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Image: Web home page header - September 2010
CAPTAIN JAMES COOK: NORTH YORKSHIRE DAYS
New postings now added below
Image: Whitby
SETTING OUT TO SEA
John Walker had a successful shipping business on Grape Lane in Whitby. Walker’s cottage opened onto the harbour with a stone slipway where boats could be drawn up. As the business expanded the cottage became a store and a larger house was built. These structures still exist. The front of the house is on Grape Lane [at left in the street scene], narrow and edged with terraced houses and shops giving it a town aspect without much hint of the harbour behind. Some years ago an adjoining building was demolished to make room for a car park, leaving Walker’s house standing at the end of a row.
The entrance today is through an archway opening onto a yard, and here the river connection is once again apparent. Visitors today go in via the older part of the property, pay an admission fee within a small shop, and then make their way gradually into the main house. Photography is not allowed. There is no guide book. Each room has good interpretation of the displays but the lack of a guide to be taken home and studied in detail and at leisure ever afterwards is a sad omission. There is a DVD priced at just under £10 and this is well made, and contains details of previous special exhibitions that were shown in an upper gallery. DVDs have many advantages, but the need of a player and the nature of the linear narrative that they impose make them poor substitutes for quick and easy review of the museum.
John Walker was a Quaker. The influence of this approach to life and the world will have made its mark on Cook as a young apprentice. Adding it to his own family values and country village life must have shaped the ways in which he viewed his crews and fellow explorers during his career. It must have determined his approach to the native peoples encountered around the world: respectful and understanding of cultures unlike his own, even if this was within the confines of a military and colonialising political system. Hard work and study marked James Cook’s progress throughout life and it was evident here. He lived in the attic space of John Walker’s house together with the other apprentices. When not at sea helping to deliver north-eastern coal to the capital, London, Cook spent his evenings in studying books on navigation and general science subjects, helped by having been given some working space and candles to light his table.
The Captain Cook Memorial Museum makes it possible to see how the man made the move from life on the land to life on the oceans of the world. It depicts the house and household, but also describes much more of his later life, the explorations he made and the people for whom and with whom he made them, right up to his violent death as the result of an unfortunate incident many years later on one of the Hawaiian islands. From this house James Cook began his journeys, seeing for himself and on behalf of a fascinated public just what the world had in store.
[In the photo lower left a scaled-down replica of Cook's ship 'Endeavour' plunges into the waves as it takes tourist trippers out of Whitby harbour]
Image: Staithes
WITHIN SIGHT OF THE SEA
Young James Cook was fortunate in having helpful people around him. It was a characteristic that continued throughout his life. Perhaps it was a natural response to his amenable nature and good sense. As he approached the age of seventeen his father was keen to see him learn a trade. On hearing of an opening for an apprenticeship in a shop in the fishing village of Staithes just along the coast he was able to secure it for his younger son. So one day in the summer of 1745 James walked the twenty miles from Great Ayton to Staithes and put the farming home behind him, virtually for good.
Staithes was an important fishing village. It still has its fishermen, but relies much more on young tourists dangling little net bags of bait into the harbour waters, and then lifting out the crabs that have been hoodwinked into thinking a good meal has been laid on for them. It stands securely sheltered within a deep cleft in the coastal cliffs that edge the North Yorkshire Moors. Anyone not knowing it was there could drive past the turning on the main road a short way inland and miss one of the jewels of this popular tourist county. A steep road leads down into the village. Cars have to park before it makes its descent. It’s an easy walk down and a slow climb back up. Down below, the small streets pack in all kinds of houses, chapels and shops. A main thoroughfare, with cheery bunting zigzagging along it is well shielded from winter storms at sea. It leads to an open area with a beach and protecting harbour. In Cook’s time the fishermen hauled their boats up here. The shop, owned by a William Sanderson, was well placed in this part of Staithes to serve the busy community.
A cottage, part of a terrace, is today labelled as Cook’s Cottage (in the centre of the right-hand photo above). But it is not the building where Sanderson’s shop stood. That one was destroyed by fire many years ago. The cottage here was part of a rebuilding process that used some of the materials rescued from the burnt-out shop. Even so, it marks well the location of the place in which Cook worked amongst the seafaring people of Yorkshire. Looking out to sea he must have wondered about what lay beyond, especially when the boatmen talked of the wonders and the perils of the world out there. Within a year and a half James knew that selling groceries and cloth for Mr Sanderson was not what he wanted to do. William Sanderson, like James Cook Senior and Thomas Scottowe before him was willing to help the young man to better himself and move in the direction that he was choosing. So it was that Sanderson contacted his friend John Walker, a ship-owner in Whitby, to arrange that James could take on a new apprenticeship – that of a seaman on ships hauling coal from the north east to London.
Image: Captain James Cook - Great Ayton
JAMES COOK GOES TO SCHOOL
Cook Senior began to work as a farm bailiff for Thomas Scottowe, the Lord of the Manor of Great Ayton. It was a well-respected job. Scottowe, a kind employer, recognised that young James was a bright boy and he paid for him to attend the little school in the village. In the photos above the school is seen at the near end of the terrace in the top left-hand picture. Below is the church attended by the Cook family and in which they would in due course be laid to rest. The schoolroom building has now been turned into another museum run by a small charity, occupying just the top, near-end, floor. It is small but – well, perfectly formed – in three or four small rooms. The first has the entrance desk with sales facilities. On our visit a very pleasant lady was looking after the museum. It was by no means busy although other people were arriving and leaving. She filled in information about the running of the museum besides pointing out what was on show. Following the display round a corner introduced a life-size figure of young James Cook as he would have appeared working on the farm with his elder brother and father, for Thomas Scottowe. The member of staff told us that it had actually been modelled on the features of a local boy who would have resembled Cook. This boy had recently been awarded a first class science degree. It struck us both that there was a tiny insight into the life of the village community in this kind of detail, helping to make the museum feel more lively and immediate.
Next came a panel-based chronology of James Cook’s life and times: clear, concise and attractively done. Though the spaces here were small they were adequate for the numbers of people visiting. A busy day might be a different problem.
The representation of the schoolroom was the focal point of the storytelling. Like the cottage display at Marton the exhibit is very effective and thankfully well removed from the shop-mannequin figures that can still be found in more amateur shows. A nice quality audio sequence plays giving an idea of the kind of conversations between the pupils and their teacher. In the small shop area of the museum a short book tells of the kind of schooling James will have had in the few years of attending these classes. He would receive much more training in specialised areas such as navigation, astronomy and surveying later on, on top of many years learning about sailing ships, handling officers and crews and fighting enemies with cannon and small arms.
A glimpse up into the attic revealed the teacher in his living quarters reached by a ladder and just above the schoolroom.
The last display was about how a ship’s position on the globe was fixed by the use of a sextant and other equipment.
The museum has been successful in obtaining more money to expand and improve its displays. Below the actual museum, on the ground floor, there has until recently been an antique shop. This has closed and the space will become part of the museum, possibly as a meeting and working place for Great Ayton’s strong archaeological society.
Also shown above is a model of the Cook family home in the village, built by James Senior in 1755. In 1934 it was taken to pieces and transported to Flinders Park in Melbourne, Australia, where it helps to commemorate one of the country’s European pioneers. In return the Australians sent a facsimile of the stone monument that marks the spot where Cook’s expedition first sighted the land that became known as Australia. It carries two bronze plaques: one records the sighting itself and the other the moving of the stone quarried in Australia for the obelisk in North Yorkshire.
It’s doubtful whether an historical property like the Cook house would be allowed to be taken away today but in the last century (and earlier) it was done quite frequently.
Through Great Ayton runs the River Leven, a tributary of the River Tees. It makes a pleasant sight for anyone passing through the old part of the village and a shallow, clean playing spot for children: see the last photo.
Image: Captain Cook story - Marton Visitor Centre
CAPTAIN COOK: STARTING OUT IN NORTH YORKSHIRE
The voyages of the explorer Captain James Cook make for some of history’s most fascinating stories and they appeal to geography buffs as well. They opened up knowledge of the Pacific for outsiders in the middle of the eighteenth century. The foundations of the modern states of Australia and New Zealand were laid. Astronomical information of great importance was gained, principally by the first voyage to Tahiti in 1768. Extensive understanding of the Pacific Ocean was gathered by the surveying work carried out over much of its vast span. The existence of Antarctica was established firmly. Hundreds of new plants and animals were discovered. Contact was made with the peoples of numerous islands and the continent of Australia. Much was learned, and introduced to European and other distant continents about the cultures of those people through the reports written and goods brought back, as well as the journey made to London by one of the native people that Cook’s expedition encountered. At the same time the future lives of huge stretches of the globe were altered irrevocably, and in many ways not for the better, by the contacts that were made.
I became drawn in to the story of Cook and his voyages almost fifty years ago when I taught in a secondary school. As part of geography lessons I built the Airfix kit of Cook’s first great ship, the Endeavour, and used material supplied by the Australian High Commission in London to teach about that country. Though I discarded the model and the other material many years ago the interest remained. The result was that the building in Australia of a replica of the Endeavour, and the development of museums and attractions to do with James Cook in Britain, were bound to draw me into new visits and new reading. When Pat and I took or caravan to North Yorkshire recently the opportunity arose once more to see some of the childhood and early adult places associated with the explorer.
John Cook, James’s elder brother, was born in a tiny cottage in Marton close to the River Tees. In later years Middlesbrough would grow as an industrial port and Marton would be virtually swallowed up as one of its outer suburbs. John Cook was born to Grace and James Cook, his father being an agricultural labourer moved south from Scotland. The family transferred to a slightly larger cottage in the hamlet. It was there that James Junior, the future explorer of the Pacific, was born. The family stayed there for eight years until James Cook Senior obtained a job as a farm bailiff in Great Ayton, a few miles away. The Marton cottage was demolished in the 1790s and by the mid 1850s the land was owned by local ironmaster Henry Bolckow. He built a hall and surrounding estate there. In 1960 the remains of the hall were destroyed by fire. Middlesbrough Council opened the Captain Cook Birthplace Museum on the site in 1978. An ornate granite urn erected by Henry Bolckow marks the site where the Cook family cottage once stood.
In the photographs above are shown the Museum and part of its life-size display depicting Cook as a child helping his mother making oatcakes. The model of the cottage is part of a glass-case exhibit about the tiny house and its farm surroundings – not an easy thing to photograph well.
The Birthplace Museum has many displays designed around objects associated with Captain Cook, his life and times. There are exhibits on Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti and other places explored by Cook. These help to shift the perspective a little from a purely British celebration of Cook’s work towards one based on the peoples who he met and described to his government masters. It’s a welcome move. There is much to examine and plenty of interactive devices for visitors to explore. Other events and activities can be scheduled within the building. A shop and a cafe support the experience. The Cook connection is one of the most important pre-industrial parts of the area’s history, bringing to it the attention of a worldwide audience. It is a pity that the layout of the building – itself a very banal structure – dominates the displays: they are cramped and awkward with visitors trying to read ‘books-on-the-wall’ while standing in the way of others trying to navigate the exhibits. The whole thing is often very bitty, lacking both unity and a flowing development. The impression is that a checklist of objects has been combined with another checklist, of interpretive techniques, inside interior spaces Designed to be Different. Too many cooks have spoiled what should be a most nourishing broth.
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Image: Mi
MIDDLESBROUGH’S TRANSPORT OF DELIGHT
Well, one of them: the famous Transporter Bridge, which I think deserves capital initials. There are not many of these things around the world. They were generally built very roughly around the start of the twentieth century. Britain has three, the others being in Newport, south Wales, and Warrington, the latter being a smaller construction across the Manchester Ship Canal for railway wagons. A transporter bridge takes vehicles across a waterway used by shipping and where low banks made the cost of building high approaches and the crossing span itself prohibitively expensive. Their disadvantages include high maintenance costs and a low carrying capacity.
The Middlesbrough bridge is the lowest crossing point of the River Tees. It replaced a ferry which operated from the 1830s up to the opening of the Transporter Bridge in 1911. A proposal to build an ‘aerial ferry’ or transporter bridge was made in 1872 but never carried out. The present bridge was planned from 1906 when Middlesbrough Corporation met Ferdinand Arnodin, the French pioneer of this kind of structure. An Act of Parliament was obtained allowing it to replace the ferry by the bridge. Sir William Arrol and Company Ltd of Glasgow won the contract to build it for a smidgeon over £68,000, equivalent today to a little over £4m. Since its opening in 1911 it has provided a quarter-hourly service for 18 hours a day ever since. It is now listed 2* and is a worthy icon for Middlesbrough. It has to be said that there are problems. When we arrived at the north approach (17 July ’10) there was a sign saying Bridge Closed. We waited. Took photos. Admired – but thought we would have to abandon our attempt to use it. Then a local man turned up on his bike. Living just a short distance away he uses the bridge frequently. He said there had been many problems with the workings of the bridge over the years. Usually, he said, if the bridge was out of order two red lights on top of the support tower high above us would be lit, but on that occasion they were not. A pedestrian arrived, saw the Closed notice and bemoaned the fact that he would have a difficult journey getting around to the centre of town on the other side. We talked and gazed across at the gondola hanging on its cables from the high level track stretching between the towers. As we did we realised that two or three figures were moving around gondola. After a few minutes it began to move slowly towards us. It slides across and into place against our approach road. One of the operatives came out. There had been a problem but it was now fixed. They would test the mechanism by taking the gondola back. If all was well they would load cars waiting at the other side and return. All was well. Very shortly we drove onto the platform and paid our £1.20 fee. There was no sensation of movement for a few moments as we set off across until we realised that the world seemed to be moving past the gondola on which we were positioned. We seemed to be perfectly still. It was a weird feeling, the smoothest way of getting from A to B that we had ever encountered.
At the south side is a large, free car park, the engine house with electrical motors viewable and a Visitor Centre. From it (and of course the far side where the photo above left was taken) the structure looks massive and yet spidery. Unlike the Newport and Warrington bridges which have non-tapering towers the Middlesbrough bridge uses four which rise up to points on top of which the cross-frame seems to be balanced delicately. The track which carries the gondola carriage on a series of solid steel wheels running on rails forms the bottom edge of what for all the world look like crane jibs swung out for the occasion. It looks as if a push from one end would topple the lot. Yet it is obvious from close up viewing that it is remarkably solidly built and very secure.
Bridges are works of art as well as utilitarian affairs. They come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, forms and styles. This one is one of the best because it moves, it has a life and series of events of its own. You can bungee jump from it on certain occasions. I think it’s exciting enough without that kind of thing – it’s one of the most interesting engineering masterpieces to be found anywhere. Go See!
Image: Tall Ships 2010
Image: Tall Ships 2010
TALL SHIPS RACE – 2010
“I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
All I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by”
John Masefield’s poem about the sea and sailing gave the name to the annual celebration races involving many of the great sail-driven ships of the world. In 1956 a London lawyer named Bernard Morgan gathered together a team of people to say farewell to square-riggers and other large sailing vessels which by then were going out of fashion. Twenty ships raced from Torbay in Devon to Lisbon. The public’s imagination was caught by the spectacle and from the increased interest brought about by that event an organisation called Sailing Training International came into being. An annual event was started in which ships raced on the first leg of a three-stage journey, cruised the second in company, and raced the third. For each event four ports, usually European, are chosen for the start and finish of each leg. The ships taking part have to be training vessels with 50% of the crews taking part aged between 15-25. There is therefore plenty of opportunity for them to test their skills under pressure and to engage in social and cultural activities while in the ports since the Tall Ships Races take place over four or five weeks.
The 2010 event participants started in Antwerp, Belgium, raced to Aalborg, Denmark, then cruised together to Kristiansand, Norway, and finally raced to the last port, Hartlepool in the north east of England. I visited Hartlepool for the day when the ships were leaving after the races had been completed and all other events finished. The advantage was that they would put out to sea within a short space of time before parading along the nearby coast with full sails set and departing for their own new destinations. As it turned out the weather was at first beautiful but by the time they were leaving the heavens opened with a series of very heavy downpours. Even so thousands of people had gathered and braved the rains to watch them go. 67 ships took part in either the Tall Ships Races or a Regatta the next day, or both. They came mainly from European countries with two others, one from Indonesia and one from Oman.
Image: Hartlepool Museum
Image: Hartlepool Museum
TALL SHIPS’ HOST HARTLEPOOL SHOWS OFF ITS NEW MUSEUM
I last visited Hartlepool several years ago – in the mid 1980s – when it was making moves to recreate economic activity round the docks. HMS Warrior had been moved to Gray’s Shipyard in 1981 at the start of six years’ restoration (Warrior was the British warship to outdo all other warships – especially those of France – which commenced service in 1851, being later downgraded and finally used as an oil terminal pontoon).
The new Hartlepool, on show for the Tall Ships Race, is much smarter – undeniably – but in many areas looks like every other town with its retail shopping sheds and entertainment complexes. The place that is definitely Hartlepool is the docks – you can’t muck around with wharves and water too easily. Even here, however, the new life blood being drip fed into the waiting patient is from the same group as for every other run-down British dockyard – T for Tourism.
Hartlepool has its new museum down in the docks. With the Tall Ships Race event it has enjoyed some major attention this year, hopefully to the benefit of all concerned. It’s an interesting overall concept, being a mix of a reconstructed eighteenth century harbourside around one of the old docks. In the centre is the world’s second oldest warship still afloat, HMS Trincomalee (oldest? The USS Constitution, now in Charlestown, Massachusetts). HMS Trincomalee was built in 1817 in Bombay and was a classic Napoleonic-era frigate. From 1903 to 1986 it was a training ship, ending its service as such moored unmoving in Portsmouth Harbour. After restoration it took its new position in Hartlepool.
The web site for the museum (www.hartlepoolsmaritimeexperience.com) uses the phrase “superb recreation of an eighteenth-century seaport”. It is and it isn’t. The ship, quayside, mix of buildings and general dockside furnishings are good. They give a fair sense of that time and place. For the Tall Ships days there were people dressed in appropriate costume walking at ease around the dock. Two men dressed for the part were demonstrating the firing of muskets and cannon and two others were showing how rope was made in those days. But – and it’s a big but – it was all too smart, too clean, too prosperous and good old days. Where were the working sailors, the cut-purse thieves, the maimed sailors reduced to begging? Where was the smell of sewage and the evidence of disease? Nowhere. The buildings were just right – one of everything in tip-top condition, well maintained and daily cleansed. Some of these elements could be found in the museum galleries, where the use of large cut-out figures (some with 3D items attached for realism) personifies some of the characters in Hartlepool’s story.
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SHADES OF LIGHT AND DARK IN THE GARDEN OF ENGLAND
Notes of a recent visit to Kent and East Sussex, June/July 2010
Image: Biggin Hill 2010 2
Image: Biggin Hill 2010
BIGGIN AGAIN: BATTLE OF BRITAIN 70th ANNIVERSARY
Stuck in the past or learning from the past? One of the central arguments about heritage tourism in Britain is the degree to which it either informs or hinders national self-awareness. Do we recall it to learn from what happened and avoid the curse of history repeating itself? Or do we suffer from a blinkered, heavily out of date understanding of what our role in the world ought to be? Recalling military victories can obscure the realisation of what they really cost in terms of human suffering. It might also tempt our policy-makers into pursuing new military adventures. Iraq and Afghanistan could be examples. And so could the war over the Falkland Islands nearly three decades ago, which itself could be seen as a military success setting a precedent for a later government anxious to reap a similar political reward.
The light and shade of tourism is hardly better exemplified in the south east corner of England. The gardens of Sissinghurst and Down House are amongst many in Kent and East Sussex – indeed, further into West Sussex and Hampshire – which add to the orchards and patchwork farm fields and give the label Garden of England, by promotional claim to Kent but equally applicable to that wider set of counties. But this region was the one invaded and fought over again and again. The Romans and Normans succeeded: Napoleon and Hitler did not. Bonaparte’s troops never set out and neither did those of Hitler, but his air force did, bombing and burning cities across much of southern Britain. Those ancestors of modern cruise missiles, the V-rockets, terrified London. Hitler’s navy attacked the coast with heavy loss of life. Communities had to abandon their farms and villages. School children had to be sent to safety in distant parts of the country. King William’s Normans had landed, fought and won in the Battle of Hastings. Their success brought the casualties of war and one of the deepest revolutions Britain underwent before the industrial changes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. King William established a new ruling order based upon barons, castles, new squires and a powerful church system. All of these events have left their marks on Britain. In the south eastern corner there are remains galore spread across the landscape and deeply embedded in the whole culture of its people.
Which brings me to that great event involving British, American and German flying machines – fighters, bombers and others. Not the Battle of Britain, but a celebration of it seventy years later. The Biggin Air Display took place in front of 35,000 people in late June this year.
It was one of those days with something for everyone, even though six decades separated the oldest in our ten-person family group from the youngest. Though British-cloudy it was un-British hot. Long queues of cars wound through the lanes of the North Downs onto the open grass edging the long runways. At one end, about a mile away, were a static display, a funfair and army and air force recruiting stands. In those young children climbed over self-propelled guns and into the gizzards of troop carriers and tanks. They were having fun. It reminded me of when I had the chance as a young teenager to ride on top of a tank around an armoured corps driving range in Dorset. It was something to talk about for weeks. Along the edge of the spectator zone parallel to, but well separated from, the long runway, were family groups and individuals. Many took picnics, folding chairs and sunshades. Close to the rope barrier at the front were the camera-wielding enthusiasts. Beyond the barrier every now and then a steward wearing sunshades and walkie-talkie rode along on an all-terrain vehicle to make sure nobody got over-enthusiastic about literally joining the planes skimming along the tarmac.
Once the flying started it really got going with something up aloft, landing or taking off again constantly from about 11:30 to 5:30. There were small, fast and highly manoeuvrable aerobatic teams. A Chinook helicopter hauled a 4x4 and trailer several hundred feet over the airfield. Another circled much higher and then passed over as a team of parachutists jumped out to land in precision formation by the runway. Later in the day there would be displays by a Eurofighter Typhoon which would scare the pants off most enemy combatants just by flying in close and then hurtling up vertically while its engines deafened everything within a couple of kilometres.
This was the Battle of Britain Anniversary however. The heart of the show in every sense was the flying displays by World War II aircraft. In fact the preliminary to these came from biplanes of the 1914-18 war, climbing and swooping above and around the sky in a recall of the start of aerial warfare. Then there were the Spitfires and Hurricanes which engaged in a mock dog fight with enemy Messerschmitts. They were only play acting, but the sense of drama was there for any of the audience below who were familiar with countless books and films that have told their stories over the years. Over the public address system a commentary interspersed with sound effects of machine guns and explosions was relayed. Real eruptions of simulated bombs beyond the runway sent huge flames and billowing smoke into the air. Military marches rounded off the ‘defeat’ of the would-be invaders.
Whether all the excitement generated by the exhibition of flying put on in this was an attempt to relive the triumphs of the past or was a way of getting closer to knowing the horrors of warfare is an issue that is central to this kind of tourist spectacle. Sir Winston Churchill contrasted two mental images in his speeches at the time. In his 18 June speech in 1940 on the war situation he referred to the danger of sinking “into the abyss of a new dark age”. He also held out the prospect of a “move forward into broad sunlit uplands”. The enemy would be seeing it the other way round as they tried, as they would see it, to climb out of a dark age into the sunshine of a new, thousand year order. Pre-war Nazi propaganda such as the Leni Reifenstahl film “Triumph of the Will” from 1934 is built on the idea. Churchill’s speeches during the war are imbued with the same ideas, in reverse as it were. Different people have different shades of opinion on the situations that confront them. Opinions are never perfectly polarised but do have a whole spectrum of shading. The ways in which people interpret events like the Biggin Hill Air Display varies in like manner. It depends on who they are, what their experiences are and how they see these shows in the light (or dark) or those experiences.
For most people, the outcome of the Battle of Britain was good even though it necessitated death, injury and destruction. The outcome of the War was good, even though it involved tragedy on a vast scale and left the world, as all major conflicts do, full of potential for many further wars and tragedies. There was plenty to celebrate therefore and plenty to be proud about, even if that pride had to be balanced by regrets about loss and misery. Some people may say that preserving military aircraft and admiring them in museums or in flying displays is ignoring the fact that they are killing machines. Of course they are. But they were also contributors to the end of murderous military operations and the philosophies that led to the existence of those activities. Designing, testing and then turning them out in great numbers depended on high levels of human ingenuity and effort. Flying them and using them to defeat a deadly enemy required more skills and so often the ultimate sacrifice in what most would see as a noble cause. And besides all that, the wisdom of our collective experiences and understanding over the decades since 1940 should mean that we know of the downside, the divisions, death and destruction that those machines were built to be part of. The appearance of modern jet fighters like the Typhoon during the Biggin Air Display was impressive, perhaps exciting. But the earlier Second World War dog fights and mock bombings had reminded the spectators about the nature of warfare and the truths revealed by seven decades of education and media documentaries. Present day conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and other parts of the world bring home the reality of what wars mean to humankind.
And I couldn’t help thinking that the ideal Battle of Britain Display would be one in which Spitfires are flown by Germans and Messerschmitts by Britons.
Click here for earlier postings on 'Shades of Light and Dark'
Click here for the latest news on the Sustainable EduTourism Conference in Havana, 8/9 November 2010
Click here for a 1960 promotional film of Scarborough from the Yorkshire Film Archive. A real gem!
Image: Tourisms Educational Value - Stonehenge
Click here for details of the November 8/9 International Conference on EduTourism in Cuba
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A RICHER EARTH
Notes of an exploration in Shropshire, May 2010.
Image: Knowledge and Understanding - Blists Hill
I think it was Oscar Wilde who said that most museums should be put into a museum. They were themselves dusty, boring and suitable only for antiquarians. More than a century later they have gone through a communications revolution which has meant that they have also had to make radical changes to their curatorial policies. So what they collect, study and show is now related much more to their particular audiences. In some ways they have shared the presentational switch-round with IKEA. Furniture shops, for example, used to have sections with a couple of dozen different chairs were ranked together, or rolls of carpet hung on racks, or dining table place settings shelved in boxes. IKEA still does, but its main contribution to display techniques has been to make those parts support mock-ups of sitting rooms, dining rooms, bedrooms and kitchens in which all the elements of furniture, tableware and decorations are brought together. Customers can walk into and around the displays and imagine themselves proud owners.
Museums still have their glass cases themed with types of artefacts – pots, tools, ornaments and the like. But they also have constructed ‘total representations’ of houses, shops, gardens, workshops, factories, even mines and harbours. Visitors can walk into and around them and imagine themselves as Romans or Tudors or Victorians. Mind you, there is one way in which museums have gone the opposite way to IKEA: you can wander where you will and in any order. The York Castle Museum has been an example of the imposed flow-style of visitor handling where it was necessary to walk every inch of every corridor and see the whole lot even if it was only the last bit that was of interest. IKEA still does it, with just a few crafty short cuts and some areas for wandering more freely. IKEA is into marketing: museums do have to flog things in their shops in order to fulfil their purpose and to survive – IKEA’s reason for existence is to sell everything it has.
The Victorian Town at the Blists Hill Open Air Museum at Ironbridge is a case in point. All the components of a reconstruction of a town are progressively being assembled – pub, shops, bank, workshops, gardens, pig sties and hen coops. You wander around as you like, walking into the displays and often handling things in a way impossible with the old glass cases. But there are more differences to be found with old-style museums - and with those hard-line Swedish retailers. You can read guide books or interpretive panels, watch displays, listen to lectures, ask questions. Or even enjoy street theatre, sometimes mixing in with the action. All five senses are engaged, not just the single sense of sight of the older museum galleries. This is full-on communications, planned to grab your attention, stimulate the brain and make that essential mix of education and entertainment that builds up knowledge and understanding in a much more positive way. No wonder a third of a million people walk through the Ironbridge Museums every year – and regularly go back for more.
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The photo composite below is from 'A Richer Earth'. Scroll down to the link below to read the previous postings, or go to the list on the left and click the title 'A Richer Earth'.
Image: The Iron Bridge
Click here for earlier "A Richer Earth" postings
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What is the connection between a military reenactment in the Mediterranean (below) and a fine National Trust property in Northumbria?
Image: Lord Armstrong - Connections
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News of this important conference (below) has arrived. The subject is the theme of this web site and likely to be one of the most important topics in tourism management over the next decade. It complements concerns about the environment and sustainability in that it examines strategies to help overcome the issues raised.
Image: EduTourism Conference advertisement
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A short piece on BBC Radio 4's You and Yours (30.04.2010) reported on tourism in the Lake District. Rugged mountains, beautiful lakes, hosts of golden daffodils, that kind of thing. A Japanese tourist guide working in the area was asked what it was that attracted so many Japanese visitors, as it does. Prompt, confident reply from a voice of experience: "Peter Rabbit". [That's a boat on one of the lakes above: main view - Northumberland. No Peter Rabbit!]
Image: Railway Children 40th Anniversary 01.05.10
Above: Steam Up For A Famous Film's Birthday Party - click here
Click here for Discoveries in Northumberland
Click here for Discoveries in the Midlands
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New improvements to this 'Tourism As Education' website.
The whole website is being reorganised as well as continuously developed. Monthly pages of general blog-postings will no longer appear.
Additions will be made on the subject of Tourism As Education to these key pages:
News Reports
Useful Sources
- and five pages or groups of pages under these Key Theme headings:
Reporters – the work writers, broadcasters, film makers
Persuaders – marketing promotion and selling
Navigators – how-to-get-there maps, guides, satnavs, signposting systems
Discoveries – accounts of our explorations and what we found
Explainers – visitor interpretation; guidebooks, films and software
[Some of the pages may be blank for a while pending new postings or the movement of earlier entries to these pages]
Links to pages will be provided here and the list to the left of this page slowly reorganised
Earlier blog pages and features will remain though some content will be moved to pages arranged under the five Key Theme headings
The Bibliography will be updated
The Leeds Met Tourism Alumni page will stay
As a Work In Progress website additions and amendments will be made to any and all pages.
Main changes will be flagged up on this home page
There isn’t a Comments page as such but I am always delighted to receive emailed messages of all kinds relevant to the website,
including material for inclusion. The usual editorial requirements apply as to content, style, length etc:
the final decisions have to be mine
Click here for brief notes About the Author
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Image: Christopher Columbus 1492
"How do you know that Australia exists? Maybe when you were young your great uncle told you he wrestled goannas along Christmas Creek on the Gulf of Carpentaria when he worked as a bandicoot farmer. Did you believe him? Or perhaps there was that TV series called Skippy the Bush Kangaroo or the movie ‘Australia’ with Hugh Jackman. Or did you take your lead on all things Oz from that geography teacher who lived for six months in Melbourne and reckoned it the best, the only important city on the continent. As you finished your days as a student you decided New Zealand was the place to be because Australia was full of men with corks hanging from their bush hats, swigging Fosters and decrying the chance of pommie bastards ever learning to play cricket......."
Part of the opening to the February '10 postings about The Development of Tourism As Education. See the February 2010 blog page listed to the left: open the page and scroll down to the foot to read the first posting.
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A puzzle/quiz to test your knowledge - with an element of detective work needed to solve it:
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Click here to solve the quiz puzzle
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Wide ranging postings on the subject of Tourism Photography
Click here for more on Tourist Photography
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More pages of interest on the associated Topics web site:
The Environment As Data: new tourism theory
Theory on attractions: Showcases
Talking to tourists: Visitor Interpretation
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Image: San Luis Obispo Farmers' Market
Image: Travel to Understand logo
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Below: Our History, Our Heritage - one of a series of postings in my April 2009 blog on the subject of heritage and tourism.
Image: Leeks - Staffordshire - history and heritage
Image: Chronology - Children's Museums
Timelines: The Growth of Tourism as Education
Image: Alan Machin Work web page header
Scenes From A Course
The May blog page celebrates in photographs and text the Leeds Met Tourism Management courses since 1992.
The June 2009 page reflects on the same period in short essays which make some challenges about the teaching of Tourism.
See the pages listed to the left.
Image: Leeds Met field visits composite x3
Click here for Scenes from a Course
Highest number of hits on these pages on one day: 3,613 on 14 April 2008. Previous highest: 3,081 on 1 October 2007.
March 2010: average number of individual visitors per day is 223.
Since being launched on 7 January 2005 it is estimated that there have been something approaching two million hits.
*
Hits = all requests to any pages from a distant computer
Visits = a single user looking at any number of pages and not returning for at least 30 minutes.
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The Alumni News page (see the left-hand panel) contains photos and news from many Leeds Met Tourism Management alumni.
Click here for my personal Facebook page
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