January Museum Blog – Burns Night & Museum Mysteries

The opening weeks of 2025 have continued in much the same theme as the busy Christmas and New Year period, with 25 ships visiting during January. This month also marked an important milestone in the season – our 10,000th visitor!

We are fortunate that many of our visiting ships invite us on board at the start of their visit to speak to their guests about the heritage and environmental conservation work that we undertake here on South Georgia. We always really enjoy our interactions with visitors during the presentation, especially all the brilliant questions we get asked! The standard ones are ‘how long are you here for’ and ‘how many people work on the island’ but occasionally we get asked a curveball that we have to go off and research!

Between visiting ships, we took the opportunity to tackle some of our behind-the-scenes tasks, one of which involved cleaning our natural history display in the Prince Room. To do this, Bodil and Livvie used a special ‘museum vac’ to carefully hoover around all of our delicate specimens and remove any dust or debris that had formed there. This is a really important part of caring for our collections because dust and dirt can attract, and act as a food source for, pests. After munching their way through this initial food source, there is a risk that they then move on to taxidermy specimens or other natural materials in the collection. We are really lucky that none of native bug species on South Georgia are known to attack museum specimens, but just in case we keep everything nice and clean so we don’t give them any ideas!

We also received an exciting delivery in January in the form of a new display case for the Fullerton Room. Our Curatorial Intern, Bodil, installed this and used it to create a display about Shackleton’s Endurance expedition featuring the almanac that Worsley used to navigate from Elephant Island to South Georgia, and Reginald James’ Polar Medal that he received for his contribution to the expedition. This new specialist museum case will help to ensure that these very precious items are preserved for many generations to come.

Towards the end of January, we were joined on island by two more members of our curatorial team – Jayne and Helen. They had a very exciting ‘commute’ to work, coming via South America and Antarctica on board Island Sky. On arrival, they immediately launched into some of our bigger projects for the season, including relocating some of our larger objects from the store above the Post Office in to the museum. One of these items, an old life-raft, particularly caught our attention as its origins were a bit of a mystery. After a bit of digging, we’ve uncovered that its proper name is a ‘Carley Float’ and it was a type of raft first invented in 1903 and subsequently used by the Royal Navy. We assume it must have come from a visiting ‘HMS’ navy ship at some point in the past but we’d love to know more. If you can shed some light on this, we’d love to hear from you!

Finally, it wouldn’t be a January blog without mentioning our annual ‘Burns Supper’. This is a Scottish event that takes places on 25th January every year to celebrate our national poet – Robert Burns. With a record number of people on station for this year’s event, we had to get inventive with the venue, eventually working out that we could squeezy everyone into the Ping Pong Room if we set up the tables a certain way! From that, it was on to peeling enough potatoes for over 40 people and preparing the traditional speeches and poems. After a hearty dinner of haggis, neeps and tatties, the right wrapped up with an energetic ceilidh. (I’m sure there were a few bruised arms the following morning!)

With January winding to a close, we are all very aware of how the days are starting to get a little shorter again, and how there is a slight chill to the wind that wasn’t there a few weeks ago. With only 8 weeks left on the island, I know we’re all going to make the most of every moment in this remarkable place.