We were delighted to have received £28,000 funding from Art Fund to have curator Dr. Tehmina Goskar on secondment from the Curatorial Research Centre as our Headley Fellow throughout 2022. Tehmina worked at the museum two days a week researching the history of our museum and its collections. As a result of this project Tehmina will continue curatorial development and research at the museum, principally reviewing the social and cultural significance of our farming collections.
Latest research
How the museum got its brain: 20th-century cataloguing and documentation
Love them or hate them. Curating dolls in the museum’s collection
A spade, wheelbarrow and pillas traft: the museum’s first objects
The radical roots of Camborne’s libraries and museums
The story of old Camborne Museum
Dolls! The history and culture of dolls in the museum
About the Fellowship
Everyday museums have extraordinary objects that are frequently overlooked when viewed through
generalising lenses like ‘social history’. Also hidden are everyday, and often embarrassing problems, that we
don’t talk about. This project critically engages with knotty collections issues that will resonate with many other UK museums. Based in the Museum of Cornish Life, we will apply modern ethical practices to writing an entirely new history of the collections and the museum itself; we will reunite the orphaned collections of the defunct Camborne Museum to their people in a special exhibition; and share a sector toolkit on how to deal with embarrassing problems in small museums.
The Museum of Cornish Life has literally opened all of its cupboards, doors and filing cabinets to me so I can explore the history of our museum, its predecessors, our collections and how we can better care for and share them. My research is closely linked with that of the Under the Eaves project by Julia Webb-Harvey, volunteer researchers, and formerly, Tamsin Chaffin, Trainee Curator. I will regularly share news of her research here and would be delighted to hear from you if you are interested in any of the following topics she is researching:
- history of the museum and its curators in Helston
- history of the old Camborne Museum in the Literary Institute (Donald Thomas Centre)
- toy and doll collection
- history of items from different parts of the UK and rest of the world (not from Cornwall)
- cultural representations in our photographic collections, including panto, carnival
- objects of violence, e.g. man and animal traps, agricultural and military items, and their representations.
Contact Tehmina, Headley Fellow: tehmina@museumofcornishlife.co.uk
Unravelling museum history
Museums have histories too, they are not just houses of art and history. I am particularly interested in investigating the influence of former curators and donors on the collections we see today, how and why we have the displays we do, and how museum attitudes and fashions have changed. As part of this part of the Fellowship we will interview former curators and influencers of the museum, thoroughly research the museum’s own archives of correspondence, newspaper stories and photographs and also charting a timeline of events and changes. While the Museum of Cornish Life has the majority of its artefacts on display, there are still some in store that we know very little about, how they got here, and what we can do to find out more about them. We will be exploring the ‘loft’ soon…
While this museum was founded in 1937, and opened properly to the public in 1949, did you know there was a museum in Helston back in the 19th century? It was known as Penberthy’s Helston Museum and was established by the then Mayor of the same name. While I was applying for the Fellowship I did some research in the newspapers and saw a notice that announced the closure of the museum in 1893, with its contents transferred to Burton’s Old Curiosity Shop in Falmouth. Interestingly, National Maritime Museum Cornwall has a display in the Falmouth Gallery recreating the shop’s window display, but we don’t think any of the original stuff from Helston ended up here. We have a portrait of William Penberthy and his wife here at the museum and I must have walked past it loads of times and never read the label, which acknowledges the former museum. I wonder what it was like? Perhaps then, there wasn’t a lot of difference between a Curio Shop and a Museum.
Tracing the history of Camborne Museum has just begun. Its foundation was much older than the museum here in Helston. It was in fact a museum in the radical library that was established by the Camborne Literary Institute in 1842. The society itself dated back to 1829. The building still stands and has been the Donald Thomas day care centre. While much of the collections came to Helston after its closure in 2005, there has in fact been a long-standing relationship between Helston and Camborne’s museums, largely owing to both towns being part of the South Kerrier District. Former Curator, Martin Matthews, was Museum Officer for both museums in the 1980s. The to and fro of collections between museums is not unusual, and when museums have closed, other museums may take on items that may be relevant to them. However these periods of closure and change have also made collections vulnerable, information about them and their histories goes missing, sometimes objects themselves go missing. It’s remarkable that even though museums are ‘memory institutions’ it’s common for organisations to forget or not properly records their own histories.
For the love of catalogues
I think some people thought I was odd, but my first major task on joining the museum was to sit down and read every record in the collections database. Currently we have 19728 records that document our collections. There are still some items that are undocumented, including those from the former Camborne Museum collection, so that is another priority for later in the year. Reading museum catalogues is an easy way to get to know the collections and patterns of donation, e.g. when there were large and significant deposits. Most of the object records do not have associated imagery. The exception is the Photographic Collection.
Reading a museum catalogue also gives you a sense of the idiosyncrasies and styles people adopt during documentation. The main legacy of my research here will be added to the relevant object records as, after the book is written and the exhibition is done, this will have the most legacy in the future. Most of our records have actually been transferred to our Collections Management Database (Modes) from much older index cards dating back to the early decades of the museum. I actually love these old records cards as they sometimes carry beautiful, hand-drawn illustrations. This also means that some information we hold might be out of date, inaccurate or misleading, or an item may have been misidentified for a long time. It’s always useful to remember that, while museums and curators try their best, they can and do get things wrong. Cataloguers may also use descriptions that aren’t particularly helpful to people searching for information or making an enquiry, and in some cases, we notice certain judgements have been made and recorded in those descriptions, e.g.
“9 wives dressed for a night out?” “Pretty young lady in a white jumper” “Lady with spotted dress and smile.” “Large lady seated posing by a brick fireplace.”
Some descriptions from the museum’s collections database.
Interestingly, photographs of men and boys are rarely given qualifying descriptions like ‘wife’, ‘pretty’ ‘smile’ or ‘large’. They are much more ‘matter of fact’. Although there are some ‘lads’ in the catalogue records.
I have been tidying up some records along the way, such as typos, as this will help aid discovery in the future. Where I have immediately had useful information to add, I have added it, for example, we have a lovely sample of ilmenite from Manaccan. Ilmenite is an ore of the mineral titanium that was first identified by mineralogist William Gregor in 1791 in a stream south of Manaccan on the Lizard peninsula. Given the proximity of the discovery to this location, I added this information the record.
While this will form part of a next phase of familiarisation with the collections, I have felt compelled to rescue objects in peril! Again, because we become blind to long-standing displays in museums we sometimes miss the deterioration that goes on in front of us. Gallery checks are performed regularly, but even during these it can be easy to miss the obvious. We spotted an quarry order book in the Serpentine Turner’s display. It was from the 1960s/70s pertaining to serpentine sent to the Steetley Refactory Brick Co. Ltd, Nottinghamshire. Again I was able to add this information to the object record, and also take it off display as its pages were deteriorating from years of being on open display. It is now in the museum’s archive store.
And of course there are the items different people may find weird or peculiar. Early on I developed a particular fascination for the collection of bullock’s hairballs, also known as bezoars. They are like shiny white cue balls and are on display in the ‘Personal & Curios’ cabinet. With these agricultural bodily items we also have calculus from other farm animals. Who said this museum was just about people?
More grizzly, and certainly more affecting that I was expecting, was reading about the collections of man traps, trip guns and other items designed to deter people from encroaching on the property of landowners. These brutal weapons often penalised desperate and hungry working people wanting to catch a rabbit or similar – otherwise known as poaching. Man traps were outlawed in England and Wales in 1827, however their presence here is a salutary reminder of the violence used to control members of society in this country (think also the severe punishments and sentences of hard labour, transportation, physical punishment and execution that were as much spectacles as tragedies). I wasn’t initially expecting to research this topic, but I feel that it’s an important invisible aspect of our history that could do with better interpretation. I felt the display of one of these snares as a window decoration in the museum, hitherto not commented upon, is an opportunity to educate our visitors.
We are also going to be facing the reality that we have some items in our collection that are either duplicated many times, for example, baby rompers (!) or have deteriorated so badly (or may have always been) and become undisplayable, or are outside our collections development policy. Part of my job here is to help the museum make ethical and methodical decisions about what to do with collections that never see the light of day, and what we need to be collecting to reflect Cornish life today, otherwise we are at risk of being a museum that ‘stops’ in the 1950s…