2008 Family Events
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Night Mail poetry workshop
Our family events started on 29 March 2008 with a family poetry workshop at Finsbury Library based on the GPO Film Unit classic, Night Mail (1936). The film screening was followed by a potted history of life on the TPO using a puppet in 1930s-style postal uniform. Puppets make it easier to put across historical information as reminiscence, making it much more accessible to children.
We had also filmed machinery at Mount Pleasant Mail Centre, and used a puppet in modern postal uniform to narrate the footage. Visitors used percussion instruments and their own words to create a soundtrack for the video.
We were delighted to work with poet Maureen Roberts, who led group readings of W H Auden’s poem Night Mail and helped families write about the mail systems of the future. The results were wonderful, and ranged from supersonic mail machines to dinosaur riddles! The children were recorded speaking their poems, and these have been edited together with the video footage and will soon be available on our website.
Philatelic Fun Day
To mark World Stamp Day, the BPMA tried its first Philatelic Fun event on Saturday 10 May 2008. This was intended as an informal introduction to stamps, with activities aimed at families of all ages.
A film of Arnold Machin sculpting his classic design for British definitive stamps, helped visitors create their own profiles using the same process of photographs, sketches and modelling. The Machin plaster cast is on display in the Search Room, completing the evolution of this familiar, iconic design.
A picture quiz based on our philatelic exhibition Lions, Leopards, Unicorns & Dragons: the first “Regional” stamps encouraged visitors to examine the heraldic and floral emblems which represent the regions, and to design stamps using symbols of their own identities.
The event was very enjoyable, and we were delighted to see how enthusiastic families were about the huge range of stamp designs which celebrate every aspect of British culture. Carnival mask making was inspired by the 1998 Europa Festivals: Notting Hill Carnival stamp issue, and children had fun with the 2003 Fruit and Vegetables self-adhesive stamps and sticker accessories, on postcards to send to friends.
The most successful activity of the day was our basic introduction to collecting stamps. Children removed stamps from envelopes by floating them on water, before mounting them on National Postal Museum album sheets.
Even the youngest children were able to handle the stamps with care and mastered the art of using tweezers and stamp hinges.
We took care to explain that in a museum context, stamps are not removed, partly to avoid any damage to the stamp itself, but also because the envelope can also be an important source of historical information.
Family events like these provide much needed opportunities for children, parents and carers of all ages to have fun and learn together in a variety of creative, stimulating environments. A recent meeting of the Camden Family Learning Forum, attended by representatives of cultural and heritage organisations, including the British Museum, the British Library and the BPMA, highlighted the importance of free family events in the borough.
Other family sessions this year include Family Learning in the Archive in June, Letter Boxes in Miniature in August, and this year’s Big Draw initiative in October. The BPMA is striving to cultivate new audiences, and to promote a wider interest in philately and all things postal across the generations.
If you have children or know of anyone who would like to be kept informed of our future family activities via inbox, the BPMA’s young people’s mailing list, please email inbox@postalheritage.org.uk and ask for an inbox sign-up sheet.