8. A Year in the Life of Elizabeth Gaskell’s House
Posted
1st December 2024
in 10 year Anniversary, blog, blogsNnews
Week 8. 25 -29 November 2024
The week started with back to back meetings for me, catching up Trustees, a meeting about the plans for International Women’s Day 2025 and my Spark leadership workshop. Jane, one of our volunteers, was in the House cataloguing a new book donation (see the blog on Howitt’s journal), and Katy and Adam packed up two objects (a watercolour and a photo) we had on loan which will be returned very soon. Adam also made a start on removing some old/defunct signage that had been painted on the wall by the stairs- he finished this later in the week and you wouldn’t know that anything had been there. It looks so much better.
On Tuesday and Wednesday morning Katy attended the Heritage Volunteer Group Conference online. I had nominated her for volunteer leader of the year and although she didn’t win, it sounded like the conference was very useful and topical. At the same as this, Lucy and a group of volunteers visited The Working Class Movement Library (WCML) in Salford which had been organised by Elaine, who volunteers both at WCML and Elizabeth Gaskell’s House. I worked from home trying to tackle some of the admin relating to the new Writers Residency.
Wednesday was Lancashire Day and in the evening we hosted another popular online talk about Manchester in Victorian Literature. Lynda also officially announced the event programme for next year, which will include a focus on the novel Ruth. In the House we welcomed two new volunteers and began training them with the help of other volunteers. It was a busy day in the Tea Room with lots of people (including staff and volunteers) picking up Christmas gifts.
After running a very successful fire drill (everything reset correctly this time) on Thursday morning, we welcomed three new volunteers to the team and started to get them trained on tickets, the Victorian period rooms and the Tea Room. Down in the Tea Room I had a meeting with Steve from the Writing Squad about the application process for the upcoming Writers Residency so we could agree a plan and timeframe. As soon as Steve had left, I then had to act as crowd control whilst Cheshire Drainage checked everything was working as it should in our drains. More proof that we never have a normal week!
I spent the next hour watching the camera explore our part Victorian drainage system, which includes two large water tanks which we think were built to collect rain water so it could be reused for laundry etc. rather than using fresh water from the well. If this is correct it shows us another example of how sensible the Victorians were and how they were well ahead of us when it came to ‘some’ matters of environmental sustainability.
Thursday evening was our Board Meeting and this month we were in the House rather than on Zoom. Excitingly we welcomed two new trustees – Rose and Rana – who we have recruited as part of the project we are doing with Kids in Museums to recruit Young Trustees to our board. I’m currently working on a news story to introduce them, which I’ll share in the next week or so. I finally locked up at 7pm after getting in at 8.15am. It had been a long day.
On Friday we went live with our discount code for Museum Shop Sunday (1 Dec) for our online shop and several orders immediately came in. (NB – cat garlands have sold out – sorry!) Lucy and Ellie set up the House for our final wedding of 2024 and dealt with all the last minute preparations with the wedding party. In the midst of this we got a call saying we had hit our email data limit so some of us (mainly me) spent an hour deleting old emails. The theme for this week does seem to be about blockages – drains and data!
Sally Jastrzebski-Lloyd
