Category Archives: Volunteering

Object of the Month – July 2023

The Museum’s ‘Object of the Month’ provides an opportunity to explore interesting and unusual objects from our stores. 

Forgeries in the Museum!

by Joanne Pegrum, Museum Volunteer 

On display in Saffron Walden Museum during July, possibly for the first time since the 19th century, are a group of six lead objects known as ‘Billys and Charleys’. The objects appear to be medieval religious objects but they are known to be forgeries with a tale to tell from Victorian London.

Billy (William Smith) and Charley (Charles Eaton), who give their nickname to the objects, were mudlarks. Mudlarks would scour the foreshore of the Thames to find things of value to sell. From the 1840s they were selling the antiquities they had found to antiques dealers, then in the 1850s they turned to profit by deception. Billy and Charley began to fabricate medieval religious objects which they claimed to have found at a development at Shadwell.

The volume of these strange medieval objects appearing on the market began to arouse the suspicion of archaeologists and antiquarians but there were conflicting opinions as to their authenticity. Proof of forgery could not initially be established and so their deception and profiteering continued.

Visit the Museum in July to learn more about this intriguing story and see these charming objects. Can you spot the clues that might reveal these objects as forgeries?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Joanne Pegrum holding the lead figure of a saint.

Lead medallion 8.5 cm wide, showing two figures mounted on a grazing horse.

Lead figure 16.3 cm high of a saint holding a scroll and book, and riding a four-legged animal. 

© Saffron Walden Museum

National Volunteer Week – June 2020

The first week of June is National Volunteer Week.  With the Museum still closed due to the covid-19 lockdown, we’re really missing you all especially our amazing volunteers, who are all integral to the museum’s diverse activities. We thank you all for your on-going support.  Here’s a message from us to you for #NationalVolunteerWeek  – It reads:

We miss you all so much especially our amazing volunteers and can’t wait to see you again when it’s safe

Volunteers play lots of different roles within our organisation:

Welcome Desk volunteers.  June for example (pictured holding the “When” word, has been one of our dedicated volunteers for over 20 years.  She undertakes the vital work of co-ordinating all our welcome desk volunteers –they meet & greet our visitors and provide them with orientation information, sell admission tickets and souvenirs and answer your enquiries.

Collections volunteers  (Natural Sciences, Archaeology and Human History) assist staff with vital collections tasks such as cataloguing, packing, labelling and digitising collections, they also transcribe early museum records and assist with exhibition installing. #DidYouKnow We also have verge volunteers who carry out ecological surveys of plants at 16 Special Roadside Verges in the Uttlesford District

Learning and Activity Volunteers have a vital role assisting us with preparing and running our school sessions and school holiday activities.

Last year we held a Volunteer Party for #NationalVolunteerWeek. When it’s safe to do so we will make sure we have another one!  The volunteers admired a temporary display explaining how they are vital cogs in our organisation.  They also took part in wildlife surveying with our Natural Sciences Officer, James Lumbard. 

Follow this link for a full-size PDF version  of the Volunteers Pictures  Scrapbook  or see the Flipbook version  below

Behind-the-scenes on a Monday!

Have you ever wondered what staff do when the museum is closed on a Monday? We’re busy behind the scenes, making sure our collections are documented and cared for.

An important job to complete when the Museum is closed to visitors is routine cleaning of the museum’s permanent displays. Volunteers are helping curatorial staff to clean objects on display, a few cases at a time. This not only keeps the displays looking good, but also prevents potentially harmful dust particles accumulating on fragile objects, and allows curatorial staff to check for signs of corrosion and other problems.

Objects are carefully removed from the case to a table covered with acid-free tissue paper. Here they can be examined and very gently brushed to remove dust particles. The nozzle of the special mini-vacuum cleaner, designed for museum conservation, is held just above the object to remove any loose dust without touching fragile surfaces. Once the case interior has also been cleaned, everything can by placed back on display and the case secured. It can take about an hour to do a medium-sized show case.

Volunteer Joanne has been helping our curator Carolyn to clean the archaeology displays. So far, we are about half way round the gallery. In the case behind Joanne are some of the beautiful Roman glass vessels, pottery and metal objects used by and buried with local people over 1,800 years ago, at Little Walden, Canfield, Bartlow and Stebbing.

Other curatorial staff work in our off-site store with volunteers on a Monday. Here, we add and edit information about the collection onto our collections management database, making sure we know exactly what we have in the collection and where it is! This has been particularly important in the aftermath of our store-move, as the locations of all the objects moved (about 80,000 objects in total) needed to be updated! Every object has a separate record on the database, with information about its history, provenance, significance and physical appearance. 

As we work through the collections systematically, adding information to the database, we check the condition of our objects and identify any conservation work that needs to be done. Our new store has helped dramatically with this process as we now have the space to store our objects in a more visible way and to lay out objects so that they can be inspected. 

Whether they are on display, or cared for in our stores, our collections are at the heart of the museum. It is vitally important that we take the time to care for them properly, so that they are preserved for people to enjoy long into the future.