We promise to clean this up before anyone steps in a can.

The loans were unpacked last Friday under the supervision of Andy Holbrook, the loans shipment courier who is the Collections Care Manager at the IWM, and our Quarantine Inspector from AQIS. read on

We are just now finalising the exhibition catalogue for printing and I have some time to do more posts about the exhibition. So, here is a brief post to let you know a little more about some of the items we are bring out from the collection of the Warden and Fellows of All Souls College in Oxford.

T.E. Lawrence was a Research Fellow of the College from 1919 to 1926. He tried living there during 1919 and 1920, but had also spent time writing in London. He gave up his rooms at Oxford in 1922.

The people at All Souls have been very helpful and generous. I met with the Bursar, Thomas Seaman in the middle of 2006 and he was very understanding as I arrived at Oxford very late in the day after catching the wrong train back to central London from The National Archives in Kew. We didn’t have much time to chat, but he was really helpful and agreed to facilitate our request for these loans: read on

Well, at least something we were not allowed to borrow . . .

We did want to bring one of Lawrence’s Arab daggers out to show in our exhibition. Two were displayed by the IWM: a gold dagger made for Lawrence in Mecca in 1917 that is now owned by All Souls College, Oxford; and a silver-gilt dagger now owned by Lord and Lady Kennet. I thought that it would be best to try for both and my first negotiation was in London at the home of Lord and Lady Kennet. We didn’t get the dagger, but I have the Kennet’s permission to tell you this story, which is pretty interesting, at least from my perspective.

I was told on the phone by Lord Kennet that I could not have the dagger but was invited to evening drinks with him and Lady Kennet and walked up there, across Hyde Park from my ’summer residence’ in South Kensington. Ha! When I approached the house I noticed one of those blue historic site disks mounted on the house. They live in the former home of Sir James Barrie.

read on

In this post I will begin to cover my second trip to London in late June 2006 to negotiate

loans from the UK, mostly for the Lawrence side of our exhibition. It really was a great priviledge to be able to do this and to return to London so soon after my quick visit over Easter to see the IWM’s Lawrence exhibition. Museum’s are not made of money and this trip was made possible because my colleagues here in Art and Travelling Exhibitions, Lola Wilkins and Jude Savage, generously allowed for me to travel as their courier, bringing our art works in Shared Experience back from their London show.

Before packing up Shared Experience, I had almost two weeks to race around, negotiating loans from various collections in and around London. So, on to my stories about loan negotiations and at last, some interesting facts about the items we will be bringing out to Australia for the first and maybe the only time. read on

A while back, one of our regular readers was talking to me about what we were doing and expressed some surprise at what effort is going into this exhibition. He said that he thought we just went out the back and grabbed things to put into cabinets and presto, an exhibition is born. Well, words to that effect. Others have emailed me recently about being interested in what goes into putting our exhibitions together.

The process isn’t actually that simple and with about half of this exhibition being devoted to international loans regarding Lawrence, it is even more complex than our normal temporary exhibition process. So, for those of you who might be interested, I will now attempt to outline the key elements of our process thus far. I suspect that it’ll take a few posts, based just on my rough notes and there won’t be too many relevant images, so if you don’t have a deep abiding interest in our process, I suggest you turn away very quickly now and do a crossword puzzle or look at one of our other blogs. My colleagues working on the To Flanders Fields, 1917 exhibition are doing a great job with excellent content, so maybe check that one out. read on

A while back, actually a long while back, I promised to enlighten you about a couple of inspiring things that I saw in London in 2006 during my visits to view the IWM’s Lawrence of Arabia, the Life, the Legend exhibition and to negotiate our UK loans. So after a long delay and absolutely no requests to read the second part of my story, here it is. I must tell you that what I’ve written below were my impressions, recorded in London over Easter 2006. Since then, I’ve worked on the challenges presented by our exhibition and I’ve developed an even deeper appreciation of the work that went into these exhibitions.

Firstly, I found the IWM’s relatively new Churchill Museum absolutely stunning. Located with the Cabinet War Rooms, it is visually splendid and makes full use of modern exhibition technology to educate visitors about Churchill’s amazing life by very clever use of sound, documents, images, film footage, interactives and the display of selected objects. I went for a quick visit, just to breeze through and found myself there for some hours. You get a very good sense of the man and his achievements without being confused or overwhelmed by too much content or context.

read on