Henley Archaeological & Historical Group

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Trip Report – Museum of English Rural Life

Occasionally, time seems to circle around and the past catches up with the present.  This was true of the recent HA&HG visit to the Museum of English Rural Life (MERL) in Reading.  Several members of the group fell strangely silent when looking at some of the objects.  They had met their childhoods (many spent on farms) head-on.  Whisked back to the first decades of the twentieth century by the sight of a milk churn, a wooden cart, a bobbin, the group was obviously fascinated by the huge variety of memory-triggering objects on display. As one of them said, ‘This is pure nostalgia’.

The museum has undergone an upgrade and reorganisation in the past few years.  It is bright and inviting, with several fun and informative interactive computer screens, and the collection is displayed by theme.  The HA&HG visit started in a very civilised way with coffee and cake, then the guide, Anne, took us to the start of the tour.  The route around the building starts with the seasons: the farming life, represented by typical objects used at each point in the year.  There is the ‘seed fiddle’ for spring, for example.  Invented in the 1850s, it gave a farmer a way of sowing seed by hand, but efficiently.  The farmer would carry a box topped with a bag holding seeds.  These fell from the bag, through the box and on to a disk, kept spinning by a pole, like a violin bow, that the farmer pulled and pushed continuously (hence the ‘fiddle’).  There is a YouTube display, if you want to explore this further!  One of the displays for autumn is the Herefordshire Pomona, a book of all the apple and pear varieties growing in Herefordshire at the end of the nineteenth century, many now disappeared; each of the 441 illustrations was exquisitely painted in watercolour by Alice Ellis and Edith Bull, so that each fruit looks ripe for eating.

One of the most arresting displays in the museum is that of milk production and delivery – not because the objects are extraordinary, but quite the reverse: many of the ‘everyday’ objects, such as milk bottles and cartons; the milkmen’s uniform or the milk marketing board adverts, are eerily familiar to anyone who was a child before Mrs Thatcher (the ‘milk snatcher’s) removal of free milk for the over 7s in the 1970s.  There were the triangular cartons, still waiting for the straw to pierce the top and spray one’s neighbour, hilariously…

 

Anne, our guide, was another person to have grown up on a farm.  She recalled a story from her farming father about milk delivery, which used to happen every day, twice a day before refrigeration.  Delivery even happened on Christmas Day, when the milkman was offered a drink at every house on his route.  Anne said drily, ‘Fortunately, the horse knew the way home.’  A display board in the museum recorded the fact that there were 1.2 million horses in Britain in 1900, a million of those being used in agriculture.

Some of the humblest household objects in the museum were the most moving, such as a late 18th century mattress from rural Hampshire, made of woven sedge.  This would have been used for the start and end of life: either supporting women giving birth, or holding a corpse for laying out.  In both cases, the mattress would have been burned after the event, hence the rarity of this surviving example.

An array of medical equipment was on display to ease birth, death and anything in between, such as the ‘Tabloid’ first aid kit, circa 1900 and made by the Burroughs Wellcome & Company.  This small portable kit included smelling salts, carron oil for burns and scalds, and castor oil to be used as a laxative, as well as a first aid booklet.  The kit was used by Alcock and Brown on their first transatlantic non-stop flight on 14-15 June 1919. It was also used by Georgina Pullen of Andover, Hampshire and Hambleden, Buckinghamshire, during her work as a rural nurse and midwife in 1904-17.

There was so much to see in this museum, including the long display of wooden agricultural carts, the wagon walk, taking up a whole side of the ground floor.  Above it, on the first floor, there is another huge group of stationary agricultural equipment, now defunct: serried ranks of ploughs, each slightly different and used in a specific region of the UK.

The first floor also contains collections of objects in floor-to-ceiling display storage cabinets.  Here you can find horse harnesses, pipes, basket-work, toys (including a miserable-looking doll confined to the stocks).  It is a treasure-trove for anyone doing research into one of these areas.  The trustees of Henley’s River and Rowing Museum are said to have visited MERL to see what lessons it offers. We hope that they can  find a way to emulate MERL’s transparent approach to what is in its collections.  The one thing we found slightly disappointing at MERL was the lack of explanatory labels on display.  These were available through a QR code on one’s phone, but this didn’t prove altogether simple to master and some things were not captioned, at all.

However, as a reminder of a simpler age, at the end of the first floor there is another time-bending collection: Ladybird books with their glorious illustrations, many of them redolent of the agricultural land of the 1950s and 60s.  Who knew there were so many of these books, or that so many of these covers would be joltingly familiar.

Talking about it afterwards, we agreed that the objects in the museum are only just out of our reach.  Our generation is the last for whom a tactile, close relationship with the land would be recognisable.  To our children and beyond, will these collections have an entirely different meaning, simply as fascinating curiosities from another world?

Written and photographs by Jane Redley