After a somewhat frantic effort yesterday of trying to place the mystery glass plate negatives I found, with help from various individuals we have got some results! My colleague Lucy Hermann, Sally England from Hackney Archives, Dr Andrew Jackson from Bishop Grosseteste University in Lincoln and Sara Hodson, the Museum Manager at Ilfracombe Museum have all massively helped to try and unravel the mystery. I thought I would share the findings with you while the topic was still hot!

We have all come to the conclusion that the image below is definitely from Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel. I found a more modern image of the same place, and I am sure you will all agree, they look pretty much identical! The image below the glass plate negative is from a Telegraph article entitled Hiking on Lundy Island with Nicholas Crane and is a National Trust image.

The Lundy connection was confirmed by Sally after an initial discovery by Lucy. Sally also then steered us towards Devon for the rest of the images, and Andrew chipped in saying the coastal town looked like Ilfracombe and suggested I got in touch with Sara at Ilfracombe Museum. She was very prompt in her reply and much to my joy, the locations started to unravel.

The above image is of Ilfracombe Harbour, with St Nicholas’ Chapel to the left of the image. The chapel was constructed in 1857, so the glass plates will date from after that year – which means our guess of around 1910 may well be right.

The images below have been identified as Hele Beach, which is just outside of Ilfracombe. The bay looks very different now to what it did – though in some photographs from the 1940s and 50s still seem to have the row of houses which you can see in the distance in the mystery glass plate. The modern image below has been taken by Shaun Ferguson and was found on the Geograph website.

The next image (see below) was identified as being Old Maids Cottage in Lee, just outside of Ilfracombe. This house is now rented out as a holiday cottage. There are a few photographs of it from the late 1800s on the Francis Firth website. The cottage itself dates from 1765 and was once home to three beautiful young ladies who were very picky about their perspective husbands. They ended up unmarried and were known as the Three Old Maids of Lee. There is a poem about them, written by Frederick Weatherly. You can read the poem on the Devon Heritage website.

The two final images of the family sitting on the terrace have obviously been taken at the same house as image one, overlooking the now identified Ilfracombe Harbour. This has been given a possible location of Rupertswood Terrace in the town.

The second, very blurry image of the boy on a beach in yesterday’s blog entry still remains a mystery – but one mystery out of seven is not bad going at all in such a short space of time! I am so happy and grateful to the aforementioned people who were willing to share their knowledge and help me out!

The family in these images must have taken a holiday around the Devon coast, with a visit to Lundy Island by boat. As Sara mentioned in one of her replies to my email, “it was quite a common past-time for tourists to take a horse-drawn coach to these destinations on the Devon coast”.

If only we had a way to find out who the people in the photographs are…

Anyone still out there…? I have not written a blog entry for a good five months, though the thought has been there on several occasions. I am attempting a come-back with a bit of a mystery to resolve – not related to the Design Archives specifically, but something that is definitely of archival and historical interest.

To give you the background, there are a number of office moves currently taking place here at the Grand Parade campus. One of the offices has been churning out surplus materials like files, folders and books as a free-for-all to go to new homes. On a rainy Wednesday morning I was passing by the piles of materials and something caught my eye. Of course in true archival mindset, this something had to be a very ‘old-looking’ box…

I thought for a moment or two that the box would actually hold within it what it said on the lid – vellum envelopes – which in itself would have been brilliant. Imagine my excitement when on opening it, I discovered a selection of seven 5.5×3.5″ glass-plate negatives!

I emailed the office from which the box had appeared from to see if anyone had any kind of back-story about their origin. The only bit of certainty was that it was found inside another box, filled with French books. While there is no recollection of anyone in the office having seen them before, there was one distant memory of an elderly lady dropping off an assorted box of ‘things’ and that the images could possibly be something to do with her. An alumni perhaps?

I decided to scan them all to have a better look. They all appear to be taken in the same place and of the same family. On looking at the collection of images with my colleagues, we guess them to be from around the 1910s or so. As for the place – we have no idea!

I am absolutely certain that there has to be someone out there who is familiar with the location of the photographs, and I would be eternally grateful if you could let me know! Better yet – a long shot to say the least – if you happen to recognise the people portrayed in the images, that would be an absolute lottery win! For identification purposes, if anyone needs to see a larger image file to clarify anything, please do get in touch.

So… over to you!

At the risk of stating the obvious, we are well and truly in the midst of the age of the internet – with its pros and its cons – to which the majority of people have access to and use on a daily basis. Information is shared and can go global, even instantly viral, in the blink of an eye.

Professionally, and with a kind of grass-root point-of-view in mind, the internet is a great invention to try and make the most of. This is one of the reasons I created this blog over 4 years ago. I feel that writing in this manner enables a wider communication about conservation practices, creating a more open profession by revealing to the ‘general public’ small fractions of some behind-the-scenes activities.

Blogging about what you do can of course be rather time-consuming, and some might well argue that the time might be better used in doing what it is you do. In the busyness of the modern workplace, trying to ‘open up’ in this way is therefore not for everyone and admittedly, writing a blog can at times feel like you are simply talking to yourself and/or preaching to the converted. However, I am personally armed with a big drop-down menu of bookmarked conservation blogs and love reading conservators’ musings online – be it about paper, textiles or glass!

Of course the digital also must comes with the analogue… So when the opportunity arose for me to put up a good old-fashioned 3D display about conservation, a different type of thinking cap had to be firmly placed on my head. This chance came up because from the beginning of this year, the Center for Research & Development here at the Grand Parade campus of the University began offering the opportunity for members of staff and postgraduate students to put on small research-based displays in plinths on the Mezzanine floor of the building. This facility is open to individuals or groups within the University and can be used for showing artifacts, digital or text-based items, along with the research question or context that informs them. The conservation display is the first of these mini exhibits.

I am always happy when anyone shows an interest in paper conservation, and could enthuse about it until the cows come home. However, it can be challenging to take a step back from the things you know to attempt to explain these practices to someone wanting to know what it is you actually do. I find this relatively easy to do by writing and showing images online, but struggled with the notion of a showcase within the constraints of display plinths. Hopefully I have managed to do justice to this opportunity!

The first of the displays is a selection of text panels and sample pieces about the discoveries and mending attempts from attending the workshop about conservation of tracing paper late last year. The text panels draw on what I learnt about the different types of transparent papers, their behaviour in contact with moisture and different tissue repair methods for tears.

The middle display simply shows my toolbox with a few tools taken out to highlight their use. I have found that people are genuinely fascinated by the bits and pieces used in paper conservation and took this chance to exhibit the tools – even if this means I am not able to repair anything in the meanwhile!

The third and final column has a selection of mounting method samples from my portfolio. I felt showing these was a great way to highlight the importance of safe storage and mounting methods of archival materials.

The display, entitled ‘Conservation as Research: Behind the Scenes at the University of Brighton Design Archives’ is up until the 6th of March.

I had the chance to work with some of the oldest materials we have in our predominantly 20th Century collections – these gems originate from the 1880s/1890s and belong to the Vokins archive. This archive has a very local focus in that for over a hundred years, Vokins was a major Brighton department store located on North Street in the centre of town. The department store closed its doors for the final time in 1997.

Founded in 1882, the company was originally named ‘Leeson and Vokins’. The name changed to ‘W H Vokins Limited’ in 1937 with another shift to ‘Vokins Limited’ in 1983. The company have continued to sell furniture locally as the Vokins Furniture Centre but sadly they will be closing down early 2015 – a definite end of an era!

In the archive we have materials from the period when the department store was still called by its original name of ‘Leeson & Vokins’. Within the collection there were six of the older advertisements that desperately needed attention. Sometime in the past, these items had all been sandwiched between an acidic, cheap backing board and a piece of glass with a tape edging holding the parcel together. My mission was to get them out for a spot of fresh air and to repair any tears and amend any holes. The ‘Midsummer 1895 Clearance Sale’ piece shown (see image above) was the first one I tackled.

When this particular piece emerged out of its frame, I realised in just what a poor condition it was in. On this piece alone, there are tide-lines along the edges from having been previously wet, as well as discolouration to the paper on the side which was shown in the ‘frame’. On top of these issues that I can not do anything about, the paper itself is extremely brittle – tears, splits and holes were everywhere! All six pieces I worked with were folded up materials. Removing their frames has revealed the adverts in their entirety after three quarters of their original contents have remaining hidden from view for many years.

As you can see from the image below of the sale announcement from 1894, some of the glass of the ‘frames’ had already broken prior to my taking them on. There were no concerns about the glass being of historic importance and they were carefully disposed of for recycling.

I have written before about the pleasant discoveries you can make from not only what can be considered the verso’s of items, but from their original backing boards too. When unraveling the ‘Progress’ monthly magazine piece from 1886 away from its frame (see images below), the backing board used was a piece originating from packing materials for Crysella soap flakes.

I would imagine this piece of board was used as the quickest and cheapest backing for framing the items – it must have originated from a delivery to the store from the Co-operative Wholesale Society. I would love to know when the Vokins advertisements were originally put in their ‘frames’ – so if anyone out there has a deep knowledge of the C.W.S Archive, it would be amazing to hear which decade this particular piece of backing board might hail from!