Mere Museum is celebrating the start of 2011 with their new conservation themed exhibition entitled ‘Preserving the Past for the Future’ and staff from the Wiltshire Council Conservation and Museums Advisory Service teams were privileged to be invited to the opening on 4 January for a sneak preview.

A Gladstone Bag, c.1882

The exhibition shows the range of objects conserved by the Conservation team for the museum over the years with photographs showing the objects before treatment alongside the actual objects after treatment, together with informative panels about the conservation treatments used.

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My name is Beth Werrett and I am a conservator for the Wiltshire Conservation Service. I recently treated an extremely unusual table, which was inlaid with fossils; the object was so popular in our building it seemed like an excellent candidate for discussion on our blog.

 
Condition of the table before any conservation work was carried out

Background

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Wax visible inside the skull before treatment

Background

The 2009-2010 project to conserve 300 items for the new display at the Roman Baths Museum included a variety of materials from Roman earthenware ceramics to bronze statuettes. Some of the larger objects were made of lead and included lead piping from the baths themselves and a Roman coffin. The coffin was the feature of our last blog and we’d like to follow on from this with details of the conservation of the coffin’s contents.

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The story of how archives have survived can be almost as interesting as the documents themselves; but not quite. Last year a furniture restorer in Sussex sent some papers of the Hazland family of Woodborough which he found in a drawer in an antique chest that he was working on. We recently received a document written in 1804 that had been found in a wall in a cottage in Tetbury, Glos, in 1949. This find was of particular interest because it illustrates the social structure the parish of Charlton near Malmesbury around the time that Nelson was killed at Trafalgar.
The Schedule

It is a schedule of Assessed Taxes which included duties on houses, windows, carriages and servants. 93 people, of whom 52 are described as poor, are listed with their occupation or status. The completeness of the picture is confirmed by the 1801 census (for which no personal details were kept), which counted 88 families. The document suffered somewhat by its immuration, and subsequent treatment with adhesive tape, but the paper of the time, made from rags as opposed to wood pulp, is very durable and only one name is lost. 

By a strange coincidence a few weeks after this document was deposited we received a similar for Tisbury, dated 1825, which was found in a wall space in a house in the village, lived in by one of the assessors. It seems that filing away tax returns was taken to rather extreme lengths...

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We thought it was time for another update on the grave burial from Bognor Regis as yet more exciting finds have been uncovered.

The Helmet
 

The latest stage of the excavation has seen the helmet completely uncovered with the discovery of an attachment that would have held a chin strap in place. Although damaged the helmet is in one piece and, thanks to the painstaking work of our contract conservator Kelly Abbott, is ready to be lifted free of the surrounding soil. Read on to see some additional images of the helmet attachments........
 

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