The Historic Buildings Unit (HBU) at St Fagans National Museum of History have recently welcomed a new member of the team - Jen Farnell.

Jen joined HBU in January 2020 on a placement with The Prince's Foundation Traditional Building Skills Programme to learn traditional carpentry skills.  The bursary programme provides 8 months training in traditional skills for tradespeople already qualified in their field, but who want to train in traditional techniques.

Jen had completed her NVQ level 3 in Site Joinery and worked her apprenticeship with Persimmon Homes in south east Wales, when she heard about The Prince's Foundation Programme from a friend who had completed it and gained his NVQ level 3 in Carpentry Traditional Skills. The first 4 months of Jen's training were spent at Dumfries House with 11 other students, building an arbour in the grounds with a curved hip roof. Previously, Jen has volunteered in Swaziland teaching local women carpentry skills and worked for Wild Creations and NoFit State Circus.

At St Fagans, Jen has been working with Ben Wilkins (HBU Senior Traditional Carpenter) and Tom James (Apprentice HBU Traditional Carpenter) on the windows for The Vulcan Hotel. 

For the Castle Gardens, Jen has repaired the Mulberry Garden gate using traditional scarfing techniques to replace damaged sections of timber with new. She is also making a new gate for the Rosery replicating the trellis pattern from the Mulberry Garden gate.

Jen is originally from Aberystwyth and is a first language Welsh speaker. She is enjoying her time at St Fagans with the HBU team and said that “it is such a thrill to be at St Fagans, the home of Welsh culture, working with hand tools learning traditional techniques”.

Today is National Autusm Day, a chance to spread awareness and increase acceptance of Autism. Here at Amgueddfa Cymru National Museums of Wales, we believe passionately in making our museums and galleries accessible to everyone, and more than that to creating welcoming, comfortable spaces for all. To that end, a couple of years ago, with the support of autistic volunteers and family members, the National Waterfront Museum created a 'chill-out-room', and began offering 'quiet hours' each month. Here, Ian Smith Senior Curator of Modern & Contemporary Industry at the Waterfront Museum explains how this special space came about.

“In October 2016 we had a staff training day in ‘Autism Awareness’. It opened our eyes to how they see the world and how we can support their needs. It showed us how even the simplest of environmental changes can affect a person with autism. Things like light and sound levels, the colour of walls and floors. In fact the general layout of a space which might be deliberately made stimulating and flashy might cause many autistic people to retreat within themselves.

It was around this time that we welcomed a new volunteer at the museum. Rhys, 17, has autism. His mother contacted us and asked if he could volunteer with us to help his confidence when meeting people and in a real work environment. Rhys helps to run an object handling session, usually with another volunteer or a member of staff, and he has taken to it really well. We have all noticed that he’s become more outgoing and will now hold conversations with total strangers.

With the growing awareness of autism the Museum decided to create an Autism Champion. Our staff member Suzanne, who has an autistic son, readily agreed to take up the challenge. She now attends meetings with our sister museums where issues and solutions around autism are discussed.

During our training session we discovered that some organisations have created ‘chill-out’ rooms. These are for anyone who is feeling stressed or disturbed to go to and relax and gather themselves together. These rooms are especially useful for autistic people. We put a small group together to look at creating a safe, quiet space somewhere in the Waterfront Museum. After considering options, we decided that a little used first aid room on the ground floor offered the best place.

Rhys came into his own. He offered us a number of suggestions on how we could change the space to make it autism friendly. These included making the light levels controllable and sound proofing the room so that gentle music or relaxing sounds could be played. Suzanne too came up with a number of ideas from her own experience of looking after her son. Additionally, a local special school, Pen-y-Bryn, with whom we had an established relationship also offered us their valuable expertise.

The room we’ve created is a very soothing space and we find it gets regular use by people with a range of needs, and is clearly much appreciated as shown by the comments in the visitor’s book:

“Fantastic resource! My daughter really needed this today – thank you!”

“Lovely place to get away from the hustle and bustle for a little one.”

“Lovely idea for people on the spectrum to come for quiet.”

“Really helped my son to have some time out.”

This has been a very big learning curve for most of us, but it has been made much easier by talking to people who have direct experience of autism. Their input as part of our team has been invaluable.”

The Museum is of course, closed right now, but for those of you interested, the times for our 'quiet hours' are posted on our events pages each month. We look forward to welcoming you all back in the coming months. 

In June 2019 the opportunity arose to begin a partnership between the Learning Team at St Fagans and the Access Base at Cantonian High School, Cardiff. The Access Base offers a provision for children from the ages of 11 to 19 who have a statement of educational need for Autism. As a Learning Facilitator I have always found working with Autistic Spectrum Disorder groups rewarding, so I was excited to be asked to organise a programme of activities for the group. I was particularly looking forward to getting to know the group as the same learners would return each visit.

During June and July we met with the students and staff for 3 visits. These visits acted as taster sessions where we could all get to know each other a bit, and find out what sort of activities would be enjoyable and beneficial for the group. They included a guided tour of the site, making coil pots with air drying clay, and potting plants with our Gardening team. Following this, it was decided the students would visit fortnightly with activities based around a different project each term.

Our first project was based around the theme of craft, with Christmas in mind. We began by making baubles and woollen 'fairy lights' using the wet felting technique. This hands on, tactile activity proved popular as the students enjoyed coming up with different colour combinations! In the following visits the group made more baubles and designed and created their own sets of Christmas cards using stamps and ink. In our last meeting before Christmas, the students decorated plant pots before planting daffodil and crocus bulbs to take home and grow.

Following the Christmas break, the plan was for the group to help develop a resource for ASD visitors, allowing them to become familiar with the site before their first visit. Developing a resource like this is something I’ve been interested in for a long time. This has involved visiting the galleries and buildings at St Fagans, and taking part in workshops such as the Warrior Grave and Lambing. I have collected feedback to add to the future visitor resource - for example the need to be aware that there's an echo effect while walking through the Atrium, and low level lighting in the buildings.

Unfortunately, our time together working on this project was cut short by the current events. There are still many more buildings for us to visit together, and more workshops to take part in. We look forward to welcoming Cantonian Access Base back to the museum in the future.

Miss Aimee Phillips – Cantonian High School said “Having a partnership with the St Fagans Learning team has given our pupils some amazing opportunities to learn outside of the classroom. Multisensory, hands on learning is vital to our pupils who are on the Autistic Spectrum. When working with the learning team, our pupils have been able to develop and refine their social skills which is a key area of learning. Some of our most memorable moments at St Fagans over the past year include, working in the Italian Garden, learning how to be a miller, the warrior workshop and most recently, watching lambs being born on the farm. As a teacher I would highly recommend the Learning team and their resources to anyone wanting a unique learning experience.”

You can learn more about the St Fagans Learning programme on our website. 

Wooden Objects

We’re sure that you can think of many images surrounding us at the moment, in shops and in the media, associated with the Easter holiday:  colourful chocolate eggs, fluffy chicks and rabbits, white lillies and simnel cakes to name but a few.

But can you guess what the two wooden objects in the images on the right are?

Easter Customs

This week I have been listening to recordings in the Sound Archive relating to Easter Customs.  We have oral testimony on a wide variety of traditions:  holding “eisteddfods”; “creu gwely Crist” (creating Christ’s bed); singing Easter carols; cutting hair and trimming the beard on Maundy Thursday in order to look tidy for the Easter weekend; eating fish, “hongian bwnen” and walking to church barefooted on Good Friday; drinking water from a well with brown sugar on the Saturday before Easter; climbing a mountain to see the sun “dancing” at daybreak and wearing new clothes on Easter Sunday; playing “cnapan” (a game of Welsh hurling using a ball of hard wood) on the Sunday following Easter.

“Clapio Wyau” (“Egg Clapping”)

But the custom that really caught my attention was the practice of going “egg clapping” on Anglesey.  Going egg clapping before Easter was an extremely popular tradition among children years ago and the images on the right show the wooden egg clappers that the children would carry with them.

According to Elen Parry who was born in Gaerwen in 1895 and recorded by the Museum in 1965:

We would usually have an hour or two off school, maybe a day or two before the school would close so that we could go clapping before Easter.  You would nearly be doing it throughout the week, but there was one special day when the school would let you go clapping for an hour or two.  Nearly everybody would go clapping.  You’re father would have made you what we would call a ”clapper”.  And what was that?  A piece of wood with two more pieces either side so that it would “clap”, and that’s what a “clapper” was.

The children would travel around local farms (or any homestead that kept chickens).  They would knock on the door, shake their clappers and recite a short rhyme similar to this one:

Clap, clap, os gwelwch chi’n dda ga’i wŷ

Clap, clap, please may I have an egg

Geneth fychan (neu fachgen bychan) ar y plwy’

Young girl (or young boy) on the parish

And here’s another version of the rhyme from Huw D. Jones, Gaerwen:

Clep, Clep dau wŷ

Clap, Clap, two eggs

Bachgen bach ar y plwy’

Young boy on the parish

The door would be opened and the occupier would ask “And who do you belong to?”  After the children had answered, they would each receive an egg.  According to Elen Parry:

You would either have a small pitcher, a small can, or a basket with straw or grass on the bottom.  And then everybody would get an egg.  Well, by the time you’d finished, you might have a basket full of eggs.

The inhabitants of the home would usually recognise the children and if a brother or sister was missing, they would place an extra egg in the basket for siblings.  Mary Davies, from Bodorgan, born in 1894 and recorded by the Museum in 1974 recalls:

And if the family in the house knew these small children, knew their siblings, and some were missing, they would also give them an egg for those brothers or sisters.

Eggs on the Dresser

Having returned home, the children would give their mother the eggs and she would place them on the dresser.  The eldest child’s egg would be placed on the top shelf, the second eldest’s egg on the second shelf and so on.

With plenty of energy and determination, an impressive haul of eggs could be had.  Joseph Hughes, born in Beaumaris in 1880 and recorded by the Museum in 1959 remembers:

Some would be quite brazen-faced and would have been clapping solidly throughout the week.  They would have a hundred and twenty eggs.  I remember asking my wife’s brother, “Did you go clapping, Wil?”, “Well, yes”, he said.  “How well did you do?”, “Oh, I only got a hundred and fifty”.

A Type of Begging?

Even though most people would give the children eggs, some would refuse and answer the door with a disgruntled “Mae’r ieir yn gori” (“The hens are brooding”) or “Dydy’r gath ddim wedi dodwy eto” (“The cat hasn’t laid eggs yet”).  Some parents would also be wary of allowing their children to go clapping, considering it to be a type of begging.  This is what one interviewee had to say:

My father would never be happy for us to go because everybody knew who my father was.  Well, my father never liked the fact that we had been begging at doors, but we would still go

Revival

It’s great to see that the tradtion of clapping is now enjoying a revival on Anglesey.  It seems, for one week only, it’s still safe and acceptable in Wales to put all your eggs in one basket.

2020 marks the National Waterfront Museum’s 10 year anniversary of working with the pupils and staff at Ysgol Pen Y Bryn

The National Waterfront Museum prides itself on the work that it does with the local community and schools within Swansea. These collaborations come in many different forms, from our GRAFT community garden to our innovative ‘my primary school is at the Museum’ programme. Our collaboration with Ysgol Pen Y Bryn is our longest running and a source of continual pride for the Museum.

The Museum and the school first came together in 2010 for a project named ‘Behind the Grey Doors’ which aimed to give a ‘behind the scenes’ look at the work that goes on at the Museum. The project gave an insight into everything from how our exhibitions are created to the operation of our Museum shop. Pupils from Pen Y Bryn interviewed staff at the Museum to find out what exactly it takes to run a Museum. The project was hugely enjoyable and beneficial for both the school and the Museum not only for its end product, a wonderful exhibition, but the journey towards it. Teachers and staff both noted the effect that the project had on pupils. Those who may have been tentative in the Museum at first were transformed by the end to feel more comfortable at home amongst the public and the exhibitions. This sense of ownership is something the Museum strives for in all of our community programmes.

The pupils and staff at Pen Y Bryn are a continual source of inspiration for all of us at the Museum. ‘Behind the Grey door’ gave us an insight into their amazing creativity and passion. Everyone at the Museum was keen to continue the work and Ysgol Pen Y Bryn have continued  to amaze us with their creativity. Each project has been more inspiring that the last. Projects have included the creation of books on subjects ranging from Swansea Football club to superheroes. The collaboration with huge organisations such as comic book studios and football’s club illustrates how the enthusiasm of the staff and pupils is infectious. They have also created films that have been voiced by everybody from Joanna Lumley to Michael Sheen. The galas that launch these films hosted at the Odeon in Swansea are a true celebration of all the hard work that goes into these projects, and the big screen occasion a reflection of the amazing talents of all those at Pen Y Bryn. All of the proceeds gained from the sales of books and dvds relating to the projects have benefitted local charities such as Ty Hafan.

Working with the school has helped the Museum to improve the support it provides to individuals with special educational needs. A ‘chill out room’ was created in the  Museum, with staff at Pen-Y-Bryn advising on the project. The room, similar to facilities they have at the school, offers a safe space for anybody who needs to take a moment.

To celebrate staff at the Museum have created an exhibition that celebrates all of the projects of the past ten years and the amazing objects that have created as part of them. Dethlu Deg marks ten years of working with Ysgol Pen Y Bryn and everybody here looks forward to ten more!