In this week's blog post, Dr Jack Hayes from The Brunel Museum discusses his research into a pair of shoe buckles within the museum's collection, detailing their following conservation and its impact for the museum's work.
Research
In November 2023, I set out to answer the following question: Why does the Brunel Museum, a museum dedicated to nineteenth-century civil engineering and industrial heritage, hold a pair of sparkling eighteenth-century shoe buckles? My research, informed particularly by the work of Matthew McCormack and of Aymeric Péniguet de Stoutz, as well as by conversations with colleagues at Northampton Museums, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Centre for Fashion Curation, unlocked the buckles’ interpretative potential for our audiences and centred them in the Brunel Museum Reinvented Project, a £1.8M renovation of the site and galleries, due to begin in 2025.
The buckles were donated to the Museum by descendants of their former owner, Marc Brunel (1769-1849). A French-born civil engineer, in 1793 Brunel fled France, then in the grip of the most violent phase of the revolution which had begun in 1789, to New York. In the United States, Brunel became involved in a number of projects including a survey of indigenous lands purchased by a French company and a race to produce copying-machines for early American politicians including Alexander Hamilton. Brunel then arrived in Britain in 1799, where he rapidly became a notable engineer, responsible for automating the production of pulley-blocks for the Royal Navy and of boots for the British Army. He is now best remembered for the groundbreaking Thames Tunnel, built 1825-43 and still in use today, almost 200 years later.
By 1841, Brunel’s son Isambard Kingdom Brunel had also became a renowned engineer, and Marc Brunel himself had been knighted. My interest in the buckles drew on this shift in social status, to examine the process by which Marc Brunel moved from the son of a minor French farmer to a British knight of the realm and a ‘gentleman engineer’. The image of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, is well-known to the public, thanks to his distinctive stove-pipe hat immortalized in the iconic portrait by Robert Howlett. Marc Brunel, it seems, did much the same, using dress as a political and social statement and ensuring his image, too, was widely reproduced, as prints and on commemorative objects.
Key to understanding Brunel’s buckles is the fact that, while such buckles were widely worn in the mid- to late 1700s, by the turn of the nineteenth-century, they had essentially disappeared from men’s wardrobes. Replaced by laces, their demise decimated a large, profitable industry centred especially on Birmingham. This development was connected to a contemporaneous process taking place in France just after the 1789 Revolution, in which buckles became highly politicised, associated with the aristocracy which was to be swept away. Several commentators wrote for or against the wearing of shoe buckles. Vast numbers were handed over to the revolutionary government to be melted down for currency; ‘national’ buckles made of copper replaced them for some. This negotiation of political ideology via clothing can be seen as part of a wider ‘sartorial revolution’, in which the clothing of revolutionaries – cockade pins, bonnet rouge hats, carmagnoles jackets – publicly identified their radical politics. Indeed, even the revolutionaries’ collective moniker, les sans-culottes (‘the people-without-breeches’), referenced a distinctive style of dress.
Brunel was decidedly conservative, and deeply opposed to the revolution. Having fled, apparently following an altercation in a Paris café at the time of the execution of Louis XVI, he remained committed to the restoration of the French monarchy and aghast at the political unrest which gripped France from 1789 to the end of his life in 1849. The buckles, then, may have served a political purpose: they identified him as part of the old guard, not simply old fashioned, but also conservative in a political sense. In England, Brunel’s manner of dress drew comment: one contemporary noted in later recollections of their first meeting in 1829 that Brunel wore the ‘dress of a French gentleman of the ancien régime’ and that ‘he had kept to a rather antiquated, but very becoming, costume’. This may well have included buckles, perhaps even those now in the Museum’s collection.
Conservation
In order to ensure the buckles’ material stability, to restore some of their lustre and brilliance, and to learn more about their material composition and histories, we decided to undertake conservation work. After a successful application to the Costume Society’s Daphne Bullard Grant, we invited metals conservator Joanna Whalley to the Museum to carry out proposed treatment. Joanna has significant experience of similar objects, having been Senior Metals Conservator at the V&A for many years, in which role she was Senior Conservator on the William and Judith Bollinger jewellery gallery. We were therefore very excited to learn more from her and to have her carry out the conservation.
Joanna’s treatment concentrated on examining and cleaning the buckles. It consisted of dry brushing, followed by removal of residue with a bamboo pick; cleaning of surfaces with denatured ethanol; removal of tarnish with a sponge embedded with precipitate of calcium carbonate; and removal of residues with denatured ethanol.
The conservation work was useful, firstly, because it confirmed that the buckles are stable and secure, and can remain on permanent display, including in the new gallery next year.
Conservation provided key confirmation about the buckles’ material composition, strengthening the Museum’s ability to care for them. The buckles themselves are made of a mixture of silver, and silver-plated steel. The use of plated steel made the buckles both cheaper than solid silver, and hard-wearing for use on shoes. Joanna’s examination confirmed our assumptions that the buckles’ stones are paste, a common material in eighteenth-century jewellery which imitates diamonds. As is typical for objects of this kind and period, the paste gemstones had black dots painted on their culets and were then set on silvered foils, both techniques used to further develop the stones’ sparkle. These silvered foils have since tarnished significantly. Pre-treatment examination had found significant deposits of a white residue around the stones. In some areas, this residue has seeped behind the stones and caused a chemical reaction on the foils which now causes some of the clear stones to glow blue, indicating that the foils beneath contain copper or nickel. While it had been assumed that this was the residue of a silver polishing compound, examination under a microscope indicated the residue was likely soap – an unconventional cleaning product, and not one the Museum intends to employ!
The work also provided new information about the buckles. It was apparent to the naked eye that stones in the buckles had been replaced. Joanna’s examination showed that at least 12 out 55 surviving stones have been replaced. This suggests the buckles underwent a number of repairs during their use, further bolstering our hypothesis that they were used and kept even after they ceased to be fashionable. Joanna also suggested that one of the buckles has had a far harder life than the other, with the silver plating on the steel chapes of one buckle having been ripped off. While we will never know exactly what happened, this insight into their material history is very useful. Finally, one stone has been lost entirely; it was decided not to replace this stone, but to leave it as evidence of the buckles’ material history.
Impact
Working alongside consultant Holiday Donaldson and designer Lydia Reed, we recently developed a new outreach activity, Tunnellers’ Tales. This dress-history focussed activity, funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, explores a theme which will be the focus of the new permanent gallery – the lives and working conditions of the miners, bricklayers, blacksmiths, and other workers who built the Thames Tunnel. The ‘Museum in a Box’-type activity consists of a range of items of dress, both modern and historic, with the historic items being designed or procured based on our archival research. This activity will give visitors the opportunity to dig deeper into the lives of working-class labourers in 1800s London through their oil-skin caps, thick woollen shirts, and heavy strait boots, with smells and other sensory elements integrated into the kit to heighten the experience.
We were keen to explore class dynamics as part of Tunnellers’ Tales. To do so, the kit includes two items of dress akin to those worn by the wealthy engineers for whom the labourers toiled: a top hat, and a pair of sparkling shoe buckles. Both vintage objects, they will be fully accessible to participants who will be able to turn the buckles in their hands to appreciate the refractive effects of the paste-glass diamond simulants and feel their weight. Armed with the information gathered during research and conservation, our volunteer guides leading the session will feel confident in sharing with visitors the relevance of the buckles, and the intriguing stories surrounding these small, shiny objects. Our intention is that this tactile, sensory experience leads participants more readily to understand class disparities in modes of dress and access to materials, and that they leave with a heightened appreciation and understanding of the accessioned collection, including Brunel’s eighteenth-century buckles, on display in the gallery.
As we prepare for the Brunel Museum Reinvented Project, we have been reassessing the layout and interpretation of the Museum’s collections informed by ongoing object-based research. One area of research has focussed particularly on dress history, with a cluster of dress items – the buckles, a hand fan, wedding bands, and two printed kerchiefs – benefitting from sustained research engagement and the generous support of funders including the Costume Society. In the new gallery, we intend for these dress objects to take centre stage. The research and conservation carried out on these objects allows us to engage our audiences with them in new ways, and has provided us with the tools to surprise and intrigue visitors with new stories. Our intention is for Brunel’s buckles to sit alongside other family possessions, in an exploration of their social class and self-fashioning. The construction of an entirely new display case will allow us to dramatically improve how they are seen by visitors, with a new mount and lighting emphasizing the effects they had when worn.
Live interpretation, through both guided tours of the gallery and curatorial short talks, will further explore various themes inspired by the buckles, such as Brunel’s innovative boot-making machinery, which brought about new techniques in dress manufacture at the same time as it did Brunel’s bankruptcy. The buckles will also form a route into questions of contemporary relevance. In particular, the knowledge gained through this research and conservation project about their reuse and repair over many decades speaks to contemporary concerns with the rise of fast fashion, and will enable too exploration of the environmental impact of the Industrial Revolution in which Marc Brunel was a key player.
