In November and December 2022 Jamie, an undergraduate history student at Queen Mary University of London, was placed with the Museum of the Order of St John to carry out projects, and gain an insight in to the work of a bustling museum and a busy heritage team. Jamie has written about his experience.

Much of my work placement while interning at the Museum of the order of St John has involved working with collections, creating an inventory of St John Ambulance objects with Immie (the Collections Inventory Assistant). The inventory project in the basement site is monumental with thousands of objects down there that are not yet identified! By joining the team in the very early stages of this project, the scale of this task is quite daunting but one we have been powering through.

This project is necessary to meet SPECTRUM requirements, a professional standard for museums which ensures accountability for their collections, and encourages their effective and ethical management. Adherence to these standards can open opportunities such as funding schemes as well as encourage professional rigour. With respect to inventory, SPECTRUM requires a museum to catalogue all unidentified objects by implementing a numbering system and documenting key information, so the object is recognisable in a database.

The process Immie has taught me when cataloguing each object consists of photographing each individual piece, measuring its length, width, and depth in millimetres, providing a brief description to put into an Excel spreadsheet, and assessing the condition of the artefact. Once all this information has been documented, I move on to conservation-grade packaging by wrapping each object in acid-free tissue paper, tying a knot of fabric tape around the object, and placing identification tags with a temporary number on them. Only once this process is complete, I can place each object safely in a box ready to be stored.

These are 20th-century metal-plate wooden print blocks which were used for first aid manuals and guides for St John Ambulance. They are all shapes and sizes, with print images usually depicting medical training or places symbolic to the Order of St John, such as maps of Jerusalem or Malta. Problems I have encountered when handling these objects consist of ink stains making the images unintelligible, copper erosion affecting the condition and the presence of lead – a toxic metal! Fortunately, rigorous health and safety training/procedures have been put in place when dealing with these potential issues, including how to spot the lead through its white powdery substance and special bags to place it into to contain it.

The triangular bandages mostly repeat similar depictions that show the multiple ways these bandages could be used in saving others. These bandages were utilised constantly in the Victorian period after their introduction in 1869, near the time St John Ambulance was founded, to train their cadets and volunteers in proper medical procedures and act as an aide memoir for users.

Finally, the last part of the inventorying project involved cleaning the objects if they are dirty or dusty. I got to use a special vacuum – a Museum Vac – to suck up the dust particles from St John Ambulance boxes while delicately using a small brush to wipe them in.

All these careful procedures and processes are crucial to the preservation and documentation of the museum’s unseen collections so that in the future they can be accessed by the public on the online catalogue, viewed on-site for research, or used for display. Each working day sees the number of unidentified objects become smaller!