During a community engagement panel for the new Pacific Encounters gallery at the National Maritime Museum (NMM), a powerful moment occurred. “We were showing an unusual ceremonial adze (a tool similar to an axe) with two back-to-back warriors carved on it, when one of the men on the panel stood up and pulled up his shirt,” says Gail Symington, the director, collections and public engagement, at Royal Museums Greenwich.
“The motif on our adze was exactly the same as the tattoo on his body. The man was from New Zealand and had come along to the consultation with a London-based relative he was visiting. It was amazing for everyone when he exclaimed that his ancestors had made the adze.”
It was also a serendipitous example of why museums need to regularly rethink how objects are displayed and treated. In the context of the Brexit debate about Britain’s trading future, maritime museums can give new perspectives on Britain’s seafaring past, its national identity and place in the world.
This was the approach to the NMM’s four new permanent Endeavour galleries, which opened in September 2018 (of which Pacific Encounters is one) so named to chime with the 250th anniversary of Captain Cook’s first Pacific voyage from nearby Deptford. The galleries, which are in a wing that was previously closed to the public, have increased the museum’s display areas by more than 40%. More importantly, they have brought genuine organisational change, says Symington.
“As a national museum we have a responsibility to share and invite everyone to contribute to the larger stories, and working on our new galleries made us realise that we were representing a very narrow slice of the population,” she says.
“We have learned to be open with our collections and allow others to interpret them. We have had to sit on our hands slightly and accept that we are not the only experts in the room. Accepting the perspectives of members of the local Pacific community who suggested, for instance, that we talk to the objects has been quite revolutionary in changing the way we work. Saying good morning to a canoe as a way of feeling the embodiment of the ancestors’ history was for us a very un-museumy thing to do, but it made us look at how we represent elements such as blessings and ceremonies, for example.
“The project has been transformational,” Symington continues. “It has fostered trust and prompted us to consult even earlier, which has led to us discovering unexpected relevance that is not tacked on at the end, but taken into the core, front and centre of our programming.”
National Museums Liverpool’s Merseyside Maritime Museum has also been looking at new ways to make its collections relevant to today’s audiences. Its Black Salt exhibition, which closed in December last year, was based on a book by historian Ray Costello that looked at seafarers of African descent on British ships. Curator Ian Murphy worked with community historians such as Costello to build on existing museum links but also to collect items that could feed into the museum’s new permanent seafarers’ gallery.
“It’s about placing stories that museums have traditionally treated as marginal back into the centre of our history, and showing how our collections can reflect wider social attitudes that were played out on board ship,” Murphy says. “Stories of unsung individual heroism or injustices that have hardened through to the 20th and 21st centuries that were kept literally below decks are now being represented to wider audiences.”
The museum was also able to draw from the wider NML collections to show how African sailors were witness to key events in British history. The painting The Death of Nelson by Daniel Maclise, which normally hangs at the Walker Art Gallery, shows that there were sailors of African descent who fought at the Battle of Trafalgar. There were also loans, such as an engraved elephant tusk of African seaman Ben Freeman from Royal Museums Greenwich that gives his testimonial and service record.
Revealing hidden histories
Across the UK, maritime museums of all sizes are revisiting their collections and bringing hidden histories to the fore as a way of connecting with communities and encouraging more visitors.
Visitor figures at the National Waterfront Museum in Swansea have been boosted by Visit Wales designating 2018 as The Year of the Sea. While the museum tells the story of industry and innovation in Wales, now and over the last 300 years, its strong maritime element is integral because of the country being bound by the sea on three sides.
“We spearheaded Amgueddfa Cymru’s (National Museums Wales – NMW) response to this by creating a series of maritime-related temporary exhibitions,” says Steph Mastoris, the head of museums at NMW. “The focus in each exhibition and its supporting events was on the human history of subjects such as the coast guards, pirates and the lost ports of Wales.
“People don’t realise that until the early 20th century Wales had ports and harbours along its extensive coastline,” Mastoris continues. “Many of these have disappeared and we wanted to explain that the global relationships between Wales and the rest of the world go back a long way. We had a huge amount of international as well as coastal trade a long time before we were a member of the European Union.”
The story of coal exportation is familiar, but the museum has been exploring Welsh maritime trade routes such as meat imports from Argentina, grain from the Black Sea and copper ore from Cuba and Chile.
“The legacies and links of this trade is proving a productive way forward,” says Mastoris. “The aim is to develop a global dialogue with industrial and maritime museums in those countries, which will link into the expectation that there will be more global trade post-Brexit.”
Valparaiso in Chile had a thriving Welsh community because copper ore was once exported from there for smelting in the Lower Swansea Valley. Some of this was then exported to the Indian sub-continent to create brassware that was then re-imported to Wales. Bollards cast and made in Cardiff can be found in ports in Argentina. Welsh links with the transatlantic slave trade can be found in the production of copper manillas, or bracelets, a form of currency that was exchanged for enslaved people in West Africa.
“Globalisation is not new and we will be slowly integrating these narratives into our core displays as we refresh them piecemeal, bringing out the more complex side of Welsh maritime trade, such as our relationship to slavery and the fine line between privateering and piracy,” says Mastoris.
Hull’s maritime history goes back 2,000 years, represented by the iron age Hasholme log boat, all the way up to the 1960s trawler Arctic Corsair. A £27.4m project, part funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, is underway to transform the city’s maritime heritage in the wake of its successful 2017 City of Culture year, with a redevelopment of the Hull Maritime Museum as a key element.
“The museum has mind-blowing collections in a stunning building, but it was opened in 1974 and is badly in need of updating,” says Simon Green, the cultural services director of Hull Culture and Leisure.
“The large amount of public consultation we’ve done has told us what is important to the people of Hull, from our star objects such as the polar bear and the whale skeleton, but also the more hidden stories of how war has affected the civilian population and the merchant fleet, as well as the well-known trawling and fishing heritage.”
The Arctic Corsair, Britain’s last sidewinder trawler, built in 1960 and used for deep-sea fishing, will be conserved and become the focal point in the North End Shipyard, a historic but previously privately owned site where the HMS Bounty was built in 1784. “The city centre was on an island surrounded by docks, one of which was the biggest in the UK,” says Green. “So maritime history is literally under people’s noses, but not as visible as in other places.”
Hull supported Brexit, but Green says the split from the European Union feels slightly artificial. “Our reality is we have always had connections that reach beyond the European Union to Iceland, Scandinavia, Russia and across the globe, and the museums can bring these connections to the fore,” he says.
There is a memorial to lost Hull trawlermen in Vik in Iceland, and Common Foe, a partnership project between Hull Maritime Museum and Reykjavík Maritime Museum, explored both sides’ feelings about the cod wars in the 1950s, 60s and 70s.
“It was a veterans’ exchange where skippers met up and bonded over the experience of being in the teeth of a gale or icing up,” Green says. “The common foe is the sea, not each other. Museums should be brave enough to set out the facts and let people process them.”
Scientific analysis
The Mary Rose Trust in Portsmouth is looking much further back in history than the cod wars for its new exhibition, which is provisionally titled The Many Faces of Tudor England. This will open in the spring and will look at the warship’s crew and what has been discovered from scientific analysis of eight of the 92 reconstructed skeletons the museum holds.
“We can find out a lot about individuals from their teeth, as these contain information about where they spent their formative years, the quality and type of foods they ate and life traumas,” says Alex Hildred, the head of research and curator of ordnance and human remains at the Mary Rose Trust. “Teeth are also good sources of DNA, which can inform us about ancestry, eye and hair colour and prevalent diseases.
“A ship is a microcosm of society and the Mary Rose gives an excellent insight into Tudor life because of the everyday objects found on board. We have glimpses from historical references that there may be a more cosmopolitan spread of nationalities than just the UK. This is backed up by the presence of a range of personal foreign objects on the ship.”
These objects prompted the museum to start looking at the individuals through detailed scientific study, and a genealogist has researched the ancestry of one of the two named individuals of the crew.
“The exhibition asks pertinent questions about identity, trade and cultural exchange at a time when we are, in a sense, cutting ourselves off from the rest of Europe,” says Hildred. “We may be on the fringe of Europe, but as a seafaring nation our ships have always been a way of moving genes and diseases as well as traded objects. It will be interesting to consider how the population may be affected by wider geopolitical changes by linking back to the human histories of the Mary Rose.”
As well as science, art is another effective way for museums to engage audiences. This has been a great success for the Scottish Maritime Museum, an independent charity-run museum on two sites on the west coast of Scotland. It is home to a nationally recognised collection of maritime heritage that includes 40 vessels and 60,000 objects. The Irvine site in North Ayrshire is surrounded by social housing, and local engagement is very important.
“The museum engages with the local community in various ways such as the museum’s boat building school, volunteering and various education programmes,” says David Mann, the director of the Scottish Maritime Museum. “But art has provided another means of connection and a route into new audiences.”
A Collecting Cultures grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund allowed the museum to increase its holding of about 20 paintings to more than 100 artworks. The collection includes known and acclaimed artists and has therefore become a nationally important art collection that attracts new visitors and complements the interpretation of the heritage collection.
“We wanted to represent all of Scotland and the islands and the new acquisitions cover mainly contemporary paintings, sculptures and drawings,” says Mann. “It was important these were of contemporary relevance to recent Scottish history and current issues, so we have paintings showing scenes of shipbuilding and the oil industry.”
The Historic Chatham Dockyard has a wide-ranging collection that includes artworks, but also ships models and numerous other artefacts associated with maritime heritage. It inhabits a site that played a key role in British naval history for 400 years but the small Medway community was devastated when the Royal Navy moved out in 1984.
“We must not disconnect from our communities or we won’t survive,” says Bill Ferris, the chief executive at the Historic Dockyard Chatham. “So, we tell these local stories as well as placing Chatham at the centre of a wider narrative about British naval power.”
Winner of both the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors National Award for best tourism and leisure project, and a Historic England Angel award for best major regeneration of a historic building or place in 2018, the museum retains its maritime heritage at its heart.
“It’s about people and we use objects, stories, the power of interpretation and cultural artefacts to link nations and build new relationships without shying away from difficult truths,” says Ferris. “We tell history in an uncompromising way, so the Battle of Medway is recognised as a humiliating defeat for the British at the hands of the Dutch.
“Our exhibitions, projects and partnerships show we are not constrained by national identity and are still related to Europe. It’s a difficult story that involves empire, but we can learn lessons from the past to help us create a new future, and I don’t think Brexit will change that.”
Museums can show that cultural heritage and arts transcend the changing political landscape and maritime museums in particular can be at the forefront of new post-Brexit narratives and partnerships.
Deborah Mulhearn is a freelance writer
It started with a boat-building demonstration 10 years ago at the Scottish Fisheries Museum in Anstruther on the Fife coast. The modest intention was to interpret their maritime heritage afresh. Today, 230 rowing boats based on the museum’s commissioned design are currently raced in regattas and races around the world.
“We decided that a boat-building kit would be a good way to involve local communities, to keep alive the links to the sea and pass on traditional skills,” says Linda Fitzpatrick, the curator at the Scottish Fisheries Museum.
The St Ayles Skiff coastal rowing project was a simple design to encourage local coastal communities to build and row traditional boats.
“It was based on a Fair Isle skiff we have on display at the museum but was also inspired by the Fife miners’ racing regattas that were held until the 1950s,” says Fitzpatrick.
“The motif on our adze was exactly the same as the tattoo on his body. The man was from New Zealand and had come along to the consultation with a London-based relative he was visiting. It was amazing for everyone when he exclaimed that his ancestors had made the adze.”
It was also a serendipitous example of why museums need to regularly rethink how objects are displayed and treated. In the context of the Brexit debate about Britain’s trading future, maritime museums can give new perspectives on Britain’s seafaring past, its national identity and place in the world.
This was the approach to the NMM’s four new permanent Endeavour galleries, which opened in September 2018 (of which Pacific Encounters is one) so named to chime with the 250th anniversary of Captain Cook’s first Pacific voyage from nearby Deptford. The galleries, which are in a wing that was previously closed to the public, have increased the museum’s display areas by more than 40%. More importantly, they have brought genuine organisational change, says Symington.
“As a national museum we have a responsibility to share and invite everyone to contribute to the larger stories, and working on our new galleries made us realise that we were representing a very narrow slice of the population,” she says.
“We have learned to be open with our collections and allow others to interpret them. We have had to sit on our hands slightly and accept that we are not the only experts in the room. Accepting the perspectives of members of the local Pacific community who suggested, for instance, that we talk to the objects has been quite revolutionary in changing the way we work. Saying good morning to a canoe as a way of feeling the embodiment of the ancestors’ history was for us a very un-museumy thing to do, but it made us look at how we represent elements such as blessings and ceremonies, for example.
“The project has been transformational,” Symington continues. “It has fostered trust and prompted us to consult even earlier, which has led to us discovering unexpected relevance that is not tacked on at the end, but taken into the core, front and centre of our programming.”
National Museums Liverpool’s Merseyside Maritime Museum has also been looking at new ways to make its collections relevant to today’s audiences. Its Black Salt exhibition, which closed in December last year, was based on a book by historian Ray Costello that looked at seafarers of African descent on British ships. Curator Ian Murphy worked with community historians such as Costello to build on existing museum links but also to collect items that could feed into the museum’s new permanent seafarers’ gallery.
“It’s about placing stories that museums have traditionally treated as marginal back into the centre of our history, and showing how our collections can reflect wider social attitudes that were played out on board ship,” Murphy says. “Stories of unsung individual heroism or injustices that have hardened through to the 20th and 21st centuries that were kept literally below decks are now being represented to wider audiences.”
The museum was also able to draw from the wider NML collections to show how African sailors were witness to key events in British history. The painting The Death of Nelson by Daniel Maclise, which normally hangs at the Walker Art Gallery, shows that there were sailors of African descent who fought at the Battle of Trafalgar. There were also loans, such as an engraved elephant tusk of African seaman Ben Freeman from Royal Museums Greenwich that gives his testimonial and service record.
Revealing hidden histories
Across the UK, maritime museums of all sizes are revisiting their collections and bringing hidden histories to the fore as a way of connecting with communities and encouraging more visitors.
Visitor figures at the National Waterfront Museum in Swansea have been boosted by Visit Wales designating 2018 as The Year of the Sea. While the museum tells the story of industry and innovation in Wales, now and over the last 300 years, its strong maritime element is integral because of the country being bound by the sea on three sides.
“We spearheaded Amgueddfa Cymru’s (National Museums Wales – NMW) response to this by creating a series of maritime-related temporary exhibitions,” says Steph Mastoris, the head of museums at NMW. “The focus in each exhibition and its supporting events was on the human history of subjects such as the coast guards, pirates and the lost ports of Wales.
“People don’t realise that until the early 20th century Wales had ports and harbours along its extensive coastline,” Mastoris continues. “Many of these have disappeared and we wanted to explain that the global relationships between Wales and the rest of the world go back a long way. We had a huge amount of international as well as coastal trade a long time before we were a member of the European Union.”
The story of coal exportation is familiar, but the museum has been exploring Welsh maritime trade routes such as meat imports from Argentina, grain from the Black Sea and copper ore from Cuba and Chile.
“The legacies and links of this trade is proving a productive way forward,” says Mastoris. “The aim is to develop a global dialogue with industrial and maritime museums in those countries, which will link into the expectation that there will be more global trade post-Brexit.”
Valparaiso in Chile had a thriving Welsh community because copper ore was once exported from there for smelting in the Lower Swansea Valley. Some of this was then exported to the Indian sub-continent to create brassware that was then re-imported to Wales. Bollards cast and made in Cardiff can be found in ports in Argentina. Welsh links with the transatlantic slave trade can be found in the production of copper manillas, or bracelets, a form of currency that was exchanged for enslaved people in West Africa.
“Globalisation is not new and we will be slowly integrating these narratives into our core displays as we refresh them piecemeal, bringing out the more complex side of Welsh maritime trade, such as our relationship to slavery and the fine line between privateering and piracy,” says Mastoris.
Hull’s maritime history goes back 2,000 years, represented by the iron age Hasholme log boat, all the way up to the 1960s trawler Arctic Corsair. A £27.4m project, part funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, is underway to transform the city’s maritime heritage in the wake of its successful 2017 City of Culture year, with a redevelopment of the Hull Maritime Museum as a key element.
“The museum has mind-blowing collections in a stunning building, but it was opened in 1974 and is badly in need of updating,” says Simon Green, the cultural services director of Hull Culture and Leisure.
“The large amount of public consultation we’ve done has told us what is important to the people of Hull, from our star objects such as the polar bear and the whale skeleton, but also the more hidden stories of how war has affected the civilian population and the merchant fleet, as well as the well-known trawling and fishing heritage.”
The Arctic Corsair, Britain’s last sidewinder trawler, built in 1960 and used for deep-sea fishing, will be conserved and become the focal point in the North End Shipyard, a historic but previously privately owned site where the HMS Bounty was built in 1784. “The city centre was on an island surrounded by docks, one of which was the biggest in the UK,” says Green. “So maritime history is literally under people’s noses, but not as visible as in other places.”
Hull supported Brexit, but Green says the split from the European Union feels slightly artificial. “Our reality is we have always had connections that reach beyond the European Union to Iceland, Scandinavia, Russia and across the globe, and the museums can bring these connections to the fore,” he says.
There is a memorial to lost Hull trawlermen in Vik in Iceland, and Common Foe, a partnership project between Hull Maritime Museum and Reykjavík Maritime Museum, explored both sides’ feelings about the cod wars in the 1950s, 60s and 70s.
“It was a veterans’ exchange where skippers met up and bonded over the experience of being in the teeth of a gale or icing up,” Green says. “The common foe is the sea, not each other. Museums should be brave enough to set out the facts and let people process them.”
Scientific analysis
The Mary Rose Trust in Portsmouth is looking much further back in history than the cod wars for its new exhibition, which is provisionally titled The Many Faces of Tudor England. This will open in the spring and will look at the warship’s crew and what has been discovered from scientific analysis of eight of the 92 reconstructed skeletons the museum holds.
“We can find out a lot about individuals from their teeth, as these contain information about where they spent their formative years, the quality and type of foods they ate and life traumas,” says Alex Hildred, the head of research and curator of ordnance and human remains at the Mary Rose Trust. “Teeth are also good sources of DNA, which can inform us about ancestry, eye and hair colour and prevalent diseases.
“A ship is a microcosm of society and the Mary Rose gives an excellent insight into Tudor life because of the everyday objects found on board. We have glimpses from historical references that there may be a more cosmopolitan spread of nationalities than just the UK. This is backed up by the presence of a range of personal foreign objects on the ship.”
These objects prompted the museum to start looking at the individuals through detailed scientific study, and a genealogist has researched the ancestry of one of the two named individuals of the crew.
“The exhibition asks pertinent questions about identity, trade and cultural exchange at a time when we are, in a sense, cutting ourselves off from the rest of Europe,” says Hildred. “We may be on the fringe of Europe, but as a seafaring nation our ships have always been a way of moving genes and diseases as well as traded objects. It will be interesting to consider how the population may be affected by wider geopolitical changes by linking back to the human histories of the Mary Rose.”
As well as science, art is another effective way for museums to engage audiences. This has been a great success for the Scottish Maritime Museum, an independent charity-run museum on two sites on the west coast of Scotland. It is home to a nationally recognised collection of maritime heritage that includes 40 vessels and 60,000 objects. The Irvine site in North Ayrshire is surrounded by social housing, and local engagement is very important.
“The museum engages with the local community in various ways such as the museum’s boat building school, volunteering and various education programmes,” says David Mann, the director of the Scottish Maritime Museum. “But art has provided another means of connection and a route into new audiences.”
A Collecting Cultures grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund allowed the museum to increase its holding of about 20 paintings to more than 100 artworks. The collection includes known and acclaimed artists and has therefore become a nationally important art collection that attracts new visitors and complements the interpretation of the heritage collection.
“We wanted to represent all of Scotland and the islands and the new acquisitions cover mainly contemporary paintings, sculptures and drawings,” says Mann. “It was important these were of contemporary relevance to recent Scottish history and current issues, so we have paintings showing scenes of shipbuilding and the oil industry.”
The Historic Chatham Dockyard has a wide-ranging collection that includes artworks, but also ships models and numerous other artefacts associated with maritime heritage. It inhabits a site that played a key role in British naval history for 400 years but the small Medway community was devastated when the Royal Navy moved out in 1984.
“We must not disconnect from our communities or we won’t survive,” says Bill Ferris, the chief executive at the Historic Dockyard Chatham. “So, we tell these local stories as well as placing Chatham at the centre of a wider narrative about British naval power.”
Winner of both the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors National Award for best tourism and leisure project, and a Historic England Angel award for best major regeneration of a historic building or place in 2018, the museum retains its maritime heritage at its heart.
“It’s about people and we use objects, stories, the power of interpretation and cultural artefacts to link nations and build new relationships without shying away from difficult truths,” says Ferris. “We tell history in an uncompromising way, so the Battle of Medway is recognised as a humiliating defeat for the British at the hands of the Dutch.
“Our exhibitions, projects and partnerships show we are not constrained by national identity and are still related to Europe. It’s a difficult story that involves empire, but we can learn lessons from the past to help us create a new future, and I don’t think Brexit will change that.”
Museums can show that cultural heritage and arts transcend the changing political landscape and maritime museums in particular can be at the forefront of new post-Brexit narratives and partnerships.
Deborah Mulhearn is a freelance writer
St Ayles Skiff coastal rowing project
It started with a boat-building demonstration 10 years ago at the Scottish Fisheries Museum in Anstruther on the Fife coast. The modest intention was to interpret their maritime heritage afresh. Today, 230 rowing boats based on the museum’s commissioned design are currently raced in regattas and races around the world.
“We decided that a boat-building kit would be a good way to involve local communities, to keep alive the links to the sea and pass on traditional skills,” says Linda Fitzpatrick, the curator at the Scottish Fisheries Museum.
The St Ayles Skiff coastal rowing project was a simple design to encourage local coastal communities to build and row traditional boats.
“It was based on a Fair Isle skiff we have on display at the museum but was also inspired by the Fife miners’ racing regattas that were held until the 1950s,” says Fitzpatrick.
“Our initial aim was to transfer traditional boat-building skills, and by using a kit it allowed people with less skill to get involved. Little did we realise how popular it would be. We imagined a few boats up and down the coast of Scotland and England, but they are now everywhere from Canada to Cape Town. It’s amazing how many communities have taken it up. They’ve been made in barns, schools, garages, museums, community halls and even a pigeon loft.”
In Anstruther’s own case, the skiff was made by 30 members of the local rowing club, mostly women who had never done these DIY tasks before. The skiffs have been seen in hundreds of regattas and races including the Great River Race in the Thames, the 2012 Diamond Jubilee Pageant and the World Rowing Championships.
“Everyone is encouraged to swap and share techniques and methods and to try out each other’s boats. The museum has gone on an astonishing journey, and everyone has embraced the whole concept,” says Fitzpatrick.
To reinforce the museum’s profile and reputation, there is a Scottish Fisheries Museum registration sticker on every boat, and the museum also sponsors the World Championship trophy.
“The general wish is for people to reconnect with the water, but the real strength is that they are built and rowed by members of local communities.”
In Anstruther’s own case, the skiff was made by 30 members of the local rowing club, mostly women who had never done these DIY tasks before. The skiffs have been seen in hundreds of regattas and races including the Great River Race in the Thames, the 2012 Diamond Jubilee Pageant and the World Rowing Championships.
“Everyone is encouraged to swap and share techniques and methods and to try out each other’s boats. The museum has gone on an astonishing journey, and everyone has embraced the whole concept,” says Fitzpatrick.
To reinforce the museum’s profile and reputation, there is a Scottish Fisheries Museum registration sticker on every boat, and the museum also sponsors the World Championship trophy.
“The general wish is for people to reconnect with the water, but the real strength is that they are built and rowed by members of local communities.”