At Tullie, we’re able to share our fantastic collections with the public thanks to the generosity of donors who have entrusted family treasures and important local objects to the museum over generations.
Not every object arrives in the museum with an interesting back story or a meaningful link to Carlisle, though. A huge part of my job on our De-tabooing Disposals project is trying to find out how objects ended up in the museum’s stores. Sometimes, this is straightforward, a catalogue number is marked on the object or on a label tied to it and I can look this number up in our object database and in our accession registers. The accession registers go back to the opening of the museum in 1893 and – once I’ve managed to decipher the handwriting – they provide me with all kinds of information about who donated an object and when.
Excerpt from an accession register, featuring tricky handwriting.
Sometimes, I locate the catalogue number in the book and read the dreaded words ‘Found in the museum’. This means that at some point in the past the object became separated from its catalogue number – or it wasn’t given one in the first place – and so it was assigned its current number. Objects ‘Found in the museum’ so far include a suitcase, a bacon slicer and a three-piece suite! I then need to see if I can reunite these objects with any information about them.
The suitcase in question has a monogram – H.H. – but there are no other clues, and there’s nothing in any of our index cards or files about it, so we’re rehoming this suitcase with our education team, who are going to use it in their workshops.
Suitcase in the stores belonging to H.H.
Sometimes, it seems that if an object stayed still long enough in the museum it was accessioned. On the store shelves, I’ve found a fire extinguisher from Old Tullie House, the electric fire from the curator’s office, and a box of hoover attachments from the museum garage for a hoover we don’t have.
Sometimes, an object does have a number marked on it and it is in the accession register, but its real origins remain a mystery. This is the case with the rusty object at the top of this post, the register tells us it is an ‘Unknown cannister believed to be a milk churn. Found on the Solway beach…Badly corroded, lid sealed’ and that it was brought in by a member of staff. The label of my favourite mystery object so far (pictured below) reads ‘Found on rubbish tip, use unknown’. If you have any idea what it might be, please get in touch!
Mystery object in the Tullie stores.
In the 1980s and 1990s the accession registers filled up rapidly as curators tried to capture everything they could about everyday life, and this is how we ended up with things like an empty M&S yoghurt pot – likely to be from a past curator’s lunch. Museums worked differently during this period. There was still space on the shelves and objects like the Hoover Junior below were accepted without question even though the museum already had three. When people were buying a new hoover, there was no Facebook Marketplace or Freecycle for getting rid of the old one. Reviewing our twenty vacuums recently, I found three came from past curator’s mums who lived nowhere near Carlisle.
One of several Hoover Juniors that were added to the collection.
I keep telling myself that at least these hoovers didn’t end up in landfill, but right now we have too many that don’t belong in the museum, taking up shelf-space that is needed for objects that matter to Carlisle. When we dispose of our duplicate hoovers, we want to make sure they find a new home or use and don’t end up in landfill. How we do that is going to be another challenge.
