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

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

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.