Harri recently finished a Skills Development Placement at St Fagans National Museum of History, where he shadowed our Front of House staff one day week for 6 months. The placements offer workplace experience for people 16+ who have barriers to work, allowing them an opportunity to build skills and confidence. In St Fagans, we specifically support individuals who are bilingual and Welsh speaking for front of house skills development placement roles.

Before Harri finished, we caught him for a chat to see what it was like taking part in a skills development placement at St Fagans! Here’s what he said: 

How did you get involved in a Skills Development Placement with us at Amgueddfa Cymru? 

I started in September 2022. I helped out with the Food Festival at St Fagans and Lauren from Elite Employment Support put me in touch with the Volunteering & Placements department. I met with the team at St Fagans. I am bilingual and it’s an added bonus that I could use my Welsh whilst on placement. 

What did you do whilst on placement? 

I started in the galleries for 2 hours. I felt the need to extend my hours to 10.00-3.00, which was just right. 

Whilst on the galleries I helped the Museum Assistants by using the clicker to count people’s attendance. 

Sometimes I would help Will clean any spillages on the galleries. 

I spent a day with Ryland – I remember travelling with him on the buggy to the castle, that was fun! We made sure the garden and the surroundings were tidy. 

What did you learn during your time at St Fagans? 

I learned team working skills and learned about the museum itself. Communication with the Museum Assistants. If I was ever unsure what to say to visitors, I would get advice from the Museum Assistants. Speaking to Bryn (a member of staff at St Fagans) was very insightful into the history. 

What did you enjoy about your experience? 

Everything! 

For example, I bought some bread from the bakery and my parents and brother were delighted.

For me I just felt more relaxed and that I’m at home here. I was introduced to lots of Museum Assistants, they were very interesting, chatty, friendly, and endearing. 

A big thank you to Harri for chatting to us about his time at St Fagans. He has now been successfully recruited as a pool staff member for the shop at St Fagans - so a big congratulations! 

There is often some competition from people interested in archaeology to participate in Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales’ student work placements, and I was delighted to secure a placement to help the museum assess and catalogue human remains. 

Joining a small group of individuals on placement, some of whom are students from Cardiff’s Archaeological Science course, we worked alongside the Curator to assess skeletons from the early medieval cemetery at Llandough, near Cardiff.  The excavations in the early 1990s produced in excess of a thousand skeletons, which have remained in Amgueddfa Cymru’s archive awaiting full examination. 

We learnt how the skeletons must be stored and handled in accordance with ethical standards for dealing with human remains.  Each skeleton is individually assessed for completeness, and sometimes it is possible to identify the sex and observe evidence of age and disease.  This information is recorded for entry into the Amgueddfa Cymru catalogue and will be useful in future research of human remains and the Llandough site, and contribute to the study of medieval archaeology more generally. 

Examining human remains provokes reflection on the lives of medieval people and, whilst it may not be for everyone, it does bring us closer to the past in a special way.  The work placement was an excellent learning experience.  The Curator, Adelle was very patient with all the questions raised by the student placements and generous in sharing her knowledge and skills.  It is a great way for Amgueddfa Cymru to engage with the public, and I am grateful for the opportunity to see behind the scenes and contribute to the work of the museum.  I hope Amgueddfa Cymru will continue to offer such opportunities for those who would like to get involved.

For more information on work placements for students, visit the 'Get Involved' pages of the website. It is possible to sign up to a mailing list to hear about any placements when they are advertised.

On Tuesday 12th September Amgueddfa Cymru kindly hosted our ESOL class on an ESOL trip-out to the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff. Welsh Refugee Council volunteer Souleymane Ouedraogo submitted the following report on the special outing. 

As part of an outing organized by Welsh Refugee Council ESOL tutors Marie and Chris; ESOL learners from different cities in Wales gathered at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff. We were warmly welcomed to Amgueddfa Cymru (National Museum of Wales) by museum staff recalling that Wales has several museums including that of Cardiff created more than a century ago. 

We then went to visit the Clore Discovery Centre. In this learning centre, there are multiple carefully preserved objects from geological, paleontological, archaeological and natural history research. Each object has its origin story. After the tour of the centre, there was time for a practical exercise that combined theory and practice seen during previous ESOL lessons. We practiced brilliantly with the support of our guide and the WRC delegation. It was both fun and educational at the same time. 

We then proceeded to visit the Art Gallery. Pictures and paintings are often tinged with landscapes and varied reliefs. Everyone can analyse and appreciate the artwork in their own way. Some paintings are very old (over 500 years), others more recent. You often have to get closer to better understand the artistic work. You need eyes to see, but even better, you need to have ingenious eyes to understand the messages conveyed by these beautiful paintings. Thanks to the great work of painters of other times, each new generation has elements of research to better understand history. 

I would like to thank the Welsh Refugee Council for organizing the outing but even more so the National Museum for having offered this invitation. It has allowed us to not only learn a little more about the culture of Wales but to also create contacts for possible opportunities in the future. 

 “I would like to reiterate our thanks to Amgueddfa Cymru, for an excellent day for our students.  I thought that there was a really nice balance of activities, excellent use of relevant artifacts and pictures – not to mention your enthusiastic and motivating presentation.” said Martin Smidman Volunteer & Partnership Manager at the Welsh Refugee Council.

Diolch yn fawr Amgueddfa Cymru.

A group photo in the Clore Discovery Centre!

I was appointed an Honorary Research Fellow at Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales earlier this year and I've finally made it down to see the collection I'll be working with!

I'm doing work on Jessie Knight, considered one of the UK's first female tattoo artists, and it was amazing seeing her machines, flash, art and photos. There are about 1000 items in the archive and I only looked at two boxes so I'm really excited to get stuck in and see what I can find. I'll be working with the collection for two years and am planning some community events as well as participatory research.

I got my first tattoo aged 19. A piece of flash chosen from the walls of a studio in Bath, inked on by a tattooist who I can’t remember anything about except he wore black gloves. Over twenty years later and I’ve got many more, mostly custom designs inked over multiple sessions, the latest by a woman whose mother I used to work with. Tattoos have, even since I got my first one, become more mainstream, more acceptable. And female tattoo artists are becoming more common - a far cry from the early 20^th century when Jessie Knight began work.

Jessie, born in Croydon in 1904, is widely considered to be the UK’s first female tattoo artist. She began working at her father’s studio in Barry when she was 18, and after moving around the UK returned to Barry in the 1960s. After her death in 1992 her collection of photographs, artwork, tattoo machines and designs passed to her great nephew Neil Hopkin-Thomas and was acquired by Amgueddfa Cymru, with the help of art historian and tattoo academic Dr Matt Lodder, in 2023. 

But why on earth should a tattooist’s archive be acquired by a museum, or put on display? As someone who has, and researches, tattoos the collection is a fascinating piece of subcultural history. And subcultures – like punk and hip-hop – have increasingly become the subject of exhibitions at museums and galleries. Tattoos reflect the hopes, loves and identities of the people who have them – as the tattoo of the highland fling that won Jessie second place in the 1955 Champion Tattoo Artist of All England competition attests – and give us an insight into the lives of people through the ages. 

But the Knight collection also tells us about the cultural and societal norms of the time. It’s estimated that there were only five other female tattoos in the US and Europe working at the same time as Jessie. This was an incredibly tough industry for a woman and we can see some of the behaviour Jessie would have had to put up with in the signs she displayed – preserved within the collection. Her great-nephew has told stories about how Jessie’s shop was broken into and her designs taken, and how she would sit on a big trunk that held her designs while she was tattooing so no one could get to them.

The designs in the collection also tell us about the trends of the day, and while some of these are intensely problematic and need to be addressed sensitively, we can also see how Jessie moved away from the more stereotypical representation of women as sex objects to create a more realistic depiction of women. This was unusual at the time, but then Jessie herself was also unusual – and blazed a trail for female tattoo artists working today. 

Hi Bulb Buddies,

I want to say a big thank you for all your hard work on planting day. You helped to plant 11,183 bulbs across the country and from the photos I’ve seen, it looks like you all had a great time doing it!

Weather records should be kept from 1st November. Please make sure that your thermometer and rain gauge are in a suitable place next to your bulbs so that you can take weather readings every day that you are in school. Don’t worry if you are on holiday this week, you can enter ‘no record’ for any days that you are not in school. 

There is a resource on the website to help you prepare for taking Weather Records. I’ve attached this here in case you haven’t already seen it. This resource helps you to answer important questions, such as ‘why rainfall and temperature readings are important to our investigation into the effects of climate on the flowering dates of spring bulbs’!

Use your Weather Chart to log the rainfall and temperature every school day. At the end of the week, log into the Amgueddfa Cymru website to add your weekly findings. You can also leave comments or ask questions for me to answer in my next Blog. 

Let me know how you get on. You can share photos with me via email or X/Twitter.

Keep up the good work Bulb Buddies,

Professor Plant