colourful specimens in a world where fossils are usually grey or brown.

“Codi i’r Wyneb - Brought to the Surface” is a project on freshwater snails led by the Museum’s Department of Natural Sciences, supported by the National Lottery through the Heritage Lottery Fund. Since our last blog in January, our project has grown from its wellspring in the collections to spill over into the outside world.

This, being midsummer, is pond-dipping season. Fieldcraft is so important to being a good naturalist, and also a good curator. No matter how good the collections, ID guides or apps, there is no substitute for finding things in their natural environment first-hand. So far we have identified and recorded snails from over 50 water bodies in South Wales alone, often with the help of local people and volunteers. As well as being good education for us, this has helped provide data and specimens from less well-studied areas, such as the lakes at Blaengarw, and the Neath Canal at Tonna, and the River Ely. We’ve also followed up a number of historical records to see whether species are still present. In a neat symbiosis, Alice Jones from Cardiff University has also been helping us out as part of her search for snail parasites and their microscopic predators. Lest anyone fear this is a Cymrocentric project, we’ve also been collecting in South-west England, and are heading East soon!

Back at National Museum Cardiff and with the help of the Exhibitions team, we installed our display in the Insight Gallery in time for the Easter school holidays. (In fact, all the displays in Insight have recently been refreshed, so it’s well worth visiting if you haven’t for a while). It features a variety of showcasing the diversity and importance of freshwater snails. To help bring the small shells of the Welsh species to life, we made magnified models of the living animals, approximately 1000 times actual size. These are shown alongside some grapefruit-sized tropical Apple Snails (the world’s largest freshwater snails), and their eye-catching bright pink eggs. The display also includes a mini-diorama of a British river, and a slideshow of images of the project’s progress. One thing which proved surprisingly hard to obtain (in Cardiff!) was an authentic-looking miniature of a sheep, so we made our own. The sheep is there to illustrate the life-cycle of the liver fluke - a big problem for British agriculture, yet one that hinges on tiny freshwater snails.

Since our last update we’ve taken part in public events including “Museums After Dark” and “Fossils from the Swamp”, and even appeared on the Radio Wales Science Café programme. The big one for us was our first Snail Day training course in late April, where we put our draft identification keys to the test. Held at Gwent Wildlife Trust’s Magor Marsh reserve, we are very grateful to the 8 members of the public prepared to be our guinea pigs, while learning as much about the 40 species as we could fit into a day. Our second Snail Day, at the “Aqualab” of the National Botanical Gardens in Carmarthenshire, was also a fully-booked success with thanks to the infectiously enthusiastic Paul Smith and our stalwart volunteer Mike Tynen, who helped amaze some visiting cub scouts by juggling a leech. The fish-free lakes at the Gardens have a huge biomass of snails!

Keen to join in? Our third Snail Day is on the 29^th June, at the RSPB’s Ynys Hir reserve near Machynlleth, once used as the base for the BBC’s Springwatch. If you’d like to take part, please email harry.powell@museumwales.ac.uk. On Twitter, follow @CardiffCurator for the latest updates.

In the first part of this blog I looked at the physicality and subject-matter of a small number of fans housed at St Fagans National Museum of History. In this second and final part of the blog, I would like to discuss some of the aesthetic objects 18th century fan shops, warehouses and stalls business displayed and sold. To conclude, I will briefly discuss the fan maker Martha Gamble (active before 1710 to after 1740).

Many fan shops sold prints and, equally, a great number of print shops sold fans. During the 1700s the status of prints increased as the market for prints which could be framed for display grew. The fan makers Sarah Ashton (active before 1750 to 1807) and George Wilson (active before 1770 to after 1801) sold a range of printed artwork, including stipple-engraved illustrated children’s maxims in Wilson’s case. Additionally, fan makers borrowed from the visual language of genre prints. The popular stock characters from the pictorial and literary trope of ‘Old Darby’ and ‘Old Joan’, visually relating to rural representations circulated in print by publishers like Bowles and Carver, were one common source of pictorial inspiration.

There is an extraordinary female fan maker whose work is represented at St Fagans. One of her fans is to be found in this collection, an Allegorical Fan (Untitled) painted with an image of (almost certainly) Queen Anne (1665-1714) and an inscription of ‘11 October 1743’ and the maker’s name ‘M. Gamble’. Although (Martha) Gamble created this fan a decade or so after Queen Anne’s death, images of the Queen were still widespread in the 1720s and 1730s. Gamble was a highly regarded female fan maker, who owned The Golden Fan in St Martin’s Court, St Martin’s Lane. Its reputation built upon Gamble’s renown for her use of the fan as a vehicle on which to present popular stories transposed from narrative print and painting series. Gamble sold copies of William Hogarth’s (1697-1764) A Harlot’s Progress, completed between 1732 and 1733, advertised in the Evening Post as ‘engraved from the Original prints of Mr. Hogarth; in which the characters are justly preserved and beautifully published’. A Harlot’s Progress was made by Giles King, who specialised in reproducing printed images made by the Dutchman Arnout van Aken, in alliance with Gamble. Examining these fans makes evident their intrinsic link to print work produced in the same period and helps us to understand and appreciate these fascinating objects better.

Continuing the international year of the periodic table of chemical elements, for May we have selected lead. Everyone knows that lead is heavy, or more correctly dense, but did you know how important it was to the Roman Empire?

Mad, bad and dangerous to use – lead in Roman times

In Roman times lead was used extensively throughout the Empire. The chemical symbol for lead is Pb which comes from the Latin word for lead, plumbum, and is also the derivation of the word ‘plumbing’.

The extraction of lead ore is reasonably straightforward, and there was an abundant supply within the ever expanding empire. As well as being easy to find and one of the easiest metals to extract, lead is soft and malleable, has a relatively low melting point of 327.5°c (“low enough to melt in a camp fire”) and it is much denser and heavier than other common metals. It is also possible to cast it. This meant that it was widely produced and used for an enormous range of purposes from industrial to domestic.

The Romans were famous for their plumbing systems, and as lead pipes replaced older constructions made of stone and wood, ever more elaborate plumbing systems could be created. In 2011 during the excavation undertaken by Cardiff University of the Southern Canabae at Caerleon an example of a lead water pipe was excavated close to the amphitheatre. It has a diameter of 0.12m, is bulged in the middle where two lengths of pipe have been joined using a wiped joint, and there are remains of a round collar pierced by iron nails at one end (to the left in the image) where it was probably attached to a wooden tank or pipe. As can be seen, the main pipe has been tapped by a narrower pipe and they were presumably used to feed a fountain or water feature within the large courtyard building found alongside.

The malleable nature of lead, and its relatively low melting point also made it very useful for soldering and repair work, for architectural fittings and for lining containers. It was even used as a type of Rawlplug.  Its density made it ideal for weights and its abundance made it cheap enough to be used in a whole range of everyday objects, from a variety of containers, to lamps used to light Roman homes, luggage labels and stamps of all varieties. It was used in paint and in medicines and cosmetics and it was even used to sweeten and colour wine. Perhaps most important of all most ores of lead also contain a small quantity of silver and, in some instances the value of silver outweighed the value of lead. For an economy so dependent on silver this precious by-product was of great importance.

A perfect example of the everyday use of lead is the Roman lead bread stamp from Prysg Field in Caerleon (see the image on the right). Within the Fortress bread was baked in a communal oven and the bread stamps were used by each Company to clearly identify their bread ration for the day. The one in the photograph below was for the ‘Century of Quintinus’.

The simple lead lamp from Gelligaer near Caerphilly (shown on the right) illustrates a common form found on Roman sites – cheap and utilitarian. The main tray would have been filled with tallow (animal fat) and a wick would have extended to the raised area.

The wonderful curse tablet (shown on the right) found at Caerleon is the only such object so far recovered from Wales. It clearly illustrates the malleable and soft nature of the metal but also links to its cultural status as a ‘base’ metal. Scratched into the surface of the lead is a curse invoking the aid of the goddess Nemesis against a thief of a cloak and boots.

Research has shown that the letters of the inscriptions at Caerleon were painted exclusively using a red pigment called litharge (PbO), also known as red lead. Traces of red can still be seen on a stone inscription found at the Amphitheatre in Caerleon (shown on the right).

The heavy quality of lead meant that the Romans used it to make weights or to weigh things down. A Mediterranean style anchor stock from a small cargo ship was found just off the coast of the Llyn Peninsula at Porth Felen, Aberdaron.

The Romans cast the lead they mined into ingots known as ‘pigs’. Originally the lead mines in Britain were under the direct control of the Roman Authorities but this responsibility was later handed over to trusted local agents who leased the lead mines out to local companies on payment of a levy. A Roman lead pig found at Carmel in Whitford shows the insignia of one such agent, Gaius Nipius Ascanius. Other examples found in Britain have marks such as “EX ARG” (Ex argentariis), indicating that it was from a lead-silver works, or Deceangl[icum] indicating it was lead from the Deceanglic (Flintshire) region.

Lead in Roman Wales

According to Pliny, lead “is extracted with great labour in Spain and throughout the Gallic provinces; but in Britannia it is found in the upper stratum of the earth, in such abundance, that a law has been spontaneously made, prohibiting any one from working more than a certain quantity of it.” (Natural History, Book 34, Chapter 49)

Lead was so important to the Romans that they started extracting the ore almost as soon as they arrived in Britain. The Mendip area around Charterhouse in modern day Somerset was an important area for lead mining and evidence shows that mining began here as early as AD49. Originally mining was under the control of the Army, and in the Mendip Hills at this time that was the Second Augustan Legion. Their experience in overseeing the extraction of lead mines may well have proved useful when the Legion transferred to their new headquarters in Caerleon in AD74/5.

The area around Draethen woods near Lower Machen, contained lead ore reasonably high in silver content, certainly comparable to the Mendips and higher than any other lead ores to be found in South Wales. Draethen is just 10 miles away from Caerleon, about the same distance from the Roman fort at Gelligaer and even closer to the fort at Caerphilly. In 1937 work on the construction of a new bypass in Lower Machen uncovered evidence of Roman occupation, including evidence of a working floor with layers of charcoal and numerous pieces of lead and lumps of lead ore.  Nash-Williams (Archaeologia Cambrensis, 1939) states that the early date of the pottery and coin finds suggest that Lower Machen “was certainly in Roman hands by the time of the completion of the Roman military conquest of South Wales in AD75, possibly before”. More recent discoveries of pottery also suggest an occupation period of c AD 70-100.

The 1965 exploration of ‘Roman Mine’ in Draethen throws more light on Roman lead mining in this area. In Roman times lead ore was extracted by laying wooden fires against the rock, heating the rock to a high temperature and then throwing cold water or vinegar onto it. This caused the rock to split into smaller pieces which could then be sorted by hand within the mine. The waste, known as ‘deads’, was packed into side chambers and empty crevices and the ore was brought to the surface on wooden trays or in leather sacks and wooden buckets. The evidence found within Roman Mine exactly matches this technique. Charcoal was found throughout the mine, even in the smaller tunnels, and the side chambers were filled with waste. The walls and roof of the tunnels were covered in a thick black patina caused by the production of an enormous amount of smoke. The creation of so much smoke also meant that the Romans had to sink shafts at regular intervals in order to create a through draft and the main passage of Roman Mine has many such outlets. No tools were found in Roman Mine but pick marks are frequent throughout the tunnels.

Who worked these mines? Nash-Williams (Archaeologia Cambrensis, 1939) presumes that the labourers who worked in Draethen were “slaves and convicts working under the supervision of a military guard, and the settlement would be under the control of an officer or government official.” It is likely that the lives of these miners were short and judging by the very small spaces of some of the worked areas within Roman mine it is possible that some of the labourers were children.

A detailed report on the lead mines in Draethen can be found here and more information about the objects found during the exploration of the mine can be found here.

Control of Substances Hazardous to Health (COSHH) - Lead poisoning in Roman times

Lead, despite all its many useful qualities, is also toxic. When ingested or inhaled, lead enters the bloodstream and inhibits the production of haemoglobin which is needed by red cells to carry oxygen. When lead levels in the blood increase it has a devastating effects on the body, including irreversible neurological damage. Children are particularly vulnerable because their tissue is softer and their brains are still developing.

Contemporary writing makes it clear that Romans were aware of the dangerous effects of lead and knew it could lead to insanity and death.

Pliny, in his Natural Histories, wrote about the noxious fumes that emanated from lead furnaces. Vitruvius in De Architectura suggests the use of earthen pipes to convey water because “that conveyed in lead must be injurious to the human system.” He goes on to note that “This may be verified by observing the workers in lead, who are of a pallid colour; for in casting lead, the fumes from it fixing on the different members, and daily burning them, destroy the vigour of the blood; water should therefore on no account be conducted in leaden pipes if we are desirous that it should be wholesome.” Celsus in De Medicina urges the use of rain water, conveyed through earthen pipes into a covered cistern.

However, although some advised against its use it was such a commonly used and important metal that it was almost impossible to manage without it. The vast majority of Romans probably remained unaware of the dangers and continued to use it in their everyday lives.

The study of lead levels in individuals from the Romano-British period is enabling researchers to gain a greater understanding of normal levels for different regions, and allows a growing degree of confidence in the identification of immigrants into an area.  In complementary isotope studies the remains of the man found in the coffin at Caerleon showed lead concentrations of 4 parts per million (ppm), preserved in his teeth, which is typical of someone from the local area at this period.

Lead pollution in Ancient times.

The Romans’ extensive use of lead gives us a fascinating insight into the ups and downs of Roman history. In 2018 analysis of cores taken from Greenland’s ice sheet by the Norwegian Institute of Air Research showed that environmental pollution is not just a modern phenomenon. Pollution from lead mines can be traced in the layers of ice and clearly show the pollution left behind in ancient times. The researchers were able to use their measurements of lead pollution to track major historical events and trends. A clear pattern emerges where lead pollution drops during times of war, as fighting disrupts lead production. It then increases during periods of stability and prosperity.  Lead pollution rose dramatically from the end of the Roman Republic and through the first 200 years of the Roman Empire, the Pax Romana. The measurements also starkly show the fall of this great Empire. The Antonine Plague struck in AD 165, a devastating pandemic that historians think was either smallpox or measles. Almost five million people died over the 15 years that the plague raged in the Empire, and whilst the Empire continued after the plague came to an end its economy never recovered. This is clearly shown in the low levels of lead in the ice layers during the years of the Plague and the centuries following it. The high lead emissions of the Pax Romana end at exactly the same time as the plague struck and do not reach those same levels again for more than 500 years.

More information about this fascinating research can be found here.

The museum’s geology collections contain many examples of lead ores from Wales and around the world including lead sulphide, or galena, the main ore of lead. Post-1845 (when official records started being kept) in excess of 1.2 Million tons of lead concentrate was produced from Welsh mines, but with a history of mining dating back to at least Roman times that figure should be considerably greater.

Natural weathering and oxidation of lead ores results in the formation of some beautifully coloured minerals. A few examples are illustrated here. It should also be noted that not all lead-bearing minerals are toxic – certain compounds containing lead are very stable. Experiments have shown that polluted mine dumps containing lead can be stabilised by oxidising some of the lead into phosphates such as pyromorphite or plumbogummite.