Leo Whisstock, National Secretary of the Association, explains that the silver lining of the pandemic was that it allowed the volunteer team to totally overhaul their collections storage and display spaces:
“I think it is safe to say that the COVID pandemic was a serious event that affected everyone, but in a strange way it did our museum a favour!”
“The Government told us to stay at home or if we had to go to work, to drive. We quite naturally closed our museum for the duration of the restrictions and my wife and I, who are both volunteers at the museum, faced the prospect of sitting at home looking at each other. We then started looking at the Government’s definition of ‘work’ and found that volunteers are classed as workers so we hatched a plan whereby we could drive to the museum and lock ourselves inside and not fall foul of the restrictions.”
“Our museum is situated in 2 separate rooms, one of which was the original room when the museum opened in 1975 and practically all the display stands etc were from that time and were second hand then. Over the years more were added, and it became very crowded and dark and all our original WW2 veterans who used to man the rooms have all succumbed to age which meant that unfortunately the room had become unintentionally somewhat neglected. We decided that now was an ideal time to tackle the room and modernise it as with only the two of us we could leave tools out and make a mess without causing a risk to visitors.”
“The first job was to remove all the exhibits and safely store them and then dismantle and remove all the old metal display stands and relocate a few of the life size mannequins to our main museum room. With a more or less blank canvas we could plan the new layout to make it more user friendly which involved only having 2 gangways rather than 3 and also not having units too high.”
“Kitchen units seemed to be the best option and we decided we could have some with doors and a top while others could have Perspex fronts and top. A local builder came in to make up and modify the basic units which he did on days when we were not there or working in the other room, thereby keeping to the COVID rules. Once he had finished we got on with painting the new woodwork and building some new stands for specific exhibits.”
“We reviewed the exhibits that we wanted to display, some of the original ones and others that had been in storage, so that visitors that had been to us before would see a change. A timeline of photographs was created taking the visitor from new recruits joining up right through the war and finishing up with present day reunions.”
“The choice of exhibits to display involved both our rooms which was quite a major task as each item had to be changed on the database to reflect its new position in the museum and also to update some of the descriptions. The extra mannequins from the original room were utilised in a representation of a WWII armed trawler’s bridge which has worked well.”
“Although the COVID restrictions were lifted 3 weeks too early for us as we still had some minor finishing touches to do, the end result is that we now have both of our rooms in a more modern and user-friendly format.”
To find out more about the museum, visit the Royal Naval Patrol Service Museum website.