July 2016 – Electrifying the Country House

Harewood’s Electricity Story: building an effective collaboration

22nd July 2016 by hummk

*Update: please see the Harewood House category for other posts about this project.*

Music Rm both lights on095 — The chandelier in the Music Room at Harewood House. Photocredit: Harewood House Trust.

In funding new collaborative projects, a key focus of the Exchange is not just on the project outcomes, but on the ways the partners think about collaborating in order to deliver these outcomes. The idea that effective collaborations can be designed from the beginning of a project is something which partners are encouraged to explore together, and so early on in our project I sat down with Ann Sumner, Historic Collections Advisor at Harewood, Zoe White, Education Manager and Rebecca Burton, Collections Assistant, to think about how best we could collaborate, and what the benefits for all of us would be.

For this the Exchange provided a framework to help us think about how to formulate three ‘principles of collaboration‘ which would help us to plan how we would work together, and against which we would measure our success as we moved through the project. Each principle was to entail one or two expected benefits for one or both partners. The framework encouraged us to consider the values which we held in common and the ways in which we hoped to benefit from the collaboration – not just from the project itself – and to turn these into commitments to guide our work on the project.

Electrical artefacts from the collections of the Museum of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Leeds.

For our first principle of collaboration, we thought that it was important to be able to understand each other’s respective work environments, and in particular to understand each other’s heritage collections and what we do with them. As well as Harewood’s extensive collections of art, artefacts, and archival resources, the University also has collections, such as the collections of the Museum of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, which include old electrical artefacts many of which were used in local Yorkshire schools to teach physics around the turn of the twentieth century.

For our first principle, therefore, we decided that we would make time to visit each other’s working environments and learn about respective heritage and cultural collections and exhibitions. I had already spent some time visiting Harewood, but at some point during the project Harewood staff would also come to visit the campus, and I would show them around. We anticipated two main benefits arising from this principle: firstly it would help each partner to appreciate the institutional structures, physicality and the working practices, patterns and methodologies, of the other, and secondly it would increase our awareness of each other’s heritage and cultural visitor offers, and how we utilise and display our respective collections.

Another of the points on which we decided was that we would try to plan for meetings to last a little longer than we might otherwise have done in order to ensure a more relaxed atmosphere which would allow space for creative and innovative ideas to develop. We hope that this will enable us to establish good personal relationships with the partnership which will encourage us to want to collaborate again – this is tricky as we‘re all very busy, but so far it seems to be working!

Harewood’s Electricity Story: a follow-on project

7th July 2016 by hummk

*Update: please see the Harewood House category for other posts about this project.*

Princess Mary, the Princess Royal, and Henry Lascelles, then Viscount, later the 6th Earl of Harewood, on their wedding day (Wikipedia).

As a follow-on project from ‘Electrifying the Country House‘, I‘m pleased to confirm that we have been awarded a small grant to work with nearby Harewood House researching the history of electricity at the property and working on new impact and engagement outputs. Over the course of this new three month project (‘Harewood’s Electricity Story’), which runs from now until September, I will work with Harewood staff to explore their archives and collections in order to better understand how electric lighting and other electrical technologies and systems were introduced into the house. Harewood House was first electrified in 1901 by the 5th Earl of Harewood, and this installation was subsequently expanded and modernised by the 6th Earl and his wife Princess Mary, the Princess Royal, in the 1930s after they moved into the House.

Whilst the early period of electrification is interesting – for instance it is suspected but not known for certain that the original installation on the property employed hydroelectricity – the project will focus primarily on the 1930s. This was a time when many domestic electrical appliances we now take for granted were becoming more common in households around the country as more people had an electricity supply: items such as vacuum cleaners, fridges, hair dryers, irons and kettles. Household management books from the period, such as the popular ‘Mrs Beeton‘s‘ range, were explaining how to cook using electric ovens, and how best to use other electrical cooking utensils. In an attempt, which began in the mid-1920s, to improve, expand, and standardise the supply of electricity across the country, the national grid was established and came online towards the end of the 30s.

An old telephone and vacuum cleaner, 1930s, from our ‘Old Science Week‘ at Lotherton Hall, August 2015.

This research will then inform several outputs: we will use it to reinterpret Harewood‘s below stairs lighting cabinet, which comprises a large collection of objects representative of different eras of lighting technology. A new interpretative panel and object labels will tell the story of electric lighting more comprehensively than is possible at present. We will also run a series of three educational workshops for Key Stage 2 children with Theatre and Performance graduates from the University. These will comprise a short performance about the history of electricity at Harewood, an opportunity for the audience to talk to the characters and ask them questions, museum object handling, and a crafts activity: making cup and string telephones.

The funding for the project comes from The Culture Capital Exchange, a new joint initiative of Arts Council England and the Higher Education Funding Council for England which provides seed funding grants up to £5000 for collaborative research projects between academics, specifically Early Career Researchers, and creative small-medium enterprises or individuals, including artists, performers and heritage organisations. This is the first time this initiative has run, and ours is one of the first tranche of awards. If you‘re interested in applying for this scheme, read through the FAQs on their website, and feel free to get in touch with us if you have any questions about our experiences!

Guest Post: “Lights Up!” Theatre as Scholarship – Alona Bach

4th July 2016 by hummk

cover of — “Watts” in a Home. Image by IET Archives.

When I told the archivists at the Institute of Engineering and Technology in London that I would be writing my undergraduate thesis as a play about Britain’s Electrical Association for Women (EAW), they pointed me to a play written and performed by the EAW in 1930. The play, “Watts” in a Home, was just one manifestation of the EAW’s central mission to free housewives from “domestic drudgery” by introducing electricity into British homes. The four-act play aimed to instruct its audience in the possibilities of the new “electrical age” by dramatising the history of domestic lighting from 1880 to 1929.^[1] One of the particularly exciting aspects of “Watts” in a Home was that its characters addressed concerns about electricity held by the EAW’s audience while using real electric lighting onstage.

The EAW’s decision to mirror the content of their play in its form became the foundation of my undergraduate thesis: I, too, would write about the history of electrification while paying conscious attention to the way electric lights would be used onstage.^[2] My play would also address the different techniques used to reach audiences of early twentieth-century popularisation of electricity, while meta-theatrically employing the same popularisation techniques on my play’s audience.

It was a big project for a year of work. But with the indefatigable guidance of my advisor Dr. Jenna Tonn (and the rocky road of revision familiar to academics and playwrights alike), I ended up with a final project which fused the history of science and performing arts. The final version of my thesis began as an analytical paper on dramatising science, drawing from scholarship in both the history of science and performance studies. It also included two chapters on the intended audiences of the EAW’s work, as seen in their private correspondence and magazine. The final chapter was a full-length play with footnotes (titled Wire in the Garden in homage to “Watts” in a Home), which dramatized 108 letters sent between Caroline Haslett and her friend and fellow engineer, Margaret Partridge, between 1925 and 1927.^[3] Wire in the Garden focused on Partridge’s difficulties in electrically lighting the rural town of Thorverton, Devon in the face of rural anxieties about electricity’s safety, appearance, and religious significance. Here are a few things I learned from the project — and why I think performance should be used more often as a tool for history of science scholarship.

[photo] Partridge, Haslett, and apprentices standing in line. — Margaret Partridge, Caroline Haslett, and apprentices. From left to right: M. D. Rowbottom, Beatrice Shilling, Margaret Partridge, Kathleen Bunker, Mona Willis, Caroline Haslett. Originally printed in *The Woman Engineer* 4, no. 3 (June 1935): 35, Women’s Engineering Society, IET Archives. Photo courtesy of IET Archives.

Dramatisation mandates deeper research.

Scripting Wire in the Garden required me to re-imagine the lives of my historical actors in intimate detail: their conversations, their physical actions, the mundane things they needed to do to get through a normal day. This meant that my research for the play needed to be both broader, and in some cases deeper, than dictated by my analytical chapters. Though I was writing about the EAW’s popularization strategies, I ended up researching things like the history of rural British Baptists,^[4] and asking myself unexpected questions about the physicality of electrifying a town: how might Partridge’s power and expertise be established or challenged in the context of a team of workers, and would rural villagers see certain physical demands of electrification as more problematic than others in the context of Partridge’s femininity? These questions led me to a more nuanced understanding of who Partridge was communicating with, and how she chose to do so.

But though I’d worked hard to reconstruct the cultural landscape in which the events of the play took place, nothing showed me the oversights in my research quite like handing the script to my director and actors. After only a few hours of workshopping, my creative team sent me back to the drawing board (and archives) with questions about the play which were not only dramaturgical but also historiographical. One character was portrayed too reductively; my limited lens was clear in the script but had not been so noticeable in my analytical chapters. Actors asked me to clarify the legal and commercial aspects of Partridge’s work so that they could better understand the stakes of a scene. The director, Megan Sandberg-Zakian, told me to learn more about the layout and construction of rural power stations, and to consider how that might have affected the contents of Partridge’s letters. Their training in theatre had shown them that the holes in my research were not only key to understanding how technology, gender, and popularisation were interacting, but also needed to be filled in to make the play structurally sound.

Theatre embraces and, more importantly, acknowledges the imagination required to tell a complete story.

Theatre is mimesis, imitation, “lying in order to tell the truth.” The real bodies which interact onstage are in tension with the constructed, rehearsed nature of a play’s performance — and audiences know that they are witnessing a fictionalized version of reality. But while I was fictionalizing history in my play, I tried not to falsify it. Only three of the characters in Wire in the Garden are historical figures; the remaining four are “composite characters,” because, though they themselves are fictional, I’d created them by combining trends, stories, and language from archival and secondary sources. It was particularly interesting to see these semi-imagined characters (e.g. a young housewife) fill out perspectives on rural electrification which were missing from Partridge’s letters.

Theatre is a multi-sensory art form, and the words of the script are only the bones.

My play became much richer when I embraced the fact that not everything needed to be spoken. Instead, I could capitalize on movement, scenography, and sound in order to communicate more nuanced ideas from my research. When I recreated ambiguous images from the historical record instead of explaining them away, audiences had the opportunity to interpret the images in the context of the other information included in the play. For example, to evoke the references to Eden peppered throughout my sources, I wrote in a huge tree to dominate the stage with its trunk of wires and pendulous bulbs hanging down like fruits. The tree could be read as a symbol of technological advancement and redemption; it might also reflect the intrusion of technology into idyllic, righteous, pastoral life (a la Leo Marx); maybe it brought light and knowledge to dark places, or destroyed what was already there. Or maybe all of those things. Or maybe none. That question was left open to the audience, inviting them to reconcile differing historical (and historiographical) perspectives.

Like the fantastical visualizations of electricity in its early days (fairies, and wizards, and imps, oh my!), writing fantasy into my script became a useful tool even as I was tied to accurately representing historical sources. By incorporating fantastical elements into different styles of scenes (e.g. dreams, advertisements, presentations, letters), I was able to quote lots of material directly from my sources. I hoped that by quoting these sources directly, my audience would note both how popularisation was deployed in early-twentieth century Britain, as well as how they were receiving it as its audience. This would lead them to experientially understand popularisation as Roger Cooter and Stephen Pumfrey’s conception of “grafting, appropriation, and transformation” of ideas, instead of the more traditional (and problematic) metaphors of “dilution, […] contamination, contagion, seduction, or colonization.”^[5]

Moving forward…

Dramaturgy, like history, is a rigorous craft — and just as watching and sketching are tools for biologists, I believe dramatisation can serve historians of science. In my own project, writing the play was as much a part of my methodology as secondary sourcework or peer review. It forced me to empathize with all of my historical actors, work harder to reconstruct their cultural landscape, and notice (even challenge) the assumptions I was making throughout. It was my first foray into an interdisciplinary crossroads where I hope more scholars will return.

The good news is that dramatisation is not as far from standard historical methodology as one might originally think. Historians have acknowledged the pedagogical benefits of reenacting experiments,^[6] historian of science Robert Marc Friedman has written compellingly about his experiences dramatising his past research,^[7] and a recent plenary at the 2015 annual meeting of the History of Science Society featured historians performing as early modern readers in mob caps. Though writing a play like Wire in the Garden is certainly not going to be the best methodological strategy for every project in the history of science, intentionality and innovation in choosing the form through which to communicate scholarship can be a productive way to shed light on parts of the history of science – like interpersonal relationships, cultural landscapes, and practitioners’ bodies – which fight against a two-dimensional rendering.

Thoughts? Would love to hear your responses in the comments below!

About the author

Alona Bach recently graduated from Harvard with a degree in History of Science and Theatre, Dance, and Media. This post is based on her thesis, “Lights Up: Performing Science and the Electrical Association for Women, 1925-1927,” which was advised by Dr. Jenna Tonn and received playwriting support from Dr. Joyce van Dyke. In the fall, Alona will begin the MPhil programme in History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University. She plans to continue to work as an actor and playwright, and pursue a career in museums.

Notes

[1] “EAW play, ‘Watts in a Home’,” Electrical Association for Women, item 31, series UK0108 NAEST 093/09, IET Archives. The play’s title was characteristically punny. Correspondence between EAW founder Caroline Haslett and her friend Margaret Partridge, for example, praised an EAW colleague who proposed a talk entitled “Ohm Sweet Ohm,” and Partridge often peppered her letters with puns such as: “must cease this babbling of watts & watt not.” See Haslett to Partridge, 18 May 1925, and Partridge to Haslett, 28 May 1925, Box 9, Correspondence with Margaret Partridge, Women’s Engineering Society, IET Archives.

[2] A similar technique is also used provocatively in Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room: Or, The Vibrator Play, which examines female sexuality in tandem with the domestication of electricity.

[3] Box 9, Correspondence with Margaret Partridge, Women’s Engineering Society, IET Archives.

[4] Partridge poked fun in her letters at a Baptist preacher who preached about “the Mysteries of Electricity,” as well as her secretary in Thorverton, “a godly man much respected in the chapel” who would “pray with the engine if it won’t run – & sing psalms to the batteries if they do gas exceedingly.” See Partridge to Haslett, 3 May 1925, Box 9, Correspondence with Margaret Partridge, Women’s Engineering Society, IET Archives.

[5] Roger Cooter and Stephen Pumfrey, “Separate Spheres and Public Places: Reflections on the History of Science Popularization and Science in Popular Culture,” History of Science 32, no. 97 Part 3 (September 1994): 249.

[6] For more on reenacting experiments, see, for example, the working group at the University of Oldenburg and Professor Pamela Smith at Columbia.

[7] Robert Marc Friedman, a historian of science who later became a playwright, argues that theatre should be used to transform episodes and figures from the history of science into “public property” belonging to a collective “cultural heritage.” Why? “Science,” he writes, “is too important a societal activity to insulate its practices, results, and consequences from public scrutiny and reflection.” Putting narratives of science into the public domain via plays invites the public to question and challenge the role of science in society. It also reveals the process and failures of science versus just its results, and thereby acts as a window into spaces previously reserved for authorities. See Robert Marc Friedman, “Balancing Act: Drama about Science Based on History,” in The SciArtist: Carl Djerassi’s Science-in-Literature in Transatlantic and Interdisciplinary Contexts, ed. Walter Grünzweig, vol. 11, Transnational and Transatlantic American Studies (Wien: Lit, 2012): 63-73.

Guest Post: Electrifying the Irish Country House – Cillian Lalor

2nd July 2016 by hummk

The study of the Irish country house has attracted a great deal of attention from scholars in recent years who have begun to unravel many aspects of its history, in particular its relationship with the wider Irish society. The architecture and material culture of the country house have also attracted a plethora of recent publications. However, there are many aspects yet to be researched. One of these is the electrification of the country house, part of the modernisation processes of the early twentieth century. This study was carried out with the guidance of Professor Terence Dooley of the Centre for the study of Historical Irish Houses and Estates (CSHIHE) at Maynooth University, for an undergraduate module on the Irish country house. The electrification of the Irish country house project was based on research using estate records in the National Library of Ireland. These included the electrical specifications and reports on two country houses, namely Doneraile Court in County Cork and Westport House in County Mayo. Below is the original copy for the electrical specifications for Doneraile Court (note the date 1906). The project appealed particularly to me as I am a qualified electrician.

By 1910, the electrification of Irish country houses was spreading. But why did country house owners, who had previously spent enormous amounts of money installing gas lighting, then decide to install this new technology? There were four main reasons. Firstly, electricity was adopted within Irish country houses because of its practical advantage over gas. Although gas lighting did provide the house with adequate illumination, it also produced unpleasant and damaging fumes which were deemed potentially harmful to the residents and interior fabric . Secondly, despite declining finances, the late nineteenth century was an era of conspicuous consumption and many country house owners “had a demand for the latest thing.” [1] Many new clients of electricity in the domestic sphere were considered ‘progressives’, politically, socially and aesthetically, and the demand for electricity was driven by fashion and a desire for modernity. Thirdly, certain houses received capital injections of income from the sale of land under Government land acts, during the early twentieth century in Ireland, in particular the 1903 Wyndham Land Act. Finally, during an era when night-time normally brought darkness to the whole countryside, an illuminated house was possibly seen as another potent status symbol.

Figure 1: Specification and Estimate for Doneraile Court.

Source: Electrical installation specification, in Doneraile papers MS 34, 107/11, National Library of Ireland, Dublin, Ireland, 22 October 1906.

Permanent private electrical lighting installations required a self-sufficient, electrical generating system including a dynamo, driven by a power source such as a waterwheel or a water-powered turbine, steam engine or internal combustion engine. In 1906, Lord Castletown (Bernard Edward Barnaby FitzPatrick, 2nd Baron Castletown 1849-1937) of Doneraile Court in County Cork was eager to modernise his house. [2] The man in charge of this installation was T. W. Storey, chief engineer and manager of the Alliance Electrical Company Limited, Dublin. Lighting a mansion such as Doneraile Court in 1908 required 383 diverse light fittings and the whole installation cost £1098 11s 11d (£83,000 today). The “Specification & Estimate” for Doneraile Court provides a valuable insight into the electrification of large houses in the early twentieth century. Since Doneraile Court contained its own sawmill, it was proposed to drive the dynamo designated for the house via belting. This was done from a counter shaft in the engine house, thus saving the expense of a separate engine. The dynamo machine used was a “Standard I.G type dynamo” and cost £74 2s. 6d. [3]

In Doneraile Court, the supply of electricity to the house meant a 500 yard overhead run of cables (via wooden poles) from the main switchboard beside the dynamo in the engine house to the main house. In order to maintain the authenticity of the landscape, these wooden poles were hidden by meandering them strategically through the woodland. The type of cable used for this long run was: “stranded copper 7/16 insulated with triplex aerial insulation on high tension insulation”. [4] This type of cable was necessary as it provided suitable protection from the trees within the grounds. If the trees came into contact with electrical conductors (cables) that had poor insulation, it would cause a short circuit, thus creating a major electrical fault.

Similarly, Westport House in County Mayo underwent huge remodelling and modernisation in the early twentieth century. This can be largely attributed to the 6^th Marquess of Sligo (George Ulick Browne 1856–1935), who was the newly established owner, after his father passed away. [5] The 6^th Marquess obtained a wide knowledge of the workings of the estate and in doing so, made essential improvements to the house with regard to plumbing, heating and electricity around 1914. The Marques hired R. E. Mellon, an architect, A. E. Porte, a consulting engineer and T. E. Brunker, an electrical engineer, to oversee the entire operation. Overall, 250 light fixtures were installed and the whole installation cost £800 (£67,000 today). [6]

The control centre for the installations in Doneraile Court and Westport House were the main switchboards. In the days before the use of plastic materials and miniaturisation of components, this was a very impressive piece of equipment. Below is an example of an early twentieth century switchboard and it illustrates the various parts of a typical lighting switchboard used during this period. There are two circuits. The components on the left hand side are for charging and those on the right hand side for discharging. Furthermore, each circuit is protected with fuses and an ammeter to monitor the respective currents. The switchboard cost £49 and had to be fitted as near to the dynamo as possible.

Figure 2: Lighting Switchboard.

Source: Charles Carson, Technology and the Big House in Ireland, c.1800-c.1930 (New York, 2009).

Once electricity had reached the house, the next phase of the operation was wiring the house with lights, switches and fixtures. In Doneraile Court, the type of cable that was used throughout the house was referred to as “B” type. [7] This type of cable was insulated with PVC and had a guaranteed resistance of 1250 mega ohms. In both houses the methods used to contain wires within the houses was similar. As they were eighteenth century houses T. E. Brunker asserted that ‘cutting out and making good’ would be necessary, that is cutting through walls, partitions, ceilings, floors and so on. However, there were methods used to limit the damage to the house whilst wiring for electricity. In Westport House, a lot of the cables were wired under the floorboards, out of sight, as much as possible. This involved the lifting of floor boards throughout the house and pulling the cables through the main structural joists to their designated location.

A supplementary method called wooden casing/capping (illustrated below) was employed in both houses, to hide wires. In the Doneraile Court specifications, the electrical contractor expected “all cables and wires would be enclosed, hidden out of sight in American wooden casing.” [8] The carpenter and the electrician had to work together, and it was the electrician who decided what pieces of wood needed modification. I examined a rewiring project by the National Trust in England. The house in question was Cragside in Northumberland, which in 1880 was one of the first houses to be wired electrically. Much of the capping and casing used in this example was under the floorboards, inside the walls, around door frames, within skirting boards, all designed to avoid altering the house’s appearance.

Figure 3: Example of Timber casing and capping

Source: Electrical topics, ‘Wooden casing and capping wiring’ available at: (http://electricaltopics.blogspot.ie/2015/04/wooden-casing-and-capping-wiring.html).

When the house was wired, switches were required, either to break an electrical circuit (turning off a light) or to divert current from one conductor to another. In Doneraile Court and Westport House, the type of switches that were used were of a Tumbler pattern, having porcelain base and polished brass cover. The diagram below demonstrates the inner working of the switch.

Figure 4: Tumbler Switch, with cover off.

Source: David Salomons, Electrical Light Installations: A Practical Handbook (London, 1901)

The light fixture that typified the advancement of technology, whilst remaining aesthetically pleasing, was the chandelier. To best exemplify how spectacular chandeliers appeared in county houses, the three Murano Venetian coloured glass chandeliers that hung in Castletown House, County Kildare are pictured below. One can only imagine the sense of awe guests would have felt, casting their eyes upon such stunning light fixtures.

Figure 5: Murano Venetian coloured glass chandeliers, Castletown House.

Source: Noel Byrne, ‘The Murano Glass of Castletown House’ available at: (http://www.trekearth.com/gallery/Europe/Ireland/South/Kildare/photo1447497.htm)

The difference which electrification made to the Irish country house is exemplified in a captivating letter written by Seymour Leslie of Glaslough House in County Monaghan to his brother on 14 July 1916:

“Dear Massa. The electric light was switched on at Glaslough [Castle Leslie] last week for the first time. Interesting discoveries of old masters and priceless books soon followed in consequence!!S.” [9]

Leslie’s use of the word “discoveries” highlights the changes the electric light brought to Irish country houses in the early twentieth century; it literally and metaphorically shed new light on the houses’ interiors.

About the author

Cillian Lalor recently received his BA in history and geography from Maynooth University, with first class honors in history. He has been accepted into the PME (Professional Masters of Education) programme in Maynooth University, where he will qualify as a secondary school teacher in these fields. Prior to undertaking his BA, he trained and qualified as an electrician.

Notes

[1] Moore Harrison, Abigail & Gooday, Graeme, ‘Decorative Electricity: Standen and the aesthetics of new lighting in the nineteenth century home’ in Nineteenth Century Contexts, XXXV (2013), pp 363-430.

[2] Carson, Charles, Technology and the Big House in Ireland, c.1800-c.1930 (New York, 2009).

[3] Electrical installation specification, in Doneraile papers, MS 34,107/11, National Library of Ireland, Dublin, Ireland, 22 October 1906.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Report on electrical lighting at Westport House Co. Mayo for The Marquess of Sligo, in Westport Estate papers MS 41, 055/27, National Library of Ireland, Dublin, Ireland, 8 December 1913.

[6] Carson, Charles, Technology and the Big House in Ireland, c.1800-c.1930 (New York, 2009).

[7] Electrical installation specification, in Doneraile papers, MS 34,107/11, National Library of Ireland, Dublin, Ireland, 22 October 1906.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Carson, Charles, Technology and the Big House in Ireland, c.1800-c.1930 (New York, 2009).