Training benefit of NMCT grants

Thanks to NMCT's grants manuscripts up and down the country are conserved and made accessible, but the grants often have another benefit - training.

A 2017 grant to Cardiff University is enabling the Collingwood Archive to be conserved.  A number of conservation students from Cardiff University and conservation volunteers from Glamorgan Archives have had the chance to be involved in the work and have benefitted hugely as a result.

The Collingwoods were a renowned family of remarkable artists, archaeologists, and writers from the Lake District. W. G. Collingwood was John Ruskin’s secretary and biographer, and a friend of Arthur Ransome, author of Swallows and Amazons, and even a suspected double agent. The archive spans 60 boxes and comprises a treasure trove of distinctive materials largely inaccessible to research and the public – thousands of letters and correspondence dating from the 18th century (including letters from E. M. Forster and Beatrix Potter), diaries, sketches, personal recipe books, photographs, illustrated story books and outstanding landscapes of the Lake District.

Two of the conservation students who assisted with the project in summer 2018, Devin Mattlin and Joanne Hoppe, have written a blog about their experience.  You can read the full blog here.

They write: "In 2017, Cardiff University’s Special Collections and Archives was awarded their second successive grant from the National Manuscripts Conservation Trust to conserve key items from the archive, and we were delighted to be selected as part of our MSc Conservation Practice course to give them a hand. This was a great opportunity to learn new skills in paper conservation and to work with Lydia Stirling, an Accredited Conservation-Restorer, at Glamorgan Archives. The objects in question dated roughly from the late 19th to the early 20th centuries and consisted of several diaries, sketchbooks and a recipe book. The ultimate goal of the conservation work was to stabilise the objects for responsible and appropriate display, and allow access to researchers and the public in the Special Collections and Archives Reading Room.

After we had completed the work we were delighted when the project team invited us to talk about our experience at the Collingwood Archive Celebratory Conference. Here we were given a fantastic platform to present our journey with the archive to a large audience of over 40 delegates from across the world, and share what conservation is and how archives are cared for. We were so grateful to the project team for this opportunity to communicate with many different heritage stakeholders, an essential skill that will be invaluable as we embark on our careers in conservation."

 

03 Nov 2018
Some images from Devin and Joanne's blog.

Some images from Devin and Joanne's blog.