Our IT colleagues have spent a day volunteering at the National Museum of the Royal Navy at Portsmouth’s Historic Dockyard.
Eight members of our Portsmouth-based IT Architecture team took a step back in time to help the museum’s curators with the preservation and care of some of the historic artefacts and exhibits held in the collection.
The team, whose role is about setting the future direction for our company’s Information Technology, were inspired to attend by Infrastructure Architect Kevin Farrow, a keen sailor who lives close to the Historic Dockyard and has visited the museum many times.
They split into three groups and rotated through the activities the museum needed support with. The first was scrubbing the decks on HMS Warrior, removing the ‘deposits’ left by the birds perched in her rigging which needed vigorous efforts to remove.
The museum has a large collection of books and journals dating back many years, which are very delicate and prone to mould growth caused by fluctuating humidity through the seasons. Armed with a soft brush and small vacuum cleaner, their job was to carefully remove each book from its place on the shelves and gently remove any mould that had grown on its covers before replacing it. It was a painstaking job but essential to preserving this historically significant collection.
The final job of the day was packing furniture removed from the officers’ cabins of HMS Caroline, which is now berthed in Belfast. It was the last ship still afloat which took part in the Battle of Jutland in 1916, the largest naval sea battle of the First World War. Each item had to be carefully wrapped in a protective sheet before being tightly sealed in polythene and sent to spend a week in a freezer to kill any stowaways like insects lurking in the nooks and crannies.
It was all part of our Community Action Programme, where our people are given a day away from their usual work to volunteer with local organisations and charities, with hundreds of our colleagues volunteering throughout the summer across our Scottish and southern networks.
We have a sizeable Armed Forces community of our own and have signed the Armed Forces Covenant. Earlier this year, we launched Military@SGN, our employee network for veterans, reservists and military family members working with us.
Stephen Reynolds, Head of IT Architecture at SGN and Chair of Military@SGN, said: “This felt like a fantastic opportunity for our team as it’s not often you get the chance to get behind the scenes in an institution like the Historic Dockyard. It was a tiring day but we came away with an immense feeling of satisfaction for playing our tiny part in the preservation of this fragment of our nation’s rich naval history. It was made all the more special as we watched HMS Medway coming back into port at the end of our day, her crew smartly assembled on deck representing today’s modern Royal Navy against the backdrop of its history and heritage.”
