Is it time for Transition Museums?
Tony Butler, blog
…So what would need to happen to create a new generation of Transition Museums? Here are a few thoughts
The development of the Transition movement should be very instructive to UK museums. Faced with climate change, Peak Oil and gas and a dependency on state aid for funding either at local or national level, museums might look to Transition as a means to encourage environmental, economic and social resilience…
- Collective action is crucial. No museum could make the transition alone. Federations or clusters of organisations should asses their energy use as a whole and examine the collective capacity to both reduce and generate energy. Imagine an open air museum generating energy which could be used by museum in an urban area (or any business for that matter) in exchange for resources such as learning or design services.
- Other resources might be exchanged depending on the distinctive assets of that organisation. Large organisations should recognise that they might draw on expertise from staff or volunteers from small museums rather than sourcing expensive products on the open market. Museums have spent 20 years working in one-off partnership projects but few have developed long-term ‘asymetrical’ collaborations which exchange knowledge and services in non-related areas.
- We should re-skill museum people. Since the early 1990s a profusion of postgraduate courses have produced thousands of bright people with a general understanding of the power and purpose of museums but few with practical skills to exchange. I suspect there are few curators or educators who might be able to turn their hand to graphic design or build exhibitions or do basic woodwork, or lay a hedge. The notion of being multi skilled should not be restricted to the possession of multiple layers of knowledge.
- Museums should ensure that ‘elders’ are genuine associates. Frequently, older people are subjects or objects of a museum’s work, rather than collaborators. At MEAL we are fortunate to have a large number of older people who volunteer, who share and pass on their skills and knowledge. Our oldest member of staff is 81. Our training programmes especially in areas of horticulture have been enriched by people who worked the land in the 1950s and 1960s and understood the need for co-operation. This knowledge used effectively will make museums mainstream skills centres of the future.
…Museums are recognised as unwieldy beasts, occupying large energy inefficient buildings and constantly competing with neighbours for relatively small amounts of funding. Understanding how to harness collectively the resources and skills of their distinctive assets and those of their communities, should a first step in that descent to a low energy future.
(28 Mar 2010)
This post was kicked off by someone who sent me a link to Tony’s blog. This set off some musings about how museums serve as a “collective memory” for communities and how “honouring the elders” is an important part of the Transition movement’s principles especially around community resilience and reskilling. Hence the links below. -KS
Tales from the plot
Tinker and Bloom blog
This exciting project funded by heritage lottery fund aims to celebrate Bristol’s rich allotment culture and aims to share that culture with school children and the wider Bristol public.
Bristol has over a hundred allotment sites and countless experienced and gardeners.
This project aims to acknowledge those gardeners by creating platforms on which the knowledge they hold can be shared.
We will be inviting allotment gardeners to be interviewed by us. The experiences and stories and top gardening tips that gardeners share will be part of an audio-visual exhibition that will tour to 3 venues in Bristol in July.
This exhibition will also outline the history of urban gardening in Bristol and the role it plays in our communities today.
We will be inviting gardeners to take part in school workshops and in public events, which aim to promote the value of growing our own food.
We will also be working with volunteers throughout the project to create opportunities for people interested in oral history and growing food to gain skills in interview techniques and workshops facilitation…
(2010)
‘How We Used to Live’: bringing Transition and oral history together
Rob Hopkins, Transition Culture
We had a great event last week in Totnes, called ‘How We Used to Live’, which explored the most recent period in history when the town had a more localised economy and less energy than it does today. It was built on the oral history work that I have been doing, which will feature in the Totnes EDAP when it comes out. The evening featured Barrington Weekes from the wonderful Totnes Image Bank and Rural Archive, and four of the people I interviewed. Two of them, Douglas Matthews and Ian Slatter, have since passed away, and the evening was dedicated to their memory.
It was divided into 5 parts, food, shopping, energy, transport and the world of work. For each, Barrington showed a series of slides from the Image Bank on the subject, and then I invited each of the four interviewees to talk about their memories of each. Then anyone else in the audience who had memories of the time was invited to contribute, and then anyone in the audience could ask the ‘elders’ questions.
The first part, food, looked at how food was produced, from allotments and back gardens, to urban market gardens and to the farms that surrounded the town. People talked of the culture around food at that time, how the generation that lived through the war never wasted any food, and that that was the culture they grew up in. David Heath, son of George Heath who ran the largest urban market garden in Totnes, talked about the garden and what an amazing place it was to go to work, in spite of being very hard work. Vera Harvey talked about her father who worked on the railways and who had two allotments at some distance from Totnes, and whose work involved regularly walking the railway lines, and who often returned with rabbits he had caught, or with turnips from the fields.
John Watson, who founded Riverford Organic Farm, talked about starting farming just after the war, and how for him, the greatest inventions of the last cenury were hydraulics and the combine harvester. I quoted his friend, Douglas Matthews, who recently passed away aged 102;
“Looking back, practically all our food came from this area. We had a couple of house pigs that ate the rubbish. A local chap would come by, cut their throats and cut them up, and make bacon and hams. We used to preserve it in saltpetre, the wives would make a salt solution and baste it every 2 days, then it was put up on hooks in the dairy to dry. I still have the hooks out there now. I suppose we might have had an orange on very special occasions. Our main meal was lunch, not supper, if the husband worked at home. Evening meals were a professionals’ thing. Lunch was normally roast beef, mutton, hot or cold. Hot or cold chicken, stews, potatoes and veg, peas and beans, potatoes baked or boiled. We ate meat every day, hot or cold, depending on how the husband and wife were getting on! For tea we had bread and butter, jam and cream. For breakfast it was bacon and eggs. Supper was just a snack meal, bits and pieces of what you liked. For fruit we had apples, pears and plums. Apples could be kept all year round. They were kept in a cellar under the house. Certain kinds of pears could be kept. We had greengages and plums; we usually made those into jams”.
Then shopping. The slides showed a town with lots of shops that no longer exist, when the town was a town that actually sold everything you could want, several hardware shops, tailors, a wealth of food shops, even a shop selling agricultural machinery. There were slides of the first supermarket to open in the town, and one audience member who worked there as a girl talked about how they had to weigh potatoes out into bags, rather different to the supermarkets of today! I read a quote from Muriel Langford who I interviewed, about a trip to the shops in the 1940s..
“I used to go to the grocers and I could sit down, lovely. They’d go through your list and say, “yes, yes, we’ve some new whatever it is, would you like to taste some?” You’d have a little snippet of cheese or something, “great, yes, we’ll have that”. “Now we’ve got a tin of broken biscuits, but they’re not too bad (half price you see), would you like them?” As soon as you put a biscuit in your mouth it’s broken isn’t it! Then they’d say “now Mrs. Langford, you’re going to the butchers, yes, yes, and going to get some fish? Yes, yes, and paraffin? Yes, yes… and they used to say to me now bring any parcels in, we’ll put it in the box with your groceries and bring the lot up for you. And they did. They’d come and deliver and you’d go through it and say that’s fine and would you like a cup of tea….”
For many, the move away from the dynamic, more self sufficient economy of that time to the supermarket-focused economy of today has not been entirely beneficial. This was summed up best by interviewee Ken Gill, who said, in the interview I did with him;
…it has been progress of a sort, or has it? I’m not sure. We lost something we will never be able to regain. The loss of a lot of small shops has been hard, although we have replaced them with what we might call ‘slightly unusual shops’… We’ve lost the dairies, the independent grocers, although we have retained a good selection of butchers and some good cheese and fish shops. When you consider what we used to have….”
In his slides about energy, Barrington looked at how the town used to be powered by town gas, coal brought from South Wales by boat was gassified in two gassifiers, producing the gas the town used for cooking and, until the 1950s, for street lighting. He also showed pictures of the first petrol pumps in the town. Alan Langmaid talked about how freezing cold everywhere was at that time, and how the idea that he could, as he did that evening, walk down Totnes High Street in a tshirt in late November, would have been ridiculous.
He talked about his grandmother, with whom he and his mother lived, keenly moving out of an old house that was a converted cider press. “She just wanted modern. She wanted electric fires, electric cookers, electric everything. She wanted automatic this, that and everything. So we moved, at my grandmother’s insistence, from this wonderful rambling old building…. to a brand new house, typical of its time. Wooden framed, single glazed windows, open fire for a chimney which she quickly replaced with an electric fire, “I’m not having any more of that dirty coal business”. The winters were actually colder than the previous house. You’d wake up in the morning, and your breath would have condensed on the window, frozen on the inside. Inside it was cold, outside it was cold. Eventually my mother paid for an electric fire to be put in so you could reach out of the bed and turn it on. Electricity was cheap in those days”.
Vera Harvey talked about washing clothes, how as a girl she had to help her grandmother do the washing in the wash house in the yard, whatever the weather, often still working by candlelight late into the evening. She remembered, once the first washing machines became available, telling herself ‘I’m not going out in that wash house like Gran!’ In the 1950s, our first washing machine had a wringer on top. I remember when we used the washhouse, being out there with my Gran, and it was snowing, getting deeper and deeper, saying ‘Gran! We can’t stay out here!’. People worked so hard in those days”.
The slides on transport started with a picture of the horsedrawn stagecoach which was how people got to the town before the trains and the internal combustion engine took over. They included some amazing slides from when Totnes High Street was two-way, amazing to imagine now, one in particular showing a bus and a tractor towing a huge oak tree trying to pass each other in the part of the High Street known (see right), appropriately, as The Narrows. There were images of the first cars, the first trains, and the interviewees recalled their first cars.
I quoted Val Price, who I had interviewed but who had been unable to make the evening. She had recalled how her father had bought a car in late 1952, and lovingly built a garage to keep it in. However, she recalls that he rarely used it, never using it to pick her up from school, and never taking it out during the week, given that everything he needed was within walking distance. It was only ever used on weekends, for trips to visit relatives. Arthur French, a member of the audience, noted how the age at which people first got cars has fallen during his lifetime. He said that he got his first car at 40, his sons at 25, and nowadays people start driving at 17.
The final section looked at work and livelihoods. Barrington’s images introduced an economy very different to the Totnes of today. The Totnes of 2009 has very little in terms of manufacturing, and has lost most of its main employers over the past few years. In the 40s and 50s, things were very different. We were introduced to Reeves Timber Yard, Harris’ Bacon factory, the markets, potters, shoemakers, the milk processing plant, and various other local employers. Alan Langmaid talked about working for the Totnes Times when he left school, and about the work ethic of the older generation, who worked from dawn to dusk, and also how incredibly strong they were.
One of the last images was of the town carter, a man with a sort of souper-up go cart, who served as the DHL of his time, running errands and deliveries around town in a handpulled cart. The photo showed him as a young man in the 1920s, but several of the older members of the audience remembered him still being active with his cart in the 1960s. David Heath remembered a particularly horrible grating noise the cart made as it flew down the High Street, and Alan Langmaid, who now runs Totnes Museum, noted that his cart is still in Totnes Museum, and is set to be part of an exhibition next year.
One of the images that most stuck with me was of the last working flour mill in Totnes (see right), which shut some time ago. What is important about these oral histories isn’t that it allows us to romanticise some former halcyon time where everything was rosy and jolly policemen smiled at everybody from the street corners, but it reconnects us with the infrastructure that a more localised economy needs. It is a reminder of how easy it is to get rid of things, but how hard it is then to put them back.
Shutting down an uneconomic flour mill is easy enough, the person who ran it was probably close to retirement anyway, and it was no doubt not economically viable. However, putting a new one in from scratch today would be a far, far greater task. Finding people with the skills to make good flour, to run a mill. Finding the machinery, a suitable space, good sites with sufficient water power to run the mill. Not easy.
This event was a fascinating look at the history of the town, still near enough for us to be able to draw on first hand memories of it, but far enough away to feel like another world. Thus far, TTT has focused just on looking forward, to visioning what a post-oil Totnes might be like…. this was the first attempt to look back, to try and capture how the place functioned before liberal lashings of cheap oil fundamentally altered how the place functions. For those I spoke to after the event, all had found it a fascinating immersion in what a pre-globalisation Totnes looked, smelt, sounded and felt like. While one can read history books, and look at the facts and figures around that time, it is hearing the stories, the first hand accounts, and the anecdotes of those who were there, that truly brings it alive.
(30 Nov 2009)
We have already run this piece, but it seemed like a great context to run it in again. -KS
Oral History Transcripts (Bristol Floating Harbor)
Bristol Floating Harbor website
Playwright A.C.H. Smith recorded many interviews (with Andy Hay) from which to write the script of his play “Up The Feeder Down The ‘Mouth” produced at the Bristol Old Vic in September 1997 and revised and revived on the dockside at Bristol Industrial Museum in June 2001.
We have reproduced some of those transcripts here, mostly accounts by several people of growing up on the dockside, and the excitement, danger and comradeship they experienced as children, both through their own encounters and those they had with the dockers.
Prince Street Families
A family who lived on Prince Street – a woman, her brother, and her son – discussing the Lord Mayor’s Christmas fund , trips to Beeses tea gardens and life around the docks plus the air raids and sheltering during WW2.
Bert (Dolly) Gray, Mrs Renee Gray
An interview with Bert (Dolly) Gray, his wife Renne Gray is present, conducted at his home discusses his experiences of working on the docks in Bristol including his childhood on the docks, various boats that ran aground at the docks and slum clearances. Bert talks of the place where his mother grew up in Hotwells and how it is now plus working with different loads as a docker.
Mr and Mrs Fred Tanner
Mr Tanner on his memories of going on a pilot boat with his grandfather who was a harbour pilot in Bristol. He recalls cargo ships that used to come to the city harbour. Explains more about his grandfather’s job and how he operated. How he felt about the docks in general when seeing it as a boy growing up. Mrs Edna Tanner comments on the clearance of St Philips and St Annes when people were moved to Knowle West. They talk about the NUWM and the Board of Guardians. Mrs Tanner’s family had to apply to the Board for help. About the Board of Guardians and the grinding poverty of the time.
(2010)
Bristol Floating Harbour web resource brings together a wealth of primary sources from Bristol’s Museum Galleries & Archives and Libraries and additional material including learning projects that explore, explain and bring to life the area of the Floating Harbour.
This resource encourages cross-curricular learning opportunities utilizing a range of skills that will support further investigation of this fascinating and historical area of Bristol.
There are also links to the audio recordings on the website.
