7. A Year in the Life of Elizabeth Gaskell’s House
Posted
25th November 2024
in 10 year Anniversary, blog, blogsNnews
Week 7. 17- 26 November 2024
This week started on Sunday for me as it was my turn on the rota to duty manage the day. It was a fairly quiet day and I manage to get through lots of admin, whilst hidden away in my warm office including Board reports, newsletter copy and follow-up emails to the young people we interviewed for our Young Trustee roles who we had interviewed the week before. I’ll share more about the two who have been appointed in a later post.
Some of our Sunday volunteers kindly allowed themselves to be photographed with their fingers crossed (see below) for the 30th Birthday celebrations for the National Lottery Heritage Fund which was on Tuesday 19 November.
On Monday and Tuesday we hosted school visits from St. Thomas More RC Primary School from Middleton. For the Tuesday tour I, unusually, had to do the tour part of the visit as we didn’t have any volunteers available. It has been a long time since I’ve had to fill in like this, but I muddled through and it sounded like they enjoyed themselves. We also included some discussions about Victorian Christmases in terms of the traditions we still do today – which was a nice warm-up for starting on the Christmas decorations themselves later in the week.
On Wednesday we did a fire drill which, despite being successful in terms of evacuating the building, resulted in creating a fault when resetting that alarm that required an engineer to come out and fix it. The fault turned off the heating, disabled the lift and stopped doors from locking. Not what we had planned for a Wednesday morning with visitors in the building. Thankfully it was resolved by mid afternoon, but it was a stressful situation.
In between all this, I managed to squeeze in a quick coffee and catch-up with the Manager of the Pankhurst Centre which is always productive and useful. Katy added some new Christmas stock to the shop including cat garlands (a personal favourite), whilst the volunteers (Elaine & Viv) helped to make some improvements to the book displays.
At the same time as all this was happening, we went public with the news that we had been successful in our application to the National Lottery Heritage Fund to deliver an inaugural Writers Residency as part of our 10-year anniversary. We have known for a few weeks, but we couldn’t share the news until last week. This is a project I have wanted to do at the House pretty much since I started, nearly 8 years ago, so I’m personally very proud that it was successful, and really looking forward to working with Manchester City of Literature and The Writing Squad on this.
After lunch I headed off site for the quarterly Manchester City of Literature meeting at the Anthony Burgess Centre and then finished the day working from home and sharing the news about the writers residency project across all our social media channels.
On Thursday we made a tentative start on the Christmas decorations. The tree itself and the holly will go up on the 1 December as we have a wedding on the 30th November, but we spent the morning hanging fairy lights and other decorations in the Tea Room and Servants’ Hall. We also tested the Christmas CD (just to get us in the mood) and discovered it had broken so new music was swiftly purchased.
Katy ran an induction for eight new volunteers on Thursday and we look forward to getting them trained and back in the House as soon as they can. Their help is very much needed.
I finished the week with the annual Literary Houses Conference, which this year was held at Newstead Abbey in Nottingham which was resplendent in snow. This conference is a chance for lots of literary house people to come together and share their news and discuss ideas. It is a real highlight of my year and is also a signifier that Christmas isn’t far away – something that was helped enormously by the snow in Nottingham and that Newstead Abbey looked glorious bedecked for their Christmas event. At Elizabeth Gaskell’s House December is by far our quietest month for visitors and we know we need to do more to attract visitors so it was good to see what others are doing.
Sally Jastrzebski-Lloyd
