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.

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

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.

Evaluating Old Science Week

In the wake of the very enjoyable ‘Old Science Week’ at Lotherton Hall last week, I’ve been thinking about how it went. I was there for the Monday and the Wednesday, which you can read about here and here respectively.

The ice cream maker, hair dryer, plugs, toaster, telephone and vacuum cleaner.
The ice cream maker, hair dryer, toaster, plugs, electricity meter, telephone and vacuum cleaner.

Working with Lotherton Hall on this event meant that we were able to use the usual setting for family activities at the house.  This is the Servants’ Hall, a great adaptable space which can accommodate large groups of adults and children, and allow for all sorts of interaction, engagement and creativity. The week fitted into Lotherton Hall’s “Six Weeks of Summer” programme, a series of themed weeks aimed at school aged children during the summer holidays.  As such, a handling table and arts and crafts related to the theme and collections were on offer.  Some of the objects on display for handling, old electrical domestic appliances, as pictured here, were borrowed from Artemis, Leeds City Council’s artefacts loan service.

Although Lotherton’s themed weeks are largely for younger children, we knew our engagement would be with visitors of all ages, some as part of a family and some alone or with friends. Thus the best format for the activities – in line with other crafts activities held in this space – was a series of drop in sessions which people could join and leave as they wished. This wouldn’t tie them into being there at any particular time or require them to participate in anything too structured or formalised. As Dee Matthews, Lotherton’s Learning Officer, later observed, the end of the summer holidays begins to quieten down; it was thus easier to engage with visitors for longer periods, and to encourage them to think about what each object was and how it was used. Relating this to electrical appliances and gadgets in their own homes was also very effective.

One of the decisions we needed to make when thinking about how best to run these activities was whether or not to include any written interpretation. We considered for example a fact sheet about the history of electricity, or domestic lighting at Lotherton, but Dee recommended that it wouldn’t be appropriate for the setting. It also might look as though we were trying to create too formal a learning environment, but with various craft activities and object handling there was plenty on offer to keep the visitors interested.

The sign next to the objects.
The sign next to the objects.

Instead we decided that it would be best simply for me to talk to those adults who were interested to find out more about the topic and about the work of the project. This I did on a couple of occasions. We also included a sign next to the handling objects which explained why they were there, invited people to pick them up, and asked a couple of simple questions aimed at the children.

However, in hindsight, I think there may have been an advantage to having a simple interpretation sheet near the objects for the benefit of adults without children coming into the area. This would have supplemented the information given on the sign and provided them with more context and information about Old Science Week. It would also have meant that these visitors would still have gained something from the display when Dee and I were unable to speak with them, for example because we were busy talking to or working with the families.

Overall I thoroughly enjoyed the time I spent at Lotherton, talking to the families and adult visitors, and I think our ‘Old Science Week’ activities provide a good model for running such events in future. However, I would bear in mind a few points where we could improve on the event.

  1. If possible it would help to have two people from the university; it might not always be possible for the house staff to be present, so in order to make the most of all of the visitors, and talk to as many people of different age groups as possible, it would help to have two people able to give personal interpretation present consistently over the course of the day. This would also help with taking photographs of the event, something which I found it challenging to fit in as I was busy speaking with people, and to have stopped and taken photographs would more often than not have interrupted the flow, spoiled the atmosphere, and lost the interest and attention of the children.
  2. It may seem an obvious point, but university attendees should have some sort of identifying badge to wear; I had nothing at the beginning and I felt the difference it made.
  3. As mentioned above, I think a page of written interpretation aimed at the adult visitors who passed through the Servants’ Hall over the course of the week would have been helpful. It would not have been long, but would have added some depth and context to the objects on display, and to the theme of the week more generally.
A picture of the house drawn for us by one of the kids. Thanks!
A picture of the house drawn for us by one of the kids. Thanks!

Please leave any comments below; if you came along one day last week, we’d like to hear what you thought of it, and if you’re thinking of doing something similar to this in another country house then please get in touch!

Hello! Hello! Are you there?

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Hello! Gran? Are you there?

Day 3 of Old Science Week at Lotherton Hall saw us making telephones out of plastic cups and string. This was a very good activity for both the older and the younger children to engage with, as they could first be as creative as they wished with their cups, and then, with a little help on the knots, they could make and experiment with a rudimentary scientific instrument. The children really got into this, and there was plenty of shouting, some loud whispering, and even a bit of singing as they worked out how best to use them by making sure the string was pulled tight. However, we soon found it was a good idea to put some sellotape over the hole to make sure the string didn’t keep popping out of the cups! The adults had fun too; here is one of the children talking to his grandmother on his newly decorated string telephone!

A heater? A bug zapper? It's a toaster!

A heater? A bug zapper? It’s a toaster!

The old electrical objects were still on display, and I got some intriguing responses when asking the children to work out what the toaster was; a heater was a fairly obvious guess, but a bug zapper and a laminator were definitely evidence of some pretty good out-of-the-box thinking from the visitors. As one of the items was an ice cream maker, which was not electrical, I asked the children to think about which of the items was the odd one out and did not use electricity. Some were surprised to be told that not everyone had liked electric lights at first, because they were considered to be too bright, and also to learn that old telephones were not as easy to use as their modern equivalents.

A colourful set of telephones.

When talking to the children about the electrical objects, we also took the opportunity to engage with the adults, and talked about how Lotherton Hall was electrified relatively early, having previously only been lit by oil lamps and candles. The decision to electrify the house, taken by Colonel Gascoigne around the turn of the 20th century, was not an obvious one, and was complicated and expensive as Lotherton Hall needed to be able to generate its own independent electricity supply. Whilst it may have been more common at that time to have gas lighting installed, Colonel Gascoigne was keen on modern technologies, and also had central heating installed as well as owning a fleet of motor vehicles, so he chose electric lighting.

Read about what we did on the first day here!

 

 

 

The toaster, the hair dryer and the vacuum cleaner

The telephone and the vacuum cleaner.
The telephone and the vacuum cleaner.

What do these things have in common? Apart from the fact that they are all pretty ubiquitous electrical domestic appliances, they were all at Lotherton Hall to be handled and marvelled at (“it’s really heavy!”) by the young visitors to Old Science Week today. Some of these items were borrowed from Artemis, Leeds City Council’s artefacts loan service, by Dee Matthews, Lotherton Hall’s Learning and Access Officer, and we showed them to the children, encouraging them to work out what the less obvious ones were and compare them to their modern day equivalents.

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The surprisingly heavy hair dryer.

The hair dryer and the vacuum cleaner were fairly obvious, but the old toaster was slightly more problematic; on first guess it was usually identified as a heater. The advantage of using objects to engage with the idea of ‘old science’ is it can offer something to all visitors, and it encouraged all sorts of responses from curiosity to sharing stories. The objects will be at Lotherton until Thursday, and we will be encouraging children to think about how they use electricity at home, and what life would be like without it.

DSC00497At the same time, children can also participate in craft activities. Today this meant colouring in or making ice creams out of paper, cotton wool balls and lolly sticks – to connect in with the old ice cream maker we had on display, nearly always the most difficult object to work out – not to mention fascinating discussions about Disneyland and lightsabres. Over the next few days, other activities will include making paper lanterns, to tie in with the history of electric light at Lotherton Hall, and using plastic cups and string to make telephones.

And if these are conducted with more exciting conversations about Star Wars and My Little Pony, then so much the better.

Lotherton Hall hosts Old Science Week

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Lotherton Hall, c.1903. ©Leeds Museums and Galleries

In a few weeks’ time on Monday 24 August I will be over at Lotherton Hall to take part in our very exciting Old Science Week. This series of fun activities for kids visiting the house will run from Monday until Thursday 27 August, and has been devised by Dee Matthews, Lotherton Hall’s Learning and Access Officer, in conjunction with Steve Hutcheon, Leeds Museums and Galleries’ Science Learning and Access Officer. It ties in very closely with the themes of the ‘Electrifying the Country House’ project which we’re running at the University of Leeds: a key focus of our work is on electric lighting in the domestic sphere, and during this week children will have the chance to think about light and how we use it.

We’ll have a range of objects from the Leeds Museums and Galleries collection for children to look at and handle related to light, and Steve will demonstrate some kaleidoscopes. We’ll be making lanterns as well, which connects with the way some Victorian ladies made shades for their new electric lights; they thought lightbulbs were brighter and harsher than the gas, oil or candle lights they were used to, and wanted to soften the glare. I’ll be on hand also to talk about what people first thought about electric lighting when they used it in their homes if older children or parents want to more about the history of light in the home.

The activities will run from 10am to 4pm each day; for full details of how to get to Lotherton Hall and for price details, have look here and here.

The very model of a modern army Colonel: Frederick Trench-Gascoigne at Lotherton Hall

P1.92 Col FRT Gascoigne in rowing boat at Craignish Castle 1930s
Colonel Gascoigne, c1930s. ©Leeds Museums and Galleries

On a recent visit to Lotherton Hall, it occurred to me that the man credited with bringing electric lighting to the house in 1903, the owner Colonel Frederick R. T. Trench-Gascoigne, was also keen on other modern technologies. For example, he had central heating installed at Lotherton, and was an avid motorist (although not, if the stories told are to be believed, always a very careful one!).

As Graeme has noted in Domesticating Electricity, householders needed to actively make a decision to install electricity, and it wasn’t always seen as the best option in comparison with the widespread alternatives; after all, many country houses remained lit by gas, or even by oil lamps and candles, for many decades to come.

Indeed, sometimes keeping the older technologies of lighting could be seen as a status symbol, as the householders were demonstrating that, at a time when the influence and wealth of the traditional aristocracy was waning, they could still afford to employ the servants necessary to maintain these very labour-intensive technologies.

I wonder if the Colonel’s decision was part of a more general tendency towards modernisation and new technologies. This could certainly be said to be true in the case of Sir William Armstrong at Cragside (later Lord Armstrong), who had a reputation as an innovator, and installed Joseph Swan’s filament lights in 1880.

What attitudes did those who first adopted electric lighting have towards other new technologies in this period, and might this give us an insight into why some people made the decision to use electricity in their homes and others, who could also have afforded it, did not?