Wrapping up the project: delivering the house trails

An electrified candlestick in the Hall at Lotherton.

An electrified candlestick in the Hall at Lotherton.

As the project comes to an end, we are now ready to unveil the new history of electricity house trails we have produced for Standen and for Lotherton Hall.  These are available to view and to save on our Downloads page, along with a couple of other documents detailing our resources .  These trails have been designed to fit with existing trails used in each house, using templates supplied by the houses.  We are in the process of producing a one-off print run for the houses, which we will send to them, and after that each house will be able to print more as needed.

Each trail gives visitors an idea of the kinds of electrical artefacts and systems present in the house – such as the electrified candlestick at Lotherton Hall, pictured left, and the pressels at Standen, below.  When developing these, it was important for us to get input from house volunteers and guides, as they know best the kinds of things visitors want to know, and the questions they ask, and will be the first point of contact if visitors want to know more about content of the trails.  To get this feedback I visited each house to present early drafts of the trails, and discussed the content with guides and volunteers.  Although with limited space it was not possible to incorporate all suggestions into the finished drafts, it was very useful to run these early versions past the people who interact with visitors on a day-to-day basis.

One useful discussion we had was how much technical detail ought to be included.  There are visitors who appreciate this information – I have met several current or former electrical engineers at various houses over the course of this project myself.  However, we agreed that on the whole visitors do not come for, or expect, electrical history, and so the interpretative content should focus on the social history, with a few details about the technical aspects of the system for those who want this information.  The trails therefore contain a lot of social history content from Professor Gooday’s and Dr. Harrison-Moore’s work as it applies to each of the houses, for example emphasising the significance of class and gender in people’s responses to electrical technologies.  Each makes reference to nineteenth-century fears about electrical accidents, the design of electrical fittings, and the use of electricity for communication within the house.

Pressels: electric buttons on cords, hanging behind the bed in the North Bedroom at Standen.

Pressels: electric buttons on cords, hanging behind the bed in the North Bedroom at Standen.

In addition to these full trails we have also produced a template schools’ resource for Lotherton Hall – a shorter trail with activities – and are also producing a children’s trail for Standen.  The challenge for these resources was to distil some key points out of the research and to convey them in a way which would appeal to a young person moving around the house.  As with most of the work we have produced as part of this project, the key was to focus on the human stories and relatable imagery, such as ladies worried that the bright electric light would be bad for their skin, or unreliable lights going out in the middle of a meal, and where possible to include children or young people – such as the Beale children playing billiards by electric light in the evenings.  Ultimately I believe it is stories like these that are the reason why this research lends itself so well to the various interpretative resources we have produced over the past year.

The new trails will be in use at Lotherton Hall and Standen from July, and are also available to download here.

The peripatetic post-doc: conference talks and public lectures

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.

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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.”
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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.

Lights, Camera, Standen! (And Cragside!)

I’ve recently been busily travelling around the country visiting Standen and Cragside with film crews to film and photograph various rooms for our digital interactive. At Standen we were joined by the very helpful Leeds Media Services, who will also be doing all our editing, and at Cragside we worked with the University’s own Digital Learning Team, and also filmed material which will be used in first year teaching in January.

Taking photos in the Drawing Room at Standen.
Taking photos in the Drawing Room at Standen.

The main body of the digital interactive will comprise three floor plans, one for each house, and within each floor plan users will be able to click on four rooms to find out more about the history of electricity in that room of the house. Clicking on a room will display a large photo of the interior of the room, within which will be a clickable hotspot, for example an electric lamp, a telephone, or an electric call signal board. Users will have to find this hotspot, and hovering over it will generate a larger picture of the object, and a question about electricity, which, when clicked on, will open a video answering the question and giving more information.

On these visits we had very little time as we needed to fit around the respective houses’ schedules, so we needed to be very efficient and well organised. We were also very aware of the potential dangers of using filming equipment in small spaces filled with so many invaluable artefacts! Nevertheless, we knew beforehand exactly what we wanted to film and photograph, and we got it all done carefully and in good time.

Not allowed on the carpet!
Not allowed on the carpet!

It was interesting to move around some of the rooms in areas which are normally roped off, and which the public can only see from a distance; in one room in Standen this necessitated us all removing our shoes, a slightly surreal experience which made me glad I had, however unwittingly, managed to find socks without holes in them that morning. We were very grateful for the hospitality of the teams at both houses, and especially for accommodating our requests to move interpretative materials, rope barriers, or occasionally some of their display objects around in order to improve the shot or the photograph.

The library at Cragside. ©University of Leeds Digital Learning Team and Leeds Media Services
The library at Cragside. ©University of Leeds Digital Learning Team and Leeds Media Services

One of my favourite shots, which I am looking forward to using in the interactive, is one in the Library at Cragside, where we simulated a power failure by filming the lights slowly going out. Early electrical installations often weren’t very reliable! We will be filming at Lotherton Hall, the third partner house, in December.