Upper Gallery Online Diary
The Upper Gallery, home to the Museum's collections of weapons, recently re-opened to the public with several new and improved displays. This diary charts some of the occasional stories and challenges that arose during the re-development project.
Notes from the Engine Room
Submitted by Helen Hales on Fri, 07/04/2010
The Pitt Rivers Museum is fortunate to have a skilled and dedicated team
of five technicians, whose varied tasks include designing and installing
displays, building apparatus to store and transport objects, implementing
security measures, repairs and maintenance, and dealing with contractors.
In short, they keep the Museum machine running, which is why the Museum’s
Head of Technical Services described his team as the engine room of the Museum.
Technicians working on the new
firearms displays
Jon Eccles has been a Museum technician for six years. For the past year or so, he has been working in the Upper Gallery, helping to get it ready for reopening in May 2010. He shared with me some of the issues he has been dealing with. Getting any gallery space ready for public viewing is not just about making sure the display cases are full and the signs are hung up straight. There are a myriad other, sometimes less obvious, things that have to be done in the interests of the objects, staff, and visitors.
In the 1980s, bark chippings and pebbles were frequently used to line the bottom of display cases to add aesthetic appeal. A couple of years ago, an eagle-eyed attendant noticed something going on in one the large wall cases on the south side of the Court. He discovered ‘frass’, the debris and excreta of insects. Suspicions of the likely culprits were compounded further when damage to some fur clothing inside the case was discovered. To blame were those enemies of museums everywhere – insect pests.
The types of pest encountered in a museum depends on the type of material stored there. For example, libraries and archives may have to deal with silverfish – small insects that love to eat paper and the glue of book-bindings. Meanwhile, institutions with collections of old furniture or wooden-framed artwork are wary of woodworm. Somewhere like the Pitt Rivers, with its extremely mixed collection, has to be aware of all these, but perhaps most of all, of moth and beetle larvae, which have an appetite for organic material. Textiles, furs and feathers are particularly vulnerable.
The Museum’s Pest Management Programme, overseen by the Conservation Department,
has measures in place to deal with pests if they appear, but the main focus
is on prevention. It was thought that the pebbles and chippings on the floors
of the cases may have provided cosy breeding grounds for the pests, so work
began to remove all of it. This was no small job. Suspect cases were located
in the Museum’s Court and included more than half of the Upper Gallery displays.
The floor of the archery case was
among many which had to be cleared
and
repaintedDamaged objects requiring treatment had to be taken off display
with care and patience due to their fragility and the overlapping nature of some
of the arrangements. Some objects that had been resting on the floors of the
cases were found to require different sorts of treatments unconnected to
pests; an inflatable float made of sealskin in the Upper Gallery had become
dimpled from lying on pebbles for some time, and elsewhere, rust had appeared
on some metal objects. New mounts had to be made for displaced objects, and
the case floors had to be repainted in a neutral-coloured emulsion before
being left to ‘off-gas’. Thi s prevents emissions damaging artefacts in the
confined space of museum cases.
Traps were placed in cases containing objects vulnerable to insect attack. But it is not just a question of monitoring those cases devoted to clothing or textiles. For example, many wooden clubs and other objects are decorated with fabric, feathers, or hair. The installation in 2009 of around thirty floor grilles and a new air-conditioning system in the Museum has helped control air-flow and improve environmental conditions. However, the fact that heat rises means that the Upper Gallery can be a little warmer than the rest of the Museum, making it even more attractive to pests. Therefore, it remains the duty of staff to check the displays regularly and remain vigilant of any suspected changes or problems.
Insect debris on a Naga textile from IndiaAside from removing the chippings and pebbles Jon had other tasks to attend
to. For the last decade, the Museum has been going through a major re-development
programme. This entailed major building works, first in order to create the
19000 sq. metre new extension facing South Parks Road, and latterly, to redesign
the entrance with a new shop, information point and adjoining displays. All
this construction creates dust which gets in to all sort of nooks and crannies
and which requires considerable cleaning.
Part of the plans to improve the appearance and visitor experience in the Upper Gallery includes laying a new carpet and installing new, more efficient lighting. The old single-track lighting system is being replaced with double-track lighting, fitted with halogen-LED lamps, which can be positioned to illuminate the displays on either sides of the gangways. The old-style lamps had silver backs resulting in considerable glare, but the new lights are black-backed and use a lower wattage to help diffuse the light and save energy. Since the Museum is a Grade 1 listed building (and rightly so, as an example of late Victorian architecture with cast-iron features), there are restrictions on any structural changes which make the ostensibly straightforward matter of installing new carpets and lighting a tricky one, needing careful consideration.
Finally, Jon talked about the other, small but important tasks that he and his colleagues have to attend to, such as replacing cracked or diseased glass or installing new locks on the cases and drawers. The Museum prides itself on its grand mahogany cases, which contribute towards the character of the place; many of them are original, dating back to the 1880s, but with age comes a higher degree of maintenance. Despite all these responsibilities, Jon said that he hoped one day to have the time to go around and re-polish each one of the several hundred cases in the Museum!
All this goes to show that getting a space like the Upper Gallery fit for visitors is certainly a team effort and that sometimes, if you look out for them, it’s the subtle changes that make the biggest difference.
If you have any related comments or questions, or would like an email notification when the latest entry is available online, please email cuttingedge@prm.ox.ac.uk.
Selected Objects from the Upper Gallery
In this Virtual Gallery you
can explore over 200 highlights from the arms and armour collections at the Pitt
Rivers Museum.
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Spreading the Word:
Object Stories Too Big for a Label
Submitted by Helen Hales on Fri, 18/12/2009
Any new object that goes on display has to be researched to a lesser or
greater extent. If the object is to simply retain its identification label,
it is important that the country, ethnic group, date, and other basic facts
are correct as far as can be ascertained. For the most part, this information
can be gleaned from the Museum’s accession book records, now conveniently
stored on a digital database. However, to write a more in-depth object label,
or even a text-panel that refers to that object, it is necessary to dig rather
deeper.
The new firearms display will contain around 300 objects and most of these
will have an individual object label. Some have been on display before and
therefore already have an old label to provide a useful starting point, but
many have been in store for decades and do not have much accompanying information.
One of the skills in researching a large number of objects is knowing how
far to go. Just how much information do you need? When do trivia and incidentals
turn into irrelevancies? It is important to provide enough information to
aid the visitor’s understanding without ending up with the ‘book on a wall’
effect. Such a bombardment of words can often be off-putting, and can detract
from the real stars of the show – the objects themselves. Thus, written interpretation
needs to be engaging but ultimately brief: the main idea, the basic facts,
the bare essentials, with minimal footnotes. This leads to one of the most
difficult aspects of producing texts and labels: the editing process – choosing
what material stays in and what is ‘extraneous’ and can be discarded.
For the researcher, however, this does not mean that ‘edited-out’ material
is necessarily lost or wasted, nor does it mean that the public is necessarily
deprived of it either. There are other interpretive resources into which
it can be incorporated, such as audio tour entries, topic-specific information
sheets and discovery booklets, or the Collections pages on the Museum’s website.
Curators, project staff and others regularly produce journal articles, conference
papers, and books that often examine objects in great detail. All of these
cater for different audiences and require different types of content and
approach.
In addition to these ‘visible’ modes of information collation and dissemination,
there is another, more internalized system we can use. Many of the Museum’s
objects, though not all, have an accompanying individual ‘Related Documents
File’ (RDF). This contains any extra information relating to the object,
such as published articles that refer to it either directly or indirectly,
personal information about the collector or donor, photographs, bibliographies,
or notes made by visiting researchers. If a researcher produces a body of
work about an object which doesn’t have an RDF, one can be created for it.
The files are kept on-site and can be accessed by appointment only. They
can be a fascinating and revealing resource for anyone who wishes to find
out more about an object or collection.
In addition to this traditional paper-based depository, the digital age has
enabled us to organize information within ever-expanding online resources
and internally on a digital database, which has special fields for all sorts
of garnered data. There are ongoing efforts to increase accessibility to
this data via the web catalogue search facility.
And then, there are those fruits of research that just don’t really belong
anywhere; those avenues you trundle down, often fuelled simply by curiosity,
which may yield precious little concerning the original ‘starting’ object,
but which reveal stories and ideas that seem too good to waste. Such scenarios
have occurred with regularity in the months spent researching the firearms
and other weapons that inhabit the Upper Gallery. Most of these findings
end up in a specially designated ‘Interesting but Useless’ folder on my computer.
However, this seems an ideal opportunity to share an example with you.
When searching through the reserve collections to identify firearms, ammunition,
and accessories for possible display, we came across these six odd bits of
metal that looked rather like deformed coins.
Flattened steam gun bullets; PRM 1888.28.45
The database revealed that they were, in fact, ‘bullets flattened by being
fired from a Parkin's Steam gun at a distance of about 30 yards’. They had
been collected by Stephen Peter Rigaud, an Oxford-trained astronomer, sometime
in the 1830s and passed into the Museum courtesy of his daughter in 1888.
A quick search found that the term ‘steam gun’ was coterminous with the name
‘Perkins’ so ‘Parkins’ must have been a misspelling in the original documentation.
A diagram by Mr Perkins himself, showing fired bullets in much the same deformed
shape, revealed that the sheer force behind each shot causes the bullets
to flatten completely upon impact with a flat metal surface. Although the
steam gun never caught on, its story, and that of its inventor, is worth
telling. Allow me to introduce you to Mr Perkins…
~
Jacob Perkins (1766-1849), lithograph
by Richard James Lane, 1826
National Portrait Gallery, London
Jacob Perkins (1766–1849) was the descendant of Puritan settlers
in Boston, Massachusetts. He was apprenticed at the age of 12 to a goldsmith
and, having inherited the business at just 15, started his prolific career as
an inventor by devising a way of plating shoe-buckles. By the age of 21, the
State of Massachusetts employed him to make dies for copper coinage and at the
age of 31 he invented a machine to cut and head nails in one operation. However,
the potential of this invention was ruined by a seven-year lawsuit disputing
the patent and the mismanagement of his financial backers. Jacob moved to New
York and Philadelphia where he developed the first steel plates for banknote
engraving to prevent forgeries. However, once more, he failed to receive the
backing he deserved. So he left for England.
In England, his talents were better recognized. There he started a successful
banknote business, invented instruments for measuring ship speeds and diving
depths, and saw his machines make nails by the million. He used the proceeds
of his successful commercial inventions to pursue more ‘fanciful’ (in fact, ahead-of-their-time)
ideas, which infuriated his business partners. Such ideas included a water pump
for a fire engine, a rocket thrower, cooking with gas, a refrigerator, and central
heating. Though rarely commercially successful in his projects, Perkins’ scientific
credentials did not go unnoticed in the academic world. He was elected as the
36th Member of the Institution of Civil Engineers on 27 February 1821, having
been proposed by such contemporary luminaries as Thomas Telford and Joshua Field.
In 1823 Jacob began experimenting with steam boilers and submitted ten steam-related
patents in as many years. He invented a single-cylinder steam engine with
a working pressure of 800 psi (pounds per square inch) – an unbelievable
amount in the days when only 5 psi was deemed to be a safe limit. The extreme
temperatures caused the normal oil lubricants on the piston to char and disintegrate,
so Perkins came up with a special metal alloy for the moving parts that required
no lubricant.
In 1824 he built a gun that discharged 1000 musket bullets a minute using
900 psi steam which gave a muzzle velocity not far off that of gunpowder.
It had a barrel six foot long and an odd, stick-insect like appearance, but
its bullets were capable of piercing eleven one-inch thick deal planks an
inch apart at a distance of 115 feet. In a world of single-shot, muzzle-loading
weapons, it really was extraordinary and the Duke of Wellington was highly
impressed during a demonstration near Regent’s Park in 1825. However, others
argued that it would take too long to generate steam in a sudden attack and
that, with a generator (boiler) weighing five tonnes, the gun was not easily
portable. Besides this, having relied on firepower for the past two hundred
years, the British Army and Royal Navy were generally wary of change and
the abandonment of their trusty gunpowder.
A Charging chamber B Handle to operate chamber and hoppers C Ball hoppers D Barrel (six feet in length) E Regulating screw F Swivel to elevate or lower gun and position barrel G Throttle valve to admit steam from the generator into the pipe H Pipe system to transmit steam at high pressures Diagram from The London Mechanics’ Register, 6th November 1824
Thus Perkins failed to gain the military endorsement he needed and all too soon the introduction of the percussion cap would push his wonderful but impractical weapon into obscurity. It was true that cannon were still muzzle-loading and the French toyed with the idea of a Perkins steam cannon on warships because of its rapid fire and use at close-quarters in boarding raids. However, sea warfare was changing rapidly too with the advent of steamships, and the French interest was interrupted by the July Revolution of 1830. Perkins’ son and grandson would persevere with the steam gun, attempting to persuade Abraham Lincoln of its merits in the 1860s, but it failed to become anything more than a novel idea.
Perkins himself grew disillusioned with the lack of commercial success and interest generated by his various patents and, despite good health, lived in retirement for the remainder of his life, leaving the business side of things to his son, Angier. During his quietude, Jacob conceived the idea of a museum where he could display and demonstrate his own inventions, as well as promote the latest scientific or artistic advancements and applications of the day. He subsequently opened the National Gallery of Practical Science (commonly known as the Adelaide Gallery), on Lowther Arcade off the Strand in London, in 1832.
Open daily from 10 to 5 and again from 7 to 10 in the evening, the Gallery’s main attraction was Jacob Perkins' ‘Extraordinary’ Steam Gun. This was fired up several times a day in front of enthusiastic crowds, discharging rounds of 70 balls in four seconds at a target placed at the further end of the Gallery's Long Room. This room also contained a 70-feet-long canal and pool on which demonstrations of model paddle-driven steam boats took place. In rooms surrounding the upstairs gallery visitors could feed electric eels and see a hydro-oxygen microscope magnify the waters of the Thames three million times (allegedly). The popularity of the Adelaide Gallery soon turned the one-shilling admission into a comfortable return for Jacob.
In his book, Sketches of London Life and Character (1859), Albert Smith recalls:
…fearful engines revolved, and hissed, and quivered, as the fettered steam that formed their entrails grumbled sullenly in its bondage; mice led gasping subaqueous lives in diving-bells; clock-work steamers ticked round and round a basin perpetually, to prove the efficacy of invisible paddles; and on all sides were clever machines which stray visitors were puzzled to class either as coffee-mills, water-wheels, roasting-jacks, or musical instruments. There were artful snares laid for giving galvanic shocks to the unwary; steam-guns that turned bullets into bad sixpences against the target; and dark microscopic rooms for shaking the principles of teetotalers, by showing the wriggling abominations in a drop of the water they were supposed daily to gulp down by pints. (page 26)
The Long Room, National Gallery of Practical Science, London, circa 1840
Science Museum PictorialWith the addition of daily science lectures
and promenade concerts, the Adelaide flourished during the 1840s. However,
a distinguished aeronautic engineer and fellow inventor-entrepreneur, Sir
George Cayley, opened up a rival establishment, the Polytechnic Institution
on Upper Regent Street in 1838. It was named the Royal Polytechnic Institution
under the patronage of Prince Albert in 1841 andwould, 150 years later,
become the present-day University of Westminster.Where the Adelaide Gallery
featured Perkins's steam gun as the star attraction, the Polytechnic had
a full-sized diving bell in which visitors could descend to the bottom of
a glass tank; it also housed the first photographic studio in Europe. It
soon eclipsed the Adelaide, which shut down with Jacob’s death in 1849.
However, Jacob Perkins left behind him a considerable legacy. He recorded
a total of 21 patents in his lifetime, which were impressive in their diversity,
from ornamental engraving to sofa and bedstead construction, and from steam
pumps to ice-making machines. His descendants would follow his lead to establish
Perkins Engineers Ltd, which joined forces with Joseph Baker and Sons Ltd
in 1920. Situated at the ‘Westwood’ site in Peterborough and also in the
US, Baker Perkins Ltd has become one of today’s world-leaders in the design
and manufacture of industrial equipment for the food, chemical, and printing
industries.
Jacob’s ground-breaking, if short-lived, museum played a significant role
in the popularization of science, and it became a major tourist attraction
in Victorian London. He realized that exhibition provided a means of individualizing
the inventor in an age where, for the first time, the process of mass-production
was increasingly estranged from the human labour that underlay it. Jacob’s
endeavours fuelled an insatiable public taste for the first-hand experience
of science and wonder that, in no small part, ensured that the Great Exhibition
of 1851 was such a huge success.
As for the steam gun, you can see a surviving example on display in the Tower
Armouries in London. Meanwhile, those six, small, splattered pellets, laying
dormant for perhaps a century but soon to go on display, provide a gateway
to discovering an extraordinary man and a fascinating period in the history
of weaponry, engineering, and early Victorian life. Like so many other objects
in the Pitt Rivers Museum, they are the starting point for a great, sprawling
story that could never fit on to a single label.
If you have any related comments or questions, or would like an email notification
when the latest entry is available online, please email cuttingedge@prm.ox.ac.uk.
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Forget Anne Boleyn, meet the weapons that ignited Henry’s passion…
Submitted by Helen Hales on Fri, 28/08/2009
It is 500 years since young Henry VIII was crowned King of England. During 2009, the anniversary is being marked by a variety of events throughout the country celebrating Tudor life, commemorating Henry’s reign, and examining the marks he left (other than those in the executioner’s block). One of the highlights is the recently opened Henry VII: Dressed to Kill exhibition at the Tower of London. The curator is Thom Richardson, Keeper of Armour and Oriental Collections at the Royal Armouries (once housed at the Tower, now relocated to Leeds). The aim of the exhibition is to shake off the general perception of Henry as a rather fat, grumpy, megalomaniacal and bitter old man, an image immortalised by Holbein in his portraits of the late 1530s. Instead we are taken back to the earlier part of his reign and presented with Henry, All Action Man – outstanding sportsman, slim and handsome soldier, enlightened scholar and poet, and idealistic and astute young king. The 28-year old monarch’s finely articulated tournament armour, with a 36-inch waist, is on show to support these claims.
Stirring sounds complement the exhibition: the rumbling of hooves and the clashing of metal blade upon metal blade. But what about…the crack of gunshot and the boom of cannon? Did guns have a place in Henry’s world? You bet. Swords, lances, spears, bows, arrows, and shields provided the medieval stock-in-trade weapons but Henry was also a man with a passion for new military technologies. In his lifetime, he spent the modern equivalent of £1bn on warfare and weapons.
In fact, by Henry’s day, firearms had been used in European battles for nearly a century. The last battle of the Hundred Years War, the Battle of Castillon in 1453, was the first battle in European history in which artillery was the deciding factor. Although it is believed that gunpowder and firearms had their origins in China, it was a technology that Europe would quickly grasp. In the mid 1200s, Roger Bacon wrote down the recipe for gunpowder (sulphur, charcoal and saltpetre), possibly thanks to his links with Arab scholars and scientists in Spain.
Hackbuts and cannons from the catalogue of the arsenal of King Maximilian I
of
Hapsburg (later Holy Roman Emperor), 1502
- 72r ‘Messinghakenbüchsen’ and
24r ‘Schlangenbüchsen’, Zeugbuch
Kaiser Maximilians
I, BSB Codex. Icon 222,
Innsbruck, 1502 (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek) Although ‘handgonnes’
and heavy artillery such as the ‘trebuchet’ and ‘ballista’ are mentioned in the
14th century, little evidence survives of their use. In any case, by 1453 and
the last battle of the Hundred Years War at Castillion, records and accounts
leave us certain that artillery was a deciding factor. Some firearms took the
form of a metal cylinder fixed to a crossbow-type wooden stock. By around 1400,
records and illustrations improve and it is clear that cannons for sieges and
defence became more widespread and hand guns got longer and heavier.
Guns
of the 15th century were equipped with a lug to hook over a rampart to take
the extra weight and absorb recoil. Such weapons were known as Hackbuts in
England, Hackenbüchse in Germany and Harquebus in France. These were simple,
muzzle-loading cylinder weapons forged from staves of iron by a local smith.
The museum is fortunate enough to have a few of these very early guns
(shown above), which will form part of the early chronology in the new firearms
display. 
Hand cannon, Europe 15th century; PRM
1884.27.2
Four-barrelled hand cannon, possibly
British, 15th century; PRM 1906.20.256It
is difficult to know precisely where they came from or how old they are.
Like so many firearms in the Museum’s collections, the hackbut was collected
by General Pitt Rivers prior to 1874 but it is not clear where or how. It
may have been at auction. The second piece, a marvellous early ‘revolving’
hand cannon with four barrels and a wooden tiller, was part of the collection
of William Silver, a 19th-century businessman and later lord of the manor
and collector. Both examples probably date to the 15th century and are of
European origin. Slow and cumbersome to fire, inaccurate, apt to misfire,
short in range and unsuited to wet conditions, hand cannons were a limited
success. But there were a few who, like Henry later, saw they were on to
something big and set about pursuing the potential within the technology.
England stubbornly retained the long bow but the ‘arquebus’ – a smoothbore gun fired by a new ‘matchlock’ mechanism - had replaced crossbows on European battlefields by 1520. The lighter culverin form with an integral wooden stock was fired from the shoulder, while the heavier ‘musket’ type was fired from a fork rest. Both could equal the crossbow’s 400 yards range and outdo her in sheer power, if not yet in accuracy.
But it was artillery that really improved and changed the face of both war and defence-building in this period. Castles were no longer needed and were replaced by fortresses with lower, stockier walls. Armies had to change their formations and tactics and were issued with manuals on how to carry and operate their fantastic new weapons. As the feudal system collapsed, the king no longer relied on his nobles to provide men-at-arms and went about setting up centralised, industrial arms production at his dockyards in Deptford and Woolwich and his armouries at Greenwich. Canons were churned out to be used on ships – the inventory of the Mary Rose lists 51 heavy guns and 50 muskets alongside 137 traditional longbows. In 1544, the year before the sinking of the ill-fated ship, Henry had been to the Venetian Republic in Italy to seek out the most up-to-date models of firearms. He had bought a huge number of muskets, many of which were lost to the seabed, unused.
Henry’s fascination with firearms meant his personal armoury featured many
experimental weapons, such as a set of ‘gun-shields’ (consisting of a matchlock
pistol protruding from the centre of a targe) and a gruesome-looking combination
gun-mace he nicknamed the ‘holy water sprinkler’, presumably for its resemblance
to the aspergillum used in the Catholic mass. These items are on show at
the Tower exhibition. However, they did not really catch on, and it was the
musket that is Henry’s great legacy in the history of infantry combat. 
Matchlock, Europe, 17th century; PRM 1884.27.17
Sadly, the Museum does not have any Tudor firearms but it does have a wonderful, possibly Swiss, piece dating from the early 17th century, showing just how far the musket would progress in a relatively short space of time. It had become a long cast iron barrel of around ¾ inch bore, mounted on a wooden stock that extended under the barrel for support. The stock had a foot-long shoulder section and the simple but robust mechanism featured a spring-operated match and a covered flash-pan on the right hand side. The only throwback to medieval warfare is the crossbow long lever, used instead of a trigger to fire.
As the new firearms display will endeavour to illustrate, the musket would remain - albeit with a variety of lock types - the standard military infantry firearm of European armies for 300 years. Only in the mid-19th century did the rifle finally supersede it.
Could Henry have imagined that?
If you have any related comments or questions, or would like an email notification
when the latest entry is available online, please email cuttingedge@prm.ox.ac.uk.
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Introduction
Submitted by Helen Hales on Wed, 08/07/2009
As many of you are aware, the Upper Gallery of the Pitt Rivers Museum has
been closed to visitors for some time. Since the grand re-opening in May 2009,
visitors have been able to see the fruits of the latest stage of the Museum’s
‘Decade of Development’ in the form of a marvellous redesigned platform entrance,
shop, information point and new, vibrant displays of objects and photographs
on the ground and first floors.
However, the Upper Gallery represents one major
segment of the development programme yet to be completed. One of the many questions
asked of our members of staff is, ‘when is the Upper Gallery going to open?’
or ‘what sort of things are in the Upper Gallery?’ Well, if you want the answer
to these questions, and much more besides, you’ve come to the right place!
The sign in the elevator and staircase give some tantalising clues as to what is up there – ‘Shields, Spears, Samurai…’ The Upper Gallery is just as full as the galleries below it, containing several thousand objects. The majority of these are, as you may have guessed, weapons and accessories related to warfare, ceremony, display, hunting and survival. General Pitt Rivers liked to collect and exhibit items in typological groups – that is, placing things of a similar nature, or that fulfil the same purpose, together. As elsewhere in the Museum, many of the categories (i.e. ‘throwing blades’ or ‘non-metal armour’) are unchanged from those thought up by the General to organise his collection a century and a quarter ago. Indeed, when the Museum first opened to the public in the 1880s, the Upper Gallery was the home of the weaponry collections, and so it has remained ever since, give or take a few ‘lone’ displays at times elsewhere around the Museum. In this photograph from the 1890s you can see Henry Balfour (who would one day be curator) as a student making notes among the wall-mounted displays of spears and clubs of the Upper Gallery.
So if the Gallery isn’t really changing, how come it has been closed for so long? Like the recent work undertaken to construct a new entrance and learning area in the Museum, many of the changes are quite subtle. Some of the work being undertaken is practical – such as installing new cases, dealing with conservation hazards, and manufacturing special mounts for objects. Other aspects are more academic: focussing on researching the stories of the objects in order to present fresh and innovative interpretation (including web and audio content) for visitors.
This online diary will enable us to update you on how we’re progressing with these tasks and share our discoveries with you in the run-up to re-opening the Upper Gallery in 2010. With any luck, it will whet your appetite with a taste of what’s in store. Entries accompanied by photographs will be posted regularly (every fortnight or so) and will provide insights into highlighted objects and topics, but also touch on the many challenges faced by Museum staff (such as curators, technicians and conservators) in the planning and installation of both new displays and re-displays.
Just as with the developments undertaken in the other parts of the Museum,
our aim is not change the look and feel of the Museum but to improve it. With
this brief in mind it is hoped we can create a refreshed Upper Gallery that
offers an interesting, accessible and rewarding experience for all visitors.
If you have any related comments or questions, or would like an email notification when the latest entry is available online, please email cuttingedge@prm.ox.ac.uk.
Selected Objects from the Upper Gallery
In this Virtual Gallery you
can explore over 200 highlights from the arms and armour collections at the Pitt
Rivers Museum.
