'People often expect a perfect repair, but we are not about that': The experts taking care of leather
Whether it’s a football used in the First World War or the seats of an early electric taxi, the Leather Conservation Centre in Leicester helps conserve historic objects, as Corinne Julius reveals
Where would mankind be without leather? It is one of the oldest materials our ancestors used, key to survival from the Stone Age onwards. It provided clothing, armour, transport, drinking ware, furniture, sporting equipment, decoration and protection for soft human feet — the oldest leather shoe, discovered in excellent condition in the Areni-1 cave in Armenia in 2008, is 5,500 years old. Yet, it is often taken for granted and its preservation has only fairly recently become the focus of specialist attention.
The Leather Conservation Centre, set up in 1978 by John Waterer and now in a brand-new building in the centre of Leicester, is a world leader in this field. It focuses on preserving and understanding historic leather and related materials, including parchment, intestines and various skins, as well as spearheading research on issues such as red rot, environmental damage caused by pollution that turns the surface of vegetable-tanned leather into dust (the damage cannot be reversed, but it can be slowed and, in some cases, stopped).
Among the centre’s clients are not only a huge variety of institutions, but also many private people, especially from historic houses during the off season. As a result, its projects are strikingly eclectic — a sedan chair, a moving book about the sinking of a ship of refugees that became a snack for a hungry hound, sword scabbards, armchairs old and new, handbags, gloves, bellows from a working print press and even shadow puppets.
Amid samples of leather of all kinds, an ancient bishop's chair is gently brought back into a stable condition at the centre.
Most of the objects that make their way to Leicester are poignant, often with historic significance. Rosie Bolton, head of the Leather Conservation Centre, is currently working on a book detailing the voyage of St Louis, an ocean liner that left Germany on May 13, 1939, carrying primarily Jewish refugees escaping the Nazi regime, and journeyed to America and back in search of a safe place where they could disembark. The book was savaged by the owner’s dog. ‘There’s been a lot of dye transfer and there was a lot of mangling. I’ve gently humidified and tried to flatten the pages out where they were really pulled together. I used gentle moisture to try and separate them and get them back as close as possible to their original shape.’
The process is painstaking and involves inserting archival card, scraping the leather back and using kozo and gampi (Japanese multi-fibre tissue papers made from mulberry bark) to give strength, before colouring them to match the original binding. Woven fabrics are never used, as they tend to stretch and distort in one direction, and all the adhesives (usually dry ones) are carefully chosen to cause no damage.
Rather than cutting a rare 17th-century gilt-leather panel to move it from the Cotswolds to London, the centre worked with joiner John Bolton to rehang the piece to spectacular effect.
The centre’s conservators also restored the Battle of Loos football, the only remaining of three known to have been used in the First World War, which, now held by the Untold Museum collections and archives, will be displayed in new galleries in Belfast as part of ‘Untold Stories of the Irish in the British Army’. Dribbled into No Man’s Land, the ball ripped on barbed wire. The conservation work took into account the ethical considerations of preservation, such as the use of vegetable dyes, to avoid confusing original and new elements. This approach is typical of the centre, which emphasises historical integrity and ethical practices. It’s not about making the work look pristine, but rather, after due research, leaving an object in a sufficiently stable condition.
‘People often expect a perfect repair, but we are not about that,’ Bolton explains. ‘Obviously, it’s their object, and they’re free to do what they want with it, but we feel that it’s important that any decision that’s made needs to be made with full knowledge, so we give them as much information as we possibly can about an item’s history, context and significance and give suggestions for alternative options.’
An example is a client who wanted a rare 17th-century gilt calfskin panel from his Cotswold home restored, then cut to fit his new house in London. ‘We ended up finding another approach. We chose specific panels that would fit nicely to fill a kind of geometric space within the room, painted behind them in a colour that matched the background of the gilt leather and worked with a joiner on the hanging system.’ That said, she adds, ‘if a client wanted to do something too drastic, it’s not something we would do here’.
Gilded, painted leather is a rich variation on the myriad samples of plain leather.
The centre aims to preserve as much of the original material as possible, using gentle techniques to consolidate and humidify an object, reshape and soften the leather and thus reduce efflorescence and undulations, using patching techniques to repair objects and aiming for an ‘old-but-loved’ appearance. A case in point is a coin purse that belonged to First World War soldier Arthur William Byford, shot at Gallipoli. He wrote in his diary: ‘I was shot in the right thigh & was saved from a more serious wound by my purse which was doubled up in my pocket with some money inside. The Bullet went through my pocket, the purse and took the edge off of a ½ crown that was in the purse.’
The centre treated his life-saving possessions with minimal intervention, doing extremely light repairs with Japanese tissue. ‘The splitting was retained, but we sutured it in the corners and we very, very gently reshaped some bits, but in a way that there was barely any visible difference. It’s just stable.’ All this doesn’t mean that the centre won’t restore objects to look much as they once did: the craftspeople recently finished work on Omersa elephant sculptures to look as new.
The centre also works on classic cars, reviving — not merely replacing — the leather seats of cars, such as this E-Type from Cariconics.
Classic-car owners call upon the skills of the staff, too, so much that there is a large door and ramp to allow vehicles to be driven inside the premises. Conservators have treated an early Argyll that still runs in the London to Brighton race; a Bugatti; an early electric taxi of 1897 for the Science Museum; and, for specialist classic-car firm Cariconics, a Jaguar E-Type: ‘We have been moving towards conservation of cars rather than restoration; conserving what exists, rather than replacing with new panels or new leather,’ says Stephen Gannon, co-owner of Cariconics.
‘We bought the E-Type four years ago, off the driveway of a widow whose husband died tragically. All the interior was original. The centre stabilised the leather, re-stitched, cleaned and refreshed it all. The guy who did the refit said it was obvious those panels were made for the car, because everything went back together perfectly. It’s cost us a lot more to conserve than it does to replace it with shiny new leather — but it tells a story and it’s worth it.
