I am looking at a selection from the family collection.
All are those everyday objects we all have knocking around the house, and I doubt that any would command much in the way of money if we tried selling them in the local secondhand shop.
And yet each has a story and that story tells us much about ourselves and the century in which they were made.
We have few items in the collection relating to our own British Home Child who was shipped out from Liverpool in 1914, by Middlemore acting for the Derby Union. There are three letters, a handful of official documents and the chilling assessment by Social Services on his mother’s ability to care for him and his siblings, which set him off on his journey to Canada.
Each in their way has provided bits of his story, and I am grateful that they survived.
And in the same way I am also pleased at the odd jumble of other bits in the collection.
In no particular order, they include a darning mushroom, my first Nokia mobile, some 1920’s RPM records, a 45 cm long brass earth rod, and a Viking oyster shell.
There are more, but I rather think these are enough for today.
We have all come to accept the mobile phone as an essential part of modern living, and my present one is an all singing, all dancing machine, which allows me to pretty much do everything I want. My old clockwork Nokia was different and was limited to calls, and texts, but it had that quality that it could be dropped, and it would just bounce, had a battery that lasted weeks and played Snake.
But what often exercises my mind is just what did we do before mobiles, and in particular what we did on days out in town when we split for an hour or so. I suppose we would decide on a place and time to meet, and curse if one of us was late. The upside was of course there was no thirty second conversation from a shop, about whether Uncle Rodney might like the woolen mittens that our partner/wife/ companion had come across while shopping for a dress.
In the same way in this online digital world which allows instant communication, as well movies streamed into the home, I marvel at the early days of wireless when to enhance reception, you had to attach a wire from the radio to a brass earth rod positioned in the garden. This I know because dad had sixty of them the back in his shed in London. Ours will date from the early 1920s, and came in its box, made by the Anacoda Works in Salford, just a few miles from where we live in Manchester.
Lastly there is the wooden mushroom which was used for darning socks, in a pre-throw away time, and the oyster shell, which was found by archaeologists in the 1970s in York. It dates from when the city was a Viking stronghold, is about a thousand years old, and along with a barrel of other shells was being sold for 10p, which is an indication of just how many they had unearthed, and just how cheap and plentiful were oyster in Viking Jorvik.
The collection is not unique and is just a small handful of the everyday objects which would once have come through our house, but they tell a story, as do all those that find their way into museums.
And the trick is how to use them to engage people, fire their interest in the past and get them to go off and look for their own items and their own family history.
So, during the course of a talk I will bring out that mushroom tool and ask the audience what it was used for. Depending on the collective age of those in front of me, the answer will range from a door handle to part of a mortar and pestle set, with only those born before the middle of the last century identifying it correctly. And the same is true of the earth rod.
Even more exciting is the reaction when I hand around items from Manchester Museum’s Paleolithic and Neolithic collections, consisting of an Old Stone Age hand axe, along with a polished axe head and flint arrows from the New Stone Age.
People marvel at the workmanship, draw conclusions about what they tell us about the hand axe which was the tool of a hunting community compared to the polished axe head dating from when the land was being cleared for farming.
But above all, it is the sheer fascination of holding an item which dates back 9,000 years in the case of the polished axe, and another 11,000 for the earlier hand axe, and that sense of being able to touch the past.
Pictures; darning mushroom, circa 1930, my first Nokia mobile 2000, a 45 cm long brass earth rod, circa 1920 and a Viking oyster shell, circa 900.
And yet each has a story and that story tells us much about ourselves and the century in which they were made.
We have few items in the collection relating to our own British Home Child who was shipped out from Liverpool in 1914, by Middlemore acting for the Derby Union. There are three letters, a handful of official documents and the chilling assessment by Social Services on his mother’s ability to care for him and his siblings, which set him off on his journey to Canada.
Each in their way has provided bits of his story, and I am grateful that they survived.
And in the same way I am also pleased at the odd jumble of other bits in the collection.
In no particular order, they include a darning mushroom, my first Nokia mobile, some 1920’s RPM records, a 45 cm long brass earth rod, and a Viking oyster shell.
There are more, but I rather think these are enough for today.
But what often exercises my mind is just what did we do before mobiles, and in particular what we did on days out in town when we split for an hour or so. I suppose we would decide on a place and time to meet, and curse if one of us was late. The upside was of course there was no thirty second conversation from a shop, about whether Uncle Rodney might like the woolen mittens that our partner/wife/ companion had come across while shopping for a dress.
In the same way in this online digital world which allows instant communication, as well movies streamed into the home, I marvel at the early days of wireless when to enhance reception, you had to attach a wire from the radio to a brass earth rod positioned in the garden. This I know because dad had sixty of them the back in his shed in London. Ours will date from the early 1920s, and came in its box, made by the Anacoda Works in Salford, just a few miles from where we live in Manchester.
Lastly there is the wooden mushroom which was used for darning socks, in a pre-throw away time, and the oyster shell, which was found by archaeologists in the 1970s in York. It dates from when the city was a Viking stronghold, is about a thousand years old, and along with a barrel of other shells was being sold for 10p, which is an indication of just how many they had unearthed, and just how cheap and plentiful were oyster in Viking Jorvik.
The collection is not unique and is just a small handful of the everyday objects which would once have come through our house, but they tell a story, as do all those that find their way into museums.
And the trick is how to use them to engage people, fire their interest in the past and get them to go off and look for their own items and their own family history.
Even more exciting is the reaction when I hand around items from Manchester Museum’s Paleolithic and Neolithic collections, consisting of an Old Stone Age hand axe, along with a polished axe head and flint arrows from the New Stone Age.
People marvel at the workmanship, draw conclusions about what they tell us about the hand axe which was the tool of a hunting community compared to the polished axe head dating from when the land was being cleared for farming.
But above all, it is the sheer fascination of holding an item which dates back 9,000 years in the case of the polished axe, and another 11,000 for the earlier hand axe, and that sense of being able to touch the past.
Pictures; darning mushroom, circa 1930, my first Nokia mobile 2000, a 45 cm long brass earth rod, circa 1920 and a Viking oyster shell, circa 900.
What The Snake by the Pink Fairies???
ReplyDeleteI'm no Metalhead but I must've seen them 20 times at the Marquee ( & once with their then new guitarist at the Harrow Inn)