House Magazine Autumn 2006

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New Museum films will reveal how agricultural machines worked

The Museum’s latest Designation Challenge Fund project began in April and involves producing short films showing the detailed setting-up and use of the Museum’s horse-powered agricultural machinery. 

Three recent graduates from Portsmouth University – Tim Connell, James Allison and Oliver Turner – have been employed to produce around 10 films which will provide an invaluable record of how agricultural machinery was used. The team began work in September, with the Horse Gin at Watersfield Stable. 

The digital films will eventually be available for use by the Museum, other institutions and the general public, and cover the 10 most significant generic types of equipment in the Museum’s collections e.g. implements used in ploughing, drilling and reaping. Three versions will be made available: an onsite version for use in exhibitions and displays – up to five minutes long; a research version – up to 30 minutes long; and an online version – some two minutes long. Where possible, each film will show a range of examples within a generic type, and include demonstrations of preparation, use and maintenance of the equipment. 

“It is increasingly important to record exactly how these types of machinery were operated since those people with the knowledge become fewer and fewer,” says Curator, Julian Bell.  “Besides the general working principles of each form of equipment, it is those unique pieces of personal knowledge that experienced operatives have accumulated over the years which are of great importance and in most danger of being lost.” 

The two-year project, for which the Museum was awarded £76,000, follows on from previous projects funded by the Designation Challenge Fund. These have included the moving to a more appropriate site of Winkhurst Tudor Kitchen, the refurbishment of Pendean Farmhouse, the removal of the artefact collection to the Downland Gridshell, an Interpretation Strategy, the Volunteer Support Project and improvements to the condition and accessibility of the large collection of items stored off-site. 

The Museum moves forward on its Access Project

By Richard Harris

Aerial view looking south west, showing the Museum (left) with its boundary (broken orange line) and the site for the proposed visitor centre (red outline). West Dean College, park and village are in the middle distance, and the sweep of the River Lavant and the A286 turning southwards to Chichester can be clearly seen.

Contour map of the Lavant valley, showing the boundary of West Dean Park (a Grade II* listed historic park) and the Museum in its north-east corner.

The Museum has submitted an application for outline planning permission for its proposed ‘Access Project’, first described in the Museum Magazine, Autumn 2004 issue. 

The aim is to improve the standard of our visitor services and there are two elements to the proposal:  

The key to the visitor centre lies in the word ‘orientation’. In our Forward Plan, adopted in March 2003, we recognized that our collections and site potentially cater for many varied interests among visitors, but people need guidance to understand what is available – hence the concept of an ‘Orientation Gallery’ at the heart of the  visitor centre. The gallery would offer help at many levels and in many different areas of interest, from an introductory presentation to specific and detailed information on a wide variety of topics. 

The second element of the project relates to parking facilities. Our car parks were created in 1971, carved out of the wooded chalk slope. They are charming but dangerous – too steep, too narrow, with no pedestrian separation, and extremely difficult for people with disabilities. We need safe and accessible car parks, designed to modern standards.  

Our other problem is that our existing car parks can only support up to about 750 visitors. Above that number we have to use fields on the opposite side of the site as overflow car parks. This happens on less than 28 days in a  year, but affects 25-30% of our visitors.  

It creates great difficulties both for visitors, who are remote from our facilities – and for us, as we have to run parallel ticket offices. So we need car parking areas that give all visitors access to a single reception point, whether on a winter’s day with a dozen visitors, or a summer event with 5,000!  

We commissioned exhaustive feasibility studies from consultants, including architects, road engineers and landscape consultants. We have studied our site in the context of West Dean Park, and thought long and hard about future development of the site. The result is that we believe that our proposed solution has the potential greatly to enhance the Museum’s future.  

The proposal 

The Museum acquires a ‘Tin Tabernacle’

Richard Harris

St Margaret’s Church, South Wonston, Hampshire, on its original site.

This summer the Museum acquired a new exhibit building for re-erection – the first for several years. It is a small prefabricated church, of the kind often known as a ‘tin tabernacle’. Originally built in 1908, its site, at South Wonston, Hampshire, was needed for redevelopment and the owners, the St Margaret’s Mission Trust, offered it  to us.  

We accepted it because there was clearly no other alternative to demolition. As an exhibit it will be ideal, as it is very small (30ft x15ft) and simple: no spire or transept, just a plain rectangle plus a tiny porch and vestry. The interior was well preserved and had always had chairs rather than pews. It has an excellent provenance, in that a lot is known about the circumstances of its construction.  

Several such chapels have been dismantled and re-erected in other open air museums, but no one seems to have published an account of the details of their construction, so we have taken detailed records in order to add to the sum of knowledge about prefabricated buildings. It bears interesting relationships with other exhibits at the Museum, such as the Whittaker’s Cottages and the workshop from Newick, and we intend to re-erect it in the vicinity of these buildings to form a study area for buildings of the late 19th and 20th centuries. Its construction is also comparable with that of some of our wheeled vehicles and shepherds’ huts.  

The dismantling, which took three weeks, was carried out by the Museum’s  collections team – Curator, Julian Bell, Guy Viney and Ben Headon – while Museum Director Richard Harris did the measured drawings. Meticulous planning is required, but there are always decisions to be made as the job progresses. Detailed recording has to be carried out at all stages, resisting the temptation to go too fast and miss significant finds – such as the wonderful ‘Red Hand Inodorous Felt’ labels that survived. All smaller components such as nails, and even later repairs and alterations, have to be sampled.  

Naturally enough, the dismantling sequence is the reverse of construction – more or less. First the corrugated cladding was taken off, each sheet being numbered. Then the roof structure was removed as a series of intact sections consisting of the purlins and the internal boarding attached to them. The two internal roof trusses were also removed intact. Then the internal boarding was removed from the walls – the trickiest job of all, as it is all too easy to split the boards – so that the wall frames could be taken apart. Once the main structure was removed we lifted the carpet to reveal the original wooden floor which still bore a number of marks indicating where fittings had been, including the altar, altar rail, font and stove. The building rested on a brick plinth, and the top two courses of bricks were numbered to ensure complete accuracy of the reconstruction.  

The timber framework was all of 4in x 2in softwood, jointed together, and the main building and porch were clearly supplied as a kit of pre-cut parts. The number ‘207’ was stencilled in numerous places, which we assume was the kit number, and the horizontal rails were of three standard lengths. The vestry, however, was of slightly different and markedly poorer construction. 

One of the timbers showing stencilled marks
indicating their position in the structure.

We intend to re-erect the building as soon as possible, subject to planning permission being obtained. It will be restored to its original state, the few later alterations being removed, and interpretation will cover both its function as a church and its manufacture as a prefabricated kit building.  

Red Hand Inodorous Felt 

This material was the precursor of the modern bitumen-backed material we know today. It was made by D Anderson of Manchester and the idea for the logo has its origins in Anderson’s plant in Belfast, where it was known as the Red Hand of Ulster (in the middle of the Ulster flag).

Wikipedia tells us that: the story of the Red Hand of Ulster reputedly dates to the arrival of Heremon, Heber and Ir, sons of King Milesius of Spain (Galicia), who were dispatched to conquer Ireland in 504 BC. One of them supposedly cut off his hand and tossed it ashore, that he might be the one to have first claim to the land. Another story relates to one of two giants engaged in battle, whose hand was cut off in the process and left a red imprint on the rocks. A third story recounts how Ui

St. Margaret’s Mission Church, South Wonston, Hampshire.

Karen Kousseff describes the history of the Tin Tabernacle

In 1892 an area of poor quality farmland, on a chalk Downland ridge at the southern end of the parish of Wonston, near Winchester, was sold for development, and so as born the village of South Wonston. The Mission Church of St. Margaret’s was among the earliest buildings erected there, and became the hub of the growing community.  

With no water supply to the area, initial development was slow, and the 1901 census lists just 10 households in South Wonston. The Rector of Wonston, the Revd. R. F.  Bigg-Wither, saw that it would be both practical and necessary to have a base in the new village, from which his curate could minister to its people. In July 1908 he paid £8 of his own money for a plot of land measuring 80ft x 50ft, for the purpose of erecting a mission room.  

Within a matter of months, the curate (the Revd. Charles H. Roberts) had placed an order with Humphreys Ltd of Knightsbridge, a company that specialised in supplying corrugated iron buildings ready to assemble. The mission room was to be timber-framed, clad with galvanised corrugated iron, and measuring 25ft x 15ft (although its length as finally built was 30ft, not 25ft). The interior was to be clad with pine panelling; there would be a porch at the western end, a bell hung externally at the eastern end and a small vestry area added on the southern side.  

Money for the structure and fittings was raised largely by public donations, but included the proceeds of a jumble sale, a concert and two offertories. The building was purchased for £89 10s, and the foundations were laid at a cost of £13 by Joseph Groves, a local carpenter and builder, whose eldest child became the first person to be baptised in the mission church.   

The church was first used on Sunday 7 February 1909, and was formally licensed for divine service as a daughter church by the Bishop of Winchester on 20 December 1909. Baptisms could be performed there and recorded in the Wonston baptism register, but marriages and funerals would take place at the parish church in Wonston.  

The church was originally heated by an oil stove, but this was replaced in 1910 by a coal and wood burning stove. The church was lit by oil lamps, so ‘evening’ services were held only in daylight hours, as early as 3.00pm in the winter months. It was not until 1954 that electric lights were installed in the church. There were no pews, but wooden chairs and kneelers for up to 60 people. A sanctuary was created by means of two iron poles extending at right-angles to the wall either side of the altar, for which the ladies of the newly-formed St. Margaret’s Guild made curtains. The altar rail consisted of a single length of wood supported on brass uprights, screwed to the floor. At Christmas 1912 a local couple gave a set of silver Communion plate to St. Margaret’s, which had to be brought to church every Sunday from a neighbour’s house, until a safe was later installed in the vestry. Hymns were sung from the English Hymnal, accompanied on a harmonium donated by the Lady Laura Ridding. 

The interior of the Mission Church in 1981. (Photograph supplied by Karen Kousseff).

While most of the fittings were bought or donated, the stone font, originally installed just inside the back of the church, was actually ‘the ancient one of the parish’, possibly around 400-years-old. It had been discovered under the floorboards of the parish church in Wonston, after a serious fire there just a few months before the mission church was opened. It is believed to have been deliberately buried there in 1871, when a new font had been presented to the parish church. A note in the Parish Magazine of 1917 warns the architect of the future permanent St. Margaret’s church not to discard it, as it ‘links up a score of generations by the act of entry into the Church of their fathers.’  

By 1918 the village was growing but still very small, and the residents must have been devastated when nine of their young men were killed in the First World War, two of them from the same family. The villagers clubbed together to commission a marble memorial plaque to hang in the church, and later a second memorial commemorated a further four men who died in the Second World War, including two sons of Joseph Groves.  

In the 1920s, the role of St. Margaret’s as the focus of community life was enhanced by the addition of a corrugated iron hall, put up next to the church. Over the years many activities took place, from Sunday School, youth club and harvest suppers to concerts, shows and sales of work. The community continued to cherish the little church, surviving various setbacks such as an attempted arson attack (1932), woodworm in the chairs and dry rot under the vestry window (1948), and the cross falling from the roof in high winds (1963).  

After the arrival of electricity and mains water in the 1950s, and proper road surfacing and mains sewerage in the 1960s, South Wonston began to expand rapidly. By the mid 1980s, the mission church had become much too small for the size of the congregations, and some services were regularly held in the hall. The last ‘amen’ was said in the mission church on 29 September 1996, after which all services transferred to a new church of St. Margaret’s, built in the centre of the village adjoining the local school. As well as being much larger and better equipped, the new church was licensed for all forms of service, so marriages or funerals could be performed in the village for the first time.  

South Wonston is now preparing to become an ecclesiastical parish in its own right, an achievement founded on the faith and dedication of the early pioneers of the village, and for which the mission church will always have a special place in its history. 
 

Collections Update

Julian Bell

Over the summer the Museum received its usual numerous and extremely generous offers of historic items from the public, invaluable to the continuing development of our collections. Although a large number of offers are received, it is with regret and frustration that we are unable to accept them all. As with all museums, we have a collecting policy which dictates which types of artefact we collect in furtherance of our themes – historic buildings and rural life – and from which geographical area. We also have to take into consideration storage space and possible duplication of artefacts already in the collection. If we are unable to accept offers we always attempt to suggest alternative museums which may be able to help. Whether a donation has been accepted or not we are most grateful to all who have offered items.

Reed Comber

One item which we collected at the beginning of the year was a reed comber. This was actually a transfer from Plymouth Museum, rather than a donation from a member of the public, and it comes from well outside our collecting area. However it was in good condition and was collected expressly for use on site. 

Following some excellent conservation work and minor repairs by Ben Headon, our Collections Assistant, the comber is now in full working order and awaiting use.

Currently located in Redvins Yard, the comber will be attached to an external power source – a horse gin or small engine. The two spiked drums turn in opposite directions to each other and the sliding rack at the front feeds straw or reed into the machine which is then combed ready for use as thatching material. Great care is taken that the operator does not follow the straw into the machine!  

Band Saw

This hand-powered band saw was donated to us by Mr K White of Storrington, West Sussex in May and is a superb example, in excellent condition.

For a rugged piece of workshop equipment it has extremely graceful curves. It too has been conserved by Ben and brought into full working order.

It will shortly be transferred to the wood yard where it will be used alongside the treadle lathe, racksaw bench and timber crane which was re-erected earlier this year.  

Wheeled vehicles return to site 

By the time this magazine is published we will have completed vacating one of our offsite stores, at Manor Farm, Singleton.  

The artefacts stored there were all horse-drawn, wheeled vehicles and machinery, some of which have not been seen at the Museum for quite some time. By bringing them back to the main site, not only do visitors, staff and volunteers have the opportunity to see them, but we are also able to conserve and repair them more easily.

There are a number of larger waggons, including a rare and important Hop Waggon, used on the Whitbread Estate in Kent for the transportation of hop pockets. This is now located in the Charlwood Waggon Shed. A number of tip carts are now stored and displayed in the open fronted shed in Redvins Yard, along with two Sussex waggons, which differ slightly from each other in appearance.

One particularly interesting item is the wheeled water carrier which was previously used on the Museum site. Ben Headon has restored it, including its attached hand pump, and it will shortly be available for use once again for transporting water to crops and livestock.

Mystery object

During the spring, we placed a glass display case in the Upper Gridshell to show new and unusual acquisitions and also those artefacts for which we would like further information. This has proved to be very useful with visitors helping provide us with some extremely interesting details.

One such piece should, on the face of it, be fairly straightforward to identify as it has makers’ details stamped on it. However, this has not been the case and despite enlisting the help of the Patent Office and the national Rural Museums Network, very little helpful information has materialised.  

Any help in identifying this item, or any other we have included in the case would be greatly appreciated.