Thackray Medical Museum

Rather than go for another walking and talking afternoon out it was unanimously decided that we would pay our second visit in ten years to The Thackray Medical Museum, one of our fine city’s bestest ever museums and deserving of more fame.

Unfortunately its not a national museum so it costs you to get in, £16 for two adults and one U16, (£18 for a family of five) but the good news is that if you gift aid the fee you get a buy-one-get-one-free ticket for each person, so we get to back for nowt anytime in the next twelve months – that sort of thing warms the cockles of a Yorkshireman’s heart and add the fact that Alistair Darlings Exchequer will not benefit from the tax I paid when I earned that £15 then its double-bubble.

The museum opened in 1997 in what was the old Victorian Workhouse in East Leeds, which then became St James’ Infirmary which then grew ten zillion times its original size and abandoned the old broken down workhouse buildings, until the early 90′s when a former customer of ours, Chas F Thackray & Co sold their Leeds based surgical instrument manufacturing concern and donated the owners private collection of historical surgical items to the Health Trust with the wish that a small museum should be opened.

Along came lottery funding and the old workhouse buildings were donated to the cause provided that the top floor could be adapted for their own administrative offices, a decision that they were soon to regret, thanks to a friend of mine.

With the lottery cash the project soon became a huge one rather than just a collection of medical instruments and an educational centre for West Yorkshire schools was incorporated as well as its unique selling point – “The Victorian Streets of Leeds”.

The first thing that you walk into having handed over your dosh is the ground floor section that has a reconstructed Victorian slum neighbourhood intended to demonstrate the squalor and deprivation of that era in an overcrowded working class district.

But how do you recreate the sort of squalor that no-one understands in these days of relative good health and modern sanitary arrangements, how do you depict the fact that drainage was rudimentary, how do you show that the local streams and becks were used as open sewers, that the terraced houses did not have toilets of their own but that everyone shared one down the street which was not connected to any sort of sewage drain that we know of but was instead shoveled out by the “night soil men” once a week ?

Enter Steve Burt.

Steve was the older brother of an old schoolfriend of mine, we boozed weekends with Steve, he was at the time a primary schoolteacher but had a history degree and moonlighted outside of school running lectures on local history, he quickly became an acknowledged expert on the history of Leeds and walks around the older parts of our city on Saturday nights out would turn from being booze-fests to impromptu and fascinating lectures on what each old building was originally used for, he lit the first spark of the flame of my interest in local history and he is now a big-shot at the Royal Armouries which includes the Frazier International History Museum in Louisville Kentucky, the bas’tad, not bad for someone who wouldn’t even come to Greece on holiday with us one year because it was “abroad”.

So,

You’ve built this whole street of tiny hovels and terraced houses with filthy little shops and a pub and there’s a toilet block with the night soil trap open at the back so that you can see the human excrement inside awaiting collection, and the street you walk down is filthy and the sounds are piped in and it feels uncomfortable and unsafe and not somewhere you’d like to live – but its still just a museum and in the back of your mind you know its not real – so how do you conquer the last of the senses and make it real enough to not want to linger too long ?

You make it smell like a Victorian hovel, thats how.

And thats how Steve Burt, in his role as historical advisor to the trustees of the museum ended up sitting at a meeting one afternoon where a company from down south somewhere came and presented their unique ventilation equipment that could make places smell like someone had just taken a very big smelly shit and not bothered to even waft it around a bit or let everyone know to “give it ten minutes in there”.

He swears that the conversation at that board meeting went something like,

“This Gentlemen is what we think a Victorian open street sewer would have smelled like”
(various sniffs)
“Its not meaty enough”
“Pardon ?”
“Needs to have some rotten meat in it, theres a butcher in the street, have you any offal ?”
“Yes, here is some rotten meat”
(phial gets passed round the table again, lots of sniffing)
“Thats quite good, can you mix the sewer and the bad meat ?”
“Like this ?”
“Thats good but it needs sweat now”
“Human sweat, like this ?”
(more sniffing)
“Its close now, but they kept pigs in their houses too you know”
“We have pigs”
“We’re nearly there now, if you can just turn up the human shit a bit I’m sure we can sign a contract…”

And so the museum bought the most awful range of foul smells in which to assail their visitors in the carefully laid out educational street of hovels, and the kids think its fantastic and they are each given a card with details of different Victorian urchins of their age group and told to follow their progress through the streets, most of whom die of some wretched disease before they reach the end and the most over-used building in the street is the toilet block for it smells terrible and someone is farting inside one of the toilet stalls and when you try the door he shouts at you to “bugger off” and small kids laugh and run away while their parents stand holding their hands over their noses and wondering just what sort of hell they’ve brought their offspring to.

And the punch line to this whole story is that after years of planning and £3 million spent, the museum opened to fantastic critical acclaim in 1997 and on the first week of opening the Leeds Health Trust took back their newly renovated third floor office suites (which had always been part of the deal) only to realise that their air conditioning system was pumping the odour of fresh Victorian shit, sweat and pigs up from the ground floor – they evacuated their offices the same day and refused to come back until they had a separate aircon system.

For anyone close enough to avail themselves I recommend The Thackray Medical Museum to the house.