Old Shirts • Travelling Menageries • History in Schools • Concealed Garments [audio 30min]

Sue Cook and the "Making History" team examine listeners' historical queries and gets to the bottom of historical mysteries, local legends, family curiosities and architectural oddities. 1) Listener Catherine Darcy, who once worked at Glyndebourne and at the Royal Shakespeare Company, became so frustrated trying to find period shirts for various productions that she decided to start her own company making them. It was then that she realised how little information there is on the history of shirts. 2) Our recent visit to Saffron Walden Museum, and mention of a stuffed lion called Wallace who may have been the inspiration for Stanley Holloway's monologue "Albert and the Lion", prompted many letters and calls with information about other 'Wallaces' throughout the UK. "Making History" consulted Dr Vanessa Toulmin, who is Research Director at the National Fairground Archive at the University of Sheffield. 3) Following recent comments by HRH Prince of Wales and the Chancellor the Rt Hon Gordon Brown, together with a House of Lords debate on the subject, "Making History" asked Professor Alun Howkins at the University of Sussex and Professor Lisa Jardine at Queen Mary, University of London, for their views on the teaching of history in schools. Andrew Wrenn of the Historical Association then gave us his views on the current syllabus and outlined changes that being piloted in September. 4) Listener Dinah Eastop tells us about a project she runs which, quite literally, deals with important hidden history. Dinah is a conservator and she used to get lots of queries from members of the public about the remnants of clothes and shoes that were found in the structure of old houses. She set up the Deliberately Concealed Garments Project at Winchester College of Art as a focus for these finds and research into them.