Displays
A beaker, probably hand made at Much Hadham, typical of pots made after 400
Two years ago, I put together a small exhibition for Baldock Museum on Roman Baldock. It meant not only choosing a selection of interesting objects not on display in North Hertfordshire Museum but also writing the text for panels on the wall. I wrote enough to put into a leaflet, which I intended to make available at the Museum. As well as telling the story of the ancient town and its people, it contained a brief catalogue of the artefacts in the cases. It so happened that the exhibition coincided with a major programme of work on Baldock Town Hall, which meant that the Museum was closed for a long stretch during the year it was supposed to be on open.
Now that North Hertfordshire Museum is also temporarily closed, it seems a good idea to make the leaflet available for people to read. It explains how the ancient settlement has been revealed over the past hundred years. Beginning with remote prehistory, it looks at why the settlement came to grow up in the hollow between the hills of North Hertfordshire. The main part of the leaflet talks about the development and decline of the Roman town, looking especially at its people and their beliefs. The catalogue gives further insights into the history of Baldock. There are 22 A5 pages in all.
Every February since 2005, LGBT History Month aims to promote tolerance and raise awareness of and help to combat the prejudices faced by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. It started as a Schools OUT UK project. The 2020 event was launched in November 2019 at The British Library. After centuries of criminalisation, discrimination and invisibility, initiatives such as this show that LGBT+ people are not a new phenomenon.
Although some of the press have dismissed the project as mere ‘political correctness’, LGBT people suffer disproportionately not just from discrimination by employers, family members and the public, but also from unprovoked violence. The project tries to educate the public about the fact that LGBT people have existed throughout history (and prehistory!) and that some past societies have been more welcoming of diversity than our own.
We like to think of our society as tolerant and welcoming of diversity, but there has been in increase in homophobic hate crimes in recent years, with 21% of LGBT people (41% of trans people) experiencing a hate crime or incident in the past 12 months. Discrimination affected 10% of LGBT people looking for property to rent or buy and 17% of those visiting a café or restaurant.
Throughout February, we will post occasional articles relating to the history of LGBT+ people in North Hertfordshire. We don’t have a lot of material in the museum collection, so we are asking for people to consider donating things that help tell the stories of these people from the past who are usually overlooked in our history books. There is a small display in the entrance hall of the museum that illustrates the diversity of people in the history of the district, with characters such as Baldock’s ‘female husband’ landlord of The Sun and the Roman Emperor Elagabalus, and themes like the introduction of Civil Partnerships in 2005
Curator Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews will be giving a talk relating to the exhibition on Wednesday 19 February at 1.00 p.m. and 7.30 p.m. Tickets are available from https://north-herts-museum.arttickets.org.uk/ or from the Museum reception.
I have been working in the new museum recently and it is looking fantastic – and it will get even better when the objects for display start appearing in the cases!
Some of these will be recognised from previous displays in Hitchin Museum and Letchworth Museum and others will be on view for the first time.
There will also be many objects in store but we can look forward to seeing some of these in special exhibitions and displays.
From time to time I reflect on some of the items I have worked with(cleaning/photographing/packing) and which I hope to see amongst the wonderful displays we will be treated to!
This smock was worn by a shepherd in Wallington (Hertfordshire) and each side (front and back) is the same.
Smocks were worn as protective outer garments and were made from rectangles and squares of fabric. Some of these pieces were smocked to give the garment its shape but the smocking was also decorative.
I can imagine the shepherd out in the fields, wearing this comfortable smock, which as well as covering his clothes also hopefully gave him some protection from the elements.