After the rush of the school holidays, we are taking a moment to catch our breath and giving the collections some much needed TLC. Whilst the fingerprints on our cases are a testament to the enjoyment of our younger visitors have found amongst the displays, they can be disruptive for our other museum visitors.

So volunteers Rachel and David joined museum staff, Melanie and Evie, to clean the display cases inside and out. The objects inside the cases were cleaned inside and out. The objects inside the cases were cleaned, as well as our mannequins wearing the uniforms of Riflemen past and present.

Although not the most glamorous of tasks, this type of housekeeping gives us a really good opportunity to get up close and personal with our artefacts, and you really start to notice some interesting details. For example, Melanie observed that the previous owner of our Taliban motorbike had attempted some repairs to the handlebars. Evie also polished the bugle, our Regimental symbol, keeping it up to standard.

We have also taken the opportunity to put out some fresh pest traps in some of our cases. It is an unpleasant fact of museum life that there might be something trying to eat your collection, so we place little sticky traps to keep tabs on what is around so we know if we have a problem – the only creepy crawlies we want in our museum are the ones we are planning as part of our Halloween craft activities on 28th October 2016!

This is an on-going task, so watch out for members of the team cleaning the cases or checking up on the pest traps throughout the year. There is always plenty to do, so if you are interested in helping out, feel free to contact us at museum@the-rifles.co.uk to find out more…

Rachel cleaning our modern Rifleman uniform mannequin and David cleaning our ‘Rifles in Iraq’ case.