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Research Process

Being there

I admit it. I did think that it was a bit of a luxury to go and visit all the museums that are being featured in our Mapping Museums book. After all, Toby, one of the researchers on the project had already spent most of a year visiting, taking photographs of the exhibits and conducting detailed interviews with the founders, and I’d read or looked at all the material he’d gathered. In principle, I rely on his research as the basis for the book and in doing so save myself time and the project money. I’m now very glad I made the effort. Not just because it was fun, interesting and a bit of an adventure, but because it changed the way that I understood the museums, and the founders, and what they were doing. I had temporarily forgotten that it matters if a museum is on the side of a hill or the valley floor, is in a pretty village or an empty high street.

In his interviews Toby asked people why they had wanted to open and run museums. Elizabeth Cameron, who was one of the founders of the Laidhay Croft Museum (above) had answered that she liked meeting people. Taken in abstract this comment seemed quite bland (Surely most of us like meeting new people?) and it was certainly repeated elsewhere. For me, her reply only took on weight and meaning when I went to the area, visited the croft, and met her.

Elizabeth Cameron faces the camera, wearing a purple jacket
Elizabeth Cameron

Laidhay is a mile or so north of the village of Dunbeath, which has a population of 129, and is about thirty miles south of Thurso, the most northerly town on mainland Britain. It is remote by any standards. Before setting off I had attempted to book a place in the local campsite. When it turned out to be full, I had asked the owner if there was anywhere else close by. ‘This is Caithness’ she responded, ‘there is nothing close by’. I stayed in a farmer’s field, looking out over the North Sea. At night I could hear the seals singing. Elizabeth grew up in a nearby village and was 30 years old when she and her husband bought the thirty-acre croft at Laidhay. They built a house on the site and Elizabeth worked with a local trust to open the original eighteenth-century longhouse as a museum. She is now 82 and has spent her adult life on the side of the hill, bringing up her sons, looking after sheep and cattle, and managing the museum.

The croft was closed on the day that I visited but other motorists spotted my campervan in the carpark and stopped to see if they could come in. It quickly became clear that Elizabeth is a natural host and tour guide – welcoming, interested, engaging, kind, and very sociable. Within a minute or two she had discovered that one man was a carpenter and so showed him the barn which has arched beams made from ship’s timbers washed up on the beach. A woman visitor was tracing her family who came from the next village. Elizabeth said, ‘you may have cousins there still’, and told her stories about her relatives, the Macbeths. A third group were also welcomed in. Later she said ‘I love meeting people you see, all the strangers. If you’re left at home with two bairns, you’re quite happy to meet people. I liked the company. Making conversation’. Living high on the side of a hill, in a sparsely populated area, it is easy to see how weeks or months could have gone by with no or little social interaction. The museum stopped passing motorists and brought people with different life experiences to Elizabeth’s door.  It was a way of connecting herself to the wider world. There was absolutely nothing bland about it.

Aldbourne village green. A war memorial on the left, houses to left and right, and the church with a large tower in the centre, at the top of a slight rise.
Aldbourne village green
Blue Town Heritage Centre
Blue Town Heritage Centre

Elsewhere, the founders of local history museums made comments about being proud of the area they lived in and of wanting to inculcate pride in younger residents. The implications of those comments varied depending on where the museum was located. Before visiting Aldbourne Heritage Centre, I had never been to Wiltshire, and I was taken aback by how beautiful and how affluent the county was. Aldbourne itself is exquisite: a twelfth century church sits on a rise above a large village green surrounded by cottages with deep thatched roofs. Ducks paddle across a small pond. When I met the founders of the museum, it was clear that their pride was tied to their pleasure in the village itself, to a sense of its deep past and continuing inhabitation, and to its lively community spirit. Two days later, I visited the Criterion Heritage Centre in Blue town on the Isle of Sheppey. On one side of the high street is a huge Victorian brick wall that circles the docks and cuts off any view of the sea. On the other side of the road are some run-down pubs, a fish and chip shop, and a few houses. Behind them are empty lots where buildings have been demolished and not replaced, empty car parks, and a few light industrial buildings. There are very few people in sight. Having read Toby’s interview with Jenny Hurkett, who opened the heritage centre in 2009, I knew that she had insisted on her pride in the area, and on the importance of understanding its role in maritime, wartime, and industrial history. It was only when I walked along the empty high street that I grasped the extent of her resolve and dedication.

Fiona Candlin

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Research Process

The Mapping Museums Campervan tour: a catalogue of mechanical collapse

Having decided that I needed a campervan for my research trip around the UK’s micromuseums, I faced the problem of buying one.  Along with dogs, campervans had become the most wanted purchase of the pandemic and they sold almost as quickly as they were listed. I spent several months watching eBay and prevaricating while the prices rose and higher until finally, I emptied out my bank account and swooped, buying a 1990 VW Holdsworth conversion. It had the doubtful distinction of a rose pink and beige floral interior (think late 1980s Laura Ashley living room) but it was advertised as ‘ready for camping’ and running like ‘a finely tuned watch’. Over the next four weeks the van broke down five times, twice on the way home.

The first time was ten miles up the road when a warning light went off. I rang the seller who drove after me and fixed the problem. It then refused to start. That was fixed too. The second time was an hour later when the petrol gauge swung ominously from half full to zero. I managed get to the edge of the nearest town where the van ground to halt outside a petrol station. I filled it up, only for petrol to start leaking across the forecourt. I tried to move the van but again it refused to start. This time two things had gone wrong. There was a leak in the tank and the petrol in the tank was months old and had coagulated, so when I ran it on empty the sediment had been dragged through the engine. I abandoned the van in the adjacent Morrison’s carpark and the seller picked it up at 5am the following morning. He was embarrassed by the vehicle’s failings and agreed to put them right.

Two weeks later I went to pick up my newly MOT’d campervan, which I drove without a hitch to Manchester, to the Museum of North Craven Life in Settle, and then up to Cumbria, where I have been living for the last year. All went well. A few days later I set off for Glasgow to visit the Women’s Library and Museum. Thirty miles before I reached the city the engine started juddering and lost acceleration. I limped it along the hard shoulder with the hazard lights flashing and into another garage where it subsequently failed to start at all. The owner of the garage repaired the starter motor, but the other problem was harder to identify. Modern vehicles can be plugged into a computer which identifies the fault. Diagnosing faults in vintage vehicles requires the mechanic to work through the possibilities, which takes time and costs money. And, as the owner of the garage pointed out, we’re not used to working on such old vehicles. He thought it might be the fuel distributor which was duly upgraded. Off I went again, the engine purring, heading to the far north where I was due to visit Gairloch Museum and the Laidhay Croft Museum. As I started across the Cairngorms it broke down for the fourth time. The juddering started again, I was losing speed, and the massive artic trucks behind me were getting ominously close. This time the AA came to the rescue and accompanied my limping vehicle to Blair Atholl garage where another mechanic diagnosed an ancient and faulty coil. It was Thursday night. The new piece would arrive on Monday afternoon. I settled down to wait.

Four days later I was off again and just south of Inverness the same thing happened. This time the AA put me in a taxi headed for Glasgow. I spent a night in the Premier Inn and then drove a hire car home with the van following on a trailer. By this point I was feeling pretty low. After months of being inside I’d been looking forward to travelling and seeing some new places. I was keen to get on with my work and excited to meet the people who had founded museums. And I’d spent all my savings on the van. I had a bad-tempered conversation with the seller.

Macs VW in Manchester - view of signs on a brick wall

Then social media came to the rescue with a recommendation for Mac VW in Manchester. The garage was down a warren of back streets and industrial buildings, and it was stuffed with vintage VWs in various states of disrepair. My 1990 vehicle was the most recent model they worked on, and Steff, the owner, quickly diagnosed the fault: the fuel filter had been fitted back to front and it was so tightly clamped that the flow was doubly restricted. ‘How much did you pay for repairs?’ he asked and flinched at the response. ‘It’s embarrassing’ he said, ‘a new filter costs £1.25 and it took ten minutes: it’s the problem with going to see general mechanics’. Still anxious, I did two laps of the M60 which orbits Greater Manchester before driving home to Cumbria. I’d only been in the house a few minutes when Steff called. ‘Was it OK?’ he asked, ‘Yes’ I said. ‘I knew it’d be fine’, he replied. ‘You’re all right to set off for Scotland now’.  

Fiona Candlin

Categories
Research Process

Visiting micromuseums in a pandemic

Everyone’s plans have been disrupted by the pandemic and mine are no exception. I’d just started writing a book on why thousands of people set up their own museums and part of the research involved meeting the founders. I was going to visit around forty museums, the furthest north being the Laidhay Croft Museum in Caithness, and the most southerly Perranzabuloe Museum in Cornwall. I’d also planned on visiting museums at pretty much every point in between as well as having a trip to Northern Ireland.

In March, when all the museums closed and my plans were stymied, I stayed indoors and wrote as much as I could using my colleague Toby’s interview research (See my last blog). He’d spent a year interviewing museum founders as part of the Mapping Museums research project, there was plenty of material for me to work with, and we’d always planned that I’d use his research for the book. Nonetheless, it got to the point where I simply needed to see the museums for myself and to ask my own questions. I also wanted to visit some extra museums that would provide different perspectives on the subjects raised in the first round of interviews.

Over the summer, some museums re-opened but many small museums postponed opening until spring 2021, and so I wondered about delaying my research. I would only be able to visit some of the museums on my list, the founders are usually elderly and may be justifiably anxious about meeting me, and I felt uneasy about making dozens of train journeys and staying in multiple hotels. I would get on with my other research in the interim. Then, during the summer, I was talking over the situation with a close friend who is the director of an independent museum and she advised the opposite. Small museums were struggling, she said, and it was likely that some of them may never re-open. If I could get to see them now, then I should take that opportunity. It might be important to document them while they were still there.

I started telephoning the staff at the museums I wanted to visit and almost everybody said, ‘yes, come’. Some people were routinely checking the museum one day a week and suggested that I accompany them, or they were happy to open up the museum for a special visit so long as I socially distanced and wore a mask. Several of the founders suggested I visit them at home so that we could sit in the garden. The research was back on.

That left me with the problem of travel and hotels. In 2012 I had hired a campervan to explore small museums for my last book Micromuseology: An analysis of small independent museums. Since then, the price of hiring a campervan has risen steeply and as we are now at the end of the Mapping Museums project there wasn’t enough money left in the budget to cover the costs. However, for several years I have thought about buying a campervan and have day-dreamed of epic journeys across Europe. Those daydreams became considerably more vivid under lockdown and I decided to go ahead. I could use a van for the Mapping Museums research trip, travel safely in a relatively controlled environment, I would reduce the risk to myself and to the people I was visiting, and next year I’d set off for Spain, or Romania, or Italy. All I needed was the van. That proved to be a saga in its own right and in the next blog I’ll detail some of my campervan-related trials.

Fiona Candlin