Getting personal – the thrill of cataloguing meaningful everyday items

I’ve been an Inventory Officer for Project Reveal for almost two years now. And after 23 months, 10 colleagues and 9 properties, I can say there’s nothing like the thrill of cataloguing an object that has an intimate connection with the location where it’s stored. These objects can also help us reveal new information about the people who once lived there.

So far, my favourite Trust property to catalogue has been the Tenement House in Glasgow – a flat frozen in time, where Miss Agnes Toward, a shorthand typist, lived from 1911 to 1965. The fact that the majority of the collection is original to the property makes it a very special space.

Miss Toward moved to the Tenement House in Buccleuch Street with her mother, who was a young widow and started her own dressmaking business that she ran from the flat. After her mother’s death, Miss Toward continued to live in the apartment alone. She never married and worked for almost 50 years in the same job and company.

Neither Miss Toward nor her mother liked to throw things away. This was surely due to a ‘make do and mend’ attitude and possibly for sentimental reasons; a lot of the objects at the Tenement House still carry the emotional value they must have carried a century ago. The house is full of furniture, documents, cleaning products, dresses and photographs that tell us a lot about the story of these two independent women.

A few of the objects in the collection are very private to Miss Toward, and I’m not sure she would really have appreciated me enjoying them so much. But I think they’re a very good example of how much objects in the care of the National Trust for Scotland can open a door to past lives.

In the picture below you can see a postcard sent to Agnes by an admirer when she was a teenager. We don’t know if she ever wanted to get married or have a family, but a lot of women from that generation never had the chance to do so as many men died during the First World War. In any case, we don’t know anything about the postcard’s sender – or why he signed himself ‘Mr Bulldog’.