Blog posts

A Message from Christmas Past and a Tragic Reminder

Posted by Meredith Greiling on Monday 8 November 2010

This beautiful Christmas telegram came into Aberdeen Maritime Museum's collections just a month ago.

It seems unremarkable; a charming example of a lost form of communication and similar to the millions of Christmas greetings we send every year, but it illustrates a tragic story from Aberdeen's fishing history.
The telegram was donated to the collection by a former trawlerman who sent the message as a teenager to his family in December 1964 via Wick radio station.
Just a few weeks later his fishing boat, the Blue Crusader, and the 13-man crew went missing in a storm off the Orkney Islands and were never heard from again. The deckhand who had sent this telegram had decided not to go back on the Blue Crusader when it went out again after Christmas and so was not, fortunately for him, on board when the vessel was over come by a storm on the night of the 13th January 1965.
This summer a team of divers contacted me to help identify a wreck they had found and, using ship plans from the museum's collections, they were able to positively identify the Blue Crusader and provide some closure for the families of the men and boys who died on her that winter 45 years ago.
As often happens, circumstances such as the discovery of a wreck have brought new light onto past events and has led someone to realise that something previously treasured as a purely personal family token can speak to a bigger historic story.

48 hours in the Life of a Curator

Posted by Meredith Greiling on Monday 20 September 2010

Sometimes in this job we get to do some very glamorous and exciting things and sometimes we get to do things that sound glamorous and exciting, but aren't, or at least not entirely.

Courier trips largely fall into the latter category. Last month I had quite an epic trip escorting George Hitchcock's immense and beautiful painting; Maternité from Grand Rapids Art Gallery in Michigan, USA, to a storage facility in the Netherlands.

This is part of an ongoing loan of the painting to an internationally-touring exhibition 'Dutch Utopia: American Arts in Holland, 1880-1914' which has seen the painting previously exhibited at the Telfair Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia and my job was to over see its safe arrival into Den Haag, prior to it being installed at the Singer Laren Museum in the Netherlands.

I have to admit that it is a real treat to visit cities such as Grand Rapids and see their fabulous new art museum from top to bottom, but this trip was a real endurance test as well. We packed the painting in the gallery at Grand Rapids Art Museum on the Tuesday morning and I watched it safely taken down from the wall (a six man job as it is such a beast of a painting and the crate is gargantuan) and then I had the afternoon to explore the city. I visited Frank Lloyd Wright's beautiful Meyer May House and the Gerald R Ford Presidential Museum and generally strolled around enjoying the city.

On Wednesday morning my fellow courier, Jessica, and I over saw the packing of 59 crates, of all shapes and sizes (Aberdeen's was one of the largest and definitely the heaviest!) into two 16-wheel trucks. At 2:30pm we set off on the five hour drive to Chicago's O'Hare airport, or at least to the cargo warehouse, where we stood, literally - chairs are for wimps, apparently, for another five hours in the heat and dirt and sweat while the cargo handlers unloaded the crates from the trucks and re-packaged (palletized) them for the cargo plane.

At midnight, Jessica and I were taken to a hotel to shower and rest for two hours before being picked up again and taken back to the airport to over see the packing of the airplane at 2:30am. This was finally completed by 7am on Thursday morning and we took off into the sun rising over the Great Lakes to New York to collect some more cargo and then on to Luxemburg. I highly recommend flying on cargo flights; tons of leg room and you help yourself to food in the galley, plus we were invited to sit in the cockpit with the pilots for take off and landings.

At Luxemburg there followed a short walk through passport control and a long wait for our trucks to arrive; the drivers had arrived at 6pm only for our flight to be five hours late and they had all gone to sleep in their cabs. We started the process of unloading the plane, identifying crates and watching the loading of the trucks at 11:30pm on Thursday night and set off for our final destination, Den Haag, at 5am on Friday morning.

By the time Jessica and I and our 59 oversized pieces of hold luggage had made it to the storage facility it was 10:30am and our beds were tantalizingly close, but still we had one final unpacking of trucks to oversee. Thankfully, a gang of chirpy Dutchmen arrived to help our by now very tired drivers to unload and we were all finished by 12:30pm on Friday; more than 48 hours after beginning the process of packing the first trucks at Michigan.

It was a long, gruelling, sometimes exhausting, sometimes frightening, sometimes boring trip, but it was also an adventure and parts of it were really fun.

 

In the Harbour this Week: Greenpeace ship; Esperanza

Posted by Meredith Greiling on Monday 20 September 2010

An interesting visitor to the Regent Quay this weekend is the Greenpeace ship, Esperanza. 

I love the bow-fitted webcam, which currently has a great view of the Regent Quay.

The ship arrived in Aberdeen on Friday morning, fresh back from disrupting drilling on the Stena Don Oil platform in the Arctic.

Built  in 1984 as a fire-fighting vessel for the Russian Navy in Gdansk, Poland and bought by Greenpeace in 2002, Esperanza has been involved in some high profile activities, such as protests against Japanese whaling and the action in the Arctic earlier this month.

Aberdeen, of course, has links to another Greenpeace vessel; the Rainbow Warrior.  Originally built in Aberdeen in 1955 as the Sir William Hardy, this trawler became world famous when she was sunk by French secret services in July 1985 with the loss of one Greenpeace crew member.

You can see more information about the Sir William Hardy/Rainbow Warrior on our website: www.aberdeenships.com

 

Aberdeen Maritime Museum Phase III - Time for a Revamp

Posted by Meredith Greiling on Monday 14 June 2010

At Aberdeen Maritime Museum, we pride ourselves on bringing the history of the city right up to the present day with our high tech displays on the oil and gas industry in the North Sea.
The trouble with trying to be cutting edge though, is that technology moves so fast and pretty soon you are left with displays that, frankly, belong in a museum.
We have to keep up with the progress being made in a fast moving industry, but our permanent oil and gas displays haven't changed in twelve years and are starting to look a little creaky.
That is why we have asked museum designers, Studio MB, to come up with a proposed redesign for these areas of the museum.
Watch this space as we begin the process of bringing our museum into the 21^st century.

 

 

Aberdeen Ship Still Chasing Illegal Whaling in the Southern Ocean

Posted by Meredith Greiling on Thursday 25 March 2010

From today's Guardian newspaper. That's not just any old ship, that's our old ship (Fisheries Protection Vessel, to be precise). The Sea Shepherd started life as the Westra in Aberdeen in 1974.

Good to see she's still working hard after all these years.

Links to relevant bits:

Guardian Article

Aberdeen Built Ships

 

Goodbye to Hall Russell - the jewel in British Shipbuilding

Posted by Meredith Greiling on Wednesday 24 March 2010

So that's that then. The last items have been wrapped in bubble wrap and returned to their rightful owners or their shelves in the store and all the months of hard work last summer are now forgotten.
Well, not quite. It's true that the exhibition has been dismantled and the next show is going up as we speak, but that's not quite the end of the story. There have been a lot of unexpected legacies from this exhibition which will have a positive lasting effect for the museum and its collections.
An important part of the work I did last year in preparation for the Hall Russell exhibition was collecting dozens of oral history interviews with people who worked at the shipyard about their lives and experiences. I used extracts from just ten of these recordings in the show on our fabulous 'Talking Telephone'. Rather than just see this put on a shelf until the next exhibition to use oral history recordings, we have installed the telephone in the shipbuilding gallery, where it looks like it always belonged. The entire collection of recordings, which has increased since the exhibition opened as so many former Hall Russell employees got in touch, are now being kept for posterity and will be an invaluable resource for future historians.
Some the items on loan for the exhibition may well be coming into the collection permanently (watch this space for future updates) and many more items were collected during the run of the exhibition as people went home and thought, 'hmm, maybe the maritime museum would like this'.
Whilst the temporary exhibition may have ended, the story of Hall Russell & Co Ltd, the jewel in British shipbuilding, goes on at Aberdeen Maritime Museum.