My name is Scarlett Parry I'm a conservation intern here at the Royal
Armouries. It's an educational internship for me to learn how to repair and
protect arms and armor ranging from medieval and weapons up until modern day
firearms. I've been here for 12 months and coming towards the end of my
internship now. As an ICON intern it means I'm funded through the institution of
conservators and funded by the clothworkers foundation and the whole purpose of the
internship is to bring new conservators like myself into the industry and gain
more experience that we wouldn't have gained during our studies at university.
A conservator someone who is extremely passionate about physical history and
wanting to preserve objects for the future and being able to look at an
object and understand not only its historical context and importance but
also the material needs and the importance of the actual physical
material. The object I've been working on is an Indian male shirt also known as a Zereh
and it would have been used on some form of parade or display as it has got a lot
of decorative features to it. It's made of butted mail which means the
rings are pulled together rather than riveted which means it wouldn't have
been as protective as some forms of mail.
The downside of butted mail is that if it gets broken the entire thing will often
continue to deteriorate and that is because one ring is fallen out and it's
created a chain reaction so all of them fall out and my job is to go in repairs
and gaps in the mail and make sure that this doesn't happen anymore.
The specific challenges of this object is that the rings are so small.
Roughly all the rings obviously the size of a bamboo skewer so when making the
mail it was very fiddly and it took a lot of time and also getting new metal
new materials to replace the originals and you have to go through a process of
aging the metal so it matches with the original and because you can't have
bright shiny metal next to the original antique. Also, mail making in
general is very fiddly you often have to lay the mail down to get it into the
correct pattern because if you don't put mailing the right pattern then the
entire thing is wrong. My favourite object has been this shirt because it's
been the biggest transformation that I've been able to show. The
before-and-after photos are quite striking especially reconstructing
the brass pattern that runs throughout the shirt. My dream object to work on
within the Royal Armouries would probably be the elephant armour purely because of the
scale of it. There are quite a lot of things that you notice as a conservative
that you would quite like to go in and repair
but definitely the elephant armor.
Conservation is extremely important because it preserves our physical
history it it's the reason why museums exist is to show people where we've come
from and how we've developed and also to demonstrate and show other cultures to
people. It's important that conservation exists so we can preserve
that as we continue for continued knowledge and learning.