STRAWBERRY HILL FOR EVER!

 

When we visited Strawberry Hill last September one of the friends there mentioned that David Austin had bred a special rose for them, called, predictably, Strawberry Hill.  It was due to go on sale in 2008.

Like everyone else I really enjoyed our visit to this fantastic house and particularly appreciated the quality of the tour we were offered.  I thought that the new rose might be an appropriate memento of our weekend so in January this year I checked out the David Austin website and put in an order. 

The fearful weather has meant that my new rose has taken a long time to flower but – at last – it’s in bloom and it’s everything the description said it was.  I’m delighted with the addition to my garden and the Strawberry Hill Friends will have received a small commission on my order.

Perhaps a Blackburn Museum rose might be too much to hope for….

by Valerie

Chairman’s Jottings

We have celebrated the 25^th anniversary of the founding of the Friends way back in 1982 and it has been an interesting year.

We started off with the Garden Party at ‘The Garth’ and luckily the rain held off for the afternoon and then came down after the last guests had left. We had a superb weekend in London at the end of September and the sun shone all weekend. The theme was ‘Sir John Sloane’ and we began by visiting the museum in Lincoln’s Inn. Over the weekend we went to the Dulwich Picture Gallery, visited the Wallace Collection and finally were entertained by the Friends of Strawberry Hill, the home of the Walpoles, before returning home.

I must pay tribute to Mike Millward who, over the years, has given us great inspiration, entertainment and education in all things artistic and in French cuisine and their wines on our visit to France. He now is in need of a rest and the committee have agreed to take some of the load off his shoulders. David Shipway has offered to take on the responsibility of organising the day trips and I hope to be able to find speakers with your help. PLEASE, if you have heard any interesting speakers let me know.

Sadly we have had to say goodbye to Bill Baldwin, Harold Thornber and Garth Edwards. We will miss them both and the Friends were well represented at their respective funerals.

I thank all the Friends for their support in this Jubilee year and I do hope you have enjoyed taking part in the celebrations.

 

Joy Heffernan

 

This year the AGM was held in Penzance, organised by the Friends of Penlee Art Gallery and Museum. A great opportunity for a visit to Cornwall.

The weekend started off with a dinner for members of the council at the seafront conference hotel. With BAFM flags flying on the front.

The conference opened with two keynote speeches. Kate Brindley, Director of Bristol Museums, spoke about how a museum can help define the ‘sense of place’ (the theme of the conference). There followed group discussions around our need to represent the local community and support our museums. Some of us may hold longer local knowledge then our present staff and joining a Friends group can help.

Later there was a challenging talk by Sir Neil Cossons, past director of Ironbridge Gorge Museum and past Chairman of English Heritage, who argued that museums should be the leaders in helping to set the cultural agenda. He urged us to think about the role of Friends and of our national organisation.

The social side of the conference went well with an after dinner talk by Jonathan Grifffith from the National Maritime Museum in Cornwall, a Gala Buffet at the fascinating Porthcurno Telegraph Museum near Land’s End and lots of opportunities to share ideas during the informal periods at our comfortable hotel. A choice of six trips was arranged: we climbed St. Michael’s Mount and visited a tin mine.

A what? An Ubi Bird!

 

This cuneiform tablet from the Hart collection, is one of many thousands of such tablets found at Drehem in present day Iraq. As the summary in the museum tells us the tablet records the numbers of bulls (305) sent for sacrifice to the god Elil in one year. How do we find more information about this tablet?

Elil, more commonly known as Enlil, is widely referenced as he was one of the chief  Sumerian gods, one of his epithets being ‘wild bull’. He is the prime mover of their flood myth in that he planned to destroy mankind to be rid of their noise – too many people, too much clamour. Having sent the great deluge, he remembered too late that  the gods depended utterly on mankind for their food. But there was a survivor and the starving gods ‘fell like flies’ on his first sacrifice.

Information on Drehem is very scarce. None of the reference books  I searched had any mention of it. I did find from the Internet that Drehem was a distribution centre for livestock, hence the vast numbers of tablets found there, and that it was almost a suburb of Nippur. I could now return to my books to find that Nippur was a great religious centre where Enlil was worshipped.

What truly intrigued me on the tablet was the name of the month when the greatest number of sacrifices was  made ‘the month of the eating of the ubi bird’ What was an ubi bird? I was driven back to the internet as I could find no printed material. This is when I came up against the iniquitous system of charging for knowledge, as one of the few references was to an academic journal which demanded a  subscription for access. Having tried the free sites and only found the ubi bird mentioned in what appears to be a hymn, I had to ask a colleague to use their institutional membership to do the research for me. The article she found, for  which I could have paid several hundred pounds, quoted a  list of birds, one of which is the ubi, from what appears to be a hymn….! I am sure this knowledge is worth hiding behind a financial barrier, think how it could be exploited.

The Hart collection of printed material is, to my mind, the chief asset of the museum, a source of endless pleasure and fascination. How much more interesting it would all be with a little more information about the background of these texts. I have found out a little with the expenditure of much time, which of course the museum staff do not have. But there is so much else which could be asked.  Who wrote them? Who read them? What do they actually say?

Many thanks to Nick for taking and supplying the photograph.

by John