University of Reading Museums and Collections

Alongside finalising gallery layouts, coming up with exciting ideas for interactive displays and filling in foundations for our extensions, our biggest update for you this week from the Museum of English Rural Life is the removal of our wagons from their monorail.

We managed to finish the job in one day with the help of a specialist removal company, a fork-lift truck and much bated breath. If you haven’t been to the Museum before, for the last ten years we have had several wagons raised from the floor on a monorail running down the length of the galleries. Each wagon was attached to its own beam which was first removed from its supports and brought to the floor; once the wagon’s own wheels were supporting it, the beam was then lowered from the wagon itself and taken away. One main worry was that since the wagons have been off their wheels for so long, and their wood so desiccated from the dry atmosphere of our building, that they may be a little brittle when on the floor again. They all, however, came down without a hitch and are now waiting with the rest of the collection to be redisplayed.

The reasoning behind their removal is that the wagons currently take up precious space in the rafters where we would like to build a new gallery for our ploughs. The Wagon Walk, where the majority of our wagons and carts will now be, will allow us to show our nationally important collection at its best. As well as exploring the craftsmanship and technical complexity of a wagon’s construction, we will also be delving into personal stories of those behind the wagons and how they used them. We will reveal how these wagons are intimately tied to their landscapes but also to local building traditions, and how the geography dictates the size, shape and construction of every single one of our unique wagons.

GIFriday - Wagon Model Box, 20th Century (MERL/63/37/1-20)

This is a box containing various bits and pieces used in making model wagons. The contents include: 

2 model wagon wheels

2 model wagon hubs

5 metal model wagon hubs (made from walking stick ferrules)

5 baskets to simulate a loaded wagon

1 printer's block showing a wagon

1 rubber

1 model axel

1 spring

and 1 tube containing small nuts. 

They belonged to H. R. Waiting, a model wagon maker from Slough, Berkshire.

A snap of our Wiltshire wagon during all our wagon movements last week, at the Museum of English Rural Life.

S.E.Miles & Sons of Melbury Mills were the previous owners of the wagon. It was built around 1910 at Birdbush Wagon Works, at Donhead St Mary.

(MERL/61/44)

After ten years high in the sky, today is the day our wagons come down to earth.

We have 6 wagons up on a monorail at the Museum of English Rural Life, but they're all coming down to form a new gallery called the Wagon Walk. We'll have more about this later in the week!

We've been doing a lot of work making up our object lists for the new galleries at the Museum of English Rural Life.

It's rare to see one of our actual wagons moving, but thankfully it's much easier to get one of the tiny models going. This is a model of a Wiltshire farm wagon, though it has its ladders folded up on top and hasn't got its shafts on (ladders were used to keep the hay in, shafts were what the horse or oxen were tied to at the front).

Visualising where to put 22 wagons and carts in our new MERL galleries can get a bit messy. Today we've been thinking about how wagons group together under different themes but also how they work in relation to the space around them (i.e. is there room for a case?).

At the moment we're mostly focusing on the forensic details of the wagons - who used them, what they were used for, how they were made and who made them etc. However, with a lot of the project to go, who knows what else we may be able to fit in there? Popular culture may come into it - in fact, most English people today are probably more familiar with American wagons than our own English ones. One particular infamous example are the unreliable wagons of the game Oregon Trail..

(Our wagon above is a Hertfordshire Miller's Wagon (MERL/51/1295))

Paint your wagon red!

It takes a lot of skill, craftmanship and patience, backed up by centuries of local tradition and style to paint an English wagon. Each one is different, differing according to village, town, region and individual painter.

All of these objects may be on display in the Museum of English Rural life's redisplay (from top, l to r):

Wagons can be beautiful, as shown in this illustration made for Geraint Jenkins's The English Farm Wagon. All these frontboards are of wagons in the Museum of English Rural Life's collection, which holds a collection of English wagons Designated as of national importance.

Top row (l to r): Somerset, West Berkshire, East Anglia, Yorkshire.

Bottom row (l to r): Vale of Berkeley, Huntingdonshire, Sussex, Hereford.

I have to admit I usually run straight to my colleagues in the reading room when I need something from the archives, so I was really pleased that the terms I used (MERL, archive, harvesting, Farmers Weekly) to narrow my search revealed (amongst many others) this beautiful - and local - picture.

This photograph, by the Reading based photographer Eric Guy, shows “lodged wheat” being gathered up by hand in 1945. When a crop is “lodged” it means that it has been flattened by the wind, making it difficult to harvest. Eric Guy gave this photograph the caption “Picking up the last of the Harvest” but this particular print was not found in his own collection at MERL, but in the Museum’s Farmers Weekly’s picture library collection. In fact, the image was used in Farmers Weekly on 19 October 1945, with the following caption:

“The “Indian Summer” has enabled crops to be rescued in many parts of the country. This lodged wheat, on a farm in the Streatley Hills, near Basildon, Berks, was too much for the binder, but now it has been safely hand-gathered.”

A binder is a machine for reaping crops – now largely obsolete, as the combine-harvester does the job of both the binder and the threshing machine. For details of the binder on display at MERL, see the entry in our database .

Although at first glance the crop is being loaded onto an old farm wagon, a closer look reveals rubber tyres, and a tractor rather than a horse at the front.