Old Cyder House Talks, Berkeley 2009/10

1.
Walking on Dinosaurs: Trampling on God?
Rev Richard Avery & Prof Tim Walsh,
Thursday 24 September 2009 7.30pm
Cost: £6 including glass of wine
Advanced booking advised, as places are limited.
01453 810631
education@edwardjenner.co.uk

The publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species a hundred and fifty years ago was deeply offensive to many Christians, and yet on his death he was buried with great ceremony in Westminster Abbey.
Can Christianity and Evolutionary theory be reconciled? Are Christians bound to follow the lead of many transatlantic brethren and become Creationists?
This promises to be a fascinating evening for believers and unbelievers alike, as we attempt to unravel the history and clear up misconceptions.

Richard Avery is vicar of Berkeley and has been a teacher of secondary school science and a former student of Richard Dawkins at University of Cambridge.
Tim Walsh is the Professor of Medical Microbiology & Antibiotic Resistance at Cardiff University.

Audience members will also have the chance to look round the museum’s temporary exhibition Walking on Dinosaurs, part of the Darwin Bicentenary celebrations.



2.
The Making of Mr Gray’s Anatomy – the story of the ‘Doctor’s Bible’
Dr Ruth Richardson,
Sunday 11 October 2009 3.30pm.

Cost: £10 including tea, cake and free entry to the museum earlier in the afternoon.
Advanced booking advised, as places are limited.
01453 810631
education@edwardjenner.co.uk

Gray's Anatomy is to the human body what Mrs Beeton's is to cookery or Roget's is to thesaurus. It started out as a student text in 1858, and became so indispensable that it has been called 'The Doctor's Bible'. The book has never been out of print. This talk tells the story behind the famous medical text, how it was created by two young medical men in mid-Victorian London: Henry Gray and Henry Vandyke Carter.




Ruth Richardson:
The Wall Street Journal described Ruth Richardson's most recent book, The Making of Mr. Gray's Anatomy (Oxford University Press) as 'one of those rarities, history that reads like a novel'. The book has won the 2009 Medical Journalists' Open Book Award.

Ruth Richardson's history of the corpses in UK dissection rooms - Death Dissection and the Destitute - is now a standard work and teaching text. She has also authored Vintage Papers from The Lancet, and co-edited two volumes: Medical Humanities: An Introduction and The Healing Environment for the Royal College of Physicians, London. Her historical introduction to Gray’s Anatomy, has just appeared in the latest 40th edition of the famous textbook itself. Dr Richardson is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.



3.
Location: WOTTON ELECTRIC PICTURE HOUSE

The Incredible Human Journey
Dr Alice Roberts
Tuesday 3 November 2009, 7.30pm
Wotton Electric Picture House
18A Market Street, Wotton-Under-Edge
www.wottoneph.co.uk
Cost: £12
Advance booking essential.
Contact the Edward Jenner Museum: info@edwardjenner.co.uk or ring: 01453 810631
Tickets will also be on sale in Clarence’s Gift Shop in Wotton High Street.

Who are we and where do we come from? Genetics, archaeology and fossils come together to provide some answers. Amazingly, we can all trace our ancestry back to Africa, where our species appeared around 200,000 years ago. Dr Alice Roberts, presenter of the BBC series, tracks the ancient migrations that took our ancestors to the corners of Earth: through stones, bones and genes, the story of our incredible human journey unfolds.

Dr Alice Roberts is a biological anthropologist, author and broadcaster. Medically qualified, she taught clinical anatomy to undergraduates on the medical course at Bristol University for over a decade, and continues to teach postgraduate surgical trainees.

She has a PhD in palaeopathology, the study of disease in ancient human remains. She is interested in what old bones can tell us about human evolution, the diversity of the human species, and about diseases that have affected us over time. She is also interested in burial archaeology, and has joined an international research team investigating the archaeology and anthropology in Mongolia.

She is also passionate about public engagement with science, and is involved with planning Cheltenham Festival of Science. On BBC2, she is part of the team presenting the hugely popular Coast series. She wrote and presented two series of Don’t Die Young, exploring anatomy, physiology and health issues, and the 2009 landmark science series, The Incredible Human Journey, about the origin of our species and the ancient colonisation of the world. She also wrote the books to accompany both these series. She has recently ventured into radio, presenting Costing the Earth on Radio 4.



4.
The Crown Jewels – the inside story
Keith Hanson
26 November 2009, 7.30pm
Cost £10 including a glass of wine
Advanced booking advised, as places are limited.
01453 810631
education@edwardjenner.co.uk


What’s it like to live in the Tower of London and to be responsible for the display and security of the world famous Crown Jewels? Do you lie awake at night?... or is that the fault of the ghosts of those incarcerated long ago? As the Chief Exhibitor of the Crown Jewels, Keith Hanson should know.

Keith's main responsibilities are towards the security and display of the Crown Jewels, and the Crowns and Diamonds exhibition. He also looks after the running of the oldest part of the Tower of London, the White Tower, which contains unique artefacts belonging to the Royal Armouries, such as the armour of Henry VIII.

Keith is also a member of the Queens Bodyguard of the Yeoman of the Guard, which involves attending many State and Royal events.

Heritage: from chocolate box to concrete box

Series 1 Land Rover, Lacock: B&W
Originally uploaded by CopperPhoenix

From The Times
August 19, 2009
Heritage has democratised and rightly even includes pig-ugly buildings, says the man behind Saving Britain’s Past

Tom Dyckhoff

Heritage used to be easy. It was stately homes. It was cathedrals. It was tea towels in the gift shop and buttered crumpets in a National Trust café. It was nostalgia. Not any more. Over the past 50 years, during which British society and our towns and cities have been utterly transformed, ordinary people have fought to save the streets, buildings and landscapes that mean so much to them. In doing so they have completely revolutionised what we mean by heritage.

Heritage has democratised. These days, it can mean pretty much anything: a coalmine, the childhood homes of the Beatles (now owned by the National Trust), that little café down the road with an interior straight out of Expresso Bongo. It can even be a building which to many is pig-ugly.

Take Robin Hood Gardens. For the past year a battle has been raging in East London over plans by Tower Hamlets to demolish and redevelop this 1960s Brutalist housing estate. Passions run high. Architects and preservationists are pitted against council and developer. Yet if, 40 years ago, you’d have said that this slab of concrete was heritage you’d have been laughed out of the planning department.

To understand how heritage went from chocolate box to concrete box, I’ve been filming a seven-part TV series for BBC Two, Saving Britain’s Past. It was the experience of the Second World War that created our basic understanding of heritage. Before the Blitz there were, astonishingly, no proper systems or records for preserving our buildings and landscapes. There had never been any need, because the British landscape, at least the oldest, most cherished parts of it, had changed so slowly.

Admittedly the Industrial Revolution had so transformed much of the country that the glimmers of a conservation movement emerged through campaigners such as William Morris and his Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, aghast at the modern world’s impact on the old. But compared with what was about to happen, the industrial revolution was small fry.

That all changed when Hitler embarked on not only the Blitz, but also the infamous “Baedeker raids”, a bombing campaign targeting not military or industrial sites, but those of cultural value listed in Baedeker’s guide books. Cities such as York, Exeter, Canterbury and Bath were bombed just because they were beautiful. Looking at the archive footage of Bath’s destruction in April 1942 is a grim task. Besides the human suffering, 19,000 of the city’s buildings were wrecked, including such gems as the Royal Crescent and the Circus.

The attack sent the country into panic, triggering a sense of collective ownership of our landscapes, the same drive that brought into being the welfare state and the NHS. John Betjeman proposed a national buildings record, the Ministry of Works began a salvage scheme of historic buildings that needed urgent repair, and the 1944 Town and Country Planning Act gave birth to the lists — Britain’s first inventory of buildings of national or historic importance, graded I, II and III according to their significance, to be protected.

Heritage was born. The Ministry of Works appointed 30 architectural historians to compile the lists. These were traditional, nostalgic, conservative. Things not quite up to scratch included architecture from most of the previous century, certainly all things vulgarly industrial. But at least it meant that what Britain looked like in the future would no longer be left to chance or be so vulnerable to attack.
What is remarkable is not simply the country’s speedy acceptance of the idea of saving heritage, but how enthusiastically we have done so. We are an intensely nostalgic country, especially in our post-imperial decline. Yet conservation is not always conservative. It can be downright radical.

Ever since it was invented, this cosy idea of heritage has been whittled away by those it excluded. Just as our understanding of history has diversified from kings, queens and great men to the social history of ordinary people, so what we choose to feel passionate about has shifted from cathedrals and castles to the 1950s cafés in which our quiffed teenaged mums and dads tried to be cool; to the coalmines some slaved in, and the council estates many lived in. My heritage wasn’t a 14th-century village church or a Georgian mansion but a postwar school built by the Hertfordshire schools building programme, a strikingly modern place jam-packed with welfare-state optimism. Can’t that be preserved alongside the 14th-century village church? Why can’t the everyday landscapes most of us live in be heritage?

These ideas began to arise in the mid-1960s just when British society was loosening up and admitting grammar-school politicians, gay playwrights and working-class pop starlets to its higher echelons. They even came up in Bath. As the council started tearing down Grade III listed Georgian streets — the only grade then not legally protected — not even the nascent heritage bodies noticed. But ordinary people did. In the mid-1960s Peter Coard began drawing the little human quirks of the artisans’ cottages and shopfronts disappearing around him and co-founded the Bath Buildings Record. It took another decade for cultural grandees such as Kenneth Clark to catch up with this battle by the little people. Coard unearthed a brutal fact: there was a class system in heritage.
In London John Betjeman became the first secretary of the Victorian Society in 1958, but it took another decade for the Victorian to be thought of as anything but vulgarly industrial. In early 1970s London an alliance as radical as CND or the antiVietnam rallies, of Marxist activists, gentrifiers, old market porters and West End actors inflicted the first big defeat against the planning establishment, saving Covent Garden from being transformed by the Greater London Council into Alphaville.

Since then, we’ve started listing everything, and Britain has become a museum obsessed with its past. The real turning point came in the 1970s when economic decline slowed the pace of the wrecking ball. “A recession,” Roy Strong whispered to me, “is terribly good for heritage.”

Today a recession is proving good for heritage once more. Cranes have stopped swinging in our cities. Visits to National Trust properties this year are up an incredible 24 per cent. Battles, though, are still raging. The front line these days might be Brutalist bruisers such as Robin Hood Gardens. It might be with the kinds of histories we tell through our buildings. In February, the environmentalist George Monbiot launched an excoriating attack on the cute “tea towel” histories told in too many stately homes, which ignore the hidden tales of land seizure and fortunes made through slavery. One thing’s for certain though. We now know that heritage isn’t so much about what we preserve, but why we preserve it. It isn’t just about architecture. It’s about the people who live in it.

Urban Sunrise

Urban Sunrise
Originally uploaded by CopperPhoenix

An early morning start meant I could catch this lovely sunrise from home.

Scrap to Steam - One Month of Fundraising in Caernarfon

For one month only Caernarfon is hosting a unique fundraising event in its Town Square, where the Welsh Highland Society in association with Brunswick Ironworks will be using a steam locomotive as a centre piece attracting the public to donate towards a restoration project. Scrap to Steam will be opened by the Town Mayor, Councillor Hywel Roberts on August 3rd 2009, when he will make the first donation of this event towards the restoration of the narrow gauge NG 15 Locomotive.

The unique fundraising method chosen is based on a mathematical formulae "if you saved one penny on day one, doubled it on day two, doubled it again on day three and so on, how long would it take to save a million pounds? The answer is 27days! The aim is to test the theory and see how near to £1 million pounds the fundraisers can get in 27 days, with all proceeds going towards the restoration.

The event is being run by Cymdeithas Rheilffordd Eryri, the Welsh Highland Railway's supporting society and the organisation behind the restoration; however it is also being supported by Brunswick Ironworks Limited, Caernarfon. The NG15 restoration team are holding the month long fund-raising event at Y Maes (Castle Square), Caernarfon from the 3rd to the 29th August 2009. The event's primary aim is to raise funds for the restoration of Locomotive 134, but is being staged in Caernarfon to raise awareness of the Locomotive amongst the local population.

In addition to funds the Welsh Highland Society hopes to inspire more people to take an active interest in working on the restoration project, joining a growing band of local volunteers new to the Welsh Highland Railway, which now runs between Caernarfon and Porthmadog through spectacular Snowdonia Scenery.

The locomotive actually on display will be Number 133, sister to Number 134 (the subject of the restoration project but is currently dismantled while it is being worked on).

Whilst accepting that with the credit crunch and job insecurity, this is not a good time to ask for donations, the organisers feel that by getting the local community involved, and hopefully with many people giving a little, the appeal could yet cause a surprise.

Tim Davies of Copper Phoenix ( http://www.copperphoenix.co.uk/ )helping to promote the event said "This is a fascinating new way to raise money for appeal funds and many fundraisers will watch the event with interest. It will be great to see No 134 eventually getting from Caernarfon to Porthmadog under its own steam!"

You can follow daily progress of the appeal on Twitter, see http://twitter.com/NG15134

Any donations, however small, can be either brought in person to the Square during August, or they can be sent direct to the Brunswick Ironworks, Peblig Mill, Llanbeblig Road, Caernarfon Gwynedd LL55 2SE. Cheques to be made out to "NG 15 Appeal". See also the appeal site http://www.ng15-134.co.uk/ or http://www.brunswickironworks.co.uk/

The Importance of Hi Vis

The Importance of Hi Vis
Originally uploaded by CopperPhoenix

You need to be seen on the site.

Petition to Return Statue to Trafalgar Square Gains Momentum

A campaign to return a statue of Edward Jenner to Trafalgar Square has been re-launched in his 260th Anniversary year. The Statue used to stand on a fifth plinth in Trafalgar Square but was moved to Kensington Gardens in 1862. Next year sees worldwide celebration of the 30th anniversary of the eradication of smallpox: Edward Jenner discovered the vaccine against smallpox and was the Father of Immunology. It is therefore highly appropriate that this “Great Britain”, should be honoured in 2010 and his statue restored to its original position.

The Gloucestershire country doctor received worldwide recognition after his smallpox discovery on May 14, 1796, receiving various international honours and awards including a letter from United States President Thomas Jefferson.
In his home country it was not until after his death that a statue, with permission from Queen Victoria and support of Prince Albert, the Prince Consort and a keen supporter of vaccination, was erected in Trafalgar Square.

The statue, paid for by world subscription, was unveiled in May 1858 on the anniversary of Jenner’s birthday but sadly in 1862 the statue was removed and taken to Kensington Gardens apparently a non-military statue in Trafalgar Square was inappropriate.

However, with the 30th anniversary of the World Health Organisation announcing world eradication of smallpox, The Edward Jenner Museum wants to honour the doctor’s contribution to saving millions of lives by relocating his statue to its original site.

Sarah Parker, Director of The Edward Jenner Museum in Berkeley, said: We’ve started a petition on the Number 10 Downing Street site and support is growing. It's such a shame that people in the UK don't seem to remember who Jenner was and his significant part in the eradication of smallpox from the world. Sadly we have forgotten what a truly horrible and disfiguring disease it was, killing one in three children.

He gave the world vaccination and was at the forefront of other medical breakthroughs. His statue quite rightly used to be in Trafalgar Square; we need to get Jenner back there and back into the public’s awareness.

There is much discussion at the moment concerning the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square; it would be an ideal setting for Jenner’s statue.

To sign the online petition on the No 10 Downing Street site to return Jenner’s statue to Trafalgar Square go to

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/Jenner2010

or visit the museum’s website

http://www.jennermuseum.com/

and follow the link from there.

Edward Jenner & the Missing (Fifth) Plinth

The national spotlight is currently shining brightly on an empty plinth in Trafalgar Square. Built in 1841 the ‘Fourth plinth’ was intended for an equestrian statue but was recently the subject of a hotly contested competition by artists who desired their own brand of art fill the plinth.

Famous figures in the world of art such as Antony Gormley, Anish Kapoor, and Tracey Emin battled to have a spot to showcase their art in central London’s most famous of squares.

Today, a moment of fame on the world’s most famous plinth is within reach to anyone who has the inclination to apply.

Of course, Trafalgar Square’s most celebrated monument is Nelson’s Column, designed in 1843 by William Railton and erected in 1845.

But did you know that a ‘Fifth plinth’ once existed in Trafalgar Square?

On this plinth sat a statue of Dr Edward Jenner (1749-1823), the father of Immunology and the pioneer of vaccination. His work on the development of the smallpox vaccine has saved millions of lives and led to the development of vaccines that have had a significant and lasting impact on world health.

Smallpox – the ‘speckled monster’ - was greatly feared and accounted for millions of deaths around the world. In London alone, 10% of all deaths in the eighteenth century were as a result of Smallpox. Smallpox was disfiguring and horrific. It infected old and young, rich and poor. Those sufferers who survived were often blind and disfigured by spotty scars. Famous Smallpox sufferers included Queen Elizabeth I, Mozart and Queen Mary II (wife of William III). The latter was not to survive.

On 14 May 1796 Edward Jenner finally made a breakthrough with a cure for Smallpox at his country home, The Chantry, in Berkeley, Gloucestershire (now The Edward Jenner Museum). Lymph from a cowpox pustule of dairymaid Sarah Nelmes, caught from a Gloucester cow Blossom, was vaccinated by Jenner into James Phipps aged 8. Later when the boy was inoculated with smallpox, the feared symptoms failed to appear. Jenner called it ‘vaccination’ from the Latin vacca for cow.

This process marked the beginning of a worldwide eradication of a devastating disease. In the late eighteenth century, Jenner predicted: The annihilation of smallpox – the most dreadful scourge of the human species – will be the final result of this practice. The World Health Organization finally declared the world rid of the disease in 1979 following an international eradication programme. The WHO declared Smallpox one of the most devastating diseases known to humanity.

So far, it is the only disease to ever be eradicated from the world.

International Recognition

Jenner’s research was duly acknowledged internationally. Thomas Jefferson, 3rd President of the United States was a keen supporter of vaccination. In a letter to Jenner in 1806 he wrote: Yours is the comfortable reflection that mankind can never forget that you have lived. Future nations will know by history only that the loathsome small-pox has existed and by you has been extirpated.
Showered with a variety of international honours, gifts and medals, Jenner was also acknowledged with many statues. The first was erected in 1825 in Gloucester Cathedral, a few miles from his home town of Berkeley inscribed simply ‘Jenner’. Other commissions followed and statues around the world in major cities can be found in Italy, France, and Tokyo - the latter stands in the gardens of the National Museum.

Following permission from Queen Victoria, a statue to Jenner was erected in Trafalgar Square in recognition of his enormous contribution to the welfare of mankind. Top of the list of donors for the statue was America, followed by Russia.

Britain was last.

Prince Albert, the Prince Consort, a keen supporter of vaccination and himself the leading British contributor to the memorial fund, presided over the inaugural occasion on the anniversary of Jenner’s birth in May 1858. According to reports of the occasion anyone who was anyone was there and all agreed it was an excellent likeness to Jenner.

Removal of Statue

However, not long afterwards the statue was removed. A non-military character sitting reflectively but not astride a horse, was thought inappropriate in Trafalgar Square. The Times supported its relocation and Parliament similarly demanded it be removed. The medical profession led by The Lancet and the British Medical Journal were furious and fought vigorously to preserve the statue. Punch naturally joined in the bitter debate getting straight to the point:

England’s ingratitude still blots
The escutcheon of the brave and free;
I saved you many million spots
And now you grudge one spot for me

The Prince Consort, Jenner’s main supporter died in December 1861 and by 1862 Jenner’s statue had been moved to Kensington Gardens, the first to be placed there. It currently still stands in the Italian Gardens. Many however commented that it was entirely out of place.

St George’s Hospital originally sited at Hyde Park Corner, put in a bid for the statue in 1896 on the centennial anniversary of Jenner’s great discoveries. Jenner had been a student there and the illustrious surgeon, John Hunter, Jenner’s mentor and friend, had been a surgeon at the hospital. It is just as well the statue wasn’t moved again as this site is now a hotel.

Jenner continues to sit resplendent in his Kensington surroundings but it is perhaps ironic that they are ‘Italian’ gardens. Shunned by the British establishment, he was forcibly removed from his rightful place in the heart of London’s Trafalgar Square. One can speculate whether these new artworks are worthy of such a place. What would the puritanical Victorian press for instance make of today’s debate?

New Demand to re-instate Jenner Statue

2009 marks 260 years since Jenner’s birth and the 30th anniversary of the eradication of Smallpox. Ironically, it is a disease that has all but been forgotten by the world following Dr Jenner’s pioneering research.

Jenner has been cast into the shade for long enough. It is time for one of the world’s forgotten heroes to have his statue reinstated in Trafalgar Square in its rightful place. This would be a fitting tribute to Jenner and his victory in mankind’s ‘war’ on disease.

Join our campaign to get Dr Jenner’s statue reinstated.

Sign up now:

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/Jenner2010/


Sarah Parker
Director
The Edward Jenner Museum, Berkeley, Gloucestershire
http://www.jennermuseum.com/ info@edwardjenner.co.uk

Sources: John Empson BSc BLitt – Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, September 1996