The House Husband

Finally, I’ve finished. The 1152 records on the medical update list are completed. It feels like I’ve amended more like 20,000 records! All I can see are pots and statues of Florence Nightingale, breast relievers and feeding bottles. Now I’m just wondering what will be waiting for me next week.

Kevin did mention a possibility of my scanning in old images off the original catalogue cards but that won’t be for another couple of weeks so, who knows.

Anyway, it was such a glorious day today (nothing like yesterday) that I went for a short wander after lunch.

The Queen’s Tower looked fantastic against the blue sky so I snapped a photograph of it in all its glory.

Queen's Tower, Imperial College

This is all that remains of the Imperial Institute which was started in 1888 to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. It was completed in 1893 and was intended to be an institute for scientific research into things brought back from all corners of the empire. It was demolished in 1969, because it was considered not adaptable by Imperial College, which was expanding all over the square.

The Victorian Society and John Betjeman (the poet who wanted to destroy Slough) managed to save the tower. It now stands alone at the end of a large green space of super green grass. It is clad in Portland stone which explains why it looks so bright and clean. I say alone but it is surrounded by the distinctly 1970s architecture of Imperial College, London, generally sprinkled with students wandering from building to building.

At the time of the proposed demolition, there was a lot of resistance, prompting Lord Home to say:

Many will regret this change in the Kensington landscape. But it is symbolic of the needs of the times that we can no longer rest on the memorials of past greatness but must prepare for a new but different greatness of the future.

I’m not sure how that was received!

The Tower, which is now more accurately called a free standing campanile, is, sadly, no longer open to the public but, apparently, affords wonderful views of London. It houses ten bells (named after Vic & Albert’s kids) which are still rung on royal anniversaries by a group called the Ancient Society of College Youths.

Here’s a shot looking up from near the base.

Queen's Tower, Imperial College

It’s a bit of a shame that the building was demolished because everything else around it is decidedly Victorian. Well, everything except Imperial College which is decidedly not. To be fair, the Tower makes a wonderful counterpoint to the boring architecture of the college buildings and compliments the Science Museum, which is merely a block away.

I’ve been told to stop doing such detailed and well researched work! Well, maybe not quite as harshly as that. Ailsa wants the oil paintings finished by the beginning of March so I’m having to update the merest of bits of the records. Like, the artist, the measurements and the date. Instead of spending up to an hour on a record, I am now getting them completed in about five minutes! Nick assures me I can come back and finish them properly when I’ve completed the list. I hope so! I miss the research.

I emailed Mirinda early in the day to find out whether we’d be travelling home together. She had a meeting but said she’d like to. This meant I had some time to kill so I decided to have a wander around the museum.

Apart from the odd ten minute forays after lunch, I’ve not really had a good look around apart from the day I went up for the special initiation into the ways of the SciMu Volunteer. So, I decided to start on level 5 and work my way down. (5 is the top.)

I particularly liked level 5. it was the history of medicine, using lots of pieces from the Wellcome Collection. The history of the Wellcome Collection and the Science Museum is here. However, if you’d like to read about the actual Wellcome Museum at Euston, that is here. I might go there next Wednesday.

In a continuation of the medical theme (after Wednesday’s anatomy lesson with Dr Hunter) it seemed ideal. I wandered around the display cases, amazed at some of the incredible stuff. It starts with the Egyptians and even has an unwrapped mummified head! Here it is:

An unwrapped mummified head - wicked!

A little further around, passing the Greeks and the Romans and their nasty little implements of medical duress, I found a St Sebastian! Unbelievable. It was in a section concerning the mediaeval belief in saintly intervention. Lots of examples of saint, including my very own St Sebastian. He didn’t look too well, I have to say but he was there, willing to cure anyone with plague who happened along. The only way I could get a photo was from above, so the angle is a bit weird but I think it brings out the colour in his cheeks more.

A very unexpected St Sebastian

You’ll have to ignore the reflections as he’s (obviously) in a case and the light bounces all over the place and I refuse to use a flash in museums, particularly with organic subjects. Anyway, it’s clear enough to see the arrows and his splendidly wavy hair. Gotta love him.

Of course there was lots of great quackery as well. The whole phrenology thing which took a very tight grip on Victorian England and beyond was well represented with, what was described as , ‘a box of phrenology heads’. I don’t know but that struck me as kind of funny. It was impossible to get the entire box in – it was very big with a LOT of little heads in it – but this shot may give you an idea.

Part of a box of phrenology heads

Actually, now I’m looking closely at it, I wish I’d blipped this shot today. I didn’t mind the one I did send (using my phone from work) but this one would have been much more bizarre. I might do it again and then blip it. Keep it to yourself. I don’t want Dawn to know that I’ve pre-scouted a blip.

Well, after a quick shot of a poster about gout showing a vile little creature, all claws and fangs, getting stuck into someone’s foot which I took with my phone and sent off to Nicktor, I left for my rendezvous amid the extreme sport called ‘train catching on a Friday night at Waterloo’.

I was all alone in the basement this afternoon. Kevin was at Blythe House, Nick may or may not have been at Blythe House, Ailsa was on annual leave and Barbara had gone to a training session. The lights down here operate by movement (to save electricity) and the office I work in is all dark when I’m sitting on my own. Mainly because the movement sensors are on the other side of the office. Normally one of the others trigger it. But not this afternoon. So every ten minutes or so, the lights go off.

Fortunately I have the skylight above me which gives a lot of natural light. And then, every now and then one of the guys in the office next door walk by the doorway and trigger the lights. Which is disconcerting!

Kevin actually rang this morning to make sure all was well and to let me know he’s nominated me for the Volunteer of the Year award – I guess because Nick wasn’t around to do it. The ceremony is being held on Thursday but I’ll not be able to make it as I have a Talking Newspaper session. Pity. It’s being held in a part of the museum not normally opened to the public and I’d have liked a bit of a gander.

Kevin also asked if I could change my Monday to some other day because there’s a new volunteer they need to slot in somewhere. As much as I’d like to be helpful, I’m really only happy doing Monday and Friday. As it is, Tuesday is my only guaranteed day at home! Well, once I restart lunch with Mirinda when she returns to work.

And so I spent the day repairing records for models of war stretchers, made during WWI, and pewter hot water bottle records (no breast relievers today), hopefully improving them for general consumption. The records, not the stretchers or hot water bottles.

Here’s a picture I took of the office before the lights went out. This is the view from my Monday desk. Nick is right in front of me, Ailsa is in the far corner, to the right of the photocopier and Barbara sits just to the left, almost behind the pillar.

Down in the basement

At lunchtime I was wandering around the museum, looking for something to blip (I ended up finding something outside) when I came upon this. It’s the boiler from an old (1796 old) early steam engine. I have no idea how it works or what it does but it has an oddly alien look about it. Sort of Jules Verne-ish. It’s as if something from the pages of The First Men on the Moon suddenly leapt from the pages and onto the museum floor.

Steam header thingy

Today I found out all about the Foundling Hospital. Oddly coincidentally I heard about it a few weeks ago while watching an art programme about Hogarth. A few of his paintings were specifically created for it and, I think, still hang in, what is now the Foundling Museum.

The reason I researched it today was because of a pap boat I entered at work came from there. Actually, I entered 94 records today and most of them were pap boats. Of those, nearly all of them had no history at all so finding one from the Foundling Hospital was a welcome diversion from typing the same thing over and over.

The Foundling Museum was the brain child of philanthropist Thomas Coram. He mostly messed about with boats. He built them in Massachusetts and then, returning to London, became a very successful merchant. He was appalled by the homeless, dirty waifs roaming the streets and decided to do something about it. He applied and received a Royal Charter from George II to create the Foundling Hospital.

I should explain that it wasn’t a ‘hospital’ as such, although it did tend to sick as well as healthy kids. The word ‘hospital’ was used as in ‘hospitable’; being welcoming to foundlings, in other words.

It was a huge success, to the point that people would send their unwanted children to it and the government paid an amount for each one. Unfortunately this meant that a lot of nasty people exploited the poor and helpless but basically it was a good idea.

The hospital, when it was completed in 1745, was in Bloomsbury and William Hogarth, the great painter, decorated it with portraits of the staff and children as well as a celebrated portrait of Coram.

Another great supporter was Handel, who donated a manuscript of his Hallelujah Chorus to the hospital as well as performing a special charity concert for it.

The building has long since gone (it was torn down in 1926 after being sold to a man who wanted to turn it into the new Covent Garden) but the legacy lives on in both the Thomas Coram Foundation for Children and the Foundling Museum.

For its time, the idea of a charity devoted to the care of unwanted children was well ahead of its time and I think Thomas Coram must have been a true saint. Not one of those pretend ones that Catholics believe in but, like Mother Teresa, a real one.

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In case anyone really wants to see Widdy dance, I’ve embedded a youtube video that should work. But, first, a little background. She berated the judges afterwards because they didn’t understand the dance at all. She is, in fact, a cape and her partner (Anton Du Beck) the matador. It’s obvious really…

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And because I like putting photos in my blog and it was actually sunny today (a bit), here’s a picture of where I work. From the outside. Note that this is actually the exit and it’s before the museum opens. Still…it’s the same building.

Science Museum - exit

There’s been a lot of roadworks on Exhibition Road, which is why the fences and cones are everywhere. Actually, it’s been going on since at least April when I started.

In the early hours of this morning, an idiot from West London decided it was fine and dandy to walk along a Tube tunnel (I assume he’d missed what he thought was the last train). He stepped off the station at Bayswater and was not seen again until a maintenance/cleaning crew came through at 2:30am and found his body. Police think he was trying to walk home.

While this is an incredibly stupid thing to do at any time, it threw the Tube into a massive mess this morning. The police closed off the Circle line completely and a large section of the District line. And then, to compound the problem for this morning’s commuters, there was a signal problem on the Northern line and it was also stopped.

I watched as a train full of passengers, heading north from Waterloo, disgorged as the announcement was made. I joined the huge flow of humanity, heading for the Jubilee line, hoping it was running.

As I stood waiting for the next train (along with about 28,000 other disgruntled travellers) an announcement came over the tannoy. A man with a voice that dripped of inevitability, read off the various lines that would be closed on the weekend. As usual, the Jubilee line was one of them. As the next train pulled in, I thanked the Roman god of transport and squeezed on.

Getting off at Green Park (where the King lives) I walked the 32 miles to the Piccadilly line for the short trip to South Kensington. I wasn’t alone as I shuffled along in the grumbled mass.

After all of that, I managed to get to work on time if somewhat rattled. This is one reason why I’d NEVER work full time at the Science Museum. This would only have to happen a few times before I quit.

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The day was rubbish again so, after lunch, I wandered around the Energy Hall and took a few educational pictures. Firstly, here’s a picture of Old Bess, built by Boulton & Watt…well, the top bit, anyway.

Old Bess by Boulton & Watt, 1777

While Old Bess was a very important move in the development of steam power, she was, apparently, not very reliable and, in the words of Boulton & Watt, probably the worst thing they ever built. She was so unpredictable that people called her Beelzebub. She was only called Old Bess when she was used for removing water from mines.

And here is a drawing of all of her.

Drawing of Old Bess

If you’d like to read more, there’s a Science Museum piece about it here.

Here is a child looking up in wonder at all the amazing things in the entrance hall of the Science Museum.

Science Museum Energy Hall

I love it when they do that. The museum has things hanging from the ceiling as well as all around the walls. At one end is a big rocket. I think that’s what he’s looking at.

There’s always a lot of kids at the museum at lunchtime. I think it’s great and they all seem to have a wonderful time.

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I heard on the news that a stranded luxury liner had run out of food and a navy helicopter flew them out some emergency rations. They gave them Spam and pop tarts! Is that all they could manage to find?

Blythe House, exterior

This is where I went today to view the objects I’ve been amending at work. Originally the headquarters for the Post Office Savings Bank, Blythe House now houses reserve objects for the Science Museum (and the V&A AND the British Museum). It is very big. The Science Museum has a short, but interesting, piece on it here.

I had a call from Karen and Farelli today (Farelli wanted to hear if my accent had changed at all) and, in the course of the conversation, I mentioned I was off to Blythe today. When Karen was working at the V&A she had to go there to photograph some quilts. She warned me it was a rabbit warren of rooms and corridors, stairs and hidden rooms. She was SO right!

What an amazing place. To work there would be a dream; a utopia. Except for the transport. Getting there on the Overground was fine. In fact, I’d never been on the Overground before and I have to say it sure beats the Tube into a cocked hat! It is a very easy connection from home because I changed at Clapham Junction rather than go all the way into town. This was a 10 minute wait between connections. more than manageable.

Fortunately, Mirinda had warned me that the Oyster touch pads were very well hidden. I think I’ve mentioned before this evil habit of London transport. Well, this is the worst one. Very well hidden it is. And then, at Kensington Olympia, it’s also hard to find – they do not have automatic gates. Still, these are minor annoyances. The worst thing was coming back. The Overground was rammed full and, by the time I arrived at Clapham, I managed to miss the train home by three minutes. This meant a wait of 30 minutes on a cold draughty station. Mirinda also reminded me of this as she had the same experience when she had to go to Shepherd’s Bush two years ago.

Anyway, I digress. That was all very unimportant. Yesterday Kevin gave me directions for getting to Blythe House and I dutifully turned up at 2pm for my tour. They were all just finishing their lunch and I met a whole load of people, mostly called John and then Nick led me away.

From the outset I have to say that any sense of direction is immediately destroyed. I have no idea where I went, where I was or how I returned. The place is amazing. Doors, carefully marked, lead off into rooms full of reserve collection objects.

First up, Nick took me to see some of the artworks I’ve been researching. He showed me some amazing pictures of some amazing people including an engraving of Charles Babbage which I’d not seen before. He looked quite the dandy!

I’ve just finished reading Bride of Science (about Ada Lovelace nee Byron) in which Babbage features heavily and recently I read Jacquard’s Web, again with a lot of Babbage. Both of these feature him when he was older, as most of the pictures I’ve seen of him do as well, so it was nice to see him looking young and eager.

From the portraits of inventors and scientists, passing the two huge busts turned towards the corner, looking as if they were in trouble but I suspect to save their noses from careless feet and trolleys, we moved into the print room to view railway engravings.

Way back, when I was studying for my undergraduate degree, I wrote an essay about early transport in England. I learned an awful lot about the first railway lines and trains as they superseded things like coastal shipping and canal boats. Imagine my delight when Nick produced the original drawing of the Stockton and Darlington Railway which boasts having the first (ever!) steam driven passenger carriage! Wikipedia has a nice entry here. One of the pictures I saw today can be seen here but it’s nowhere near as good as the original!

Having looked at lots of railway pictures, we moved on to ships (I should add that trains and boats are Nick’s passions) and came across a wonderful hand drawn panorama of Portsmouth harbour in the early 1800s. Wonderful stuff! But my time with Nick was drawing to a close and he had to hand me over to Kevin for the second part of my tour. Before we left this part of Blythe, I made him pose for a photograph.

Nick, my boss at the Science Museum, humouring me

We then walked upstairs to the office they work in where Kevin sat waiting for me. Most importantly I was handed a pair of latex gloves because, as he said “We’ll be touching things.” We said goodbye to Nick and he led me deeper into the maze, further below the ground, in a strange world of long dark corridors with blank nondescript doors, each locked and marked only with a location code.

First up we went to G24, the location for the objects I am currently entering (the masses of feeding cups, posset pots and breast relievers of recent posts). And guess what? We looked at (and handled) masses of them. I saw the various types of nipple shields – I really have to wonder how women kept them on – and marvelled at the weight of the lead one. This was like MIMSY records coming to life before my eyes. Plain and patterned feeding cups all jockeying for position in great cabinets.

When he opened a drawer containing lots of wooden boxes and opened one to reveal a breast reliever, I just had to snap a photograph!

Breast reliever in mahogany box

I thought this was it, but no, there was more!

He took me deeper into the bowels of the store. We saw Dr Frankenstein laboratories full of ancient medical equipment. We saw a room full of Roman artefacts, including the biggest plaster phallus I’ve ever seen. And after studying the Romans, I’ve seen a few. We saw…oh God, we saw so many things. It was heaven. I was like a kid in a sweet shop.

Fortunately Kevin was there to show me the way out, otherwise I’d be there forever, haunting the lost corridors like some mythical bull on a Greek island.

Truly a wonderful afternoon. Thank you Nick and Kevin!

Tonight Mirinda and I watched Date Night. What a hilarious movie! Highly recommended for a jolly good laugh. Tina Fey is fantastic, the script excellent and the car chase has to be seen to be believed. Ok, it’s not an original premise but it doesn’t matter. We both laughed out loud A LOT!

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It was Amy’s last day at the Science Museum today so we had cakes. She is going off to study geology – lucky thing! Our little band chatted about nonsense for a bit and we ended up discussing why Guiness tastes better when it’s poured and drunk in Ireland. Amy thinks it’s because it’s filtered through kittens. There was a stunned silence (Amy is the sort of person you’d expect to have kittens on her screensaver rather than advocating their use in straining alcoholic beverages) and then we all started laughing.

I had an interesting day fixing up more of my mistakes (grrrr) on the database and finding out about artists and more ships of the Royal Navy…or at least paintings of them.

Or so I just heard on Front Row. Apparently a lot of popular songs recorded this year include a certain amount of whistling. It is catchy, I guess. The first recording of someone whistling is from 1891 by an African American. It’s very scratchy. As opposed to catchy.

According to the guy on the radio, hand clapping may make a return by the end of the year.

I had another lovely day at the Science Museum today, learning all about the Earl of Cadogan, the 11th Earl of Huntingdon (who was dead when he was honoured posthumously because there was no true heir for 30 years) and the Reverend William Buckland.

Buckland, in particular is a guy I have known of before. He understood the importance of fossils and he excavated the Kirkdale Caves in North Yorkshire, finding all manner of strange beasts. Of course, he did rip off Mary Anning to some extent but, even so, we have a lot to thank him for.

I am so glad I’ve finished the Locations Project! Long live the Arts Project, I say.

I have to just mention the Arabic rug seller. Every Friday morning, he would greet me, beckoning earnestly, as if he had a bargain only I could collect; a secret for my ears only. He would desperately look left and right, to make sure it was just me to whom he would impart this important information, this carpet bargain.

Well, now he has gone. I would pull faces at him and mutter things under my breath, but to be honest, I miss him now he’s gone. But the thing is, the exhibition is being removed. Workmen now take the place of the rug seller, unscrewing, unbolting, wrapping carefully in industrial protection.

It was an exhibition about the 1001 Inventions of the Islamic world and was very popular. It was made up of a series of big octagonal displays, each with a massive flat screen TV sitting, facing out in portrait rather than the normal landscape. From each of these screens came a performance from various Arabic looking chaps, eager to tell their stories.

They would gesture frantically, making you press the button at the bottom of their screens, so you would listen. My rug seller was one of them. It’s rather sad that I’ll never see him again.

Today at the Science Museum I started working on the art project. While I enjoyed the Location Update Project, it was, basically, just data entry. The first couple of vials of poison may be quite interesting but by the time you get to the 150th vial of poison…well, you get the picture. Which doesn’t even help because most of the records have no picture!

Anyway, that is all behind me. The Art Project is still updating the database and fixing up things that have been a bit skew-if since about 2006, but with the added difference of including research.

Each arty item has a maker, each maker has to have a record on the database. If there is no record of the person, one needs to be created. In order to create one I have to hunt them down using any method I can find to do so. It’s like being at uni except it’s work! Ignoring the fact that I don’t get paid, of course.

Anyway, it was a great day at work today. Though, to be fair, with the Location Update Project, I was getting through around 200 records a day. Today I managed 5.

Next Monday is my first Monday volunteering day, working with Kevin (whose chair I sit in on Fridays) rather than Nick. What this entails, I have no idea.

Mirinda had to give a presentation today at a conference and did very well. I’d leave it for her to elaborate but I know how difficult she finds it to make an entry on here…

I am not going to talk about the football except to say it’s the most dismal performance by a team of supposed international class footballers I think I’ve ever seen. I am stunned. They wouldn’t have beaten France the way they played tonight.

So, today was my induction into the Art Project at work. Though Nick worried me when I turned up and he said there was good and bad news. The bad news was that I hadn’t actually finished the Location Project because he’d found another load of records. The good news was that there were only 108 of them.

We had tea and stickies at 11am but I felt a sham. I hadn’t finished. Actually we had a jolly time just chatting, something I don’t get to do seeing as I only come in on Fridays. ‘Tea and stickies’ is lots of cakes with something wet to wash them down with.

Anyway, I’d completely finished the Location Project by lunch time. Since I started work at the museum (May 7), I have updated and entered 1,377 records. Yay.

After my usual lunch surrounded by hordes of school children eagerly screaming while stuffing food into their conveniently open mouths, I sat with Nick for the rest of the afternoon while he explained the Art Project. This is going to take some time. This project. I’m pretty sure it will not finish within my lifetime.

Essentially, I will be transferring information from a 1,000 page Word document, which represents the old database, and putting it in MIMSY, the newer database. But it’s not just a simple copy and paste. Oh no.

The information has to be disseminated throughout the proper fields and joined up with Places and People and Things. And if the information isn’t there, I have to research and enter it myself. Way cool! I’m really looking forward to starting next Friday!

I’m off to a lecture on Forensic Aspects of Ancient Egypt with Dawn tomorrow, which should be fun.

Did I say how bad the English played tonight? No, REALLY, they were awful.