(offered to but not accepted for a conference at Ironbridge in 2009)
This is an auspicious occasion when the luminati of a rather
small and specialist profession have assembled. Three anniversaries
lie at the heart of this gathering. The 300th anniversary of coke smelted
iron, the 50th anniversary of the Museum of Iron
and the 30th anniversary of what would coelsce into the Ironbridge Institute are all being
celebrated. I was a member of one of the earliest Diploma in Industrial
Archaeology cohorts in1983/84 and brought to the subject the background of two
degrees in Theology.
Many of us here today will, through the age range suggested
by a 50th and a 30th anniversary, have fond memories of the cultural
milestones of the 1970s. One such made a great impact then and now upon your
speaker. This was David Nobb's series of books and TV programmes
called The Fall and Rise of Reginald
Perrin starring Leonard Rossiter.
Reggie was a moderately successful participant in the world
of dessert manufacture and sales located with many of the trappings of
middle class life in south west London.
However he found no satisfaction in this lifestyle and supported by an adoring wife abandoned convention and "disappeared".
After numerous adventures Reggie and his wife create a
business called Grot selling Rubbish imagining it doomed to failure. The
reverse happens and Reggie finds himself a success who is able to employ
various tormentors from his previous existence.
Now, no analogy should ever be taken too far and made too
exact. But there are parallels both at the macro (the profession) and
micro (my own experience) between Reginald Perrin and Industrial
Archaeology. Classical archaeology may be dealing with decay, ruins and rubbish but
very often they have been romanticised. They involve heroic empires and
tales of daring do like Harrison Ford and Raiders of the Lost Arc.
Marine archaeology with its rubber wet suited glamour pusses takes
the whole tale of archaeology and fashion to new levels.
Industrial Archaeology evolved as a supremely unfashionable
activity promoted at times by individuals characterised by their
fraught relationship to society. Contemplate L T C Rolt or Robert Aickman. They
were "alternatives" before that word had been coined.
How and whether industrial archaeology has become fashionable is another
debate. Suffice it to say that the preservation of industrial structures or
machines beyond their sell by date tends to be a grotty activity.
Investigating an abandoned coal mine complex like Wet Earth Colliery (one of the
classic sites) is emphatically about dirt and mud.
The politics of industrial archaeology have triumphed by
demonstrating to budget holders that these antics can actually bring value
back into the economy. Graham Palmer and the Waterways Recovery Group are
an iconic instance active in the 1970s. Operation Ashton and
ASHTAC were seminal occasions when rebellious youth willing to be very
dirty indulged in what appeared to be utter acts of folly but became pivotal
moments in what nowadays is the posh act of canal or waterside regeneration.
Canals were an instance of rubbish (literally full of rubbish) having
their potential unravelled to sceptical authority.
I grew up in a relatively respectable version of this. My
childhood home was not Greater Manchester but the Norfolk Broads. My father
was aretired army officer and solicitor. He loved the Broads and they were not "typical" industrial archaeology. But he knew that
the trades of Broadland, the Millers, Smithies, the Reedmen, the Boatbuilders (in the
1930s he had worked at Hickling Broad and in Hunter's yard at Ludham)
were facing inthe 1960s an era of total change. In fact he had already
acted. Even before the Talyllyn Railway was preserved; way back in 1949 my
father was one of the founding trustees of the Norfolk Wherry Trust. He was
associated with this heritage body until he died in 2004 and Albion is a
living testimony today to the vision that individuals had some 60
years ago.
It took for me the move to Durham University
and the encounter with a totally different "northern" world, for industrial
archaeology to really enter my mind. I think we bought Neil Cosson's classic The BP Book of Industrial Archaeology
in 1978. I spent easily as much time at Durham University involved in industrial archaeology as I did
studying theology. I think this caused some of my theology tutors considerable
consternation. In retrospect this fed a healthy disregard for the norms of
academia which I maintain to this day.
There came a certain point when I was undertaking a Theology
MA and it was suggested that I study W. H. Auden. I duly did so but at
no point in 1982/83 was any link made between Auden, Industrial
Archaeology, Theology and the Durham
hinterland. I was actually in my IA life exploring the very environment which underpinned Auden's theology and
no links were made. Nor was there any interpretation on the ground.
It was Grasmere without
Wordsworth.
It would be many years before those links were made but one
of the wider points of my testimony (which industrial archaeology should
appreciate) is THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX. This is not a lecture about Auden and Industrial Archaeology (much as I should like to give it).
It was about a decade ago that those links were made leading to a book, an
exhibition, TV and radio programmes and there remains a long way to go
in the full understanding of this major aspect of one of the 20th
century's greatest poets. As he said in 1972 in Lullaby "in boyhood you
were permitted to meet beautiful old contraptions, soon to be banished from
the earth, saddle tank loks, beam-engines and overshot waterwheels. Yes, love,
you havebeen lucky" . Auden was not ashamed to admit the
romantic attachmentan engine of the Weardale Iron Company could excite.
I had quite some experiences to get through before I met
that side of Auden and I truly think that had I encountered it whilst
studying theology at Durham
(as I should have done), my life might have been quite different. Instead I left Durham
and theology and realised I needed to try to make some money, although like Perrin the prospect of doing it in
any conformist manner was unappealing.
Instead in 1983 I turned up at Ironbridge. Paul Belford's
own words resonate "Many people have passed through the
Ironbridge Archaeology unit during this time, some have turned into alcoholic
wrecks and others have become glittering stars in the firmament of historical
archaeology. Some of course are both". We were a motley crew whose
general attitude was that life in a suit did not appeal.
The course passed relatively uneventfully and then there
came the matter of finding work. This was 1984 and Thatcher's clash with
Scargill. I found my first salaried job with West Yorkshire
Metropolitan County
and the West
Yorkshire Transport
Museum in Bradford. What a mistaka to maka. For the first few months it seemed as if long held dreams
were fulfilled. I even had access to a County Hall canteen, bliss. Then we
were abolished in 1986. I had a job at the Greater Manchester Museum of
Science and Industry for two days before my old job was offered back
again.
Frankly, between 1986 and 1991 employment, although it had
its highs, was pretty turgid. I met my wife on the Firth of Clyde which
was to prove very handy. But my working life was spent just jumping
through hoops to stay afloat. I had read Rolt's account of being on the
streets of Stoke on Trent
after Kerr Stuart failed about 1930. This happened to me on the streets of Troon and Irvine
(already in a fairly desperate state with the collapse of local shipbuilding) when schemes like Community
Programmewere collapsed. I found myself in a job needing to use
highly skilled classic tradesmen and unable to secure them. Job no. 2 in Scotland therefore failed and I moved to Job no. 3 in a quiet English
market town to discover on my first day that my new boss sat me down and
advised me he had paid off one of the two members of staff I had met at
interview "in order to pay my wages". This unhappy gentleman was now
leading a one man sit in in one of the facilities and it would be my first
task to deal with this.
I endured this regime for a year before in a heart to heart
with my wife we decided that self employment beckoned for me. Before leaving
this brief career account, why does my story hold any interest to this
conference? Because in the spirit of the confessional we should all
accept that the heritage and museum professions are more often than I rate
as acceptable not model employers. There are many tales that I have heard
from others to place beside my own. Museums are certainly not and are
unlikely to be institutions of perpetuity. Names like Exeter Maritime
Museum, Lound Hall(now a care home), Chatterley Whitfield or the Bolton Mining
Museum may send some shudders around this room. There are many others[1].
Can I offer three thoughts for why I think industrial
archaeology and the heritage world in general can tend to be abusive employers?
There is the perception that museums are about enjoyment and pleasure. Ergo, those who work in them enjoy it. That is the first step to
employment abuse. The second step is the utter mismatch that can so easily arise
between the wish list and what can actually be done. Politicians often
carrying trustee
responsibility can be the worst offenders. The result is
that the paid officer finds himself heaped upon with good ideas and has to fend
off well intentioned suggestions to try and achieve anything.
In the world of industrial heritage the sheer nature of the
objects re-inforces this dangerous cycle. Certainly 20 years ago and perhaps in
places today,there were industrial museums operating in a very parlous
relationship to Health and Safety. Ships, trains, buses, all moving objects,
large lumps of metal or wood subject to decay. One of my seminal
experiences, probably in 1987, took place on the hatch covers of the Clyde Puffer
Spartan. I was holding forth to some movers and shakers including the
Director of Planning from Central Region (imagine calling a local
authority that) when my life collapsed or so it felt as a hatch cover broke in
half and I started to plummet 15 feet into a ships hold. This quick thinking
Director managed to grab me and save my life but not my dignity.
From that moment on and allied to the uncertain nature of
employment that I had already experienced, a considerable degree of
scepticism about industrial archaeology as a profession accompanied my
enthusiasm for it. Those of you actually employed in the sector today can tell
us whether itis still like this with short term contracts, poor
conditions of service and raving ambitions not allied to rigorous funded business
planning. By
contrast another seminal experience - positive this time -
was playing a key role in the relocation of the Linthouse Engine Shop to
the ScottishMaritime Museum. This is a contender in the title for the
largest building saved in Britain
by relocation.
I moved on in 1991 and elected for self employment in which
I would identify subjects that I felt had mileage in them and which
I couldcontribute too. My own agenda for life and not others. For a
process like that to work some self-examination came up. Initially two
subjects came forward. A third which is the Auden and Industrial
Archaeology theme introduced itself later. The first two subjects were model
railway history and transport publicity ephemera. I shall not say too much
about the first although it remains a major research area for me. Enough to
mention that Irealised that a quintessentially history based hobby like
model railways actually knew, then, very little about its own history.
Since then, and I can claim some role in this, a lot more has been recorded. Even
so, for a hobby that was established in the last years of Queen Victoria's reign vast swathes of activity have gone into history unrecorded. A
basic question might be posed like: narrate the models that have been made
on a commercial basis of Stephenson's Rocket. At present the best answer lies
on my computer.
The other subject I turned to was transport publicity
ephemera. I shall quote from a paper delivered to the Institute of Railway
Studies at York
in 2000. The paper was called "Is collecting railway
ephemera an archaeological task?" and I stick by that analogy. I
quote "Back in 1970 a Cheltenham bookseller Roger
Burdett Wilson was the author of Go GreatWestern, a truly
pioneering volume in studying one railway's publicity, A book that has not been surpassed in its field. He wrote
however something of a cop out when it came to possibly looking at GWR
timetables "The history of railway timetables, an intricate and fascinating
subject, has yet to be written, and like the evolution of maps, is outside
the scope of the present survey". That history of railway timetables as
a whole genre has still not been published although I have now written
"Are we on time? British Railways Timetables 1948-1997" and have a
publisher.
Why the neglect? Another paper "Time and the Timetable" is on the Railway Print Society's website. There I say " My
personal response has also been driven by notions of rubbish and (un-)
fashionableness. The timetable was an ephemeral item in concept; it was intended
for use anddisposal. It has been the butt of humour and is not
something that OK or Hello make space for. Yet I have always felt driven to be
interested in what is neglected especially if the potential is immense. So it
is with timetables. A vast publishing operation has accompanied their production
yet in the past all of the breeds of librarian, museum curator and
archivist have made their excuses and left. "It does not have an ISBN or
ISSN (often)", "It's not a unique manuscript" or "I'm a museum curator and
only interested in three dimensions" are all tempting excuses to do nothing.
Never being one to accept these sorts of explanation and
always being one who thinks that Catholic and Protestant should be put in the
same room and told to sort their differences out, I started collecting
timetables. 25 years later, one librarian married and one daughter created,
we have a collection of about 250,000 printed pieces of travel and
transport ephemera. I use the fuller description there as against the
shorthand timetable. Ephemera stands for a whole genre which is now
receiving wider recognition in heritage circles. So this helpful definition
from Studying Camden a student's
guide to Camden Local Studies and Archive Centre, March 2005 page 25:
"Ephemera
Ephemera is any kind of apparently trivial item, often
produced for a particular event or activity (such as cards, tickets,
handbills, even beer mats), that actually reflects very clearly and
individually the time, place or event it represents. These bits and pieces
add another element to our understanding of the past."
We sign up to that whole heartedly and that is why we have
done what we have done”. Of course the result is much more than
timetables, important though I think they are. A major base source for history, period.
Rather as the ephemera definition suggests I have become interested in
a wide printed field which is not being properly archived. This
will mean that understanding even recent history like that of the
de-regulation of buses will become challenging. Digital resources as opposed to
print just adds to the challenge.
Perhaps you think that Industrial Archaeology is immune to
this? Well, you must not. A recent Time
Team shown in late January 2009 investigated the Rise Hill navvy camp on the Settle Carlisle
Railway. It spoke of navvying as if no material remains were left. Yet a
restored navvy's hut in its original location remains at Catcleugh
Reservoir in Northumberland in the care of the Newcastle and Gateshead Water Company. And one of the reasons I know about this is because
we have assiduously collected the ephemeral rubbish of industrial
heritage interpretation.
Fortunately one of these items refers to the restoration as
does Harold Bowtell's magnum opus Reservoir
Railways from Durham
Dales to the Border. Our own
collection grew greatly through the 1990s as we gave it time that working for oneself could afford. The genesis of
it all had been schoolboy activity back in 1972 in Norfolk. As a museum curator it was not the forefront of my work agenda but I became well aware that
a stream of resources whether in the narrow field of timetables or in a
broader sense of interpretational literature was appearing all around me and
which was often never given value in its own right. A consequence of this is
interesting examples of the re-invention of the wheel. Short dated
projects can demonstrably be shown to have undertaken work already done
by a different agency only years before because no-one recorded
the publicity.
By 2008, our own collection was long overdue a proper
institutional home. Up to 250,000 pieces occupying 275' of shelving in a semi is
not a comfortable lifestyle. It is therefore with great pleasure
that I can conclude this rather personal account of a life on the margins of
industrial archaeology over the last 30 years by revealing that early
in 2009 the National
Railway Museum
at York bought
the Forsythe Collection of Transport and Travel Ephemera and it has now relocated to
the Search Engine archive facility there. Surely Reginald Perrin would
be thrilled to know the happy outcome that has befallen this vast pile of
waste paper? In all this, although not here today, I must thank my wife
Fiona who as a professional librarian (one who undertook the Aberystwyth distance learning Masters whilst working in Newcastle and living with a new baby) has been totally supportive of what we have sought to do and
I can absolutely say without her the Forsythe Collection would
never have been saved for the nation.
[1] Some
others: Hunday National Tractor and Farm Museum, Irvine’s
Big Idea, the West Yorkshire Transport Museum, the National Army Transport
Museum at Beverley.
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