Collecting Memories – Making Light

A Close Look at Our Collections Journey

We are very excited to announce that our collections improvement journey, as a part of our larger mission towards accreditation, is going incredibly well! As of this post, we have now processed over 1,100 objects! Crossing these huge milestones would not be possible were it not for the passion and dedication of the volunteers and staff involved in each step of the journey. Last post, we introduced you to the first step of our collections process, the Treasure Hunt, the beginning stage, which locates objects so they can begin their journey through our cataloguing system. The next step is Acquisition Creation. This step is the first time that an object is entered into the online side of our collections. One of the most important aims of The Wee Museum of Memory and our collections improvement journey is ensuring that our collections are as accessible to the public as possible. As a part of these accessibility efforts, we are uploading each and every object online so that people all around the world can view and learn from the objects in our collection.

The majority of the objects in The Wee Museum of Memory’s collections are acquired through donations from members of the community. Acquisition Creation involves creating an online record for these donations so we can keep track of donors and which objects were donated together. Another important part of Acquisition Creation is ensuring that an object has been quarantined correctly. Each new object needs to be quarantined away from the rest of our collection for at least 72 hours, and up to 6 months for fabric items. We quarantine our items to make sure that they do not have anything on or in them, like mold or pests, that could jeopardise the rest of our collection. During Acquisition Creation, we check that quarantine has been correctly passed, the donation is recorded online, and the object continues along its collections journey.

Want to take a look at the 1,100+ objects now in our online collections?

The museum staff and volunteers have worked hard to ensure that the public has online access to each and every object that passes through our collections journey. If you would like to browse through these objects, click below!

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Making Light

Two objects, held in our collections, making light of a very serious and very scary time in British history, reveal the resiliency of the human spirit in the face of adversity. After all, humour is one of the best medicines.

Two sets of WWII-era playing cards travelling through our collections processing system at The Wee Museum of Memory recently piqued the interest of our collections volunteers. Both of these sets were created during the first year of the Second World War, 1939. The first set is called “Vacuation” and is a game that centers around the city evacuations, which were the targets of air raids, to the safer countryside. The cards feature caricaturised images of children, the Evacuees, along with catchy names for each of them like Ida Ittinem, Hilda Howler, and Katie Kettle. Some of the children are shown with luggage, wearing gas masks, or crying, situations that were realities of those living through the evacuations. Other cards have caricatures of Teachers in the city, Householders in the country, and a single Air Raid Alarm card.

Despite the seriousness of the evacuations, conducted to escape the air raid bombings happening in British cities, the target market of this humorous card game was the very people living through them. The parents and children playing this game were the ones actually living through the air raids, gas masks, crying children, and evacuations, and yet much of the British public purchased and played these games, making light of the dangerous situation they were living through to better face it.

The other set held in our collection, “Who’s Who or Food for Thought,” is a play on words game which involves matching wartime figures from Winston Churchhill to Adolf Hitler, with rhymes and icons. Players must complete matching sets of three cards for example:

Winston Churchill shows he is the true fighting type, ignoring all Nazis scandalous tripe.

Himmler’s Gestapo puts all behind gates, who do not shout “heil” on Adolf’s victory dates.

This game, just like “Vacuation” makes light of the serious topics faced by those living through WWII, putting a humorous tint over even subjects like Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Clearly, the British public found some solace and potentially some measure of control by flipping the script and making light of these scary times. In fact, even British authorities, like Winston Churchill recognized the importance of making light through card games during trying times.

These packs of wartime cards have a more complicated history than most people might initially suspect. During WWII, paper was a hot commodity. From the onset of the war, paper was in short supply, just like many other materials and products in the UK. Because of this, cards were initially seen as a frivolous waste of paper. That was until 1943, when Winston Churchill himself wrote a memo to the Board of Trade explaining that there was a shortage of playing cards among soldiers and that they were, in fact, essential for keeping morale up.

“I am told that in spite of contributions from civilian supplies there is at present a shortage of playing cards for use by the forces and workers in industry. The importance of providing amusement for the forces in their leisure hours and in long periods of waiting and monotony in out of the way places, and for sailors penned up for months in their ships for months together, cannot be overstated. Nothing is more handy, more portable, or more capable of prolonged usage than a pack of cards.“ – Winston Churchill

Less than a week later, Winston wrote to the Board of Trade again, elaborating on his first memo.

“The important thing is to have cards freely forthcoming when called for, and although the soldiers should have priority civilian workers need them too.” – Winston Churchill

Churchill believed that card games were important for the morale and mental well-being of not just soldiers, but civilians who were also facing hardships at home. The card games in our collections portray the resilient spirit of those living through WWII and how they used humour to make light of their terrifying situation and cope with the hardships of the time.

Want to explore our collections in person?

Our museum is open to the public 7 days a week! Many of our objects are part of our handling collections, which means you are welcome to touch and explore many of our objects, and an innovative approach meant to encourage community involvement with our collections and museum. If you want to learn more about our museum or see information like opening times, click the link below!

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Matilda Whitelock

Collecting Memories – Accidental Acquisition

Another Close Look at Our Collections Journey

The collections journey at the Wee Museum of Memory progresses every week and adapts all the time to make sure that our objects are carefully and efficiently archived. This process has evolved many times since the museum’s staff and volunteers began this official process earlier this year. The system now in place has been developed to efficiently and thoroughly comb through and archive the thousands of objects held by the museum. Our archival system is a multistep process that relies on the combination of the unique skills of the museum’s staff and volunteers. The first step of the process is what we call the Treasure Hunt. The Treasure Hunt process makes sure that we carefully match our objects in storage or on display with the donation forms completed when donors generously donated their objects to the museum.

This step gets many of the museum’s volunteers involved, especially those who, from life experience, are able to identify the make and model of, say, a record player or already know what a cobbler’s shoehorn looks like. Volunteers search for and locate objects in our collections so that they can be connected to their donation record as the first step in our archival process. Many of these volunteers have enough life experience to easily recognise all kinds of objects from the past just by looking at them and are indispensable to the Treasure Hunt process and the whole collections journey. Beginning with this first step and throughout the whole process objects are physically handled and examined. It was because of this hands-on examination that the object highlighted by this edition of the blog was discovered.

Accidental Acquisition

We’ve all heard the common saying, “One man’s rubbish is another’s treasure.” Read on to discover an object that has proved to be a treasure trove of information for us at the museum. Discarded by its previous owner, it was hidden inside another object, and only recently discovered by one of our volunteers.

What’s an acquisition?

In museum terminology, acquisitions are items obtained through donations, purchases, or loans. These are the objects that museums hold in their collections and display in their exhibitions.

Last month, our collections volunteers processed an optiscope through our archival system. An optiscope, often called a magic lantern, is an early version of a slide projector. It works by shining a light through painted glass slides. Though these devices were first invented in the 17th century, the one in our collection is much more modern, likely dating from the early 20th century. The optiscope comes inside a large metal case with a couple of detachable components of the lantern inside. One of those components is a delicate light bulb called the Royal Ediswan Lamp. The bulb is still wrapped in its original packaging, which explains that it is a gas-filled bulb. The side of the packaging reads in two places, “IMPORTANT In view of the paper shortage, this wrapper should not be thrown away or destroyed, but should be handed to the local authority or organisation responsible for salvaging paper.” This packaging is partly made of corrugated cardboard, designed to give some padding to the bulb.

One of the previous owners of this optiscope decided to wrap a newspaper around the bulb before placing it inside the case. This was likely a practical decision, making use of whatever materials were readily available to protect the fragile bulb. It appears that the owner of this optiscope made conscious choices to conserve paper, as the writing on the bulb’s original packaging asks.

While carefully examining the optiscope case as part of our cataloguing process, one of our volunteers discovered the newspaper tucked around the bulb. It turned out to be the Wednesday, 13 October 1948 edition of The Scotsman, and is covered front and back with advertisements and story coverages from that week in 1948. Though discarded and repurposed as packaging, for us, this newspaper provides a serendipitous glimpse of life in October 1948. Hidden away for decades and then brought back to light by chance, it’s like an accidental time capsule.

The edition discusses many of the major events around the world and important developments in local politics at the time. However, it also includes some very interesting, smaller stories that would not be featured in most history books, which we have decided to highlight in this blog. Take a look at some of those stories below!

“Policewoman Commended Decoyed Dangerous Criminal “

“A 34-year-old policewoman, who acted as a decoy to bring about the arrest of a man who was subsequently sentenced to four years penal servitude for attacking two women, has received the King’s commendation for brave conduct. She is Policewoman Mabel Ashley, of the County Borough of Tynemouth Police, and the award is “for services when effecting the arrest of a dangerous criminal,” stated yesterday’s London Gazette. At the trial at Newcastle Assizes, Policewoman Ashley said that she went alone in civilian clothes to a dockside road where a man had previously attacked and wounded two women. A man came up and, taking her by the arm, started to lead her away. When she saw a police inspector approaching on a bicycle she arrested the man.”

Women were only allowed to join the police force in 1916, after the “Police Act of 1916” was passed. A woman named Emily Miller joined the Glasgow Police Force as a “Lady’s Assistant” and was not paid or uniformed, but the first woman to offically join the police force in Scotland was Jean Thomas who joined in Dundee in 1918. It was not until 1924 that women were granted the power of arrest. And not until 1968 that women were allowed to be a part of the force if they were married. Prior to this married women were barred. In this 1948 edition of the Scotsman, Policewoman Mabel Ashley used her right to arrest to take down the criminal, but she would not have been allowed to be married and keep her job with the police.

“Rising Generation ‘Danger’ that They May Be Non-Smokers”

“The ‘distinct danger of young people growing up without acquiring the smoking habit‘ because of the present high prices was referred to by Mr. Percy Belcher, general secretary of the Tobacco Workers Union, at a Liverpool meeting last night to protest against the tobacco tax. During the past 18 months, he said, the numbers employed in the tobacco industry had been reduced by 3000, and they could not face the future with any optimism.”

The year this edition was written, 1948, 82% of men in the UK smoked, the highest peak in percentage of UK smokers ever recorded. While the Tobacco Workers Union was clearly pessimistic about the future of tobacco users, smoking did not begin to steadily decline until the 1970s. However, 1948 was the year that Epidemiologist Richard Doll joined the British Medical Research Council, and it was this partnership that would later definitively link smoking to lung cancer.

” Farmer Attacked with Axe rescues assailant from flames”

“Mr. George Glen, a 58-year-old poultry farmer, of Strathkinness, near St. Andrews, after being seriously injured in a struggle with a man at his farm yesterday afternoon, twice pulled his assailant from a blazing hut. Mr. Glen, a well-known speed motor cyclist in his younger days, was, it is alleged, struck on the head six times with an axe. Other members of his family who grappled with the man were also hurt. After the attack, the man rushed into Mr. Glen’s house with a double-barrelled shotgun and fired two shots which embedded in the ceiling. He then broke a window in the room and jumped through on to the ground and ran to a fuel shed where petrol and paraffin were stored. The man struck a match, which was knocked from his hand by Mr. Glen, but succeeded in lighting another, which he threw into the fuel store. He then flung himself on top of the flames. Despite his serious injury, Mr. Glen twice pulled the man from the burning shed and tackled the fire with extinguishers. Mr. Glen’s son, Ian, aged 16, who witnessed the attack, had meantime telephoned for the police, who took the unconscious man to the St. Andrews Memorial Hospital, where his condition was last night stated to be serious. Mr Glen had stitches inserted in a number of head wounds. His wife was also struck with the axe when she rushed to her husband’s assistance. Mr. Glen was on the point of leaving, Mrs. Josef Pawlici, and her two children, aged 5 and 13 months, with the intention of taking them by car to St. Andrews when the attack was made on him.”

“london and edinburgh have most ‘phones”

“At March 31 1948, there were 23.2 telephones per 100 of population in London — the highest figure in the country. Edinburgh, with 14 telephones per 100 people, was the next highest. The figure for Glasgow was 8.6.”

Telephones were still considered a luxury at the time this paper was printed, as the reported number of phones per person clearly shows. 1948 was the first year that the ‘999’ emergency number was rolled out for use in all major towns and cities in the UK.

“400 Women volunteers for nutritional test”

Nearly 400 young women have volunteered to act as “guinea pigs” in a nutritional experiment similar to that recently undertaken by 100 men medical students who lived on tablets for five days without food or drink. Dr H. E. Heitz, inventor of the tablets, said last night, that he proposed to experiment with 120 women in about six weeks time. This experiment also will be conducted at Marsh Court, Stockbridge, Hants. The report of the specialists on the first experiment confirms that the men suffered no ill-effects. Dr. Heitz said that many foreign Governments had placed orders for the tablets which will run into many hundreds of thousands of pounds.”

During WWII, the idea of finding tablets or pills that could sustain soldiers and those back at home on rations without needing to eat food was a very popular, though never actually successful, endeavor. Many types of pills were manufactured to give soldiers a carbohydrate boost, though they did not provide enough calories to sustain a person on them alone. Horlicks Malted Milk Lunch Tablets, made of wheat, barley, and dried milk powder, and were put into pilots’ emergency kits and handed out to athletes during the 1948 Olympics, though these also could not completely substitute food.

This accidental acquisition, though practically discarded at some point by someone wishing to protect their optiscope equipment, provides an interesting snapshot of some of the everyday events and conversations of the past. The stories reported in this newspaper reveal some of the dramatic ways in which the world has changed and the progress made in less than 100 years. Through reading this edition we see that women were already making significant strides in the workplace in 1948, and some women, such as Mabel Ashley from the story, were even succeeding in predominantly male roles like the police force. Today, almost everyone in Edinburgh carries a mobile phone in their back pocket, but in 1948, The Scotsman reported that there were only 14 telephones for every 100 people in Edinburgh.

However, we also want to acknowledge some of the unfortunate, harmful attitudes present in this newspaper, such as the column titled “The Red Peril,” which contains racist ideas about Asian and African countries. Or the “Weddings at St Giles'” column, where the writer uses a derogatory term to describe a shade of brown a bride wore. Reading stories like those is important because they expose the harm that was done in the past and serve as an important reminder to continue to progress away from those attitudes.

In the world of museum collections, accidental finds such as these can be incredibly exciting for those examining the objects. They provide an opportunity to feel more connected to the era from which the object originated, and help to bring into sharper focus the reality that these objects were once owned by real people. We hope you enjoyed reading about this accidental acquisition and sharing in some of our excitement. Keep an eye out for our next blog issue coming soon!

by Matilda Whitelock

Matilda Whitelock

Collecting Memories – Beauty Under the Floorboards

A Close Look at Our Collections Journey

One of the many exciting projects currently ongoing at the Wee Museum of Memory is our journey towards accreditation! A big part of this journey is the organization and improvement of the museum’s collection of historical artifacts. Around 10,000 museum objects must be catalogued, labelled, and stored, a process that requires each object to be physically handled by the museum’s staff and volunteers. As of this post, we have successfully processed over 700 objects in just a few short months! As objects work their way through our cataloguing process, many pique the interest of the staff and volunteers who are working through our collection and handling each object.

Some of the objects spark our interest because they seem particularly unfamiliar, a relic of a bygone era, while others, for the opposite reason, remind us of our own past. Others have stories attached, provided by their donors, often filled with mysteries that inspire curiosity about those who lived before us. This blog series is designed to give each of those objects a space to shine while also letting you in on our progress towards accreditation!

Want to explore our collections from home?

We’re working hard to improve our collections and store our objects properly so they are available for future generations too! However, at the Wee Museum of Memory, we don’t want objects to be stashed away in storage shelves, but instead we try to put most of our collection out on the museum floor so you can come see them in person. Now we are also moving our collections online. This way, our objects are even more accessible. You can explore and reminisce through our objects from home, and also take a peek at what we have in storage through our online collection. If you want to look at the objects we have uploaded so far, click below!

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At first glance, many of the objects held in the Wee Museum of Memory’s collection might look like something you’d find at the back of your grandmother’s cupboard, or mentioned in one of her childhood stories, rather than the glamorous artifacts you might initially expect in museum collections. When you think about museum collections, many of us might conjure up something out of the films Indiana Jones or Night at the Museum, images of huge warehouses stacked with rows of huge wooden crates filled with priceless artifacts. Those films portray a dazzling picture of museum archives and collections, and while this sentiment certainly captures how incredibly interesting museum collections can be, in the real world, impressive, luxurious artifacts really only reveal the history of those who could afford to own them.

The artifacts featured in this Hollywood-afied image of a museum collection, like golden goblets, bejewelled crowns, and imposing swords, tell the stories of history’s powerful. If we want to hear other stories, those of the less powerful and less well-known, those of everyday people, we have to take a look at the ‘ordinary’ objects that made up their lives. These are the kind of objects that the Wee Museum of Memory keeps both on display and in its collections. Our objects are often acquired with specific local memories attached and inspire our museum visitors, who might connect these objects to their own past, to reminisce. These ‘normal’ objects once sat in kitchens, school rooms, workplace benches, or other ‘ordinary’ spaces, and witnessed the happy days and the rough times of the everyday people who owned them.

Beauty Under the Floorboards

Five boxes of hair product held in our collections

The first objects that we’ve chosen to look at are five tiny cardboard boxes filled with sets of glass hair dye bottles. While they might appear unassuming at first, when you look a little closer, they are almost like little windows that allow us to glimpse a piece of daily life in the past through them. Surprisingly, these little boxes of hair product have quite a mysterious story attached, a story we can reimagine if we peer through them into the past.

Four of the boxes are L’Oreal Imedia Hair Tint. While L’Oreal is a recognizable modern brand, one look reveals that these particular dyes come from a time long gone by. The four L’Oreal Imedia boxes date from the 1930s. The fifth box, also from the 1930s, is a lesser-known brand called Nusheen Instant Retouch Liquid. Curiously, the original Nusheen product is no longer inside the box and was, for reasons unknown to us, replaced by another bottle of L’Oreal Imedia dye. The illustration on the outside of the Nusheen box reflects the beauty standards of the time: thin brows, heavily rouged cheeks, and hair cut into a bob.

Learn more about the origins of L’Oréal

Imedia was one of the first revolutionary hair-care lines created by the just-blossoming L’Oréal company in the 1930s, born in response to a world where women were now clamoring into salons to get the latest fashions in vogue. L’Oreal’s founder, chemist Eugène Schueller, created his first product, a safe synthetic hair dye, in 1909 and named it ‘L’Auréale’, potentially inspired by the popular Auréole hairstyle, which involved wearing the hair like a “halo” around the head. The company only later officially became L’Oreal.

Set of Imedia developer and dye bottles (contained in each of the Imedia boxes), c.1930s

The Bob

was the in vogue hairstyle of the 1920s and 30s. For centuries, Western women had worn their hair long. The bob, which first appeared in the 1910s, began as a rebellious statement of anti-traditionalism and individuality. The hairstyle came to be associated with flapper girls who turned traditional femininity on its head and famously disregarded the social norm. This meant, of course, that many people initially opposed the bob and its connotations of rebellion. However, the popularization of the hairstyle by celebrities such as Louise Brooks, Josephine Baker (who was known for wearing one of the most daring bob styles, the Eton bob), and Clara Bow meant that women were flocking to salons for the cut by the 1920s. The bob had entered the mainstream. To explore some of the many bob styles popular in the 1920s and 30s, click here.

Publicity photo of Josephine Baker sporting the Eton Bob, 1930s

The illustrated woman on the Nusheen box looks like she is sporting either the Charleston Cut or the Shingle version of the bob, and has styled it in Marcel or finger waves. Marcel waves were created using a Marcel curling iron, a handheld metal curling device originally heated over a fire and then clamped around the hair to create long-lasting waves. Finger waves were created by pinching and combing hair into an S-shape flat along the head, then setting them with a styling lotion.

To many women in the 1930s, and likely the past owner of the five hair product boxes in our collection, this illustrated woman would have been the pinnacle of current fashions. While women were striving to achieve this fashionable look, it was also heavily criticized by some. These competing sentiments created a tension for women, who were both encouraged by beauty corporations to subscribe to the new beauty standards of the rapidly changing 1930s and also told to resist them by others.

The three images below, from the Wee Museum of Memory’s own collection of photographs, show real women in the 1920s sporting the bob. The “unknown woman,” photographed in 1925, has styled her hair in waves and likely used a marcel iron or the finger waves technique.

Janet (Nettie) Burgess (later Park, 1924

Want to explore more photos?

We have a photo collection of over 5,000 images online and open to the public! Click below if you’d like to take a look at the rest of the collection.

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At the same time that women were cutting their hair up to their ears, hair dye became increasingly more popular. Just like the bob, flapper girls were some of the first to dye their hair in noticeable ways. However, many women were partaking in private to cover up greys or subtly change their colour, even though it was often seen as a hallmark of a promiscuous girl. Although the stigma had relaxed significantly by the 1930s and many women were openly dyeing their hair, many still wanted to hide it. Brands recognized this and often chose to advertise their dyes as tints to entice women who were scared of “dyes.”

You can see this sales technique in the five hair products in our collection. The Nusheen product specifically mentions it is “not a dye” and claims to wash out with shampoo, while the L’Oreal boxes are advertised as tints, not dyes. Perhaps the real woman who owned these hair products in the 1930s felt the tension of wanting to change the colour of her hair, but not wanting to reveal or admit that she was using dyes.

Top of the Nusheen box reads “Not A Dye”

Bottom of the Imedia box reads “Hair Tint”

The most mysterious aspect of these specific boxes is the fact that they were discovered under the floorboards of a bungalow in the Granton area of Edinburgh during a renovation. Their discovery, almost like little boxes of buried treasure dug up from the floorboards, immediately makes you question who hid them and why. What kind of pressures led them to be hidden? Was their owner embarrassed? Were they secretly dyeing their hair?

Perhaps a young girl desperately wanted to dye her hair like the fashionable older girls at her school or the movie stars she saw in cinemas and advertisements. Maybe her parents forbade her from dyeing her hair because they considered it too mature for a girl her age. Maybe she wanted the in-vogue look so badly that she scrounged together various bottles from her mother’s bathroom cupboards or enlisted her friends at school to pinch some from their own mothers. Maybe this young girl never worked up the courage to oppose her parents’ no-dye policy, and so the stolen dyes were forgotten beneath the floor.

Or maybe a woman entering her later years felt the ever-growing pressures to maintain her youth through modern artificial means, and so purchased the dye to hide the grey hairs peeking out along her hairline. Maybe she didn’t want to admit that she was going grey. Or maybe she didn’t want to admit that she was subscribing to the new world of artificial beauty, and so hid the evidence under the floor.

Could it have been that someone disliked the fact that their wife or daughter was dyeing their hair and so hid them away? Or maybe someone was jealous of her sister’s coloured hair and so stashed them away and forgot about them.

While we can’t say for sure who hid them or the reason why, these five small boxes of hair product have connected them to us decades later. Someone decades ago was likely facing the same pressures and embarrassment that many of us face today in a world where the beauty standard continues to climb to unachievable heights.

By looking at objects like these, we can relate to those who lived in the past. Their worries and joys are often not so different to out own. Its this connection between the past and the present that can make the exploration of these everyday objects so interesting.

If you want to hear more about some of the other intriguing objects in our collection and stay up to date with our cataloguing journey, stay tuned for our next blog post!

by Matilda Whitelock

Matilda Whitelock