York Museums Trust Blog

We are relaunching ‘Collections Snapshot’. We will regularly look at the story behind interesting objects from our collections. Our first object is:

Victoria Cross

In store, Castle Museum, Military History Collection

This was awarded to Lieutenant Humphrey Osbaldston Brooke Firman, Royal Navy, for bravery after his death on 24th April 1916.  On this night, in Mesopotamia, he lead an attempt to bring supplies to the force. However, they were brought under heavy artillery fire at Kut-el-Amara. Lieutenant Firman and several of his crew from the ‘SS Julnar’ were killed, while the survivors and supplies were captured.
Recently, on 24th April 2008, a Service of Dedication took place for a memorial plaque commemorating Lieutenant Firman, at the War Memorial in New Malden. We were unable to lend the medal for the ceremony but we provided large scale copies of an image of the medal. This was much appreciated by the Memorial Committee.

After a few weeks of building work (and there’s still a little bit of work left to do!) our new shop and cafe have opened at York Castle Museum

They’re both now next to the entrance area looking out across the Eye of York towards Clifford’s Tower.

The shop has lots of new stock including vintage-style enamelware, retro style souvenirs and nostalgic gifts featuring old-style adverts.

The cafe has some gorgeous-looking cakes on sale as well as sandwiches, soup and hot meals, and healthy snacks for hungry kids.

If you’re passing, why not pop in and have a look – there’s no admission charge to get into the shop and cafe area (and remember admission is free for York residents anyway!).

Sherri Steel unearths some archive recipes for using up old bread, which are set to be recreated in York Castle Museum’s working kitchen.

Recipe book from about 1930

Crumbs! It’s amazing the amount of food that can be created from a few slices of stale old bread…

I’ve been researching old recipes for some historic cookery demonstrations at the Castle Museum in March (Click here for details).

Avoiding waste does seem to be a topical subject at the moment and many of the recipes I found date from the times of rationing.

Cooking with stale bread didn’t just happen in times of austerity though, and it has been used for many things – toast, puddings, food for invalids. Breadcrumbs were often used in Roman and medieval recipes – a sage stuffing appears in a Roman recipe for baked dormouse!

Here’s some of the recipes we’ll be recreating:

Tart for an Ember Day

There were many recipes for Ember Day tarts. An Ember Day was one of the many days in the year when the church forbade the eating of meat.

This is from The Forme of Cury, c1390, a cookbook compiled around 1390 by the master-cooks of King Richard II:

Tart in ymber day: take and parboile onynons; presse out the water & hewe hem smale; take brede & bray it in a mortar, and temper it up with ayren; do perto butter, ineon, spice and salt and corans & a ltel sugar with powdor douce, and bake it in a trap,& serve it forth.

Which when translated means: Take and parboil onions; press out the water and chop them small; take bread and grind it in a mortar, and mix it with eggs; add butter to this, and saffron, salt, currents and a little sugar with sweet powder; bake it in a pie shell (or oven dish) and serve it forth.

Bread Pudding

Puddings also use up stale bread e.g. summer pudding or the traditional bread pudding.

This recipe uses breadcrumbs and is from The House-keeper’s Pocket-book, and Compleat Family Cook, by Mrs Sarah Harrison, 6^th edition, 1755.

To a pint of Cream put in a Quarter of a Pound of Butter, set it on the Fire, and keep it stirring; the Butter being melted, put in as much grated Manchet as will make it pretty light, a Nutmeg, or something else, and as much Sugar as you please, three or four Eggs, and a little Salt; mix all well together, butter a dish, put it in, and bake it half an Hour.

Toast sandwiches

And finally, here is an example of toast being used to feed invalids, in the belief it was easier on the stomach than freshly-baked bread.

This recipe is from Housekeeping Book, Edited by Mary Jewry, c.1890.

Ingredients: Thin cold toast, thin slices of bread and butter, pepper and salt to taste. Mode: Place a very thin piece of cold toast between 2 slices of thin bread-and-butter in the form of a sandwich, adding a seasoning of pepper and salt. This sandwich may be varied by adding a little pulled meat, or very fine slices of cold meat to the toast, and in any of these forms will be found very tempting to the appetite of an invalid.

This lovely armchair is made from oak and was made in one of a group of workshops operating in the Leeds area at this time. The decoration is Elizabethan in style and so perhaps a bit old fashioned for the time of its production. The chair was probably made for one of the new breed of Yorkshire gentlemen whose fortunes were based in the affluent towns of the West Riding, at the centre of the English clothing industry.

This group of furniture makers produced various forms at this period including chairs, chests and cupboards. Their work is characterised by its extremely good workmanship and decoration.

The distinctive design features of these workshops which can be seen in this chair include the double-scrolled pediment crest with earpieces, and the carved back panel with the diamond motif complete with pennant-like terminals.

Shooting a replica pistol from the Dick Turpin era – the early 18th century. 

This afternoon was the first time this demonstration was done live in front of visitors and luckily it worked first time (the gun is not that reliable).

No stagecoach customers were harmed – the pistol was loaded with real gunpowder but fired only balls of tissue.  Turpin would have used lead shot.

The demos are part of the Summer Fun Events programme at the Castle Museum.

York is busy right now.  Hundreds of thousands of visitors come to the city and August is a very popular time to make the pilgrimage. And pilgrimage is a good word for it, ever since early medieval days people have travelled to the city from far and wide.These ‘tourists’ as they are now called have always been an important part of the city’s economy.

What is surprising though, is just how many of our visitors come from the UK rather than overseas.  Even before the recession introduced us to the ’staycation’ (Brits holidaying at home), 80% of York’s visitors were British.The new Prison exhibition at the Castle Museum is proving popular too, but not quite as popular as when the museum first opened….

In his final blog before the opening of the York Castle Prison exhibition, Jim Butler explains what will be in the exhibition and why. 

The Truth and Nothing but the Truth.This one statement perhaps best sums up our ambition for this exhibition. 

Of course we want an entertaining exhibition: something to grab the attention, something fun.

But for us it had to be more than that. It couldn’t be tacky and it couldn’t be exaggerated.

It had to have truth.

But what is the truth?  The nature of history means that it is open to interpretation and therefore the ‘truth’ may never be uncovered.  However, we have sought-out and used every trace of evidence we could find (even meeting descendents of prisoners on the other side of the world) to guide and inform our vision of the Prison in the eighteenth century.   We feel we’ve achieved  the most accurate representation as possible, but it will be for you the public to judge  if we have succeeded and we will greatly value any comment you have to make (see below).

Another key element for us is to show that the buildings that we all know and love as York Castle Museum were once a gruesome prison .   The Baroque style of the Prison buildings is more greatly associated with stately homes, so I suppose it should come as no surprise that many visitors tell us they had no idea of the building’s history.  

That’s one reason why the first half of the exhibition  highlights the real, thick-walled,  dark and dank cells where thousands of poor souls were incarcerated.

The idea is to offer  visitors an ‘immersive experience’ which means we attempt to give an impression  of what it was like to  actually  be  in  the  gaol in the 1700s .

We have films of each of our real-life characters in individual cells, the very places they were once  limprisoned.  Amidst the sounds of chains rattling, doors slamming and children playing (reflecting the fact that some children were born and lived inside the grim walls), the first character our visitors will meet will be the turnkey, Thomas Ward, a thoroughly corrupt, nasty piece of work, who will make it quite clear it wasn’t just the prisoners who were rogues and scoundrels. 

We hope that we get some atmosphere across with our strong stories but fall short of traumatising the children. We  aim to show that some of the prisoners were perhaps jailed unjustly -  whilst  others deserved to be there.

Our thinking in the second half of the  exhibition  is to  show where the prison fitted into the wider context of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – times of great judicial change and prison reform. So we’ll feature a ‘what happened next?’ room where you can find out what happened to our characters  mapped against a timeline of other significant events.

 In addition, to encourage people to undertake their own research we have our database of names where  you  can find out if  your ancestors were once incarcerated , executed or transported from  here. There’ll also be a digital  projection showing  a virtual timeline   of  how the  Castle site of the museum,  Crown court and Clifford’s Tower has  evolved from the days of William the Conqueror  to today’s familar landscape . 

Finally, there will also be a tiny cell adorned with photos of former inmates.  Here visitors can contemplate what life must have been like in the Prison for those people whilst listening to the haunting poetry of a former inmate. 

 So how have we managed this fine balance of Entertainment, atmosphere and poetry coupled with cold, hard, unexaggerated fact? You’ll have to visit to find out, but trust me, like much to do with this prison, the detail is in the Execution.

 Please let us know if you think we’ve achieved our aims or not and comment below.

In the third of his blogs Jim Butler gives a behind-the-scenes account of the build up to our new major York Castle Prison exhibition.

It’s a fair bet that we’d all secretly rejoice at the discovery of a real roguish character among our ancestors.Maybe a highwayman like Dick Turpin or a political dissident cruelly hanged for fighting for a fairer society.Well, you’ll have the chance to find out if such a character really existed among your forebears as a key part of our exhibition will be a search database situated in the heart of old cells.

Visitors will be able to type in their own name or town/village and see if one of their own possible ancestors was once incarcerated within the gruesome gaol.The database is the work – and I mean countless hours of hard, painstaking work – of a big hero of our exhibition, researcher Dr Katherine Prior.Katherine has worked for many months pouring over the National Archives, British Museum records, regional archives, ancient newspapers, prison plans and written accounts of trials and hangings. Her painstaking trawl busted a few long-held myths, not least the long held belief that Turpin had been held in a cell opened to the public for many years when in fact he was more likely to have spent his last few hours in a different part of the gaol. But it’s the new information on individuals, be they murderers, rogues, debtors or petty thieves, that have really added to the buzz about this exhibition.

My previous blogs have focused on the crimes of Turpin and Elizabeth Boardingham, the last woman to have been burned at the stake in Yorkshire. But Katherine’s research has also brought us the sympathetic character of William Hartley, a man with a strong claim to be regarded as a political prisoner.Hartley, a poor tailor from near Halifax, was one of 17 Luddites executed at the prison in January 1813.

The Luddites, named after their fictional leader Captain Ned Ludd, were skilled textile workers forced into poverty by the machines of the industrial revolution and the wars against France and the USA.  At a time when unions were banned, they formed illegally with the hope of relieving their plight.They raided the house of wool-stapler, George Haigh, both for his weapons and to try and force him to charge less for the milk he sold.  But soon after, Hartley was captured on the dodgy testimony of a turncoat, Joseph Clark, desperately trying to save his own skin.Hartley, who was 41, a widower with seven children to support, admitted his presence in the raid but denied being a leader or demanding or receiving any arms. He stuck to his story in the prison and he may have got away with a lesser sentence if not for the authorities’ feverish desire to crush the Luddites. He was one of 14 hanged on a single day – perhaps the largest number executed at once in Yorkshire’s history – in front of a huge crowd and a large number of troops.

What became of his orphaned children (their mother, probably weakened from lack of food, died six months previously) is not known. Hartley asked for their plight to be published in the hope they might receive charity.A sad detail of the story is that Hartley, who had no previous record of criminal activity, initially couldn’t face seeing his daughter before his death.A tragic tale. That we can tell it is thanks to the work of Dr Katherine Prior.

Jim Butler, Learning Manager, gives a behind-the-scenes account of the build up to the opening of the new York Castle Prison experience in July and tells of the sometimes gruesome and often heartbreaking secrets of the old prison.

It’s a strange fact that York Prison was always a tourist attraction, right from when it opened in 1705.Back then people would peer through the fence to glimpse the inmates and good money was paid for the thrill of meeting a notorious criminal in the flesh. The old gaol remained a place of real gruesomeness for two centuries, where many horrors were carried out.  However, that history was a somewhat obscured when the building was reopened as the Castle Museum in the 1930s. As home to a nationally-renowned and popular collection of artefacts and our famous, recreated Victorian Street, (which became a template for other popular museums around the world) it is easy to see why the Castle’s less wholesome history was glossed-over. To this day we find some visitors don’t release our museum was once the most important penitentiary in Yorkshire.  Yet the prison aspect of the museum has also been a source of fascination for many.  So much so it was no real surprise that the decision to invest £200,000 to create our York Castle Prison experience, due to open in July, has been greeted with such interest from both media and public. In fact interest has been so great I’ve been persuaded, to write six blogs detailing key aspects of what we’re trying to achieve with the project.  Naturally the fact that, in 1739, Richard (Dick) Turpin was imprisoned and spent the final days before his execution here has always been a draw.  Turpin will be one of eight prison characters featured in the York Castle Prison experience. Their sometimes grim, sometimes heartbreaking and sometimes comic testimonies recreated and filmed for use as part of an interactive experience.                                                                 Murder

However, visitors to the York Castle Prison can forget the Hollywood view of Turpin. As a respected museum with a strong culture of education it was an easy decision for us to concentrate on the truth of Turpin and dismiss the myths of Black Bess and dashing chases.  We have discovered a lot of information on Turpin in contemporary accounts, including court reports, written with a cold accuracy, all long before the process of romanticising this nasty criminal began with Harrison Ainsworth’s novel Rookwood in 1834.  In fact Turpin, a butcher by trade who was useful to a gang of cattle and sheep rustlers, once beat and tortured an elderly man while a fellow gang member raped a servant girl upstairs.  On another occasion he murdered a servant simply for recognising him.  He wasn’t even that bright or particularly handsome. Turpin, who had a badly pockmarked face, was caught when he needlessly shot a cockerel while undercover in Brough.  He then sent a letter home and his former teacher recognised his handwriting. Hardly a master criminal.  The script we have had written for his character really gives a flavour of the true man, possibly a first in literature.  Turpin is one of our more unsympathetic characters but some of our other prisoners had heartbreaking tales to tell. Watch this space for a sneak preview of their stories.  Another key feature of the York Castle Prison project will be to give the visitor a (small) sense of what life was like in a prison rife with diseases like typhus and smallpox and where many were malnourished and the turnkey – a prison warden – was all powerful.  We will divide the area into two parts, one informative and reflective, where visitors can explore and understand the broad history of the buildings and the other, more raw and immersive, a place of ‘ghosts’, where people will come face-to-face with the prison’s former inhabitants.

This battery powered portable record player was made by Baird Ltd. in 1960 and is shown here with the original packaging. 

The black plastic base and gold metal stylus, arm and lid measures just 22cm in length and 11cm wide, but it can play both single and LP records.

The speed is produced by two drive wheels; one is triggered when the arm is in position for a single, providing 45rpm and the other wheel operates at 33rpm when there is an LP on the record player.

Three small feet open out from the base when the player is operating.  This allows it to stand above the surface and gives room for sound to come from the speaker underneath.  The record is held between the closed lid and the base.

The player was advertised as weighing less than 2lbs and operating on 1.5 volt batteries.  It sold for 15 guineas.

info by Katy