UK2012 ISSUE 18

 It seems I made a commitment to finish off Birmingham and move on to some of the things closer to home.  To that end, the Stafforshire Hoard, a single room in the Birmingham Art Museum, was a real find.  It captured our attention, or more accurately a docent captured our attention for more than an hour!  It wasn't so much what there was to see in the exhibit, but how it came to be there at all and the glimpse we got in to how an archaeologist approaches interpreting what they have found.  The "Hoard" is the largest collection of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver metalwork ever found.  The initial find was by a man with a metal detector searching in a recently ploughed field.  In England a find of this nature is to be reported to the coroner (?!) who will make a determination as to its value and whether the finder has a right to keep the booty.  In the end a team of archaeologist excavated the area and recovered in excess of 1800 items of gold and silver.  It is remarkable for being almost exclusively war-gear, with an extraordinary quantity of pommel caps, hilt plates and shield bosses.  Many feature beautiful garnet inlays or animals in elaborate filigree designs.  The odd thing was there was not a single item that could be attributed to a woman.  Little was complete, it was more a collection of oddments, bits and pieces.  They have tentatively dated these artifacts to the 7th or 8th centuries.

 Although, there was nothing especially exciting or wondrous to see, the learning opportunity was outstanding.  The possible explanations the curator wove around the how and why were fascinating.  What they know of the origin of the gold and uncut jewels is extensive, while who or where the components were fashioned in to decorative pieces is totally unknown.  Was it a collection made by a soldier from a succession of battles, could it have been stolen from a kings treasury, why was it hidden and more than that why was it never retrieved.   In the end the most thought provoking idea was that of value.  His

Sutton Hoo Burial Mask

contention was that at that time gold and silver had no intrinsic value, they were quite simply metals that were useful as decorations because they were easy to work with.  In an earlier time the Romans used metal coinage for commerce but circa 600 the peoples populating this area would have almost undoubtedly operated on a barter system.  Genghis Khan and his armies were only interested in horses and a little pillaging and spoiling, I suppose.  So why then collect the metal decorations that so obviously came from tools of war?  Many were obviously Christian but have been bent or otherwise damaged, is that significant?  So many questions and no answers.  There is nothing to use as a comparison except perhaps the masks from Sutton Hoo.  btw.  I know nothing of

Museum Skylight

Sutton Hoo but I need to go there . . . masks, possible viking ships, the things of legends.  I only wish I could remember half of what he said.

So enough of Birmingham and Art Museums and on to a museum of a totally different sort.  Taylors Bell Foundry, a happy find when driving in to Loughborough (Leuf burra).  When travelling around the UK keep your eyes open for brown signs with white lettering, they often show the way places of interest.   As you might expect Taylors Bell Foundry makes bells, not little hand bells or pretty little things to hang on a wind chime, not cow bells or ship's bells but

How bells are "stored" when not being rung

BELLS.  Their business is bells for churches, meant to be hung in belfrys and rung by pulling on ropes.  I find that once again I have forgotten most of the details but  a few bits I have held on to . . . they tune the bells after they have been cast.  Churches order bells that ring in certain tones so that a peal of bells actually has an intended sound and structure.   Each bell is a unique creation for it's recipient, there are no off the shelf bells.  A mold is made out of loam, sand, hay and horse manure!  They get buried in a pit of sand (the same sand had been in use since the 1880's) and the molten metal is poured in to the mold.  Minutiae alert, they stir the molten metal with a willow pole to remove air bubbles

Birmingham Museum

before pouring it in to the molds.  Willow poles, not some new technological marvel but a piece of a tree.  The building looks just like others I have seen in the states, red brick but painted white on the inside, quite tall and narrow with a gantry crane that runs the length of building for moving cauldrons of molten metal.  There are only two bell foundrys left in Britain and they are responsible for fashioning bells for use all over the world, the United States included.

Moving from one kind of manufacturing to another we made a trip to two different potteries in Derbyshire (pronounce darby not derby).  Denby Potteries makes what I call stone ware, not fine china.  It is easy to find their products in the states and I actually have a teapot and cups which we purchased as seconds in the 70's.  There was a time when all their products were hand painted (true of the Arabesque pieces I own) but in

B'ham Victorian Shopping District

 this day of mass production they actually use transfers to apply the designs.  I am by no means saying that it is not a highly skilled job, but it is not what it used to be.  Plates and platters and other flat pieces are actually created by pressing or stamping lumps of clay between two patterns but after that they are trimmed and prepped and generally finished by hand.

The really fascinating process was how things like cups, jugs, teapots and other pieces designed to contain things were shaped.  They start with a mold in the shape of the items being created, all the bumps and ridges, indentations and spouts, everything but the handles.  The molds

Denby Arabesque

are made of plaster and come in two halves which fit together and are held in place with large rubber bands.  The clay has water added to it until it is pourable (slip) and each of the assembled molds is filled with the liquid clay. The molds are then placed on a slow moving conveyor belt.  When they reach the end of the line the porous plaster mold has absorbed  some of liquid leaving behind the desired thickness of sold clay in the shape of the item being made.  The remaining slip is poured out of the mold and the item is allowed to continue drying until it is solid enough to be removed from the mold. 

Once the mold is removed handles are attached.  A little slip is used as "glue" and it's amazing how it adheres immediately, even better than super glue.  There's more cleaning up and grinding down and inspection before the pieces are fired in a kiln that must be a city block long.  They travel through taking something like 18 hours to go from beginning to end.  The kilns run 24/7, it is more expensive to shut them down and bring them back up to temperature that to leave them run even when they close for holidays.  Next comes the application of colours and designs.  I am sure everyone has seen a cup with one colour on the inside and another on the outside.  How that is accomplished elsewhere I have no idea, but at Denby the interior and lip are done, I'm not sure how, by one technician.  It is then handed off to another who actually dips the article in a vat of spinning "paint" or more accurately glaze, to apply colour to the exterior.  Rather precise work, say what.

Royal Derby Imari Hedgehog

Think you probably get the picture by now, Denby was definitely an interesting tour.  Just for contrast we went to the Royal Crown Derby Pottery works where they make fine bone china.  The processes were the same, but the product is something else entirely.  For starters anything labelled as "bone" china actually has 20% ash  from the bones of large animals, think horses and elephants, added to the clay.  The resulting pieces are much finer and more delicate, as in the difference between a tea cup and saucer and as opposed to a mug.  They use lots of real gold for decorative edges etc and their things are generally quite opulent and somewhat over the top.  The Hedgehog paperweight above retails for something on the order of $250 and it can't be much more than 6 inches high!  Fortunate for Mick there was nothing there I was interested in purchasing, even their seconds were out of my price range. 

Things I have learned:

1.  Pencil erasers are called rubbers.
2.  Kibworth Beauchamp is pronounced Kibworth Beacham.
3.  This is the place to find treasure; you must hand it over to the authorities but you will be compensated with it full estimated value.  No need to sell it on the black market or pay an auction house a commission.
4.  Walton, as a part of a place name, means "where the British live" in Anglo Saxon.
5.   Both Denby and Derby pottery works recycle over 95% of they clay that "wasted" in their manufacturing process.  If it has not been fired it crushed and put back in to the process for creating the liquid clay.  If it has been fired it is crushed and used as a base layer for roadbed construction. 
6.  The plaster molds used in the Denby plant are used about 30 times before imperfections make them unusable.  They are then sold off and are used in the creation of plasterboard.