Sally Middleton retired at the end of March.
Colleagues and friends at Gloucestershire Archives wished Sally a very happy retirement with lunch and of course cake.....lots of cake!
Joining Gloucestershire Archives in 2016 as part of the ‘For the Record’ archives transformation project Sally has certainly helped us transform our partnerships, learning and outreach offer. During her time our volunteer base has grown significantly and she has worked hard to break down barriers to participation.
Her commitment to Asset Based Community Development and to young people has led to some great results as demonstrated by the growing relationship with Kingsholm Primary School through ‘we love KingsHOME’, child ‘take over’ days, and oral history training for year 6 pupils. Other highlights include her collaborative work on mental health records resulting in the Never Better project which featured at Gloucester History Festival, 2019.
Her cameo appearance as a cook in the passport to the past session for children based on our county estate archives will be remembered by colleagues for a long time.
Sally as Mrs Bullas, the cook in Passport to the Past: Stories from the Big House
Sally requested that monies collected by staff for her retirement be donated to Gloucester food bank. Vicky Thorpe, representing the food bank, was presented with a cheque for £125 by Sally.
Ebullient, full of enthusiasm, optimistic, forward-looking, egalitarian, supportive, generous with praise, strategic, able to be direct - all phrases used to sum up Sally. We will miss her positive approach, management and coaching skills, and her fresh perspective arising from her background in social work and libraries. We will do our best to build on Sally's legacy.
Passport to the Past family sessions at the Hub
‘Allo, ‘allo, ‘allo, what’s all this then? Our March Passport to the Past online family event was all about the law. We were extremely fortunate to have Sue Webb, Police Archivist, leading the session. She told us all about what happened to children who broke the law in Victorian Britain. Surprisingly, children as young as six were beaten and even sentenced to hard labour in prison for as little as stealing soup or rope. Others were sent to reform school and in one case, Ann Fisher was transported to Australia at the tender age of thirteen.
Josh and Kelly, who work for the Police, also spoke to the children with particular emphasis on their police uniform. They made a fantastic impression on our young audience who could have carried on asking them questions well into the evening!
Our next event, taking place on the 6 April, will highlight the lives of children in WWII.
Growing up in war time
We will be looking at food and rationing, toys and games, shelters, and the important work children contributed to the war effort. We are also delighted to have Judy, one of our Volunteers, attending the session. Judy, who was a small child during WWII, was evacuated at the start of the war and will be telling us all about her experiences.
The sessions are aimed at six to thirteen year olds. It is also ideal for primary and secondary schools (KS2 and KS3) teaching WWII.
To sign up for the live events taking place on the first Wednesday of every month, 4-5pm, please go to Gloucestershire Archives Events
Our sessions are also recorded and can be watched at your leisure on our YouTube channel. Our most recent recording ‘Passport to the Past: Tykes, ragamuffins and scallywags: children, punishment and the law’ can be seen here
www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKiG224MKhE
Please do spread the word to any children, parents and teachers you may know! Thank you.
Women’s history month
Fielding and Platt workers
To kick off woman’s history month in the UK, every Friday in March Gloucestershire Archives has been bringing to light women in Gloucestershire, often overlooked or under appreciated.
The second week highlighted some local women in the workforce.
One of our partner projects was all about Fielding & Platt, an engineering firm from Gloucestershire started in 1866. You can see all about the company and the lives of the people that worked there here: https://www.fieldingandplatthistory.org.uk/
Black and white photograph of the women working at Fielding & Platt, Second World War
One particular page we’d like to highlight today though is this one about the woman who worked there, see here:
www.fieldingandplatthistory.org.uk/content/works/fielding-and-platt-in-world-war-ii/fieldings-female-workers-during-world-war-ii
Daphne Collier was one of these women. To listen her memories of working at the engineering firm, click on the link: www.fieldingandplatthistory.org.uk/content/people/people-general/daphne-collier
Daphne Collier
To read all the blogs written by Laura Cassidy visit Women's History Month
Oral History Interviews
In March 2022, just a couple of weeks before I retired, I carried out an oral history interview with the Rt. Rev. Bishop Rachel Treweek, the current Bishop of Gloucester, and the first ever female bishop in the Church of England. We recorded her talking for about an hour, and answering questions on her life and work. Much of the interview covered her aspirations for the people who live and work in Gloucestershire. We know Bishop Rachel is always immensely busy, so we are very grateful to her for making time for the interview, and would like to express our thanks.
It was part of a trio of bucket-list tasks I wanted to complete in the run-up to my retirement. An oral history interview with Bishop Rachel had been on my “to do” list for a considerable time! It was appropriate, as Gloucestershire Archives holds the records of the Diocese of Gloucester within our collections.
I’ve carried out several oral history interviews during my time with Gloucestershire Archives, and it is something I’d be very keen to do more of, despite retirement. A colleague at work gave me some training on how to do an oral history interview, some years ago, and we are guided by advice and information from the UK’s Oral History Society. Their website is a useful resource on issues like ethics, sample permission forms, the type of questions to ask, and so on.
The first time I did an oral history interview (recorded on an old cassette recorder, and self-taught) was in 1984, when I was an assistant (unqualified) social worker, near London. I interviewed a client who was in her 90’s. She had been born in around 1890 and was an abandoned orphan by the age of 6, in 1896. She was a Cockney, born in London’s East End, and was admitted to the East Ham workhouse when her mother died and the absent father could not be traced. England’s workhouses came into being through the New Poor Law Act of 1834 (championed, at the time, by Charles Dickens), and were only abolished in 1930. There were workhouses in every town and city in England. The history of the Poor Law can be traced back to Elizabethan England, when arrangements were made within each parish to provide “relief” for the poor.
I carried out this first ever oral history interview prior to undertaking an MA in social work. Part of my future dissertation was going to look at the history of social care institutions in Britain from 1790 to 1985. Bessie (not her real name) remembered very clearly what the workhouse had been like. She described her experiences and memories of shared clothes (in reality, workhouse uniforms provided by the institution’s Board of Guardians), having no personal possessions, lots of noise, and the pervading smell of stale food. I will forever recall her outraged comment that – young child as she was – “they put me in 8’s in boots, when I was admitted!” In other words, an adult sized pair of boots for a 6 year old child. The experiences she told me about, first hand, influenced my choice of career and the settings in which I worked for the next nearly 20 years. Listening to someone’s personal testimony is a powerful influencer. We all have a story to tell, and her story affected me deeply – it was about poverty, abandonment, never having a place to really call home, never having a history that was in any sense shared with others, having no family or kinship ties. And never (until well into adulthood) having anything of one’s own.
But, now, back to the present. What about Bishop Rachel’s story? I’d never met a bishop before. I had no idea, really, what they do day to day, and what they may or may not be responsible for. I have no dealings, professional or personal, with the Church of England, and so wasn’t sure quite what to expect. A colleague and I arrived at College Green, a few minutes before our appointment with Bishop Rachel, with 25 questions we wanted to ask, and all in the space of an hour or so!
Although I have no faith, I’m very interested in theological and ethical issues, and could have happily discussed these with Bishop Rachel for the rest of the afternoon. But the oral history interview was to look at the bishop’s ecclesiastical career, her ministry to the people of Gloucestershire, her leadership, her life, and her thoughts on the world today.
The oral history interviews we conduct are kept for posterity, as part of our diverse, and very large, collections. People visiting Gloucestershire Archives will be able to listen to Bishop Rachel’s interview and hear what she has to say about being Bishop of Gloucester in the first quarter of the twenty-first century.
In the course of the oral history interview, I discovered I had something in common with the bishop; we have been (or still are, in the bishop’s case) responsible for some of the work that goes on in HM Prisons. The bishop has been Anglican Bishop for HM Prisons, in England & Wales, for some time, and I once managed the library service at HMP Gloucester. At that time, we reckoned that in excess of 60% of convicted prisoners had low (or no) literacy skills. This is shocking. Prisons are yet another example of institutional life worthy of research and resources, especially in tackling functional skills deficits amongst inmates.
Oral history interviews are all about communication. Not in terms of questions and answers – those are the nuts and bolts, yes. But about expression, thoughts, inclusion, telling one’s story, reaching out, being self-aware, and aware of others, telling others about your experiences in ways that are meaningful. Effective communication is all about these skills.
I have an interesting anecdote about the power of communication. A close friend of mine once undertook a week long retreat, with a silent Order of nuns. She went on a pre-stay orientation visit, along with others intent on the retreat, to find out if it really was for them, and what to expect. I remember her telling me that one member of the cohort asked how she would know the person sitting next to her, at meal times, needed the salt and pepper, as it was a silent Order. The Mother Superior answered that it should not be necessary to ask what another needs; you should, as in life, always anticipate the needs of others, and act accordingly. This, to me, was a lesson in communication. Which, as we all know, is not always about words.
So, how did we get on with Bishop Rachel? We didn’t quite manage to get through all of the 25 questions we had prepared for her oral history interview. This is hardly surprising; you quickly learn that, when conducting an oral history interview, interviewees want to answer fully, and tell you their story. It is always a dilemma when you run out of time, and still have a few questions left. So we asked the bishop to choose one or two from the few that were left.
Oral history interviews make up an important part of our collections. They tell, first hand, about an individual’s experiences, work and interests. If you’d like to find out more, please go to the Oral History Society’s website at www.ohs.org.uk The OHS was founded in 1969, and its strapline is “everybody’s story matters.” This echoes Bishop Rachel’s words to me – that we are all equal, and we all have a story to tell.
Everybody's story matters
Oral history is part of a long tradition of social research which reached its peak, here in the UK, with the Mass Observation Project, set up in 1937 – mid-1960’s. Mass Observation was very much about giving ordinary people a voice (often through their written diaries and letters, but occasionally films), describing – in their own words – their day to day lives in Britain at that time.
I have read first-person accounts, from the Mass Observation archive (held at the University of Sussex) from World War 2, and it’s fascinating to read what preoccupied the people of Britain during the war. It very much constitutes what we would call a “people’s history”. It pre-dates the golden age of documentary film-making in the 1960’s and 1970’s, with such seminal documentary films as “The Family”, mirroring the “kitchen sink” dramas of the second half of the twentieth century, and the ever popular “Seven Up”.
If you want to explore the history of documentary film-making, go to the British Film Institute’s website at www.bfi.org.uk and – if particularly interested in World War 2 and the Home Front – search for the government’s GPO Film Unit.
Sally Middleton
Cotswold Life January
Each month the team at Gloucestershire Archives delve into our diverse collections and put together a piece that appears in Cotswold Life magazine. Articles often include - Photograph of the Month, Spotlight on Maps, Documents of the Month and Gloucestershire Character.
This Spotlight on Maps article was written by John Putley and appeared in the Janaury 2022 issue.
Among the most interesting maps held by Gloucestershire Archives are the county inclosure maps. Although some lands, chiefly around villages, had been inclosed much earlier, most of the Open Field land in Gloucestershire, as well as many commons and wastes, was inclosed between 1750 to 1850 by awards following Acts of Parliament. Although it’s often thought that every parish had an Inclosure Award, this isn’t so and of the over 300 ancient parishes in Gloucestershire, only about 200 were subject to an Inclosure Act. Most consist of a map with award and show the land distribution after the enclosure. The maps are usually well drawn and often show historical curiosities – as this 1815 inclosure map for Deerhurst and Leigh does in the shape of a red-coated man on horseback in the middle of the River Severn. This is Jeremiah Hawkins, who owned land on both sides of the river, but refused to pay to use the ferry at the nearby Haw passage and always forded the river on horseback. Local legend says that he made his servants do the same and at least one drowned!
Kindertransport film
Gloucestershire Archives is working with independent film maker David Grange to make a short film about the former Kindertransport hostel at 18 Alexandra Road, Gloucester, which has been awarded blue plaque status. The film will be premiered at Gloucester’s City Voices festival in September.
Most of our knowledge about the hostel comes from one of our collections, the archive of the Gloucester Association for Aiding Refugees (D7501). It contains a wealth of fascinating detail about the 10 Jewish boys who lived at the hostel from June 1939 to December 1941. There is a short exhibition about the boys on the Gloucestershire Archives website - The Kindertransport Boys - The story of ten young refugee who came to Gloucester in 1939.
The plaque is the initiative of Michael Zorek, whose father Werner was one of the hostel boys. Through Michael, we have been able to contact other descendants, and of the hostel’s wardens (themselves refugees from the Nazi regime), who have been sharing what they know. We are also collaborating with Gloucestershire University history students who are working on their own exhibition about the boys, which will also feature in the History Festival.
Sewing Seeds
If you have been in the Heritage Hub on a Tuesday recently, you might have noticed that the Dunrossil Room is a hive of activity. Following on from the successful Stitch in Time project that was hosted by Gloucestershire Archives as part of City Voices in 2021, this group of women from all over Gloucestershire, have come together again, sharing skills and stories to create ‘Sewing Seeds’ - a new artwork inspired by the gardens of the Heritage Hub.
This stunning artwork will be sited in the foyer in the Spring, and is being made from recycled and reclaimed materials, as well as fabrics that have been dyed using flowers from the garden. It was been inspired by the traditional ‘ Grandmother’s Garden’ Quilt pattern, and some of our very own staff have contributed hexagons!
Jacqui Grange - Creative Director City Voices. jacqui@cityvoices.org.uk