The Life Scientific: Eleanor Schofield

0:00Eleanor Schofield:This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

0:30at Whole Foods Market. How did a boycott Jimmy become a billionaire from posting videos? On Good Bad Billionaire, we're going to find out how the world's most popular YouTuber, Mr Beast, made his fortune. He's buried himself in a coffin for days. Counted to 100 ,000 on camera. And even recreated Squid Games, all in an attempt to go viral on the internet. But it all started when he gave a homeless man$10 ,000. So is he a philanthropist reshaping capitalism? Or is he just the king of the attention economy? Find out on Good Bad Billionaire. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to a special edition of The Life Scientific, coming to you complete with audience from the Mary Rose Museum at Portsmouth's Historic Dockyard, where maritime history meets conservation science.

1:17Ladies and gentlemen, picture the scene. It's July 1545 and King Henry VIII is at war with France. again. As the French fleet enters the Solent, Henry watches from the battlements of Southsea Castle as his warships head out from the harbour to meet them. Cannons loaded and sails high, including his favourite, the mighty Mary Rose. And then she sinks. Right there, in full view of all the spectators, the pride of the Tudor navy vanishes under the waves. Whether this was down to French firepower, the weather, or just plain human error, we don't know for sure. But what the ocean took, science has recovered.

1:55More than 400 years after she went down, in 1982, the Mary Rose was salvaged. And today, thanks to decades of painstaking conservation, the surviving section of the ship, along with thousands of artefacts, are on display here at the museum. But maintaining this ancient vessel and its accompanying treasures has been no mean feat. As the Director of Collections at the Mary Rose Trust, Dr Eleanor Schofield, knows better than most. Eleanor's work as a materials engineer has taken her to the United States and back, exploring different ways to identify and remove contaminants, most recently from delicate and aged materials.

2:32Now, Eleanor combines her conservation role with ongoing research, ensuring this historic collection stays ship-shape for future generations. And today we'll find out exactly how she manages to do that. So without further ado, Eleanor Schofield, welcome to The Life Scientific. Thank you very much.

2:51APPLAUSE As I've mentioned, we're recording today's programme at the Mary Rose Museum, where visitors can see the recovered section of the ship. So for anyone who isn't familiar with the story, Eleanor, why is it such an important historic relic?

3:04Eleanor Schofield:Well, here we have the largest collection of Tudor objects in the whole world, and there's such a rich variety of objects, from the ship itself to large cannons and carriages down to really personal objects, combs, playing dice, things like that. And what I think is really special about the collection is Nobody decided what was saved. It wasn't a, oh, this is important, or this person is important to keep their things. It's just everything that survived in the marine environment. And that means that we get a complete cross-section of the people that were there. So we learn what they wore, what they ate, the games they played, the instruments they played, the weapons they used.

3:39Eleanor Schofield:And from all of that, we can tell their story and talk about the lives they led. And do you have any particular favourites among that collection? 19 ,000 artefacts. I know, it's quite difficult to choose. There's a lot. I am very, very fond of the ship because I've done so much research on it. But if I had to choose an object, I would choose the knit combs. They're beautiful wooden combs and it's for a couple of reasons. First of all, they're exquisite how they're made. And these are all handmade, you know, and they're just perfect. Knit combs as in combing out knits. Yes. Right, right. And the other thing that I love is if you were unfortunate enough to get knits now, you would be using a very similar comb.

4:15It might not be made of wood, but essentially what worked 500 years ago works now. and I love that. And also in some of them, there are like little nits still there,

4:23Eleanor Schofield:so that's quite good for grossing people out. Particularly children, kind of, when we go to expositions and things like that, that's quite fun. And I gather there's even a ship's dog? There is. Hatch the dog, yeah. We also have the remains of some of the food that they would have been eating and also some of the human remains as well, which we can use to start to tell the story of the people who were on board, where they were from, things like that. Well, Eleanor Schofield, let me take you back. You were born in 1980 in Yorkshire, one of four siblings. And after school, you decided to study material science and engineering at Imperial College London.

4:59Why that particular subject? What appealed? Well, it was the combination of the two, really. I didn't really want to go just down the route of one of the subjects I was doing. I was doing maths, physics and chemistry. And so I just literally looked at the prospectus and came across that. And it was quite a new subject then. I can remember asking the teachers at school and they were like, I'm not quite sure.

5:16Eleanor Schofield:but I liked the real world application of it, of really clearly seeing why it mattered and the difference that it can make and the kind of huge array of disciplines that you could apply it to. So you think of yourself as a material scientist, not say a chemist? Oh yeah, definitely a material scientist, yeah. Well, you subsequently stayed on to do a PhD focusing on synchrotron science which would come in very useful later on in your career. Just talk us through what a synchrotron is and how it works. So this is something that produces very bright X-rays. It's actually a bit of a by-product from accelerator physics, that when you are turning the electrons, you form X-rays, and they're very, very bright, and then they can be put into experimental hutches, down a beamline it's called, and then they're tuned to do loads of different experiments.

6:02Eleanor Schofield:So you're looking at the elements in a material, the compositions of the different compounds, the crystal structure, like loads of stuff. It's just fabulous. So a giant X-ray machine? Yes, basically. Come particle accelerator. Yes. Well, during your PhD, you got to travel to California to use Stanford University's synchrotron radiation light source. And once you'd completed your PhD, you took up a postdoc role with them, searching for ways to manage radioactive groundwater waste. Yes. So it was areas, and probably in this country too, but definitely in the States where they've put solid radioactive waste, thinking, all right, we'll just put it in the ground, built like car parks over the top of it, thinking it'll be okay.

6:42Eleanor Schofield:but unfortunately it oxidises and then becomes mobile and becomes a liquid so then it moves so you get these big plumes of radioactive waste and we were looking at ways that you could use bacteria to try and reverse that reaction and make it solid again so that it didn't move anymore and the synchrotron was critical for that for looking at all these different bacteria and how it affected how well the treatment worked. Well after a couple of years in California you moved back to the UK to take up a research post at the University of Kent. In fact it was a project in conjunction with the Mary Rose Trust.

7:13What was it that you were working on there? So we were looking at trying

7:16Eleanor Schofield:to develop treatments for the wood. There's various things you have to deal with when looking after marine archaeological wood and one of them is sulphur and iron that are in the wood and they can form acids. And we were looking at developing neutralisation treatments basically. So we were adding particles in which would neutralise any acid that is there. And this is where you encountered a big issue for material scientists working in conservation because you can't study the material like you usually would yeah it is really challenging i mean my instinct as a material scientist if you said right tell me what that material is made of i would chop it in half and have a good look at it but obviously with unique cultural heritage this is you know not appreciated so you have to be a little bit more inventive and make some assumptions and you know in terms of developing treatments often what we do is try and mimic what the wood is so we might take a bit of fresh wood and inject it with some of the problematic compounds that we know are there and then see how the treatment works.

8:11Eleanor Schofield:It's never quite the same, but obviously we just want to build up as better picture as we can before we then apply it to these priceless pieces of heritage. So you're finding your feet on the conservation side of material science, but at the same time, you were dealing with a very difficult period personally. Yeah, so not long after I'd moved back from the States, we lost my brother, who very suddenly died in a road accident. It was just a case of getting a phone call, and he was gone. and yeah it was really hard. He had a wife and two young children and it was just a really life-changing thing.

8:44Eleanor Schofield:It was very hard to come back from. I was lucky at the time because my supervisor at Kent, a lovely man called Alan Chadwick, he was just very calm and just let me kind of creep back into work and start doing bits, encouraged me without kind of putting too much pressure on me so in some ways I could find my feet again. But I gather it influenced your decision to step back from academia and do something quite different? Yeah, I think it did. It's funny at the time. I'm not sure I necessarily would have realised it, but reflecting back, I think I realised that maybe academia wasn't quite right for me.

9:15I loved doing research, but I didn't quite feel the pull to be an academic.

9:19Eleanor Schofield:And because of what had happened with my brother, I'd moved around a lot and I just needed some stability. So I applied for a job in publishing and was looking after a portfolio of journals, which actually were in social sciences. So it was quite different. And it was in Oxford. So it was closer to where my mum and dad and one of my sisters were my sister in law. So, yeah, I jumped out, but not for long. Because at this point, your career could have headed off down a very different path. But fate had other things in store because less than a year later, a role came up at the Mary Rose Trust. And in 2012, you joined them as conservation manager.

9:56Before we get into the scientific side of your work here, let's hear a bit more about the ship herself. As I mentioned, she was salvaged in 1982. How did that come about, the salvage operation? Because people had been looking for the wreckage for many years. Yeah, so the ship was lost and the whole shipping collection survived

10:14Eleanor Schofield:because it was buried with silt. How quickly that happened, we have no idea. There were some initial salvage attempts with no success and then it was in the 60s, a local historian and diver, Alexander McKee, developed a group to find it and the big breakthrough was when they found a map which marked the Mary Rose, and then they scanned the seabed and found an anomaly there, and that then led to the whole excavation in 1982 where it came into Dry Dock 3, where we are now, where it's been ever since. And once it was salvaged, what condition was the ship in? What were the immediate problems around conserving it?

10:49The ship itself is in amazing condition, considering everything it's been through.

10:54Eleanor Schofield:Often what happens with marine finds and excavations is the wood is a bit degraded, which means that there's water in there which is kind of swelling it out. So it can kind of look in better condition than it really is and one of the key things with all the collection is to keep it wet while you come up with your plan. With the ship itself, the most common method is that you want to remove the water but put something else there so that it doesn't kind of shrivel and crack. So you know, sometimes when you're on the beach, there might be a bit of wood and it's very warped and cracked and things like that and that's what can happen.

11:26Eleanor Schofield:In this case, with the Mary Rose, it was sprayed with something called polyethylene glycol, or PEG, as we call it for short. And what happens is that... So this is a polymer, some chemical material? Yeah, it's used in loads of things, and it's quite inert. I think it's in, like, toothpaste and medicines and things like that. And it goes into the wood, it replaces the water, and then you go through a drying process to remove whatever water is left. Everything that we're trying to do is minimal intervention to try and keep it as authentic as possible. So this peg, this polymer, once it's injected into the wood, it stays there, right?

11:58So it becomes part of the structure and it helps the wood maintain. So you don't have to constantly be spraying the wood with seawater to keep it wet.

12:06Eleanor Schofield:No, you kind of have to do it over time. So with smaller objects, you would put it in a tank and you would gradually increase the concentration of the peg. With the ship, obviously that's a bit difficult. We're a charity, we rely on ticket sales, so we could have built a tank around it, but then you wouldn't have been able to see it. So the decision was made to spray it, and that just takes much longer for it to kind of seep into the wood. Well, that peg spraying process lasted nearly 20 years. And when you joined, your remit was to prepare for the next step, drying out the hull, and then considering what challenges might come after that.

12:38So how did this drying process work exactly?

12:41Eleanor Schofield:For artefacts, usually you would put them in a freeze dryer, and that increases how quickly you can dry it and you get less dimensional change. Again, with the ship, we couldn't do that. So a system was developed where there was drying tubes all around the ship. It was modelled to look at the airflow, the temperature, the speed, humidity, to make sure that each bit of the ship was drying at the same time. A lot of this was all devised before I came here. You know, this museum was built around this conservation happening. So the conditions were all determined, the treatment had been done. And yeah, it was very much my remit of this is what's going to happen to the ship.

13:15Eleanor Schofield:This is how it will be dried. How are we going to look at how it's changing over time? and how are we going to look at all that data and decide long term what's best for the ship. And during all this process, I gather you had to be around the ship, constantly checking its condition. What was it like actually standing on a Tudor warship? I mean, did you ever stop and pinch yourself? Yes. It's incredible. It's funny, though, because when it was being sprayed, it was about 30 degrees in there, about 98 % humidity. It was not pleasant and it was very slippy. and there was lots of teams working in there.

13:49Eleanor Schofield:So there was all the teams doing the build, installing everything for the drying. We were in there cleaning the ship for quite a long time and then installing ways of which we were going to monitor it. So a lot of the time you would be quite focused on your kind of health and safety and that of your team as well. But then, yes, you would have moments of kind of stopping, particularly at the bow end of the ship. If you're in the hold, you climb right up and you look back along the length of the ship. And I just actually remember thinking, imagine being on board this with 500 other people. It's incredible.

14:21Well, in 2013, while the drying was underway, the museum opened on site, showcasing the various other artefacts. But these weren't without their issues either. For example, I gather seawater has a very specific effect on iron.

14:36Eleanor Schofield:Yes, it's very challenging to conserve marine archaeological iron. Really, it's a miracle that any of the iron survived. And this goes back to it being covered in the silt, which just cut off oxygen, so corrosion couldn't happen. Typically, you put it into a solution which just passivates it, so it stops the corrosion happening. And there's been lots of different methods that have been used over the years, and we found that when we opened the museum, some of the methods we'd used to remove particularly chloride from seawater, that can be very damaging in combination with other things, soaking treatments have been done, where the level of chloride in the solution had been measured until it didn't get any higher.

15:12Eleanor Schofield:So the kind of assumption was made that you'd removed it all, but unfortunately I don't think that was the case. So when the museum opened, and we have the conditions in the museum set to be friendly to the organic materials because they seem to be more vulnerable, actually what we found was a lot of the iron cannonballs started cracking, and so we had to come in and take them all back off display, which is quite hard work in some of the galleries. And there are quite a few cannonballs. There were hundreds, yes. So that took some persuading to be like, I know you've just installed all of these, but now we're going to take them back off display.

15:42So what do you do? What happens to the cannonballs?

15:44Eleanor Schofield:Well, we then put them into a very low humidity store, so then that slows things down, and then started on a variety of research projects trying to really understand what was happening. And it was quite interesting, that one, because we did, in that case, decide to sample some of them and cut them in half to look what happened. And that took us back to the synchrotron, actually, because, again, you can do very detailed analysis, and we're building a picture all the time that gives us more information, which hopefully, eventually, we'll get more of them back on display. Well, Elena, the drying process concluded in 2016.

16:16How has the ship changed since? There are definitely changes to the ship. It's quite difficult, actually, because we know that this phase of drying is the bit where the most amount of changes are going to happen. And the balance that you're trying to strike when looking after something like this is if you put so much peg in it that there was no dimensional change, it would be black and it would look like a piece of plastic. And obviously we don't want that. We just want to do enough to keep it stable. and with the ship it's two things it's the fact that you are going to get some shrinkage

16:45Eleanor Schofield:and of course it's only half the ship so the structure is not quite as it was made it's also was not made to be out of water the whole time it was supposed to have its weight taken being in the water so that presents challenges so there are structural movements but also as you introduce air going back to some of those chemical compounds in it they start to change too so we've had various research projects over the years looking at how all these things change and now we're about to start a project where we try to map all that together because of course they impact each other so if the wood is drying and moisture is coming out then it might move and if moisture has come out and air can come in then a compound in there might change but you're talking about big data sets.

17:22Well of course that's on the research side but also in 2016 471 years after the Mary Rose sank the ship was open to public view with those epic floor to ceiling windows that that let visitors see every angle. That must have been a special moment. Yeah, it was.

17:39Eleanor Schofield:When we were working so much in the ship hall, you were so focused on what you had to do because it was quite tight deadlines to bring everything together, the conservation of the ship. And then we actually, some of our front of house staff and volunteers, they'd not been able to see it for quite a long time because it was cut off completely. It was just in case with where we were working on it. And since we've opened, we've started doing tours with some of our staff and volunteers in there and they get quite emotional because it's quite, you know, So it's lovely to be able to share that with people, something that you've been working so hard on as well.