Natural History Open Day. Julian Carter, 7 November 2012 During half term we held a Natural History open day in the main hall at National Museum Wales, Cardiff. It was a great opportunity for us to chat to visitors about our work and show them parts of the collections not normally seen by the public.The day had a Halloween theme, and visitors had the chance to engage with a wide range of material from the collections. This included solving a ‘murder mystery’ in the herbarium, comparing our UK bats to the size of the largest fruit bat or studying closely a bedbug!It was a busy, but fun day for all the staff involved. Look out on the website for the next open day.
Old Bones for a New Exhibition Julian Carter, 3 October 2012 More than 20 years ago the Museum was donated a large research collection of animal bones. This had been put together by a veterinary scientist, Dr Barbara Noddle. The collection mainly consists of sheep, goat and cattle bones from many different breeds.When it was donated the collection was in a poor state and required extensive conservation and curation. Today it is now housed in over 600 boxes at our offsite Collection Centre at Nantgarw, and a database is available on the website.Over the years the Noddle Collection has mainly been used in zoo-archaeological research – this is the study of animal remains found at archaeological sites. However parts of the collection will soon find their way into the exhibition limelight!From the 13th October ‘The Wolf Inside’ exhibition opens. This will be looking at animal domestication, focusing on dogs but also exploring other animals such as sheep and chickens. And this is where Barbara’s collection of old bones finds a new use. We are using a range of skulls from the collection to show some of the diversity found in the different breeds of sheep. A range of these skulls have been checked over and polished up ready for public display.Along with the skulls there will also be a whole range of animal specimens on display from the museums collections, many of which we haven’t had the opportunity to bring out for many years.The exhibition runs until February next year.
A History of Doll-Making: A Welsh Perspective 10 August 2012 A male doll from the late 19th century Amgueddfa Cymru houses a fine collection of dolls dating from around 1800 to 2000. Made from a range of different materials, they all possess some link to Wales. From early wooden examples to contemporary plastic figures, the development of doll-making can be traced from simple, home-made items to mass-produced factory goods. Playtime in the Ancient World Past and present, children have always played - escaping to their own imaginary world is an integral part of a healthy and stimulating childhood. Primitive dolls from materials such as wood and clay have been found in Egyptian tombs dating from 1600 BC, and such figures were enjoyed as playthings in ancient Greece and Rome. The Middle Ages saw dolls being produced in Europe, and as the centuries progressed, so did the variety of materials employed to create dolls and toys in general. Doll classification Dolls are classified according to their head type. Most early dolls in the woodcarving areas of Germany and Austria were, unsurprisingly, made from wood. Wax dolls appeared during the 17th century, and by around 1800 composition dolls, namely mixtures of pulped wood or paper, were introduced in Germany. Papier-mâché, a type of composition and a cheaper alternative to wood, was a popular mix and its mass-production during the early-nineteenth century marked the beginnings of the German doll-making industry. The production of glazed porcelain, or china dolls during the mid-19th century meant that wax doll-making had halted by around 1890. Porcelain dolls boasted a shiny appearance, creating a very pleasing finish. Most were produced in Germany and France. Also common in both countries from around the 1860s were dolls of bisque (unglazed porcelain), which featured delicately painted faces and a most attractive skin colour. While the heads were of china, the dolls' bodies tended to be of leather or wood. Historically most dolls were representations of adult women, the French 'bebe', popular in the 1880s, depicted a younger girl for the first time. The 19th century was truly a golden era for the production of dolls, whether in wood, wax, or china, when most were made in Germany, France, England (and later in the United States). This anti-suffragette 'voodoo' doll is an unflattering and grotesque caricature of a suffrage campaigner. The anti-suffrage movement used images such as this in cartoons and posters to ridicule and insult women who wanted the right to vote. An Edwardian suffragette rag doll, c.1890-1900 Set of three miniature bisque dolls, c.1920-25 Whereas travelling fairs and markets commonly sold toys and dolls during the pre-industrial era, by the 19th century more permanent toyshops had been opened to sell goods on a regular basis. Undressed dolls were often purchased, after which mothers or their daughters sewed their own outfits, either following their own designs or shop-bought patterns. The sewing of the body is a good indication of a doll's date, for sewing machines were not generally used until about 1870. By this time, dolls were generally becoming less of a luxury item and more affordable for a larger audience. In Wales, however, until the mid-20th century few Welsh families had money to spend on anything save life's essentials, which usually meant creating one's own forms of entertainment and amusement. Dolls were made by local craftsmen or a child's parents from wood or cloth, thus being rather unsophisticated, yet, at the same time, often charming and full of character. Owing to new production methods, the toy industry in Britain was transformed following the Second World War by the emergence of new, cheaper materials, such as plastic. Prices dropped as toys and dolls became available for all children. Hard plastic dolls were first manufactured in the 1940s, and from then on, such brightly coloured and fashionable new creations led to the demise of home-made items, which appeared rather dowdy in comparison. The internationally successful Barbie doll first hit the shelves from America in 1959 and nowadays, large toy shops stock a staggeringly large array of dolls, many of which are based on female characters from popular films and television programmes. The Museum's doll collection continues to grow and it is important that contemporary examples are collected to reflect the changing nature of doll-making as new materials and techniques are introduced into the market. Welsh connections remain essential, with the doll needing either to have been made or played with in Wales before it can be accessioned. The Museum is particularly proud of its Welsh costume dolls, ranging from rare mid-19th century pieces to a 1999 'Cool Cymru' Barbie smartly donned in Welsh dragon dress.
Self Assembly of a Victorian Oven Phil Tuck, 1 July 2012 Working for Amgueddfa Cymru as part of the conservation team at the National Collections Centre, Nantgarw, certainly has its challenges. This was definitely the case when we received a request from the Historic Buildings Unit based at St Fagans - National History Museum to help assemble an oven. I assumed this would probably involve a few screws and washers, and just a few hours’ work.I remember the lorry arriving at Nantgarw with two large pallets on board. One contained burnt, broken and whole pieces of mainly cast iron components from the old oven; the second pallet held the components of the new oven. Even at first glance, there appeared to be far more pieces of the newly cast material. With the help of photographs taken of the old oven before dismantling all the parts were laid out, matching old with new; it took me three days!The oven had been removed from Llwyn-yr-Eos farmhouse at St Fagans which dates from about 1820. The building had been closed to the public for conservation work to be carried out; this provided an opportunity to replace the late Victorian oven, which was definitely the worse for wear.After identification came assembly. I decided to start by making two new mild steel inner walls. This was done with the help of Len Howells, the fabricator at Big Pit - National Coal Museum. These would then act as a framework to which I would attach the new oven parts.The old oven components were fastened together using rivets, large and small, both dome and flat head, and machine screws. As the new oven was made of new cast iron, which is very brittle, I was naturally very apprehensive about using a hammer to carry out any riveting, especially as some of the pieces were only a few millimetres thick. I also took into consideration the fact that they were very costly to produce! I decided to address this problem by manufacturing artificial rivets. This was done by using the lathe to machine the heads of bolts. I ground the cutting tool to the exact shape of the dome required. The flat head rivet was cut using a normal cutting tool.The bolts now had threads, but with rivet heads. The pieces that needed riveting would be held together by having a clearance hole drilled into the top plate and a tapping hole drilled into the piece to be fastened to it. When a thread needs to be cut in a hole a tool called a tap is used; this process is referred to as “tapping a hole”.Every component of the new oven came without holes for the relevant fastenings, so measurements of every hole had to be taken from the old pieces, some of which were broken, and transferred to the new. Once this had been done, the dummy rivets were screwed into the tapped holes, the parts were tightened together and the excess thread then cut off.Turning to the machine screws, I managed to source sufficient examples with slotted countersunk heads and a Whitworth thread. The Whitworth thread was created by Joseph Whitworth in 1841 after standardising a number of contemporary threads and was known as the British Standard Whitworth thread, BSW for short; it was only superseded by the metric thread in the early 1970s. Modern-day machine screws would have been incongruous to the oven, with their hexagonal head slots and metric thread.Using these fastenings, the new oven was methodically assembled and fully constructed in the workshop at Nantgarw. It was then taken apart and secured onto a pallet, which the Historic Buildings unit then collected. It is now back in place in the farmhouse and has already baked a few loaves!So a task which I thought might mean a few hours’ work involved the building of an oven comprising 94 separate parts, the drilling and tapping of 132 holes and machining of 88 bolts to look like rivet heads eventually took me five weeks…..so much for a few hours work!!Phil Tuck, Conservation Officer, Dept. of Industry, Nantgarw.
Blind shrimps Julian Carter, 29 May 2012 Within the groundwater in the rocks below our feet is a hidden world where living animals can be found. It’s a secret world that is difficult to study, and frequently forgotten as it is out of sight. In the UK these groundwater dwelling animals tend to be made up of crustaceans (which includes familiar animals such as crabs and lobsters), and range from tiny microscopic copepods to ‘larger’ shrimp like animals.Recent survey work by Lee Knight, a freshwater ecologist, and Gareth Farr, a groundwater specialist with the Environment Agency, has found some new species to the Welsh fauna. This has included the first records for the very small amphipod Microniphargus leruthi which has now been found in a number of sites around South Wales.Recently I joined Gareth on some fieldwork around the Bridgend area to collect some voucher specimens for the museum collections. On this particular trip we found two species not represented in the collections (and shown in the pictures). Both of these are termed ‘stygobiont’ animals, which means they are permanent inhabitants of underground environments. As a result they are characteristically white and eyeless as an adaptation to life underground.So why does it matter that we learn about such animals and their environment? Understanding biodiversity is always important. Our whole way of life is underpinned by the environment through the food we eat, the water we drink, to the resources we use. In the case of these groundwater animals if the groundwater they live in gets polluted, then this affects not only these animals but us through contaminated water supplies. Thus even these small blind beasties have an important role to play in the sustainability of our environment.
