Our Journey into the Uncharted - Elinor Grey

10 Aug 2015

In March 2015 Against Captain’s Orders opened to the public. A groundbreaking collaboration between the National Maritime Museum (NMM) and immersive theatre makers Punchdrunk Enrichment (PD), Against Captain’s Orders invites younger museum visitors on an adventure that will challenge their understanding of history. Now in a series of blogs the NMM and PD come together again to discuss how the exhibition developed from initial concept stage to the first visitors through the door. However, like all things that go Against Captain’s Orders these blogs aren’t quite what they seem as the museum has agreed to Punchdrunk’s request to structure the series around an old museum myth, the apparent disappearance of curator Elinor Grey. This is her story. If you're new to the series we recommend you begin at the start here.  PD: Over a series of eight or so blogs we’ve been discussing Punchdrunk Enrichment’s collaboration with the National Maritime Museum. To help us we’ve been using a museum myth, the story of Elinor Grey as a way of exploring our own story and the making of Against Captain’s Orders. Who Elinor really is or was has never been clear. Did she really work for the museum? Did she really disappear into the stores never to return? Did she even exist? We’ve known, or not known just enough about her to lead us on in our exploration. Now, as we come to the end of that process it feels like Elinor deserves something more. A moment in the sun. Not to explain away her mystery, but to give it’s due. This is the story of Elinor Grey. Not much is known about Elinor Grey. Not where she was born, nor where she grew up or how she lived before she arrived at the National Maritime Museum in the summer of 1948. Those that claim to have known her describe, with admiration, a woman of fearless curiosity and fearsome intellect. Flame haired and stick thin she would sweep through the museum intent on discovery. For Elinor nothing was set in stone; nothing was sacrosanct. She would challenge an assertion that the sky was blue or water wet on the basis that nothing considered beyond question should ever really be. She was a true explorer, driven by a desire to understand the world around her and ably aided by an indomitable will and healthy disregard for the rules. It was perhaps inevitable that she would eventually find her way to the museum stores. No-one could have known that she would never return.   In 1961 London was still a few years away from finding its swing, but a decade and a half on from the blitz the city was beginning to adopt the swagger of a teenager. High on an air of confidence and optimism the capital was busy building a new Britain on the rubble of the old. At every turn the establishment was being challenged, torn down, rewritten and replaced. Lines once thought uncrossable were swept away in the rush towards a brighter future. The status quo was in dire straits. The rest of the world had caught up with Elinor Grey. For her part Elinor had never stopped asking questions; her reputation as a museum troublemaker was matched only by her notoriety as an adventurer. However in all her thirteen years as a curator there was still one place she had never set foot. The museum stores. Highly secure and strictly off limits, this twilight world had remained closed to her. What's more Elinor had actively avoided it. You couldn’t work at the Maritime Museum and not have heard the stories. Strange noises, creeping shadows, whole rooms of objects alive with the history they contain. They were the stuff of childhood fairy tales told with the conviction of adult incredulity. Elinor couldn’t deny, if only to herself, that the stores scared her and finally it was to be this fear as much as anything else that drove her to a fateful decision. At sunset on the 4th September 1961, after the National Maritime Museum had closed its doors to the public, a lone figure crept through the hushed galleries. Flame haired and stick thin the figure slipped past cordons, through security doors and down winding staircases that stretched into the bowels of the earth finally stopping at a simple wooden door set back beneath farthest corner of the museum. A door marked Museum Stores. The door carried no warning and yet the figure stood rooted before it as if uncertain of the next step. Exactly at the moment it seemed certain there would not be one the figure moved. A hand grabbed, a handle turned, a door opened and a figure stepped through into the darkness beyond. Not much is known about Elinor Grey. Not where she was born, nor where she grew up or what happened to her after she stepped inside the museum stores… Our Journey into the Uncharted concludes on Tuesday 18 August. Against Captain’s Orders, a maritime adventure for 6 - 12 year olds closes on 31 August. Find out more including how to book tickets here.