Behind the scenes

Thump, thump, thump. Hmm, what’s the noise coming from this box, I asked Bobby the Ranger. Oh that’s a few live mice I caught earlier to show people tonight. Eeek. We have (unfortunately) had mice at our museum before, but never carried through the front door in a plush box! For Museums at Night this year, Bobby Anderson, our local Countryside Ranger, took visitors on a night-time walk around the grounds of Prestongrange.

 Before we set off, Bobby had great photographs, skeletons and stuffed versions of animals so people could get up close to animals like the fox, badger and bat. Outdoors, we set up some moth traps and began to use a grey box with a black dial on it: “That beeps and tells you when there is a bat close by”, our youngest participant, aged 5, was able to tell us! Our group of explorers then set off with their torches around the site as Bobby showed us how to find different wildlife and creatures in the dark. I managed to see three moths and two bats. Although that doesn’t sound like much, people were caught up in the whole experience and gave really positive feedback. Many said that now they knew how to spot nocturnal animals, they would start looking in their own neighbourhoods. 

 My favourite facts I learned? Badgers eat peanuts; bats have the same route they travel round so if you see one, stand in the same place it should come back again within about 5 minutes and finally; adults get just as excited as children about seeing live mice in a museum.

This post also features on the official Museums at Night Blog!

 In the words of Andrew Stone from Pineapple Dance Studios: “It takes 10 years to be an overnight success, and I’ve been at it for 15…” As the summer season kicks in at Prestongrange again and our events programme starts, my marketing skills have to be dusted down and set to work! I might add at this point that I don’t have a background in marketing so if anyone out there has suggestions or tips, please do get in touch…

As with many museums, we don’t have a huge (or even small) publicity budget so I work away at different channels trying to get the word out in different ways. For our recent part-funded Show Scotland event, the Art of Production, we had 1500 leaflets and 150 posters around the local area, we had an advert in the Evening Times and articles in both local newspapers. I also went on East Coast FM, East Lothian’s local radio station. It was good fun, but I’ll never make it as a DJ, I kept forgetting the names of the songs I’d just requested! Julie Anne at Prestongrange also slaves away in front of the computer screen putting our events on as many websites as possible, many with great names…Remote Goat, anyone? We also try to keep our own websites up to date with details of our upcoming events to try and tempt people along.

We also put up stunning handmade banners and signs on the roadside, ala this photograph. I’m also building up our email list at Prestongrange so we can email people directly to remind them about our upcoming events. It’s difficult though because people who come to our events always, always say “Oh you didn’t advertise this very well, I only found out about it through ____”. What should we do? Answers on a postcard please…

Getting in with the BBC is one way to ensure you get publicity. I was on the Fred MacAuley show on Friday talking about our Relic:Guardians of the Museum event. If you’ve got a chance to get involved with the BBC’s A History of the World and do your own Relic trail, then do so! It is basically a trail sheet, using about 5 objects around the museum, but with different challenges at each object. You upload the objects to the BBC site and hey presto, your own TV-themed family challenge.  The kids who came to our event on Friday were so excited that this had been set by Agatha, the dead tour guide they’d seen on TV- I’ve never seen scenes like it with mums falling over in a bid to finish the trail sheet first!!

One way to ensure you get famous is to volunteer yourself for TV. There was a great programme on BBC 4 last week called ‘Behind the Scenes at the Museum’ (have they looked at our blog do you think??). Everyone I’ve spoken to who saw it said they could recognise alot of themselves and their own museum in the programme. Do have a watch, even if just for banter in the cafe!

Sarah has already posted about the object she chose for the BBC AHOW site, and I have chosen something altogether different (although no less attractive in its own way). I decided to put up an East Lothian Banknote, from 1821. Hopefully a version of this blog will be on the Museums Galleries Scotland blog too.

Why, you ask? (or at least I hope you do) The note is interesting, has a great story attached to it, and it is quite aesthetically pleasing too! Did you know that the first Scottish Banknote was issued in 1696? In those days these things were much larger than they are today, although no less ornate. This one is 12cm by 18cm – imagine a few of those crammed into your purse along with all that plastic, all those receipts, all that loose change (or is that just me)?! What interests me about this object is that whilst for us paper money is so commonplace as to be mundane it actually hasn’t been around that long in historical terms. Paper money started largely in response to the lack of precious metals to make coins out of, and forgery was a problem just as it is now. Banks used watermarking, embossing, detailed engraving, colour printing and the signature of Chief Cashiers to deter imitations.

The fact that banks operated on such a local level (although they weren’t terribly successful from what I can find out) is also very interesting, as is the information that the chief cashier, one William Borthwick, caused the bank to fail in 1822 when he absconded with the banks deposits. This caused a great scandal at the time and the tale resonates in the present day with the current global banking crisis. As more and more people begin to ‘think local’ it is interesting to re-examine stories like this one. For more about this object why not visit www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld or www.scran.ac.uk?

What would you like to see us (museums in general) put on to this site? Do you have things in your own collection or just kicking about the house that people might be interested in? The key thing for me is that whatever you choose needs a story. Just like a good film or book the narrative has to be engaging beyond the cover, which is the lure to get you to look in the first place! And remember what you might think won’t interest anyone outside your family will almost certainly resonate with someome, somewhere, sometime.

I could use a personal example here. I found a little pocket sized Bible the other day (I am ashamed to say in my sock drawer) that my Grandmother gave me, along with a coin purse and a pair of needlework scissors. They all belonged to her mother, who I am named for. My Great-Grandmother Kate carried the little Bible down the aisle with her when she married (and I can’t remember the year, oops) and carried it with her throughout her life. Ordinary? Yes. Boring? No. This little story (which I could elaborate on but not here) has religion, belief, tradition, habit, convention and a wedding. What more do we need!

 I’ve jumped blogs this week to be a ‘guest blogger’ – not a very attractive title, I know. This blog is being simultaneously posted on both this and Museums Galleries Scotland’s blog.

Recently, we were lucky enough to have one of our objects chosen to be part of the initial collection on the BBC’s History of World site. Our Bronze Age Beaker is amongst the earliest version of its kind in Britain still intact. You’ll probably have heard about the BBC’s project in one way or another, it’s basically about creating an online database of objects which represent…‘The History of the World’ (cue dramatic music).

Objects are now being uploaded from museums and individuals. Even Neil Oliver is getting involved by choosing his personal object (I know, it’s like he’s never off the TV). So I tried uploading another object to see how it would work.

I registered as a user on the website which was really simple. (Hint – make your username your museum name!)  I instantly received an email which meant I could register an object. I chose a Mak’Merry bowl because I knew a bit about it already and thought it had an interesting story. I was asked for some details which I already had on our collections database – size, colour, material, age of object and so on. The BBC have made it really simple – lots of tick boxes and drop-down lists. I also had to write 150 words on the ‘story of the object’. You might find some of it a bit too simple for museum standards, for example when choosing what size it is you might be debating between “Tiny – it fits in my hand” or “Medium – I can put my arms around it”. (I suppose it depends on the size of your body parts). From my education point of view, it’s a perfect way of getting the general public thinking about how to categorise their personal objects as part of history.

What are the benefits for you of putting an object up online? We use a lot of different sites to promote our collections – Scran, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, Blog, plus our own website. If you don’t or can’t use any of these, the BBC is a really easy way of sharing your collections instantly, without worrying about the issues of copyright and managing such a site. As an experiment I did a Google search for ‘Mak’Merry bowl’, the BBC page came up third, after Flickr and our own online exhibition about pottery. Scran came up 5^th. I imagine most people around the world would recognise and trust the BBC brand meaning they are instantly more likely to look at this search result. As an added bonus, you can also put links to your own website beside your object so that interested parties can link directly back to you. So go on, you’ll be bowl-ed over by how easy it is!!

   I thought today I’d give a glimpse into the week of a Museums Education Officer. It’s been a rather varied week!

 Monday

Spend the day at King’s Meadow Primary School in Haddington where I delivered 3 sessions to their P6 classes on the Victorians. We did a Victorian washday, using tin bath and washboard, which was very fun but also very wet! Came back to the office afterwards and went through emails.

Tuesday

Met artist Tom Ewing at Prestongrange to discuss his artwork for the new ‘shopping’ interactive at Prestongrange. Children will be able to visit a Victorian Prestonpans High Street and explore things like an ear syringe and a meat grinder! I stopped by Musselburgh Burgh and picked up the Old Toys Loan Box the P1 classes had borrowed. Teacher said it had been very useful and they would request it again next year. Then I rushed over to Dunbar for a meeting with all the museums team.

Wednesday

After a flexi morning off, I spent the afternoon going through applications for our Seasonal Museum Assistant posts – we mark them all along the essential and desirable personal specifications. It’s hard! Treated myself to a wheat-free chocolate biscuit and toffee shortbread biscuit half way through! One of our lovely volunteers, Hazel, had brought in the shortbread for Katherine and I due to our wheat allergies.

Thursday

Attended Excel training with the Council - have lots of ideas about how to improve the various databases I manage now! I keep one on all the events I’ve organised including visitor figures, cost, time, date, etc and now I’ll be able to do lots of calculations and very clever things.

 Friday

Meetings for today were cancelled, so have all day to get organised for the weekend. For our Storytelling event on Saturday for LGBT History Month, I need to buy some tacky Valentine’s decorations and print off posters to direct people around the Brunton. For Sunday, I need to remember to take our various cameras with us and to finalise the guidelines for participants- it’s our photography day for Wikipedia at Prestongrange and John Muir’s Birthplace.

Saturday and Sunday

Events, events, events…

What’s happened to you this week? Hope you’ve had an eventful week too!

I thought it was time to give a quick update on the John Gray Centre. You might have noticed, if you live or work in Haddington, that there is some activity happening outside the planned location on Lodge Street. Archaeological digging started in September – they’ve found nothing exciting as yet. No huge finds of treasure sadly.

Studioarc, the museum designers, are progressing with plans. As an Education Officer, I’m obviously really interested in the interactive side of the museum and it looks like it’s going to be really successful on that side of things. So far we have dressing up, postcard stamping, helping farmer John with his grandparent’s strange objects, unlocking secret boxes and much more!! 

I visited Wallyford P3s recently to ask for their advice on one interactive element called ‘Senses of the Sea’ (you might remember me mentioning it in an earlier blog). Their ideas were priceless, here’s a taster:

Smells of the sea – fish, seaweed, custard(?), seals

Tastes – hotdogs, chips, ice-cream, salt, beers…

Sounds – Children playing, splashes, laughing, speedboats, “icescream van jingle”

Touch – shells, sand, water, starfish, rubbish

I was particularly intrigued by one thing they all kept suggesting – “cheona”. Have you guessed what it is yet?

Of course, tuna.

They were a delightful class and their teacher Miss Reeves had them all enthusiastically talking about science, would you believe? I’ve asked if they will all be our tour guides when we open!

I was intending to come on here to write about how sad it was that the BNP were going to be appearing on BBC’s Question Time within Black History Month, when we’re supposed to be celebrating the postive contributions of Black people to British History as well as uncovering hidden stories within our own local and personal histories. However, after watching the programme last night, I have since changed my views….I now am extremely pleased that Nick Griffin was allowed to go on and air his views which were shown as false, bigoted and at points deeply upsetting that someone in today’s society can still hold (and preach) these views. Here at East Lothian Museums, we’ve been holding a series of events over the past month to celebrate diversity, many of which I’ve detailed in earlier blogs. Watching the programme last night, it made me even more determined that we should continue to hold events such as East Lothian’s Multi-Cultural Day in order to prevent segregation within our local society and to encourage people to see Britain, Scotland and East Lothian as places where a variety of different people can live together, with mutual understanding and respect for each other’s differences.

Multi-Cultural Day included a variety of performances, people and events. The highlight for many were the wonderful Indian Dancers dressed in fabulous costumes – in particular they had a performance using a mixture of Indian and Celtic music which was very clever. Tawona and Ernest, originally from Zimbabwae, performed a variety of poems, stories and music using their hand-crafted instruments. They represented the Seeds of Thought Urban Poetry Group. The noise of the instruments is difficult to describe but it sounded a bit like the chiming of a nursery rhyme in a wind-up toy, but alot faster and more musical. The Grants Braes Burns Club provided a traditional Scottish element to the day, performing some of Burns’ works along the themes of identity and told the well-known story that Burns almost went to the West Indies to become part of the Slave Trade. Coreen Scott was accompanied by Hamish on the Pipes and Scott on the guitar and produced a wonderful sound. We also had local Belly Dancers who performed an Egyptian stick dance. Their movements were amazing! The highlight of the day onstage for children was a French Puppet Show by Tania, who told the story of Lapin, who was very concerned with where his maracas were!

As well as all this we also had stalls by groups such as ELREC and the Dunbar Arts Hub, while local artist Ettie Spencer held a drop-in art workshop for all ages. Sheila Asante offered an object handling session within the Slave Trade exhibition, allowing people to get a close up view of objects such as cotton and tobacco. All in all, a wonderful day, which attracted people from many different cultures, including French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, English, Scottish, Zimbabwean, Ghanian, Brazilian, Indian, and many more. Some of the photographs are on our Flickr site. So many people said to us during the event that they were so glad we were doing an event like this in East Lothian. Draw your own conclusions from that!

But where would all these people who came and celebrated East Lothian’s diversity fit into Nick Griffin’s Britain? Yes, they probably wouldn’t and that’s why we need to continue celebrating the true diversity of our local area. Plans for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender History Month in February 2010 are already underway, as are details of how we’re going to commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day in January. So, where am I going with this blog? Well, your challenge is to come along and join us at some of these events, or to go and find out something about another culture this weekend, or watch Question Time and then share your views. It’s up to us…

   For those of you who are regular blog readers, you’ll know that Arun Gandhi was coming to East Lothian. I heard him talk on Monday and it was wonderful. He held a session for local school children in the afternoon and then the general public in the evening. He had lots of stories about how his grandfather (Mohandas Gandhi) had influenced his life and told them in such a reserved and calm manner. One story was about when he was a boy he threw away a pencil because he thought it was “too short” and was just going to ask his grandfather for a new one. However, Gandhi made him go back out and look for the pencil in the dark to teach him the lesson that man was over-using the world’s natural resources and that people consume things just because they can, but ultimately this means that others cannot access the same resources. Gandhi said Arun’s act was ”violence against nature”. It was interestingly a similar view to our own John Muir about the importance of protecting the environment, but before such issues had really reached the wider public conscience.

 We also went on a march on Saturday 10th October to commemorate the Suffragettes who campaigned for “Votes for Women!”. We had our own East Lothian banner, created by attendees at a Suffragette Coffee Morning back in September. A group of pupils from Preston Lodge High joined our group and managed to get themselves interviewed and in lots of photos throughout the walk! It ended on Calton Hill where speeches and singing took place. Sheila and I also walked to the very edge of the hill to get a few photos. It was a tad windy as you may be able to see from the photos!

 And as for the bellydancing reference in the title? Multi-Cultural Day at Prestongrange of course. We’ve got a variety of cultures represented including a French Puppet Show, Polish tour of the museum, an Indian Dancer, Zimbabwean Poets and the local Sangstream Choir and Grants Braes Burns Club. There will be a huge marquee outside the Visitor Centre and I’ll be heading there on Saturday to get it all set up and ready to go for first thing on Sunday. We have no idea what our visitor numbers will be for the day…hopefully the 144 chairs will be an alright guestimate!

If you’ve attended an event as part of Black History Month this year, do let us know what you thought!

 And it’s not even a trick title! Arun Manilal Gandhi is the fifth grandson of Mohandas Gandhi. As part of Black History Month 2009, Arun Gandhi is visiting the Brunton on 12th October and delivering a talk on his views on non-violence. It’s bound to be fascinating. Details on how to get your free tickets can be found here.

At Prestongrange, we have a few events for Black History Month too. Sheila has a talk and tour on the Wedderburn Brothers on 8th Oct at 7pm, free tickets are available from the museum. 

On the 18th of October we have ‘Welcome: East Lothian Multi-Cultural Day’ from 12-3pm. It’s going to be amazing – just a few of the highlights are: a French Puppet show, Seeds of Thought Poetry Group, Live Music, Burns Recitals, Indian Dancers, and local artist workshops! We’ll also have stalls on Fairtrade, Edinburgh and Lothians Racial Equality Council, Family History and much more. Full details of all events can be found in the Black History Month programme for East Lothian.

 Apart from all that, we’re also coming to the end of another summer season. Dunbar Town House has remained busy with the exhibition Harvest of the Sea generating a wealth of paper fish! It is planned that the Town House will be closed next season for the refurbishment so make your last visits to the ‘old’ town house now!

A Museum for Musselburgh is coming along – you may have noticed the shop front on the High Street with all the lovely old photographs in the window. It will become a museum next year, run by Musselburgh Museum Committee.

Apart from all that, the other big news is that we’re now on Facebook! Become a fan and share your comments please!

Or share your comments with us on here, we’re awfully pleased to hear from you, whatever you’ve got to say. It’s something to keep us occupied over those long winter months… 

 If you are wondering where to play hide-and-seek, Prestongrange Museum may be a good idea. Prestongrange is the industrial heart of East Lothian in the story of Scotland’s Industrial Revolution. I took part in a workshop about how to make a ‘gas mask’, which was very interesting, and was run by Sarah Cowie on the site this summer. Children also played hide-and-seek on the green grass in the sunshine. It was very impressive to see that kids can play and learn at the same time around the industrial heritage at Prestongrange museum.
Furthermore, Prestongrange Museum has a coal mining heritage. The gold mining museum in Taiwan popped into my mind suddenly when I visited this museum. Well, as the guided tour said, it’s not just a museum, where people can visit, it’s a part of local history from the 18th -19th centuries about the industry revolution. The large steam engine is very impressive. I can imagine how difficult it must have been to move it from the port in the 19th century. I can’t believe that workers could stand the noise it made whilst running.