“Is it a mystery game?” Pupils’ feedback on the online interactive

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Over the past month I have visited two local schools, Addingham and Springbank, to test our online interactive with Year 4 and Year 6 classes. “Is it a mystery game?” I was asked by one pupil as I was in the process of setting it up on the computers prior to the session. I replied that it was an educational game, which possibly didn’t quite imply the excitement they were anticipating, but nevertheless the responses to the resource have been very positive and encouraging, from pupils and teachers alike.

The Library at Cragside.
The Library at Cragside – a popular room to start in.

Over the different sessions I experimented with a few different ways of using the interactive in the classroom. In each case I began by leading the interactive from the front of the class, starting with Cragside and asking the pupils which rooms they wanted to explore (interestingly, in each session they wanted to start with the Library). In each room I opened the hotspot image and asked them the question before playing the associated video. I also wanted to see how the pupils used the interactive on their own, so depending on the session I then let them go through either the second and third or just the third house on their own. Unfortunately, at Addingham we noticed that when a whole class was trying to use the resource at once this slowed things down, and there were problems loading the videos. It also led in some cases to pupils, when left to their own devices, clicking through to the video content without being able to see the pictures of the rooms or the associated questions which the videos then answered.

Before my visit to Springbank, therefore, we implemented a fix aimed at addressing this, which was successful in that it slowed down the loading of the content in order to ensure that it would be visible before the video content would be played. With Springbank pupils, after going through the first house together, I asked a group of eight of them to work on the interactive at the back of the class, independently of the rest. They worked as three pairs at three computers, and two single pupils with a computer each – all had headphones for the videos. Meanwhile, I chose two volunteers from the rest of the class to lead the pupils through the next house, getting the class consensus on which rooms to visit, asking the hotspot questions and playing the videos. This worked very well and demonstrated how the interactive can be employed in the classroom as a peer-led learning exercise.

A sunflower-inspired wall-light from the Drawing Room at Standen.
A sunflower-inspired wall-light from the Drawing Room at Standen.

The pupils working on their own or in pairs at the back were able to use the interactive without the problems of the videos not loading properly, as we had previously seen at Addingham. The main feedback I received from this ‘focus group’ of pupils was that they wanted there to be more content: more rooms to explore, and more to see in each room. Unfortunately we’ve been limited by time and money on this project, so we stuck to four rooms for each of the three houses, with one hotspot and video in each, but I see this as a very positive response indicating that they were interested in and engaging constructively with the content.

The interactive provides a good catalyst to start discussions about a range of topics, from Victorian class and gender divides – and the contrasts and similarities with the present day – to the use of renewable energy through discussions of hydroelectricity at Cragside, to our own attitudes towards new, cutting edge technologies, to the questions and thought processes involved in designing and making everyday items. For example, Year 4 at Springbank picked up in particular on how posh Mr Grey, the butler at Cragside, sounded. “He’s like a robot!” they happily told me. This provided a perfect opportunity to discuss why it was appropriate that Mr Grey, working as he did for Lord Armstrong, conducted himself in a certain manner.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrJNY4TsMbE]

 

The quiz at the end of the interactive also provided an opportunity for the pupils to think about their knowledge of electrical topics covered in the KS2 curriculum. There are six multiple choice questions, each one relating to a circuit component with which the KS2 curriculum requires pupils to be familiar: wire, batteries, switches, lightbulbs, buzzers and motors. The questions draw on materials covered in the video content from the three houses, touching on scientific, historical and design aspects of the use of domestic electricity. In all cases I led this as an activity from the front of the class, asking questions, getting the pupils’ answers, and moving through the quiz. In the feedback, this was the aspect of the interactive which the Year 4 pupils said they found to be the most challenging, but as we want the resource to be useful for Year 6 as well I don’t think this is a problem; they did very well regardless.

A still from one of the videos in the interactive: Bertha the maid explains the electrical call system at Lotherton Hall.
A still from one of the videos in the interactive: Bertha the maid explains the electrical call system at Lotherton Hall.

The feedback from pupils indicates that the interactive encouraged them to think about how people used electricity in the past, and what different opinions they had. To evaluate each session I asked the pupils to write down, on different coloured post-it notes: one thing they had learnt, one thing they found difficult, and what they wanted to learn next. The answers demonstrated an encouraging level of understanding and enthusiasm. A common response to the first question – what they felt they had learnt – was hydroelectricity, and also the period that people first starting using electricity in the home, including the fact that not many people had electricity at this time. The interactive thus effectively introduces pupils to the idea of hydroelectricity, and also helps them to historicise the development of electrical technologies. Other key points which pupils picked up on were that early electricity was not always reliable, and that maids were often scared of electricity.

There were a few warning signs here, though, and potential misunderstandings will be highlighted in our teachers’ resource to accompany the interactive. For example, a lot of pupils found the explanation of the cloisonné lamp at Cragside tricky, and whilst this is a useful tool for discussing several topics – for example conductors and insulators, how mercury is an unusual metal, and electrical safety – it is important to be careful in order to avoid some of the misconceptions which are evident from the feedback, for example that mercury was used to power lamps, or that the method of the electrification of Cragside’s cloisonné lamps was common at the time. Teachers may wish to use the animation of the cloisonné lamp we have produced for Cragside alongside the interactive to help explain this.

Regarding what they wanted to know next, pupils had a wide range of suggestions, from how electricity was used on the Titanic to the uses of electricity in sport. Common questions were how electricity is generated, who the first person to use or discover it was, and aspects of social history, for example asking about the lives of children and servants, and what adults did in their spare time. Some asked some very insightful questions, such as why people needed electricity when they had candles, and what electricity is going to be like in the future. These responses indicate that the interactive serves to fuel interest in Victorian history, and also in how electricity works and the ways in which it is used in our everyday lives. Teachers can therefore use our interactive as a starting point for such discussions, and then go on to explore some of these other science or history topics in more depth.

The interactive is now live, and can be viewed here.

Explaining experimental electricity: animations at Cragside

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As the project draws to a close we are polishing up our outputs ready for final delivery.  One of the outputs which we are producing for Cragside is a set of three bespoke educational animations to help volunteers to explain Cragside’s electrical heritage to visitors.  The animations have been produced by our undergraduate animation intern, Alex, and will be used to demonstrate how Lord Armstrong employed and experimented with electricity at Cragside, and how he used the surrounding landscape to generate hydroelectricity to light his house – the first private house to do so.

Of the three animations, one illustrates how the house’s iconic cloisonné lamps were originally electrified in December 1880.  This was a little unusual and can be hard to explain.  The only source we have is a letter Armstrong wrote to the Engineer in January 1881, in which he explained that the lamps could be switched off or on by picking them up and putting them down again.  As this was a very experimental period in the history of electrification, before switches were readily available, this was accomplished using a dish of mercury.

A wire ran down from the bulb at the top of the vase, and dipped into the mercury.  The dish was set in the centre of a metal disc connected to two wires: one carrying current to the bulb, and the other being the return wire for the circuit.  The metal body of the vase itself – copper – served to return the current back to the return wire.  Thus, when the vase was placed on the metal disc and the wire from the bulb dipped into the dish of mercury the circuit was completed and the bulb was lit.  Lifting the vase from the metal disc would have switched the light off.  As the cloisonne vases were coated entirely in enamel it is likely that this would have provided sufficient insulation for the vases to have been moved by hand.  The animation provides volunteers with a very visual way of explaining this process.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tq2G4JIWbEw]

 

The second animation is of the arc light which used to hang in the Picture Gallery at Cragside between c1878 and 1880 – when Armstrong and Joseph Swan installed Swan’s bulbs.  This can no longer be seen at the property, but the animation gives an idea of how it worked – including the noise of operating it.  The animation demonstrates how early arc lights comprised two vertical rods of carbon in an electrical circuit, separated by a gap.  The current jumped across the gap, creating a bright arc.  The distance between the two rods needed to be carefully regulated: if it was too small, the arc would correspondingly be too small to generate sufficient light.  If the gap was too wide, the current would not be able to arc across it.  However, as the rods burned away with use it was important to have a mechanism which automatically moved the rods to keep the gap the same size as the rods became shorter.  Arc lights were more commonly used for outdoor lighting, and not many people experimented with bringing them inside to illuminate their rooms.  This, alongside the cloisonne animation, therefore helps to highlight Armstrong’s willingness to experiment and innovate.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O83e71MJ2H8]

 

The final animation shows how the hydroelectric system at Cragside worked, with water running down the hill from a man-made lake at the top, and operating a dynamo in the Power House – a separate building containing the dynamos and the batteries, which stored excess electrical charge for periods of high demand.  When more current was required to light more rooms, the butler used a telephone to ring down to the Power House to request more power.  The animation shows this simply as the movement of a lever: this operation might have been performed by switching resistance coils out of the circuit (thus decreasing the resistance and effectively making more current available for the lights in the house), or by switching the batteries into the circuit.  After this happens in the animation we see more lights coming on in the house, represented by the cloisonné lamp in the Library, until it is entirely illuminated.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyZHEZtoQ_Y]

 

Volunteers will have these animations on tablets, and will be able to use them as explanatory tools when discussing the history of electricity at the property with visitors.  The role of volunteers in providing explanatory interpretative content is very important at Cragside, as at many other country houses.  When discussing how the project could deliver outputs which would best benefit Cragside, representatives of the house were keen to produce something which emphasised the role of volunteers, rather than written interpretative content such as panels or trails.

When drawing up the storyboards for each of the three animations, therefore, Alex and I consulted with Cragside staff in order ensure that the content was accurate and suitable for this purpose: the animations needed to be short – concise and focused without distracting elements – and visual, without relying on text.  The animations will be in use at Cragside in the next month, and will also be available to view online.

[Edit, 4/7/16 – This post now contains final versions of all three of the animations.  Please also see our Downloads page for further supporting information on these animations.]

Guest Post: Eating Electricity and Delivering India – Animesh Chatterjee

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Several Bengali writers of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries used satire as their literary response to the social and political complexities of colonial modernity and anti-colonial Indian traditionalism. Satirical texts, and especially drama, ridiculed subjects as disparate as religious reformers and reforms, state and civil institutions, technological modernity, and scientific theories, usually from the ideological viewpoint of the emerging Bengali upper-caste middle-class. The introduction of urban and domestic electrification, and the emergence of electricity as a scientific phenomenon in colonial India from the 1890s onwards resulted in Bengali writers integrating and exploring electricity in their fictional and satirical works. Bengali satirists added their own interpretations of electrification, as well as their hopes and fears for its influence on the Indian individual, family and society. For several satirists, the outcomes of electrification were not restricted to the physical effects of lighting and shocks; the Western origins of electrical technologies were considered dangerous to Indian cultural values, lifestyles and outlook. This is particularly evident in Amrita Lal Bose’s drama, The Babu: A Bengali Society Farce, originally written and performed in the 1890s at the Star Theatre in Calcutta, and translated into English in 1911. The Babu was not the first drama to satirically engage at length with the Bengali middle-class replicating British language, manners, attitudes and practices; however, it offers a number of ideas and associations that indicate the complexities of Western technological modernity from within the subjectivities of the contemporary Bengali intelligentsia.

The Babu

The third scene of the first act opens in the common room of the Brahmo Samaj, an upper-caste Hindu socio-religious reform institution. The Hindu religious reformer Sajanikanta, and the Western-educated scientist Asaniprakas are seen debating the nature of God. While Sajanikanta terms God as the ‘creator’ of beings, Asaniprakas rubbishes all of God’s creations as merely results of evolution by ‘physical change’.[1] When interrupted by news of the Brahmo Samaj’s plans of remarrying a widow, Asaniprakas suggests how the Brahmo Samaj should use science to remove women’s pangs of widowhood. He asserts: “If I can produce children by means of electricity, I’ll produce them; otherwise farewell to progeny. But by science I can remove the pangs of widowhood.”[2] He adds: “I think I can make such a galvanic battery that if the patient holds its poles in her hands, the pangs of widowhood will at once be numbed.”[3]

Electricity is presented here as a preternatural force that could supplement natural processes with artificially enhanced ones. On a deeper level, electricity and electrical technologies are perceived as harbingers of radical changes that could disrupt traditional and long-established cultural values and schemes. A further aspect of Asaniprakas’s representation of electricity as an important aspect of the body’s and society’s operations is offered in references that amalgamate electricity as a socio-political tool with the wider contemporary Indian nationalist interests of autonomy and self-rule. Arguing against the Brahmo Samaj’s stance of delivering India through socio-religious reforms, Asaniprakas says: “If India is to be delivered, it won’t be by delivering lectures and remarrying widows. If we are to attain autonomy, rest assured it will be by the help of science alone.”[4] He says further: “Mark my words, if I live – and I’m bound to as I eat a quantity of electricity twice a day – I will by the force of electricity abolish the caste system, effect the remarriage of widows, teach women to ride horses, establish a Parliament in India, and many other deeds besides.”[5]

The Babu Dialogues

While there is virtually no technical detail in The Babu, the range of topics that it related to electricity demonstrated that electricity was not only viewed by writers in terms of scientific and technological development, but it also served several explanatory and metaphorical purposes. Asaniprakas’s overemphasis on science and technology to bring about social and political reforms parodies the contemporary Westernised Bengali ‘babu’ and his pretensions to rival the British in intellect and culture. Asaniprakas’s plans of using electricity to deliver India also hint at the contemporary ideological battle between anti-colonial nationalism and Western imperialism. Partha Chatterjee suggests that anti-colonial nationalism in India called for a separation between spiritual and material domains. According to anti-colonial traditionalists, nationalist sovereignty could be achieved by studying and replicating Western material culture and modernity in the outside world, while protecting Indian cultural values, spirituality and identity within the domestic sphere.[6] In The Babu, electricity is depicted as a dominant force of the material world capable of overpowering the spiritual and cultural domain sufficiently to change it.

The scene’s concerns about electricity relate to the wider issues of domestication of electricity in colonial India that my current research seeks to examine. My research will study how the acceptance or rejection of electricity in Indian domestic and urban spaces was closely linked to the paradoxes that characterised Indian middle-class identity. The research aims to trace the several interpretive positions or meanings that were adopted in relation to electrification, and how domestic spaces became contact zones for Western conceptions of technological modernity, Indian cultural values and nationalism, contestations of gender roles, and the shaping of social inequality and stratification.

About the author

Animesh Chatterjee is a first year PhD researcher at Leeds Trinity University, studying ‘The Social Life of Electricity in Urban Colonial India, c. 1880-1920.’ In 2013, he graduated with an MSc (distinction) in History of Science, Medicine and Technology from the London Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (run jointly by UCL and Imperial College London until August 2013). Animesh has also previously worked as a Research Volunteer at the Science Museum, London, and as an Education Development Consultant at Pimpri Chinchwad Science Park in Pune, India.

Notes

[1] Nibaran Chandra Chatterjee, English Translation of “The Babu” (A Bengali Society Farce) by Babu Amrita Lal Bose [Calcutta: Sanyal & Co., 1911], p.22

[2] ibid, p. 24

[3] ibid, p. 24

[4] ibid, p. 26

[5] ibid, pp. 26-27

[6] Partha Chatterjee, The Partha Chatterjee Omnibus [New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999]

Also see:

Partha Mitter, ‘Cartoons of the Raj’, History Today (September 1997), pp. 16-21

Stella Pratt-Smith, Transformations of Electricity in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Science [Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2016]

Prabhat Kumar, ‘Colonialism, Modernity and Hindi Satire in the Late 19th Century’, Zeitschrift für Indologie und Südasienstudien (ZIS), 28 (2011), pp. 1-25

Notes from an Intern: Stories from the Archives

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Harewood House
Harewood House

Hello again, and welcome to another installment of ‘Notes from an Intern’. For the second phase of my internship, I was tasked with extracting information from materials gathered by Michael in the West Yorkshire Archive Service (WYAS). While a few of the letters were addressed directly to Lord Harewood, most of the documents were between electrical companies and Claude M.S. Pilkington Esquire, estate agent to the 5th Earl of Harewood. All of these documents (dated between 1900 and 1902) were in regards to the fitting of electricity in Harewood House.

Cragside
Cragside

When I met with Michael to discuss this next stage of my internship, he mentioned that the wide early usage of hydropower to generate electricity was not common knowledge. It is a fascinating little titbit, considering that one of the country houses that had cropped up in the literature survey was Cragside, the first home in the world to be lit by hydro-electricity. William Armstrong, the first Baron Armstrong, had been responsible for its electric installation. In several publications, where some were a part of the National Trust’s efforts in establishing an Energy Centre based on the work of William George Armstrong, different authors had investigated the historical installation of the hydraulic engines and pumps in Cragside. But it is fascinating to discover that within 30 years, this same technology would become so popular that it would be one of the ‘go-to’ methods of technology for electrifying other country houses.

For the past week, I had pored over many letters and documents sent by electrical engineers in the early 1900s. It is clear that Lord Harewood had written to several companies, requesting an estimate of costs to electrify Harewood House. Most of these estimates were based on the electrical companies’ suggestion to use hydro-electric power. One such company was Drake and Gorham; they cited Chatsworth House as a ‘specimen of a water power installation’, where they had ‘two turbines of 50 H.P. each and one of 25 H.P. and something like 1,000 lights’. In their letter, Drake and Gorham invited Claude Pilkington to view the estate and not too long afterwards, the agent of the 9th Duke of Devonshire himself, Mr. Gilson Martin, wrote to Pilkington in regards to arranging a viewing of the installation.

Based on the letters that I had viewed, invitations to view installations in other country houses seemed to be quite the norm. Another company, Edmundsons Electricity Corporation, Limited, provided Pilkington with several options in viewing their water-power installations. They listed one at ‘The Holme, Burnley’, which was ‘the residence of The Rev. Masters Whittaker’, and another was in Netherby, a property owned by Sir Richard Grahams in Carlisle.

There were plenty of other companies that had written to Claude Pilkington, but one appeared to have begun carrying out an installation scheme that involved both water and steam plants. This installation scheme had been one of three proposed to Harewood by L.H. Balfour. He provided a report on electric light installations in Harewood House, detailing the different schemes, their advantages and disadvantages, as well as how much each would cost. Even with such explicit renderings of cost, it seems that the endeavour to electrify the country house was more expensive than had been initially imagined.

There is, of course, more information to be extracted from the documents found in the Archives; my notes here represent only a fifth of the material that Michael had photographed. I had found the whole process of discovering the history of electrifying Harewood House thrilling. I was particularly struck by how much personality I was able to derive from the letters. Even though the documents I looked at mainly dealt with costs and machinery, the manner in which the letters were written provided a window into the past lives of the people involved in the project of electrifying Harewood House. It just goes to show the rich stories that can potentially be unearthed and told in the present tours at Harewood House.

The next stage of my internship project involves putting together the actual grant to make this a reality! I will write again once that has been completed. Until then, I hope you readers have found the information in this section interesting, and that you’ll keep on reading to see the progress of the ‘Electrifying the country house’ project.

The peripatetic post-doc: conference talks and public lectures

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Our panel
Our panel at ESSHC 2016, Valencia.

Last month I spent some time travelling and giving talks about our project, and was very encouraged by the positive feedback we received.  It began with a talk at the end of March in Valencia at the European Social Science History Conference, given as part of a panel on energy use in the countryside.  As a historian of science and technology I must admit that this was not a conference which would otherwise have appeared on my radar, being very general in scope, but it was for precisely this reason that it afforded Abigail Harrison-Moore and me the opportunity to reach out and engage a broader cross-section of the wider historical community with our project.

At a conference of that size you don’t expect large audiences for any one session, but we were very pleased with the level of engagement with our topic, and the thoughtful comments and discussion which followed the panel.  Although there were only a handful of historians of technology at the conference, the attendance at our session and the conversations which have come out of our meetings with other scholars have demonstrated to us the unexpectedly large degree to which other people are working on questions related to ours within their own respective historical disciplines. Although as historians I feel we tend to fracture quite easily into insular sub-groups – historians of STEM, economic historians, art historians, environmental historians… – I would certainly recommend attendance at broader conferences such as the ESSHC as a means of reaching out beyond our own disciplinary communities.

DSC01198a
Professor Graeme Gooday explains how electric arc lighting first came to London.

I then delivered our Cragside, Standen and Lotherton Hall public lectures.  The first of these, focusing on Cragside, was given jointly with Graeme Gooday at the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society, the very venue were Swan first presented his lightbulb in February 1879 – noted by one attendee in their feedback: “It was great to have this here where Swan first demonstrated.”  The turn-out was excellent – nearly 70 people – and our double-act was very effective: we shared out the material such that Professor Gooday covered the more general sweep of the narrative, and I focused in on developments at Cragside where they were key to the story.  This switching between speakers ensured we maintained a good pace, as well as the interest of the audience!

My talk at Standen gave me the opportunity to discuss our work with many of the volunteers who work in the house.  For this I used the videos filmed for the Standen section of our online interactive resource in order to structure the talk, leading the audience on a virtual tour around some of the key rooms of the house and expanding upon the themes raised in the video clips.  When asked in our feedback form how the content of the talk would affect their work in the house and their interactions with visitors, many volunteers gave very positive responses such as:

  • “Can place Standen’s illuminations in a historical setting”
  • “The visitors are fascinated that electricity was in Standen from the beginning. It will help me to give them correct information”
  • “I’ll talk much better about early electricity than I was able to do before”
  • “I have learned a lot more about electricity in the house. The visitors are always interested in the electricity”
  • “Will enable room guides to better answer visitors’ questions. Some visitors want to discuss early electricity in great detail.”
DSC01222a
My talk in the Drawing Room at Lotherton Hall.

For each talk, we asked attendees to tell us the most interesting thing they had learnt.  One of the most common responses to this question was the role of women in the story of the uptake of domestic electricity.  Some respondents noted the importance of women in promoting the acceptance of the new technology as something of which they had been unaware; for others it was the concerns of women regarding the brightness of electric lighting compared to softer gas, oil or candle lighting which was most interesting.

Encouragingly, one attendee at the Newcastle talk, in answer to the question “To what extent do you agree that this evening’s talk was accessible and understandable?” (strongly agree, agree, etc), responded “Strongly agree.  Definitely thought beforehand it may not be.”  So I’m glad we managed to meet and go beyond expectations there!  Another noted the “irony of sitting in the dark for an illuminating talk on lighting!”

My next and final such public lecture of the project will be at Nostell Priory, a National Trust property near Wakefield, close to Leeds, on Sunday 19 June; please check the events page for more details.

Notes from an Intern: Surveying the Sources

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Hatfield House

<a href="http://www.hatfield-house.co .uk/images/hh2.jpg”>Hatfield House

As a final year PhD student in the University of Leeds, I was excited at being given the opportunity to intern with the ‘Electrifying the Country House’ project – finally, I would be able to analyse something beyond my own research area! And what a research area this turned out to be. My first task was to compile a literature survey, to browse through old books, new books, journal articles, newspaper clippings, and obscure websites. And what was I tasked in finding? The use of electricity, or other new technologies, by British aristocrats in their country houses. The time period? Starting from the late nineteenth (1880s) to the early twentieth century (pre-World War II).

I discovered quickly enough that it was easier to obtain resources about certain aristocrats as compared to others. A name that came up frequently was Lord Robert Cecil, the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, who had been Prime Minister of the United Kingdom for a total of over thirteen years. In regards to the project, we were particularly interested in his scientific experimentation within his country seat, Hatfield House. Most of the relevant literature found on Lord Salisbury pertained to his installation of electrical devices around Hatfield, and his laboratory being the site of new scientific (including electrical) discoveries. These sources were written by family members (e.g. David Cecil, the youngest son of the 4th of Marquess of Salisbury), fellow academics (e.g. Professor Graeme Gooday, Principal Investigator of this project), as well as Lord Salisbury’s peers (e.g. an unknown author praised the Marquess’ scientific endeavors in a journal article from 1903). Lord Cecil had plenty of people writing about him and thus will prove to be a solid starting point for this project.

Lady Randolph Churchill, mother of Sir Winston Churchill, on the other hand, will prove to be more difficult. In Professor Gooday’s ‘Domesticating Electricity’, he had discussed her dealings with the Crompton company, which provided Lady Churchill free services as a manner to advertise their company to Churchill’s social network. Our main understanding of this aristocratic figure herself, however, comes from her memoirs. These were penned under her second husband’s name: Mrs. G. Cornwallis-West. With personal accounts on life in Blenheim Palace, Lady Churchill’s descriptions of the installation of electricity will give an insider’s view into life during this period.

Another fascinating find from this literature survey is the life of American heiress Lilian Warren Price, also known as Lily Spencer-Churchill, the Duchess of Marlborough. Project Researcher Dr Michael Kay had written about her husband, the 8th Duke of Marlborough and his involvement in telephony. When researching about the renovations of Blenheim Palace by the Duke, however, books and articles referred to the heiress’ integral role in financially supporting his endeavours. This creates an interesting aspect to the Duke’s renovations where there may be room for further research into the extent of the Duchess’ influence on electrifying Blenheim Palace.

Alongside the aristocrats that owned and renovated their country houses with electricity, there were also the employees ‘below the stairs’ that worked with the technology. Books on the life of those working ‘in service’ in these country houses provide a different perspective on the era. Alongside concepts of a ‘servantless house’, these books explore how people interacted with the technology of electricity, and how it helped (or hindered) their daily duties in these country houses.

I have outlined findings that are particularly interesting to me, but of course there are many other resources found while compiling this literature survey. A point that needs to be made, however, is in regards to resources not found during this research. There are gaps in knowledge that have yet to be filled, and may be filled by this project. One of the aristocratic figures that proved incredibly difficult to find resources on is the 5th Marquess of Anglesey. There are accounts of his lavish spending on his country seat, Plas Newydd, but I was unable to pin down any mention of his dealings with electricity. Thus an interesting gap that may warrant further research. Another is the aristocrats’ own personal relationship with technology – it would be fascinating to uncover their own notes and thoughts into the process of fitting their houses with electricity.

Which brings us to the next stage of this project – looking at historical documents from the West Yorkshire Archive Service (WYAS). With an understanding of the literature available in print as well as in digital archives, it will be exciting to see what new information can be found from the WYAS. I will write again when that time comes, and until then – I hope that you’ve found new interesting things to look into yourself!

Where do we go from here? Extending, and moving beyond, the project

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The cast of Lotherton Electrified.

I am pleased to say that we have been given permission by the AHRC to extend the ‘Electrifying the country house‘ project by another two months; instead of ending at the beginning of May, we will now be continuing until July.  This is largely because we have already worked hard to produce more outputs than we originally expected, original and innovative outputs which we did not anticipate such as Electrified the musical, and our short film Lotherton Electrified.  In addition, I will be giving an extra public talk in June at Nostell Priory – a National Trust property near Wakefield, a town just outside Leeds – and presenting a paper on our work at an additional international conference in Canada at the end of June.

The question that remains is of course: what next for the ‘Electrifying the country house‘ project?  We are currently working on putting together proposals for a couple of different follow-on projects, one of which would build on the significance of the British aristocracy in promoting and disseminating new technologies in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries – as revealed in Domesticating Electricity.  Whilst the current project has focused solely on impact – working to apply the results of existing research for the benefit of collaborative partner organisations – this new project would generate new knowledge as well as impact and engagement activities and outputs.

As part of the process of writing this proposal, we have employed a postgraduate intern to support us, and she will be writing a couple of guest blog posts about her work over the next few weeks.  On the subject of guest writers, watch out also for some blog posts from other colleagues over the next couple of months addressing some of the themes of the project – such as the marketing, reception and use of electricity, technology and gender and electricity as power – in different national contexts and periods.  Indeed, if you‘ve seen something that interests you on this blog that relates to your own research and would like to write something to be published here, please do get in touch with me; it would be great to hear from a variety of voices as we enter the final stages of the project.

Presenting the project: a workshop and a short film – Lotherton Electrified!

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Our project workshop on 1 February brought together country house staff from around the UK, representing the National Trust, English Heritage and various local councils and privately owned properties.  We demonstrated some of our outputs, including our Light Night performance, this time starring a couple of the students from the Electrified musical.  This came as something of a surprise to the participants as we hadn’t told them in advance that they were going to be watching a piece of live theatre!

Shooting our short film at Lotherton Hall.

However, it set the right tone for the afternoon, which also included short presentations from representatives from each of our partner houses about their experiences of the project so far, and how they have benefitted from it.  At Standen for example, our talk for for room guides “has enabled our volunteers to find out more about a subject that has for too long been underplayed at the property and speak with more confidence to our visitors about it.”

We also heard from Dr. Ian West from the Country House Technology project at the University of Leicester about his research into lighting and other technologies at properties around the country.  We then finished off the session with a discussion about the outputs, posing two main questions to the participants:

1. Thinking about what you‘ve seen today what are the potential applications of our outputs and/or research in your institution?

2. What would have to happen for you to benefit from these outputs?

The resulting discussion, in small groups, highlighted that looking at the role of women in the story of electrification – emphasised throughout Gooday and Harrison-Moore‘s work – provided a very good way to tell these stories to interested audiences.  Also useful was the way in which we demonstrated how country houses could work more closely with universities local to them to generate new knowledge, resources or events: for example by history students undertaking primary research as part of an undergraduate or masters course in order to gain research skills and experience; or by drama students producing performances based on materials related to the house, as we have done for Light Night, ‘Electrified‘, our online interactive, and our short film.

However, it was also generally noted that staff and volunteers in many houses may be reluctant or not confident enough to present science or echnology content to visitors.  In such cases training sessions would be invaluable, and could emphasise how these topics fit into the stories that are already told in these properties.  It was also suggested that we might beneficially create a network to facilitate knowledge exchange between technology and history experts on the one hand and interpreters and country house staff on the other.  This could provide help interpreting science and technology content for educational, curatorial or exhibition interpreters to use, as it was noted that it‘s often difficult to communicate the significance of electrical technologies, including objects  and systems, to visitors.

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Preparing for filming.

Finally, our short film, Lotherton Electrified, is now available to view online (see below).  In it, a reporter visits Lotherton Hall in 1904 to interview the family and servants about the new electrical lighting in the house, but is also concerned about an accident which recently occurred on the property.  This is, it must be noted, entirely fictional, but the fears and concerns of the period regarding electricity which it illustrates were very real, and electrical accidents, although not normally fatal, were not uncommon.

The cast of Lotherton Electrified.

The cast of Lotherton Electrified.

The preparation of the individual rooms for filming required a lot of thought, and a lot of support and help from Lotherton staff Dionne Matthews and Adam Toole; we tried to avoid including too much anachronistic technology or interpretation boards in the background!  The music, too, is appropriate: it is from the 1879 song ‘The New Electric Light‘, which was also used in the Electrified musical, and was recorded by another member of the cast, Mathilde Davies.  The students handled the pressure and intensity of the afternoon very well, and the result is a short, 10 minute film pitched at a general, non-specialist audience, which Lotherton can show on tablets around the house or in its cinema room as appropriate.

Making a scene: the Electrified musical and filming at Lotherton Hall

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Last month was a big one for our work with the 3rd year Theatre and Performance students; on 10, 11 and 12 December they performed their new musical, Electrified at the University, and on the 16th we visited Lotherton Hall to shoot material for our digital interactive and our short film.

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The dancers of Iolanthe lament the harsh new electric lights in the theatre. ©Alan Firth

The musical, based in December 1882, addresses the aftermath of the death of William Dimmock, a labourer at Hatfield House, the grand ancestral home of the Gascoyne-Cecil family near London.  Dimmock died of an electric shock when he accidentally came into contact with electrical wires in the Hatfield garden a year before the events of the play, and the characters, both the family and servants, have differing views about the desirability of having electrical lighting in the house.

Robert Arthur Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury and three times Prime Minister, was a pioneer of domestic electrical technologies, installing a system of electrical call bells as early as 1869, shortly after the death of the 2nd Marquess.  He later experimented with arc lighting, powerful lights usually employed outdoors, but which he for a time had installed in the dining room at Hatfield – much to the distress of his female relations and guests.

In the musical, Lord Salisbury still feels guilty for Dimmock‘s death, and Dimmock‘s two sisters Ruth and Mary have begun working at Hatfield House and at the Savoy Theatre respectively.  Mary is a dancer in the new Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, Iolanthe.  The theatre had been electrified shortly before – the first to be so lit – and Iolanthe was the first production to be staged with the new electric lights.  However, as the musical illustrates, not everyone was comfortable or convinced about the safety of this arrangement – least of all William Dimmock‘s mother.

The songs and music are a mixture of period songs, contemporary lyrics set to new music, and brand new pieces; highlights include a tea party sing-along about the excited possibilities of electric lighting, and the dancers of Iolanthe lamenting their pale and pallid appearances under the glare of the new lights in the theatre.  The three performances were very well attended, and the students were excellent.  The musical was filmed, and can be viewed online in its entirety here:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uc2_Rwwz-nU]

 

Ben as the butler at Cragside.
Ben as the butler at Cragside.

We followed up this success with an intensive day of filming at Lotherton Hall, working with Leeds Media Services to capture content for our online interactive, such as shots of some of the rooms and green screen footage of the guide characters.  This was a new challenge for the students, but one which they handled very well, and was a great experience for them – and for me!  Getting everything right took a lot of patience, a fair few retakes, and of course the calm, efficient expertise of Steve and Mark at Leeds Media Services.

Finally we shot the short film, Lotherton Electrified, which we managed to wrap up in just two and half hours.  The experience has taught me a lot about interpreting academic research imaginatively for portrayal on film.  The most important lessons for me have been allowing plenty of time for reshoots, resting and costuming considerations, and the need for flexibility on location with matters of framing shots and scripting – if something isn‘t working out, it‘s better to change it quickly and move on.

Lotherton Electrified will be used in the house as required, either on a tablet or in the cinema room, as well as providing a great advert for the project as a whole, and demonstrating the general themes of Professor Gooday’s book Domesticating Electricity in an engaging and accessible way.  It will also be available online in February.

Invitation to our project workshop: 1 Feb 2016, University of Leeds

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On Monday 1 February we will be holding our project workshop at the University, in the Brotherton Room of the Brotherton Library.  This is the same venue where we held our Light Night performance in October.

Please see below for the full text of the invitation.

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The ‘Electrifying the country house’ project, run by Professor Graeme Gooday and Dr. Abigail Harrison-Moore at the University of Leeds, is holding a workshop on Monday 1 February 2016 at the University to present our work so far and to discuss how we can further develop and build on this existing work.

Over the course of this one year AHRC-funded project, we have been developing educational visitor resources for country houses based around their electrical heritage technologies, such as lighting and telephony. Our three partner houses are Cragside, Rothbury and Standen, East Grinstead (National Trust), and Lotherton Hall, Leeds (Leeds City Council). At this workshop our discussions will include considering potential future funding avenues for the project and the involvement of new partner houses.

We will present and demonstrate the outputs we have produced for our partner houses, including: electrical heritage house trails; explanatory animations about electrical artefacts and systems; an online digital interactive resource for KS2 pupils; and a short drama performance about the different responses people had towards the use of electricity in the home.

We would like to invite representatives from country houses around the UK who might be interested in our work to join us at the University. The workshop will take place in the Brotherton Library, from 12-5pm, and will be followed by a drinks reception from 5-6pm.

We have funding available to cover transport costs, and lunch will be provided. However, places are limited, so please register your interest soon in order to avoid disappointment. To book a place, please email the project researcher, Michael Kay, at M.A.Kay@leeds.ac.uk, by 1 January.

To learn more about our project please read our blog, www.electrifyingthecountryhouse.org, or follow us on Twitter, @EtCHProject (Electrical Heritage).

Thank you for reading,

Kind regards,

Michael Kay.