Staffordshire Hoard in Lichfield Cathedral: Almost ready for the exhibition

Staffordshire Hoard in Lichfield Cathedral: Almost ready for the exhibition: "We, the volunteers, have now had two or three training sessions with Canon Pete Wilcox, the exhibits have arrived from Stafford where they h..."

Day 1:

A gloriously sunny day, so that the cathedral has been bathed in natural light, inside and out. Arriving early I was able to take a quick look into an empty Chapter House to catch the sunlight on the Saxon jewellery, all sparkling, truly demonstrating that it is indeed treasure. I sign in and put on the Donate sash. We need the money to carry on the restoration so we are not being particularly subtle about our need for visitors coming in for free to put their hands in their pockets. Unfortunately, despite the best efforts of Canon Pete, the tax people will not agree to consider donations to the hoard fund tax deductible. It does seem strange given that charities are to support the public good, and if there is one thing the supporters of the Hoard at trying to do is to enhance the public good through making the treasure available for the public. But though the cathedral is a charity the museums that own the Hoard, as public agencies, are not, which itself is somewhat bizarre. So we need the visiting public to make their donations even more than we might have originally thought necessary.

The various volunteers are coming into the huge space under the tower, the Crossing, and signing in and sashing up. We realise there is no-one on duty at the West end where most people will initially arrive, so I high tail it down there just in time to welcome the first arrivals and direct them to where the first tour group is to assemble. Actually I later find that three people had already arrived, had taken their standby tickets already, even before the first people with tickets even put in an appearance. At five minutes to nine we Marshalls take our places, but still it seems that hardly anyone has arrived. There are one or two people on the seats in the North Transept, and yet as the clocks around the exhibition spaces reach the hour more people are coming down the North Aisle to enter the North Quire Aisle and we are in business. We have our first group and a quick head count suggests we are only two down on the thirty tickets issued. All we need now is the first bell. Nothing happens. Nothing can happen without the bell. The seconds stretch into minutes. Then it starts to ring and I suspect everyone over a certain age is suddenly back in the playground waiting in lines to file into school at the start of anther day in primary school. So now we shepherd everyone down the passageway into the Chapter House: the show is on. My colleague leads the way, and I act like a sheep dog bringing up the rear, keeping a look out for any strays. Going back to the North Quire Gate I meet up with the three standbys who have just been let in. Out of the corner of my eye I can see Canon Pete hurriedly adjusting the various clocks. It seems the crucial one the bellman was watching wasn't synchronised with the Team Leader's clock. That won't happen again.

Inside the Chapter House there seems to be even more space than I had anticipated, even though we have our visitors and four staff volunteers along with the six display cabinets. That bodes well, especially when we find ourselves having to negotiate around buggies and Zimmer frames. The Sherlock Holmes (Hollywood style) magnifying glasses provided are increasingly in use as people peer at the fine working of the bejewelled display items, the remnants of scabbards and shields and who knows what else. One man is sitting to one side not taking part, though it is only 5 minutes into the twenty minutes each tour group can expect to stay with the originals. He seems unimpressed by the 'No photography' sign, and sits waiting for the bell to signal the end of the school day. Later someone heard he had complained that he had not expected a room full of replicas rather than the real thing, so some wires really got crossed as the whole point of the exhibition has been to bring the originals out of the museum into somewhere the general public can see what all the fuss has been about. There are some replicas in the interactive section in the second part of the display beyond the Chapter House, but these are so people can handle an intact seeaxe, sword or helmet. There are one or two replicas with the originals, such as the replica cross, but only so visitors can better appreciate the adjacent original, particularly important given exhibits that have been damaged not just by the modern plough but by the Saxons themselves more than a thousand years ago. If that person really wanted to see originals rather than just take pictures of them I can only hope that he realises his mistake and returns to see the Hoard later in its travels.

On the second bell we gently start shepherding the visitors back out of the Chapter House, as the next party are now making their way in. Unfortunately the wooden benches for viewing the Hoard DVD, with their beautiful Saxon motifs, rather block the way into the middle of the interactive area. I must remember to make some note about this is the volunteers' comments book at the end of my shift. We might also want to adjust the traditional museum rope that separates those going in from those coming out of the Chapter House. Such tweaking will no doubt make this a mean machine within a day or so. After all, some 14,000 people want the organisation to be so smooth they hardly notice it.

Twenty minutes later and another bell. Our group moves out while another group moves in, a familiar face acting as their sheep dog, bringing up the rear.

I have fifteen minutes for the loo and a coffee. I manage the first and only a sip of the latter, only to be waylaid by Jo the volunteer organiser who wants to rearrange a couple of my shifts to help out another volunteer. I get back to the Crossing just as our next group is coming together. This time we feel slightly less like we are making it up as we go along, and we move visitors in, out and on with hardly a ripple. We have one late arrival who is loath to leave when the group she has been attached to moves on and out of the Chapter House, but my usual tact and patience does the trick. Again the DVD viewing benches seem awkwardly placed and still block the visitors' way into the middle of the interactive area.

So I sign out, leave my sash, and take off into town, only to realise that having agreed to change three shifts next week I am now double booked next Saturday for the Gospel lecture. I have to return to the Cathedral Shop and sort that out - now booked into the morning lecture. And in the supermarket I realise that I forgot to leave any comments in the book. Let's hope my colleagues remembered. I'm sure they did.

DAY 3:

Day off. Nina however has an evening showing of the Hoard for Lichfield members of the District Council. Well, that's what I wrote at the end of Day 2. Little did I realise I was expected to join the councillors and officers, so off to the cathedral for another look, this time as viewer rather than Marshall. Actually it was interesting to see things from the other side of the rope, so to speak, and to hear the tours which we don't hear except as they approach the Chapter House. Dean Pete made a great speech that insisted everyone there realise how non of this would have been possible without Nina bringing everyone together when it looked like things would fall apart. He didn't exactly say she banged heads to gather but that was the image that come to my mind. All the speeches took great effort to thank all the involved organisations, and it was good to see that the Hammerwich Parish Council had also been invited besides the bigwigs of the larger administrative districts.

DAY 4:
We start an hour later than on Saturday, so it'll be an almost relaxed rise and shine. Well that's the theory. I rode in with Nina (actually I drove, she worked on the phone) and the shift went well. We had my first alarm when someone stepped back into a display cabinet and the siren went off, but the system for turning it off went as planned. The system of letting people from the subs bench in after five minutes if there are no shows is working well, so if people do come without a ticket it looks like they will get in if they are prepared to wait a while, sometimes almost no time at all.

DAY 5:
I was scheduled to be on the early shift but someone needed to change so I wasn't needed until 1210, though parking was so difficult I thought I'd be late. Fortunately I remembered that the old Angel Hotel car park is now available for those prepared to feed its machine with cash, so I arrived just as Canon Pete, Team Leader, did too.

Marshalling went along in a very straightforward manner. Have started to explain, while we await the initial bell, what there is in the display and to remind the visitors in my group that the Gospel and the Angel are not just there so the cathedral can show of its best exhibits, but also because they too are Saxon, and as there is so little Saxon material anywhere, the more the merrier, and they do help set the context of the somewhat battered Hoard pieces. A lot of visitors obviously have never heard of either the Gospels or the Angel, so we need to explain their worth if people aren't going to dash beyond them to reach the real 'treasure'.

Noticed that the benches for the DVD viewing plus the TV monitor have been moved a tad down towards the exit, so minimising the bunching up of arrivals as they leave the Chapter House. A couple of the iPads in their smart black stands have been moved over to the north side so help clear a space for the relocated TV monitor.

Having breakfasted at 6.30 I was very hungry while on duty so between tour groups dashed over to the Chapters Cafe for a piece of banana bread and a juice, only to hear a couple of visitors mention to each other that they had heard there was a Hoard exhibition but they didn't know quite where or when. I was able to let them know where and when and to suggest they might want to enquire as to a standby ticket. An hour later I see them join the group behind mine, so obviously they had taken up my suggestion. As I came off shift I happened to see them and they were delighted that I had mentioned the opportunity to come, and they were going to insist that their grandchildren visit the Hoard when it moves on to Tamworth Castle next month. So the decision to make use of no-show spaces seems to be working well. The fewer people come to the cathedral who cannot actually get into the exhibition the better.

Volunteers seem to be working together well. Most have already done a variety of jobs and seem quite flexible and willing and eager to support each other, besides chat when the visitors have moved on and there are the inherent quiet moments. Even managed in a very quiet moment to find Bishop Selwyn's memorial with its unusual amalgam of coal mining and Maori images - he went to New Zealand and became involved with both, so both are on his memorial, but the juxtaposition is certainly a surprise on first view.

Extremely hot (bright sunlight) when I came out of the West End into the Cathedral Close - a great end to another shift.

DAY 6:
Another hot and sunny day, so glad to be in the cathedral tis morning, though it was pretty humid on the 825 bus home. Overall a normal day's shift, as Gateman 3 (aka the bell ringer). Things are running smoothly, and the standby queue seems to be working well, with no large build up of waiting people on the seats under the Crossing. The visitors by and large mirror the volunteers, in that they are mostly late middle age, the recently retired, with the visitors as grandparents bringing in a few grandchildren. Of course there are some younger families, for which the iPad are a godsend when they come out of the Chapter House into the North Quire Aisle. Had a small panic when I couldn't find any way to switch on the TV monitor, but it turns out that once the power is on the monitor comes on automatically within 3 minutes. The sound is set so that it no longer intrudes into the business of the cathedral, particularly the tours, but it still sounds too quiet when listening to it and too loud when not.

Even here rumours abound, whether about the supposed falling out of the farmer and the metal detectorist, or about how it was found, or how the museums are supposedly going to divvy it out when it gets back from Washington DC, or even why there's any further need to raise money for its further conservation. I try to encourage rumour control, but it's not always possible to sit on all the rumours. Hopefully it's all just idle chatter. I did enjoy hearing a local Hammerwich historian tell how he went down to the site when it was surrounded by crime tape to tell the people working there that aerial photography had already demonstrated that there was nothing there. He was told they were looking for human remains, and he left it at that. I'd been down the lane to the canal site and assumed the diggings had something to do with the proposed Brownhills bypass (which will have implications for the restoration of the Lichfield Canal).

Fourteen thousand visitors still sounds overwhelming, but in groups of thirty the vastness of the number fades away. Even when there are ninety in play (thirty in the west end of the North Quire Aisle waiting for the bell, thirty in the Chapter House, and a further thirty in the interactive area it means we are dealing with almost a hundred people an other. So, with the end of the first week now in sight we are really moving along.

The bell is rung every twenty minutes to move things along, the new group moving into while the existing groups moves out of the Chapter House. 

Almost ready for the exhibition

We, the volunteers, have now had two or three training sessions with Canon Pete Wilcox, the exhibits have arrived from Stafford where they have been on display for the last three weeks, and we are now making our final preparations. I am double checking the schedule as I am on duty most days in the coming two weeks, and need to ensure that I am at the right place at the right time. I also need to reread my notes. We are not tour guides, there isn't time for this, but it will be just as well to revise what I do know as visitors are bound to ask certain questions. After a couple of days it will become quite clear what most of the questions are about, but right now we can only guess.


Visitors have by now booked their free tickets, and tomorrow, Friday, the local good and the great get to preview the exhibition, ready for the visitors the following day. I am going with my wife Nina who has been part of the team that organised the tour (along with museum directors, cathedral canons, and other council officers) so that when we start on Saturday morning I will be quite clear where everything is, not where I think it is. Saturday morning will find me as a Marshall during the first morning shift. There will be a steep learning curve, as the largest number of visitors are expected over the first weekend. We cannot therefore practice with a small number of visitors, but must get things right first time.


To this end Canon Pete Wilcock has been at great pains to have the volunteers work through the job descriptions, schedules, and plans, and over the last few weeks we have spotted problems and opportunities which have been incorporated into the arrangements. This week we have been considering how to adjust the schedules to deal with other activities within the cathedral that might impinge upon the hoard exhibition arrangements, such as the Royal British Legion concert, or more particularly, the practice time needed by the brass band before their concert but while the exhibition is still open to the public. There's also a wedding, but the bride and groom have entered into the spirit of the things by booking their guests into the exhibition as they make their way from the West door to the Lady Chapel at the East end.


What have we not thought about? We don't know how many no-shows there will be, though the experience from Stafford suggests that there will be more than compensated for by the number of people who arrive without a ticket. Will we be able to move our visitors through the Chapter House, the main display area, within the crucial 20 minutes? The whole procedure depends upon our being able to move groups of 30 through every 20 minutes: getting people together in the North Transept ready to move through into the North Quire Aisle, leading the group into the Chapter House exhibition area, and then after 20 minutes leading the same group out into the interactive area for a further 20 minutes while another pair of Marshalls leads the next group into the exhibition. Our group will then exit into the area between the Quire and the East window (St Chad's Shrine). At that point we two Marshalls will have 20 minutes before taking another group of 30 through, and so on and so forth throughout the day for three weeks. I'm only guiding in the mornings, and there will be some change of role as the days roll by and we feel confident in what we are doing. I will be checking tickets one day and ringing the change over bell on several occasions (while watching no-one sneaks in through the Presbytery Gate).


After three weeks the crowds will disperse, the treasures leave for Tamworth Castle, and the cathedral staff will at last be able to breath out. It should be quite an occasion, and on a scale no-one could ever have envisaged. Only a week or so ago there were the Lichfield Festival concerts in the nave, and I have just received our invitations for the Cathedral Patrons annual dinner in the nave, in September. People flow through the cathedral on so many occasions - great stuff. I might even get to stay for Evensong on the odd afternoon.


And if you don't get to see the exhibition either at Lichfield or at Tamworth there are other options: the (US) National Geographic will be displaying the Hoard during the Fall (sorry, a lapse into US-speak which comes from living around the corner from the National Geographic some years ago), and then it returns to the cathedral in the New Year.