York Art Gallery is closed and we have launched our packed programme of events for the interim, until the transformed Gallery re-opens in 2015, writes Jenny Alexander, Assistant Curator of Fine Art.

We are collaborating with local artist, illustrator and general magpie, Mark Hearld, who is fresh from his wonderful exhibition at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

An exhibition of his illustrations from A First Book of Nature is currently on display in the Yorkshire Museum.

Mark is working with all of YMT’s collections to create new work and develop an exciting exhibition at York Art Gallery using our collections in fantastic new ways.

Over the next few months, Mark will be visiting the YMT stores, seeking inspiration (which is not hard to find) and generally getting very excited about the “stuff” that we have here.

Here he is at one of the social history stores enthusing over some carousel horses.

We will be tweeting and blogging over the next year with images and interesting discoveries and Mark will maybe even post the odd sketch as his new work develops. So stay tuned!

The dark, smelly tallow candle factory on York Castle Museum’s Kirkgate has inspired one visitor to write an atmospheric poem which sends shivers down the spine….

Sarah Mortimer, one of our assistant curators of social history learning, was so impressed by the piece by Nathan Firby that we have decided to publish it here.

Nathan is a member of a York adult learning group called Ekphrasis who visited the museum as part of a creative writing project led by Lizzi Linklater.

Sarah says:  ”Ekphrasis come here for a session involving a tour round Kirkgate and some object handling to inspire their writing and Nathan was clearly inspired! I think it’s wonderful.”

Tallow candles were made from animal fat and the factory in Kirkgate contains items from Marfitt’s tallow dip factory in Pickering, North Yorkshire, which was established in about 1830.  At its peak this factory produced over 7,000 tallow candles a day.

The Tallow Candles

by Nathan Firby

While walking out across the moor,
the traveller lost his way,
for he was blind without the moon,
as he knelt down to pray;
when in the darkness, to his right,
as if in answer to his plight,
appeared a window filled with light.
The traveller was saved.

Three tallow candles proudly stood
upon the windowsill.
They snapped and crackled, popped and hissed;
beyond, the room was still.
As he peered in, he saw her there:
the pox-marked maid sat in her chair.
She stonily returned his stare,
which gave his heart a chill.

She then stood up, smoothed down her hair
and forced a brittle smile.
She bade him “come into the house
and rest here for a while.”

Within the cottage, by the fire,
he took a glass of ale
and answered her enquiries with
a terse and witty tale.

He told her of his journey, though
he left out all the scandals
and finally he thanked the maid
for having lit the candles.
“Else I would still be lost,” he said.
“And I,” said she, nodding her head
towards a box, beneath the bed,
with shiny metal handles.

The ornamental box was then
pulled out – put on display.
“It’s not just beautiful,” she said,
“it keeps the rats at bay.”
“My husband carved,” she said with pride,
“this candle box before he died.
Come, let us take a look inside!”
and opened it part-way.

And pausing there, she whispered thus:
“Is not a father’s mission
providing shelter for his kin
no matter the condition?”

She opened up the wooden box
wherein the candles lay
in three compartments lined with silk;
in each, a small bouquet.

“The smallpox took my little ones,
it robbed me of all three,
though first it took my husband and
it almost finished me.”
Then, following her line of sight,
he saw the candles burning bright.
“My babies were my shining light
and they still are, you see.”

The candles fizzled, popped and cracked
upon her love shrine hallow.
They spat out fat and spewed forth soot.
Her voice came soft and shallow:
“At first I tried to use for wick,
their braided hair. It burned too quick.
But sinew seems to do the trick
in adolescent tallow.”

Aghast, the traveller gaped at her
and saw to his surprise,
reflections of the ghostly flames
and madness in her eyes.

Then drawing back towards the door,
impelled by abject fright,
with trembling hands he turned the catch
and fled into the night.

Who said Half Term’s just for kids? School’s out and playtime’s in, with excited children accompanied by travel-weary parents flocking to York for a taste of the city’s history, heritage and happenings.

With an array of activities going on – from famed locomotives to pillaging Vikings, chocolate tasting to Roman ghost sightings – my personal choice would have to be the new Toy Stories exhibition at York Castle Museum.

There’s something about seeing a much loved teddy bear, a well-worn wooden train or a delicately clothed peg-doll that evokes happy childhood memories in adults and sparks inquisitive questions from children – ‘what, no computers?!’

One of my favourite childhood toys was Weebles – those little chubby plastic people who wobbled but never fell down. With an 18-month old nephew to entertain, I’m currently on the hunt for his very own Weebles to enjoy (and possibly for my own enjoyment too!).

What was your favourite toy as a child?

Having joined a gym, grown my nails and lost weight in previous years, I thought I’d try something a bit more interesting for my New Year’s Resolution 2013.

It’s no secret that I’m a great food lover, so I thought this year I would really make an effort to try some new recipes and make use of seasonal produce.

So for January, I’ll be rustling up some recipes with kale. Similar to cabbage, kale can be used to make vegetable soup, added to stir-fries, or baked for a crispy snack.

York Castle Museum will also be doing a spot of cooking this month with their ‘Toasts and Trivets’ event on Tuesday 29 January, using a 19^th century fireside to make seed cakes and mulled ale – perfect for keeping warm this winter!

You can find out more about this and other events by visiting our website.

We’re delighted to be working with three students who won a recent competition to help us develop new museum exhibitions, writes Amy Parkinson, Learning Manager.

We challenged young people aged 16 to 24 to come up with new ideas for an exhibiton of toys at York Castle Museum and a new medieval exhibition at the Yorkshire Museum, in our Create&MakeItWork Challenge.

The competition culminated in a ‘pitching’ session at this year’s Create Your Future event in The Hospitium in the Museum Gardens.

Each finalist had to sell their ideas and outline how they would work.

We were very impressed with all the entries and very excited by the winning ideas.

The first winner was Florence Laino, an undergraduate student at York University, who came up with an idea for a Rainbow Teddy Bear Trail. This will be part of our new Toy Stories exhibition at York Castle Museum which will open in February.

Young visitors will be able to look for letters around the exhibition which spell out a word revealing the location of where our teddy bear is hiding.

The winners of the other category were Amy Ellis- Thompson, pictured above right, and Emily Murdoch, both doing Masters degrees at the University of York. Their idea was Fantasy Jousting, which is a touchscreen interactive featuring animated jousts, which  we are now developing with them.

Visitors to the medieval exhibition, which also opens in February, will be able to make their knights stronger by picking artefacts to help them in their fight and answering questions about them.

The Create Your Future event is an annual event which was in its fifth year. It aims to show young people what careers are available in the creative sector and the new Create&MakeItWork challenge went down well with the entrants who enjoyed taking part in a real-life task.

A third category in the challenge was to come up with an idea to make York more ‘dementia-friendly’ – this was won by Jayne Gledhill, also pictured above. Her idea will be put into action with GeniUS York, City of York Council and the Joseph Rowntree Trust.

The Create Your Future was promoted as part of York Business Week and Global Entrepreneurship Week and was subsequently awarded the GEW’s ‘Badge of Honour’  for being a ‘High Impact Event’.

To get involved in future Create Your Future events, contact Yvonne Emerson at NYBEP Ltd.

Nothing says Christmas to me like the smell of something scrumptious cooking in the kitchen. From chestnuts roasting to vats of spiced mulled wine, the hub of my home is a hive of activity this time of year.

I’ll be popping along to York Castle Museum for inspiration as the Kitchen Studio will be making the Christmas classic – mince pies – using three historic recipes to see which wins. The Tudors and the Georgians will be up against Nigella Lawson to claim the ultimate Christmas crown!

I myself will be having a go at baking (though I won’t be using the Tudor’s recipe for beef mince pies!). Gingerbread biscuits covered in icing and miniature cakes topped with edible glitter balls are top of my list.

Here’s some I made earlier…

Indulge your senses at York Castle Museum on the 8, 9, 16, 22 and 23 December when the mince pie making demonstrations will be taking place.

Saville’s chemist shop on Kirkgate, our Victorian Street at York Castle Museum, now has some new temporary residents in the form of leeches, writes Sarah Mortimer, Assistant Curator of Social History Learning.

They are there as part of our Kill or Cure Victorian medicine week during half-term (October 27 – November 4) to show visitors some of the weirder things that were seen as everyday 150 years ago.

Guide Melissa Bailey shows a customer the jar of leeches...

The use of leeches in medicine dates as far back as 2,500 years ago, when they were used for bloodletting in ancient India. Many ancient civilizations practised bloodletting, including Indian and Greek civilizations.

The animals were found in fresh water, mostly by women who paddled in rivers, allowing leeches to adhere to their feet before plucking them off to store in small cages or boxes, and then sold on to doctors or pharmacists who kept them in jars.

Losing blood was considered to be beneficial to health. The practice of bloodletting was the most common procedure performed by surgeons for almost two thousand years. They did it to balance the humours, as a surplus was thought to cause ill health.

All four classical elements – fire, earth, water and air – were thought to be present in the blood, and so bloodletting was believed to return the patient to general good health.

Fevers, apoplexy and headache were thought to be a result of too much blood, so the surgeon would tie the arm to make the veins swell, cut the patient and drain out a certain amount of blood, a process which was called ‘breathing a vein’.

These leeches can survive for months after feeding on blood. They have come back into use in the last 30 years and are bred specifically for medicinal purposes.

The employment of leeches became so common that their use very often out-stripped supply.

When applied to the vein of a host, the starving leech clung on by the use of the teeth in its anterior suckers from which it released anti-coagulating enzymes that not only numbed any swelling and pain but also prevented the sucked blood from clotting – until the leech became so swollen that it simply released its grip and ‘dropped’ off.

At that point the wound would be cleaned and bandaged, though it may continue to bleed for hours, and sometimes even days. The bandages were then washed and dried and used again. There were occasions when patients were allergic to the treatment, feeling faint or dizzy, or having great difficulty in breathing, and some even died from loss of blood.

The use of leeches in Europe peaked between 1830 and 1850 then fell into decline. This was partly a result of the invention of ‘mechanical leeches’ (such as scarifiers with their multiple blades).

The use of leeches in modern medicine made its comeback in the 1980s after years of decline and they are sometimes used today in plastic and reconstructive surgery, because a natural anticoagulant they secrete fights blood clots and restores proper blood flow to inflamed parts of the body.

Guide Rob Wake is pictured chatting to a customer about cures and potions sold by Victorian chemists, but he said the main talking point in the shop at the moment was definitely the leeches!

Rosamund West, a Guide at York Museums Trust, looks at works of art used to promote the views of the Temperance Movement, which campaigned against the drinking of alcohol.

Pay a visit to the newly refurbished Kirkgate, York Castle Museum’s Victorian Street, and you will find a new Cocoa Temperance Room.

Within the room, you will see two interesting posters of temperance art. These two posters used to be part of the old education collection and were unframed and tightly rolled up in the stores. They were worked on by conservator James Caverhill before going on display.

The two posters are by J.F.Weedon and are part of a series, Temperance Pictorial Diagrams.  The two posters are entitled Soldiers, which is number 9 in the series; and In The Laundry, which is number 12 in the series. They both carry important moral messages about the virtues of temperance.

Soldiers by JF Weedon

Soldiers carries the caption underneath: “A “Portage” in the Red River Expedition, Canada (1870), under General Wolsley, who says: “The men worked as I have never seen men work before but from the time we started till the time we got back, not a drop of grog was drunk.”

The British Army was the backbone of the British Empire, and had to be efficient, disciplined and in health. Weedon’s soldiers are shown as fit, active men, fighting in Canada for the Empire.

For soldiers to be commonly drunk would weaken the army, threatening Britain’s governance in far flung parts of the Empire.

In The Laundry by JF Weedon

In The Laundry carries the caption, “Of all domestic operations in which women were employed, Laundry work is, perhaps, the most trying and fatiguing. The testimony of both the employers and the women is that the work is best and most easily done without alcoholic liquor of any kind”.

Alcoholism was rife amongst women as with men. Drunken women contradicted the perfect Victorian image of womanhood and drinking could have devastating effects on the health and wellbeing of their children.

Weedon shows these women, due to their temperance, as healthy and industrious women, working in a clean and bright laundry room. Weedon shows us that temperance avoids drunken deprivation and squalor.

Both of Weedon’s posters on display in the Cocoa Room were published by the United Kingdom Band of Hope Union, a temperance group for children, first begun in Leeds.

They carry the message so strongly fought for by The Society of Friends, the value of temperance. The Society of Friends wanted to promote the consumption of drinking chocolate as an alternative to alcohol as they saw the harmful effects of alcoholism, particularly amongst the poor. Hence the opening of cocoa rooms like the one on Kirkgate, as an alternative to the public house.

Temperance Cocoa Room

The Temperance movement was strong in York, a city with a significant Quaker presence. The York Temperance Society, set up in 1830, held enlightened views on the dangers of alcohol and campaigned on such issues as the sale of alcohol to children.

They were fighting against the established view that beer was a good, healthy drink.

Beer was also a relatively cheap alternative to sometimes contaminated water. It was seen as a patriotic drink, conducive to industriousness and was seen as a healthy alternative to gin, another curse of the disadvantaged. Doctors even recommended beer to nursing mothers.

This attitude is seen in Ford Madox Brown’s Work, painted earlier in the century, where we have a central group of strong, hard-working navvies, nourished by a tankard of British beer.

Ford Madox Brown said: “Here are presented the young navvy in the pride of manly health and beauty; the strong fully developed navvy who does his work and loves his beer”.

This was a view which the Society of Friends did not share. The captions on The Soldiers and In The Laundry explain how these men and women work best and most industriously without alcohol.

Far from aiding ‘manly health’, they saw that alcohol was a destructive force in Victorian Society.

Come and see them for yourself in Kirkgate and see if you are inspired towards temperance…

Photojournalism student Lily Hartley spent a week working with York Museums Trust’s press officer Lee Clark and left us with some great images taken during her short stay.

For the past week, I have been stationed in the York Museums Trust marketing office, acting as an in-house photographer. As a Photojournalism student at Staffordshire University, I am required to experience the real world of work once in a while, and to participate in a stint of ‘work experience’.

Whilst a little nervous at first (I was, after all, just a student in a place full of professionals!), I’ve found that this week has been both educational and very enjoyable.

Everyone seemed to want something photographed, and I’ve been kept very busy this week, documenting everything from Tansy beetles to WW1 machine guns! Here are some of the highlights…

John Hoyland poses for a press photograph with a First World War machine gun outside York Castle Museum

A Tansy Beetle in York Museum Gardens. The rare species has been introduced to the gardens recently and the local press were invited to a photo call

Natalie McCaul holds a rare silver boar badge, worn by supporters of King Richard III, which has been acquired by the Yorkshire Museum

A sunny shot of York Museum Gardens taken for the marketing department's publicity materials

This picture of a shell comes from Lily's trip to the trust's natural sciences stores

Lines of neatly arranged butterflies - another shot taken during the trip to the store

Volunteers at work in the York Observatory, taken by Lily for our the trust's Volunteers Co-ordinator

Another volunteer hard at work, this time in the Yorkshire Museum's library

I want to thank everyone in the marketing department for making me feel welcome and giving me the opportunity to learn about what will (hopefully) one day become my field of work!

Throughout the summer, we have been running lots of hands-on activities for children at all of our sites, writes Amy Lang, Volunteers Co-ordinator.

In our Collections Studio at York Castle Museum, volunteers and guides have been running a peg doll making activity, one of several Victorian themed activities across the museum.

Parade of peg dolls

All of our visitors (adults and children alike) have loved the activities and got stuck in. Our volunteers have even found themselves having a go……

We had no idea of their creativity until we saw these pictures of their handiwork!

Laura Trott, double Olympic gold medallist

Our own Dave Cree, deputy senior guide at York Castle Museum, complete with radio!

Ballerina in pink

Visit York Castle Museum’s website for details of all our summer holiday activities.