Conservation recognition and the Gilbert Doble story

I blogged a few weeks ago about the Marrickville Winged Victory conservation project and I am delighted to report that our work won a National Trust Heritage Award at last Wednesday’s Award presentations.

What is interesting about the project is that we still have not worked out how Gilbert Doble made his sculptures. A local Marrickville lad, he was clearly a bit of an oddball. At a time when any significant bronze foundry work had to be sent to England, he developed a home grown electro-deposition process that he perfected himself in his own studio in his back garden in Marrickville. Even after we have been intimately involved with the Winged Victory we still can’t quite work out how he did it.

The Winged Victory conservation team inspecting the sculpture 

The interesting thing is that, despite the failure of his Winged Victory sculpture (it only lasted 40 years before coming apart at the seams and needing to be brought down for safety reasons), his other public sculptures have lasted well. These include the Evans Memorial in Bathurst, notable according to the local guidebook for “its respectful depiction of an Aboriginal man crouched at Evans' knee - representing one of the Aboriginals who acted as a guide for Evans on his surveys.” 

As well as Winged Victory, Doble was also commissioned to undertake two other memorials, for Wellington and Pyrmont. At a time when war memorials were either a block of stone or had a soldier atop them, his approach was distinctive, avoiding the militaristic nature of such and concentrating on the mix of grief and motherly support to the fallen that his female figures depicted.

Pyrmont War Memorial

A fun side story of this project is that it has all been filmed as part of a 5 part documentary on the Australian War Memorial called 'The Memorial: Beyond the Anzac legend' put together by the Eye Works team for the History Channel. Neil Oliver (he of ‘Coast’ fame) fronted the cameras and kept us all entertained with his charming Scottish accent. 

The Winged Victory conservation team with Neil Oliver

And while we are on awards, I will just slip in that we also won a Highly Commended for our work on the Sydney Town Hall Air Raid Shelter sign. It was a good day for recognition of expert conservation practice.

Context and Cragside

A constant challenge for house museum interpretation is contextualising the building and its contents. We all know how stories bring places alive, and the reality is that some house museums have more going for them in this space than others.

Cragside near Morpeth in Northumberland is one such house, and a recent visit confirmed what a sterling job the National Trust are doing with it. And what a story it has to tell. The owner, Sir William, later 1st Lord, Armstrong (1810 - 1900) was one of those great Victorian industrialists and engineers who brought Britain to world pre-eminence by the end of the 19th century. Famous for an ability to so immerse himself in solving a problem that his colleagues would wonder if he was still alive (note to self: must remember to try this in boring meetings), he would emerge from his trance with another mechanical solution.

Generally this was applied, as far as I could see, to building battleships for the Japanese at his shipyard in Newcastle. But with the fortune this provided him with, he set to in a remote part of Northumberland to build Cragside with the architect Richard Norman Shaw.

There he included every gadget he could think of to invent, from running hot and cold water (unheard of at the time!), to an hydraulic lift, an automatic spit for meat in front of the fire (every home should have one) to electric light powered by a hydro-electric power plant, the first in the world.

He even convinced the Prince and Princess of Wales to come and stay to savour these delights, building onto the house to accommodate their visit including the most humongous fireplace known to man.

The National Trust have done a great job of making the house feel as if Lord Armstrong has not long departed in an unfussy but well explained way. Well worth a visit as a model of how to tell a good story.