It's just Titanic isn't it

SHIPWRECKS. FINALLY.

And not just any shipwreck. Meg and Sara take a trip down the canal to Liverpool, where they chat with Ian Murphy, Head of the Merseyside Maritime Museum.

Ian walks us through their exhibition 'Titanic and Liverpool: the untold story' and we find out about the objects they have relating to Titanic, how collecting from a wreck site works and some of the (sad) stories they tell at the museum.

We also find out about the time Meg threw a piece of fish at the Longleat river boat.

Find out more about the Titanic and Liverpool exhibition and have a look through their Titanic collection online.

Listen, subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and all the usual podcast suspects.

Transcript

File name: Ian Murphy - draft (3).mp3 

Moderator questions in Bold, Respondents in Regular text. 

KEY: Unable to decipher = (inaudible + timecode), Phonetic spelling (ph) + timecode), Missed word = (mw + timecode), Talking over each other = (talking over each other + timecode). 

Meg: Hello, it's us and welcome to the Museums n'That podcast, where each episode we have a chin-wag and serve you the steaming hot tea on the things that museum people love the most. Have I got baked bean mouth? We're your hosts Meg and Sara from Leeds Museums and Galleries, and we get to know the people behind the objects by asking them the questions that you really want to know. 

Meg: Hello. 

Sara: Hello. How are you? 

Meg: I'm good because I'm lying in bed. 

Sara: Yes, consequently, so am I actually. 

Meg: You're still in bed? 

Sara: Yes, interesting isn't it. It's got spicy all of a sudden. 

Meg: Tell everyone where we are. 

Sara: We are in Liverpool. 

Meg: Yes, me and Sara are literally tucked up in bed, which feels extremely cosy, but basically, we literally we allowed to go on our first little trip. 

Sara: Yes, so we're recording this little bit after, so we did lots and lots of steps wandering around yesterday with some quite heavy bags if I'm honest. I don't know why they were so heavy, it was was unnecessary for one night, but here we are. Massive drama queens. 

Meg: Okay, so Sara, tell me one thing from your week. 

Sara: So, this week. I did a little trip down to the Midlands to see my beloved nana and she made the most seventies throwback pudding I have ever seen. It is a chocolate Swiss roll set in orange jelly. It was quite something, I'll be honest. How about you? Tell me about your week. 

Meg: Okay, so yesterday on the train, there's a story about a boat that I had to tell you about. Basically, this one time, I was at Longleat Safari Park. 

Sara: Do they have boats there? 

Meg: Well, so basically, they've got seals or sea-lions and you get on this boat and like, just like go down the river or whatever and like see all the sea-lions and they give you this little cup filled with chopped up bits of fish and then you throw out the fish. 

Sara: Right. 

Meg: And I threw out the fish, little chunks of bloody gross fish, which is gross in itself and anyway, as I threw it out, I missed the window and I threw it-, 

Sara: That's disgusting. 

Meg: Yes, I know, but I threw it at the boat and it bounced off and went under my coat. 

Sara: Oh my god, that is awful. 

Meg: I know. I had like gross dead fish on my coat. It was really sad. 

Sara: And then forever more you were known as fish guts Meg. 

Meg: That's me. 

Sara: Okay. Really good. Let's talk about this episode. Who have we interviewed? Who is it? What's it about? What's the deal? Like, it feels really weird that I'm asking this when I'm literally lying on your bed but-, 

Meg: Yes, I need to take a photograph of this because you're lying in a very, what can only be described as quite a sultry post. 

Sara: Well, actually, to be fair, I reckon this actually can link in because at the minute, I'm actually sort of like sprawled on Sara's bed kind of like Rose is in the film Titanic. 

Meg: Yes, so we're in Liverpool because we have gone to the Merseyside Maritime Museum, which I can apparently say correctly. 

Sara: Merseyside Maritime Museum is what I called it. 

Meg: And we chatted to Ian Murphy, who is the head of the museum there. Very lovely Ian, as was described by one of the most helpful visitor assistants. I mean, they're all pretty helpful but, she was brilliant. 

Sara: Oh, she was literally amazing. She was so nice. 

Meg: One thing that we were really impressed by as well was walking in. They have, like, this big, it's a bit display board, but it was fabric. Anyway, that's what's throwing me the material. This big board about Black Lives Matter and I was just like, yes, immediately, when you go into a museum, that's what you should see. So, yes, we spoke to Ian, all about the Titanic, which is not the Titanic, it's just Titanic. 

Sara: Never have I ever seen a man just look so disappointed. You know, it was that classic, like, I'm not cross, I'm just disappointed when you said, 'The Titanic,' and he just crumpled ever so slightly but it was worth it. 

Meg: I really hope he wasn't disappointed because I did think he really lovely. But yes, so basically, our manager Lizzie was like, what we doing for episodes this series and I was like, definitely definitely shipwrecks. Please let me do shipwrecks and it took some convincing but she was basically just like, gave in. 

Sara: I think we managed to sell it in by saying that we were effectively linked with Liverpool because it's the other end of the canal. 

Meg: Sara's literally, like, the whole train journey here, she was like, laughing to herself about the fact that we were going to the other end of the canal and I don't know why. 

Sara: Just, it is nice though isn't it? It's a nice little poetic story that we're the other end of the Leeds Liverpool Canal. 

Meg: So, we wanted to find out from Ian what the deal is with Titanic. What the deal is with the collections from there. How you get something from a wreck site if there's stuff still there. The connections they have with families. All that really. Oh, and also, I should mention, apologies, to Ian because as soon as we got there, I like, double double packed my bag made sure that everything was like fine, had batteries, like, al sorts. Got there and realised that I was missing an adapter cable for the recorder so basically spent this entire interview, just like with one microphone pointing it between all three of us. 

Sara: Yes, it was really tough. You had to hold a microphone and let other people speak for significant moments of time, including me. 

Meg: Yes, it was really hard. But basically, I was sweating throughout the whole thing because I was like, God, I hope this is good. Anyway, it was. So, yes, here's Ian Murphy's episode of Museums n'That everyone. Enjoy. 

Ian Murphy: Hello, my name's Ian Murphy, and I'm the Head of the Maritime Museum here in Liverpool. I manage the, kind of, curatorial teams who look after the collections for the Maritime Museum and the Maritime Archive Centre, so it's objects like our ship collection, our boat collection. It kind of covers everything from furniture to models to paintings. We worked out the only thing we don't really have is sculpture. We don't have a great deal of sculpture, but we've got some figureheads, which is sort of in the same ballpark, so it's really broad. 

Sara: I suppose with sculpture that's an interesting one because I would never traditionally put sculpture and ships together. Also, by the very nature of them generally being quite delicate things that are generally quite still, going on the sea, fills me with dread, a little bit. So, it's an interesting one, but I don't see why you wouldn't have, you know? 

Ian Murphy: We did very briefly have a loan, which was a sort of perspex sculpture from a 1950s ocean liner, cruise liner. So, actually, oddly, having said all of that, the decorations of some of those, kind of, more recent passenger ships, would have included those kinds of sculptural elements. We just haven't got one yet, so maybe we'll get one in the future. 

Meg: What's your background then, Ian? How did you get to be in this role? 

Ian Murphy: My background's actually Fine Art. 

Meg: So, you can do a sculpture? That's what you should do. 

Ian Murphy: Fine Art, painting. I'm no good with 3-D at all, so that's my get-out clause on that one. A variety of jobs after leaving university. I started to volunteer for the National Trust. I was kind of looking for work in art galleries, but gravitated towards social history museums in Leicester and that led on to coming back to Liverpool with a curator post at the Maritime Museum and then head of the museum after a few years. 

Sara: That's exciting. You've come home. 

Meg: Okay. So, today, we've come on to talk to you about the Titanic and speaking about Liverpool and the city, like, why is there a Maritime Museum here. What is it about Liverpool that's important to the history of Maritime History, I guess? 

Ian Murphy: Liverpool owes its existence to the port. There's no other reason for the city to exist other than that. It was founded as a port in terms of military campaigns for King John back in the 1200s. It owes everything to, you know, the wealth that the port brought in. Liverpool was very fortuitous in being in the right place at the right time. It hit on the idea of using docks, of enclosing areas of water, to keep, sort of, water levels steady and using those to load and unload. It sounds obvious but it gave the city a really, kind of, commercial edge. The city's traders were very kind of aggressive, very entrepreneurial. It led into some terrible missed decisions in terms of their involvement in the trade in enslaved people from Western Africa to those North American colonies that we mentioned, and the Caribbean. Liverpool made a huge amount of money out of those dealings. It stayed vital as a port in terms of the growth of the US. It started as (ph 08.13), sort of, the twentieth-century, Liverpool's probably-, it's the second biggest port in the world. The scale of trade coming through the city is immense. That's why there are so many grand buildings in the city, so again, it shaped the fabric of the city centre. You know, there are fewer people employed as well in the industry, so it's much more low-profile. It's a bit of a trite way of putting it, the historic port then, though, drove the tourism boom from the 1980s onwards. 

So, that heritage, that maritime heritage, continued to, kind of, prosper in terms of the city's fortunes. It was a way of pulling the city back from what was really quite extremes of poverty and deprivation to what it is now, which is, you know, one of the top tourism spots in Britain. I mean, if you'd have said that-, I grew up in Liverpool. If you'd said before they renovated the Albert Dock, Liverpool would be a tourist destination, I mean, people wouldn't have believed that all. So, that maritime history is kind of shaping the city today and hopefully into the future as well. 

Meg: Also, this is a massive detour, but I know you said about, kind of, enslavement then and this is next to the Slavery Museum, right? It's just on the other side. We noticed as soon as we came in here that we really liked the Black Lives Matter, what was it? Like, a text panel. 

Sara: Statement piece. 

Meg: Yes, a statement piece. We took pictures of it and sent it to our World Cultures curator, because it's just a really lovely thing and I think, maybe, we didn't expect to see that so, kind of, prominently as soon as you walk into a museum, which is a shame because you should, kind of expect to. So, kudos. 

Ian Murphy: I mean, all the of National Museums Liverpool have got something similar in terms of their buildings. I think the organisation as a whole use those events of 2021 to look at our collections, how the collections were sort of acquired, what our stories might mean in terms of reflecting Black experience (TC 00:10:00) in Britain and around the world. But also, looking at the way we operate as an employer as well. So, we want to use it as a way of transforming the museums and the organisation of going into the future and I think it's important for us to remind ourselves that that's what we need to do. 

Meg: Okay, so moving onto the Titanic. Does it annoy you when people say, 'The Titanic.'? It's just Titanic isn't it? Ian's nodding really politely. 

Sara: So, we did this when we did an episode about Magna Carta and we had the same discussion didn't we? Whether it was the Magna Carta or Magna Carta, which we decided actually, well, the guy that did a PhD on it, he didn't care, so, but it is just Titanic. 

Meg: I can tell from Ian's eyes that he cares. 

Ian Murphy: You're right. The name of the ship is 'Titanic'. If we're ever writing text, or doing anything for the museum, I'm absolutely rigorous in taking all the 'the's' out because it's technically wrong. But I have to say, in terms of, like, spoken language, it's just natural. I say, 'The Titanic', if I'm speaking. People within the museum do. There's just something about-, I can think of other things of film titles and names of bands where, actually, they don't have a 'the', but there's just something more naturally flowing when you speak where you kind of have to drop one in. So, I've never, kind of, pulled anyone up for saying, 'The Titanic', we just make sure we cross them out when we're writing anything. 

Meg: Just for our listeners, we're kind of in the gallery space at the moment, which is why you can hear various AV things in the background, but, first things first, what collections have you got to do with the Titanic then, Ian? Are there things that are from the wreck site here and things that are kind of related to things on it? 

Ian Murphy: We've got some quite, sort of, comprehensive collections within the museum around Titanic. We created the gallery that we are in now as a temporary exhibition for the centenary of the sinking back in 2012, and it made us go back and look at the collections in a, sort of, different way, because we realised we'd used the most obvious things in the existing gallery, so we went and looked at the story we were trying to tell, the links that Liverpool had with Titanic, and what that might mean in terms of how we looked at our collections differently. I'm being a bit vague there, so what came out of the research-, 

Meg: It was literally the vaguest question ever, so don't worry. 

Ian Murphy: That's alright. So, Belfast has an obvious link to Titanic, in that the ship is built in Belfast. Southampton has a clear link in that the vessel leaves Southampton to go off on its one uncompleted voyage, and most of the people, most of the crew, most of the people who, kind of, perish in the sinking from the crew are from the Southampton area, or wherever. So, Liverpool's links, we knew there were links, but, in some ways, they were less tangible. When we, kind of, looked at the story and looked at the links there, we realised they were really quite central to the Titanic's story, without necessarily having that obvious physical link. So, it was about things like the key people in Titanic's story in why the ship was built and the circumstances around its construction. So, we realised there were a couple of strands. One was around people and sort of, key people in Titanic's story. The people who made a lot of the decisions for good or ill, mostly for ill in a lot of respects and it was a way, how do we use our collections to talk about that sort of background information almost? So, to talk about decisions, to talk about decision-making and to talk about the kind of, the string of events that lead to Titanic's kind of creation. So, we came to looking at things like our archive collections. 

We'd looked at our archives as traditional archives so it's about, you know, documents that had information in them but we realised a lot of those documents around Titanic, were kind of, significant as physical objects in their own right. So, we went back and looked at these kind of items in a slightly different way. They weren't just carriers of information, they were signifiers of interaction around companies and around individuals and then we tried to look at things like wealth, so we used items like the Ismay Silver, which is a retirement gift for Thomas Ismay and we looked at the kind of links that related directly then to individuals to kind of personal belongings, to letters that were sent by children to their parents. You know, collecting around the wreck is quite a sensitive subject. It's changed over time in terms of the types of collecting and salvage that's going on but we realised we were offered a loan from a company in Liverpool who were still operating at the time, called the Liverpool and London Steam Ship Indemnity and Protection Society, Association. I nearly got that right. I almost got it right I think, which is better than usual. But the thing there was actually, they're still going. They were offered this material from the wreck as a settlement because they were the only people who still had a claim that had paid out back in 1912 and they were still operating as the same sort of company. 

So, it was a way, actually of drawing those links out between a currently operating company in the city and this kind of history, which in some ways, can seem like it's distant and far-passed but actually, it's very kind of relevant or it's much closer than you think. The association folded and we were able to collect those items and basically keep them in the public domain so they didn't go out for resale etc. So, we do have a small collection of items from the wreck itself. Again, a tangible link to the ship so we kind of try and connect the ship, the people on the ship particularly. I mean, that was kind of a really important story. About five years ago, we then merged what was the permanent gallery with this new gallery so those kind of very obvious physical items that we've got with direct links to the ship were merged with those slightly more, sort of, emotional and personal items as well which I think gave us a much stronger exhibition at the end of it all. 

Meg: So, what's your favourite object on display? 

Ian Murphy: Favourite's a tricky word sometimes when you're talking about Titanic because the story is obviously-, one of the things were were keen on doing, you know. Everyone's seen the films, everyone knows the story. There's a danger at times you can forget almost that these were real lives. So, there are fans of Titanic, which is a bit odd so, so long as, you know, for us getting those stories back-, and it is in the end. It's a huge-, you know, one of the key messages we had at the start of trying to do all this, was this was a huge human tragedy so we tried to get that back in. It's sort of an obvious one. I could probably name about five, but I'll go for one, which is, there's a letter over on the other side of the gallery from where we are now from a little girl written to her father, who was a steward on board and the ship had sailed by the time the letter arrived in Southampton so he never received it. It's just an ordinary letter from a little girl talking to her Dad about how she misses him and she was looking forward to seeing him again, May McMurray her name is. And, you know, on its own, it's an ordinary letter, that I'm sure thousands were written every year at the time to various kind of-, you know, from children to their parents. But the fact that he never received it just adds this layer of kind of poignancy to it and it also reminds you again that the loss of the ship is immense. 

You know, the wreck is a sort of, the physical wreck is this, kind of, quite evocative story on the bottom of the North Atlantic but the real, sort of, damage and harm that was done was on these kind of personal relationships and family relationships and that letter really brings that out. 

Sara: I was reading over there, that actually, there were seventeen people that were from Liverpool or linked to Liverpool on the ship and you know, of the over fifteen hundred that unfortunately perished, it's not a large amount considering the significant connection with the city. And yet, I also didn't realise maybe probably definitely in my naivety living in landlocked Leeds and being from Landlocked Nottingham that they were sailing to America quite regularly anyway. So, this wasn't a big deal in that respect, you know, from a journeys perspective, it was more that it was the significance of what they deemed the technology at the time being the unsinkable ship. And I mean, you say anything like that, and you just think, don't say that. Yes, it's interesting because I didn't realise the scope of the side of the story that you're telling here and again, that's because my reference probably definitely comes from James Cameron more than anything else, for better of worse. 

Meg: One thing that I really wanted to find out about was, it was interesting that you said about the letter from the girl to her father, because I always think of the disaster as having just victims. I don't really think of survivors very often and I definitely haven't ever really thought about the families that are left and the fact that ten years ago they would have maybe, those people then potentially alive or families still now that are alive. So, what kind of relationship, if any, does the museum have with families of survivors and families of victims and how far does that go in the kind of work that you do? 

Ian Murphy: With Titanic, it's probably fewer than-, another story we tell in the museum is Lusitania, which has much closer links to Liverpool in terms of, you know, there were around 600 crew from the city. We did have input and association with some children of survivors, and it was an interesting one for me. The deck crew were much more likely to survive because they were basically proper sailors. So, at the start of any voyage, they'd be assigned a lifeboat, they'd be expected to kind of man a lifeboat and you know, row and steer and do all of that. So, they kind of had an allocation in the lifeboats, whereas your crews that were doing, kind of, hospitality and victualling and stewarding work, they were really fending for themselves, so there was a much higher rate of casualties amongst those departments. But Thomas Jones was one of the seafarers who was allocated a lifeboat and he speaks at the inquiries about his experience there. We've got some of his material in the archive collection, (TC 00:20:00) and we were meeting with someone, and in my head I was thinking, 'Oh, it's his granddaughter,' still an elderly woman, I think, in her 80s. During the conversation, I realised she was talking about her father, Thomas Jones was her father. He'd survived the sinking, and she was born after the sinking itself, but it did, sort of, bring it home that you think of history as almost like stories and quite distant, whereas, actually, these stories are still one or two generations away and it's more like, you know, I've got stories about my grandparents, let alone my parents, so the connections are much more, kind of, immediate, than you really expect, and I think that was one of the things that came out of all of this. We have some contact with relatives now and again, but it's probably not on the same level as we have with some of the other galleries. 

Meg: So, I told my Nana, who's probably listening now. Hello Nana. About coming up here today and she reminded me, which is terrible that I'd forgotten that my Pops, my Grandad, his Great-Grandfather was a Gentlemen's Valet on the Titanic and he died but I asked for more information about it and they didn't really get very far because they said that they kind of reached a stopping point where because he wasn't an upper-class passenger, that they couldn't really find anything else about him. And I was reading like a blog on your website as well that said one of the victims' families who are very working class, the wife couldn't afford to have her husband's body sent back to Liverpool. So, I was just wondering how common it is to find that element of like difference between classes in the victims and how they were treated I guess. 

Ian Murphy: I mean, the most obvious thing in a way when we put the exhibition together we wanted to make sure that the names of the people on board were in the gallery. We printed off the names of everyone and we suddenly realised what two thousand names looks like. We put panels in the gallery just listing everyone by class and by you know, crew and what they did on board as well, by departments. And a) it got across immediately-, it just got across how many individuals were there on board and that all of those names were individual people. Because we'd done it alphabetically, you could get a sense where families were broken up or were separated or entire families were lost but the other thing that stood out, we kind of colour coded people who were lost and people who survived and you notice when you look at these panels under the first class passengers, there's a great deal survive and a fair number lost, which is obviously, you know, for every life lost it's a tragedy. When you get down to the third class, it's the opposite way round and the vast majority don't survive and the survivors are very much in the kind of minority. So, straight away, that kind of class distinction had an impact on the night. I mean, straight away, your chances of surviving were much much higher if you were first class. 

Meg: Why is that, sorry, is that because they were literally, in different places in the boat? Is it that people were further down? 

Ian Murphy: I think there are elements of that. There is a lot of discussion as to why it might be. The third-class passengers were much lower in the ship, so in terms of getting through the ship to get to the, kind of, lifeboat decks, you're going up however many flights of stairs to get to that area. The first-class passengers were much nearer. The first-class passengers would be getting much more assistance from the crew, because they're based up there, but I think there's also that, sort of, I'd say Edwardian, but it may well apply today, that there's sort of a sense that there's a pecking order there. There's a perceived importance and the first-class passengers would just expect and would be offered assistance in a way that a much bigger number of people further down the ship weren't going to get. You were least likely to survive if you were a second-class male passenger, and one of the theories around that, and I don't know, I sometimes think about this one I wonder how much substance there is, but one of the theories is, if you're first class you will receive assistance and you will expect assistance. 

That's one thing. If you're in third class, to a certain extent you will be used to looking out for yourself a bit more. So there's more of you, you've got a lot against you, but you will be potentially just trying to make sure you will survive in a way that you have to make sure day after day. There's a theory with some of the second-class male passengers, in Edwardian Britain, that they're potentially waiting for somebody in authority who knows what they're doing to come along and sort this out and that waiting proves kind of fatal in the end. It's interesting how those differences, they definitely play out through class throughout the ship. The other point when you were talking about the crew member, or, if it were a valet, they would be employed independently, wouldn't be part of the ship etc. Famously, with crews at that time, the minute the ship sank, your job was over so you didn't get paid. So your pay stopped when the ship sank. So everything after that was you getting back to Britain, in theory, you were on your own. Good luck and see how you go. It's still quite a shock to the system when you hear that. 

Meg: Also, speaking about the wreck site, I feel like something that really interests me and we can probably talk for maybe like hours about this, is what's still down there and who gets what and how things come to be museum collections? 

Ian Murphy: In general terms, if a wreck is in British waters, in British territorial Waters, or if something is retrieved from a beach so it's something that has come off a ship and has washed up, any material like that would need to be declared to the receiver of wreck. So basically, there would be twelve months in which the owner could lay claim to the object and to anything you find. If that doesn't happen, then we're in a position to accept something from a member of the public or if people dive on a wreck in British waters, it's a similar situation. International waters gets slightly different, or is different. All of them war ships are not protected in the same way so Titanic doesn't have that because it sank in International waters, it isn't protected in that same way and the danger, and in particularly in the 1980s when the wreck was discovered, is the potential becomes a free for all in terms of intensive salvage that-, it destroys the wreck and it destroys the ship and it is the last resting place of 1,500 people so it isn't-, there's a huge amount of the human cost and that kind of emotional aspect of the wreck so there was a presumption against collecting from the wreck itself and Titanic was slightly different in that the company that effectively took over salvage of the wreck were restricted in the US courts. They bought over thousands of items but they weren't allowed to separate the collection of items out and to sell them off and what that effectively means is, a private buyer, tempting fate by saying this, is unlikely to be able to buy that huge collection so it almost has to stay together and operate almost as a museum. It's not a museum, it's not run like a museum, but the collection kind of needs to be kept together and can't just go out onto the open market. So that's material from the wreck itself. 

The material I mentioned earlier, the indemnity association, because they paid out in 1912, they still potentially had a claim on the wreck. So as part of a settlement between the salvers, there was a cash payment made to the association but also this small group of items of around twelve or thirteen items was also given to the association. So that's why this one group is separate to the rest of this huge collection that has to be kept together so again, we haven't collected from the wreck but when the association decided to fold it's operations up a few years ago, they came to the museum and sort of offered basically to keep these things together in the museum and it had the affect in the long run of basically making sure that this material didn't go out to be broken up and then to be sold on the open market. So, it's an odd one with Titanic because there is a huge kind of market there which again is quite odd. It's strange some of the collecting around it so you kind of keep a bit of a distance from it. The wreck itself, I think there isn't, I might be wrong, I think active salvage on it has now stopped so the wreck is deteriorating over time. It will collapse and eventually it will go. I don't know whether that salvage in the '80s/'90s has hastened the deterioration as well, the impact of that. The other thing with the material that we did get, it was from the debris field rather than the ship itself. Again, it wasn't something that was taken directly from the main body of the ship and it is, there's an element of being uncomfortable with some of the work that goes on around this. What the face of that larger collection is, in the US, is open to question. There was talk of Belfast, potentially, in a kind of consortium with James Cameron, potentially, being able to get that whole collection and if that can be preserved I think that would be the ideal solution for the long term. In a way, the material is out now. What do you do to make sure that it's kind of looked after and isn't exploited in a way that just feels like it's exploited? 

Meg: Is there kind of like one particular object that people particularly are drawn to or is it a really hallowed thing from the wreck site that is a really sought after thing to own? 

Ian Murphy: There's an odd sort of sliding scale that material relating to the ship is one thing, then it's material maybe relating to individuals is the next step up. Material relating to the night of the sinking, so they might have been on the passengers or crew might have had on them and sort of come away. There is this sort of odd importance attached to all of this and it's strange in a way because we're a museum and we've collected these things ourselves. We try and put them into context. We try to do, like every museum within our collecting policy and plans, so there's a sort of focus to it. There's odd things that come up where you're just kind of surprised of the level of collecting (TC 00:30:00) that goes on and it feels at times there are potentially forgeries and faking material from the ship and at that point it all seems to get-, it's long beyond what you might call history or sort of family history into a strange football card. Football cards as a kid are harmless, I did it myself, but it feels like the collecting is divorced from the meaning of the thing in the end and I find that quite odd for me. 

Meg: It is really complex isn't it? And we're still-, I mean we were saying, there's just something fascinating about the sea, isn't there? It's just incomprehensible in a lot of ways and I think that's what draws people back again and again. It's the fact that we will never be able to master it, no matter how much we would like to think we can. 

Sara: Ian, have you ever been to a wreck site? 

Ian Murphy: I haven't and I have to say, we've done some works over the years with a local man called Steve Rigby who sadly died just before the exhibition opened and he did go down to the wreck in a submersible and I can quite honestly say I would never have done that in my life. I don't think I'm claustrophobic but whatever it was, four hours down, four hours back or something, in a space that's barely bigger than yourself. I couldn't even begin to do that but if you ask me on my death bed, I'll give you the same answer-, it's odd in a way of knowing the wreck is there is sort of enough in some respects for me. I don't need to see it. It's the same as a lot of these wrecks. In it's heyday there would have been hundreds of sailings a week from Liverpool so it becomes a bit mundane almost but actually, people are going out into this environment that humans aren't designed to live in. The idea that these wrecks are littered around the world and there's something which evocative about oddly not seeing them or seeing them at low tide when they're kind of the ones on the beach that have finally exposed above the tide. It's sort of a reminder of the fact that you don't know all of this. You aren't in control of it all. It is beyond you and I'm quite happy to leave that one there. 

Sara: We had this conversation just outside on a bench looking out and we both agreed-, actually, I didn't have so much of an issue with the going down into the sea, I have more of an issue with getting there across the sea in the first place. Makes me feel a bit gippy but also the fact that it's like, the northern Atlantic scary. 

Meg: I'm definitely claustrophobic. I find it hard to even get into the centre of Leeds at rush hour so I don't think going down will be good for me. One thing that kind of is relating to this, which is the last main question that I think we wanted to ask, was more generally about the museum. So again, I was on your blog yesterday. Literally just been trolling your blog and I really liked-, 

Sara: Cat, did you even notice that you said trolling? 

Meg: I'm going to pretend that was deliberate, Ian. 

Ian Murphy: No one is ever more than about ten words away from a nautical metaphor. We found out the amount of phrases everyone uses. I mean I say on board all the time without even realising-, now I do what you just did. 'No pun intended.' 

Meg: Right so basically there was a blog that I thought was really interesting and something that I hadn't really thought of before but I realised is such a stereotype. Not a stereotype but a theme that comes up when you think of sailing is the idea of isolation and the blog was kind of about mental health and how that kind of relates to the last couple of years. So, I just wondered if that's something that you noticed people asking about a little bit more and has become maybe a bit more prominent in the work that you've been doing as a museum? 

Ian Murphy: Not so much from visitors but there's areas now and over a search when people are looking at that more. It's interesting for me because one of the tricky things for maritime museums is fewer people go to sea now. My family, if you went back a couple of generations to my grans family, she had about four brothers who either went to sea or worked on the docks. You get to my generation, there is no connection at all. So the museums and areas of history where people don't necessarily have the direct connections themselves but what I think we've started to see or maybe pick up on are those parallels between sea farers lives and experiences and actually those experiences of everyone in their daily life and that one of isolation and of mental health and of people actively looking to sort of support their own mental wellbeing is interesting because sailors, for some reason, starting making stuff out of rope because they did. Whereas, the reason why people were keeping themselves active wasn't really the thing that we were thinking about and I think that's what has come out of the conversations we've had more recently and particularly over the last year or so when that thing of people having to fall back on their experience and being separated from the families, even with all the methods of communication we have now. There's still a real sense of being separated out and for sailors, basically they were leaving their families, their loved ones, in order to earn money to keep their families and loved ones. They were having to do something that took them away from the reason they were doing it so it must have been a kind of incredibly difficult life. 

When you go through some of our archives, you see a few instances where people do talk about it in specific terms of just how difficult it is, of issues around committing suicide on board and whatever. That isolation can become quite pronounced. That impact of being separated, which isn't something most people, including me, ever have to deal with was something they had to deal with on a daily basis so trying to look at their lives in a way that isn't just about the mechanics of being a sailor, the environment and this isolated, hostile world that they are living in of how that impacts on them and what they do to kind of try to alleviate that. I think it's been thrown into prominence over the last eighteen months or so but it would always have been there in some level so it's interesting being able to tell those stories and look at some of the collections in a slightly different way. 

Meg: That stemmed from-, because you'd watched 'The Terror', which I just couldn't watch, I couldn't do it, but I did watch 'Vigil' recently and they touch on a lot of mental health in that, but, submarines? Not a fan of that either. No. No, thank you. But it is an interesting one because I've been on boats and it's kind of boring sometimes. I have to be honest. As a sweeping statement. 

Sara: It takes a long time. It takes a long time on a boat, right? 

Meg: To go anywhere. It does and you just think, I could walk there faster than this but I kind of get it for some people. But it's a lifestyle, it wasn't just a job. 

Sara: Ian, we're not going to take up too much more of your time even though I could literally talk to you for another two hours but we have some questions that we ask each of our guests at the end of every episode. So, the first one is-, huh? 

Meg: You look really serious. 

Sara: Do I? 

Meg: They're not serious questions, I promise. In fact, they are distinctly unserious. The first one is, what's been your favourite day at work? 

Ian Murphy: It sounds like I'm clutching at the obvious. Well, there are two. I'll go with two. One is oddly when this gallery opened. It was major thing that we'd done. We'd put a lot of work into it. A huge amount of work went in in terms of research and putting the gallery together. It wasn't deliberate, but we came over on the first day it was actually open to the public, and you got to see all the work that people had put in to it. It was massively crowded. You saw people reading the panels, trying out the interactives, looking at the stuff. I thought oddly, if we hadn't done that-, and I realised, what you can do sometimes is, you go from project to project and you finish a project, and you go on to the next thing, and you never actually look at the way the active open gallery works. So, ever since then, I've, sort of, told the team, 'At least on the first day, go over and just watch everyone enjoying what you've done, because, if you don't, you forget.' I mean, you just go from job to job, and I think it's not that you need them to come up and say how fantastic it is, but you just sort of see people enjoying it and, actually, that's the reason you've done all that work. So, if you're not careful, you can miss it. So, this was a particularly good one to open. The other was just a kind of tour we had on board one of the Cunard liners about two years ago. Possibly because it was one of the last things we did before everything kind of went weird, but it was, again, just seeing, actually, the reality of a huge-, I mean, cruise liners are completely different to the ships we have, so that would be maybe my second one. 

Meg: They are very good answers. Very good answers. So final question, twofold, of everything we've talked about today, what would be the big takeaway about the museum and/or specifically this gallery, and, what is your actual favourite takeaway? 

Sara: We told you that they weren't serious. They really aren't serious. 

Ian Murphy: Take away from here would be-, I mean, it would be come and visit because even if you don't think you've got a connection to the sea or an interest in seafaring, there's loads of different stories here in terms of people's lives. We do have some props from the James Cameron film in this kind of gallery so we've got a real odd set up of displays here so if you think you're not interested in maritime stories or maritime museums, please come anyway. You'll see things I suspect that you won't expect to see in a museum. 

Sara: Poetry? 

Ian Murphy: In terms of favourite take away. You mean actual take away? 

Meg: And honestly, you've just talked to us so beautiful for like an hour but this is the thing that we judge you on. 

Ian Murphy: Oh no. Honestly, it's going to be like chips. It's just the most-, is that alright? 

Meg: Yes. 

Ian Murphy: And to be particularly Northern, I will say chips and gravy because it is the classic. 

Meg: Okay. Flash back in time. We're back in the lounge position of Rose in the Titanic. I'm still on Sara's bed. 

Sara: Yes, I have no say in the matter so it's just happened. It's fine. 

Meg: And disclaimer, we paid for the hotel ourselves. Work did not pay for this. 

Sara: Yes, we were like, 'We deserve it.' Okay, Sara, what was your best learn? 

Meg: It was really fascinated chat with Ian. Basically because I don't know anything about Maritime history which seems to be a running theme in this series actually, that I don't know a lot about anything or life. Anyway, but he told us that there was a very big push on how they wanted to talk about the people's stories rather than everyone knows about the mechanics and the ship is like a big thing and stuff but actually (TC 00:40:00) it's about the personalities and these were real people's lives and they have loads of lists of all of the names of all of the people that were on the ship and the way that they've interpreted is they've put 'Saved' and 'Lost' next to them and the divide between third class and the first class passengers which is very obvious now you think about it of who survived and who didn't. He spoke about that and it was just really sad things to think that so many of the third class passengers didn't survive basically on their class. That was my best learn. How about you? 

Sara: I think mine was, it's more the thing that made me think the most was when i asked him what his favourite object was and he kind of pointed out that favourite is a tricky word with stuff like this and it's just strange. The fact that, with the objects and the objects that are still around that are going up for auction sometimes and there's kind of this weird fanatical thing about it and it comes from a strange place because it is a disaster. People died so saying, 'What's your favourite object?' Favourite is such a loaded word when you're dealing with things that are potentially like things that people have died with. So, i don't know, it's kind of sobering i think and just really sad. 

Meg: Newsflash, Titanic is sad. Yes, I really feel like shout out to Ian because what a nice man. I had a really nice chat with him afterwards about museums in general. Didn't we? 

Sara: Yes, it is really nice to have those conversations and those things in common, especially with something that we don't really have anything in a great capacity to deal with the sea, land-locked Leeds. Greatest city in the world. It is really fascinating and I think 95% of what we consume and touch and deal with every single day has come via sea and you don't think about it like that and I just think it's important to know that part of our history as a nation. That was good wasn't it? 

Meg: Yes I know. 

Sara: You didn't expect that of me. 

Meg: No, I didn't expect literally anything good to come out of your mouth then. Also, we're just sat in Sara's room and Sara's got literally such a good room. It's so annoying. I'm just looking, she's got steps. You've got steps in your room and a bar and I've just got a rubbish room. 

Sara: I won't book it next time. You can book it. 

Meg: No, it's literally so nice. Okay, so thanks. 

Sara: Sara is lying down now. Big thanks to Alex Finney who does all of our artwork. Shout out to Timmy Bentley who did our theme music. Transcripts are on the website if you want to read those and also, if you want to leave us a review. Please do and subscribe like. Tell your mates. Tell your dog. Tell whoever you want. And if you want to get in touch with us, I'm @MuseumMeg on Twitter. Sara is @SaraLMerritt and we're at Leeds Museum. We're going to go and see a bit more of Liverpool, maybe get a snack back to Leeds. Sorry are you getting a boat because you want to go on the canal? 

Meg: It would take me forever. How long would it take to get on a boat from Liverpool to Leeds? 

Sara: Let's ask Ian.