Welcome to the British History Podcast.

My name is Jamie.

And today we're going to hear from Deborah Cain, she's a conservator with the Birmingham

Museum and Art Gallery, and she's going to give us an idea of how this material is preserved

and what goes into that.

There's a lot that goes into this, actually, and what's really interesting about talking

to Deborah is that they're coming up with cutting edge techniques that are actually

elegantly simple.

I really like how they're dealing with all this stuff.

So without any further ado, let's get to Deborah.

My name is Deborah Cain.

I am currently the Staffordshire Horde Conservation Project Manager.

I've worked on a wide range of materials.

I started primarily on organic materials, but found in my career that, obviously, organics

are usually fixed to inorganics.

So generally, over my career, I've switched from organics to inorganics and found myself

in a lucky position here at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery to be one of the in-house

permanent conservators when the Staffordshire Horde was found, and I was in the perfect position

to start the project and launch it through.

So how did that actually begin, your involvement with the Horde?

Well, I think you've heard that it was kept quite a secret process, because, obviously,

it's a gold Horde found quite important, or I don't think it was even from the beginning.

...