Their Story: The narratives followed by the Vale and Downland Museum

One of the things I really like about the museum is that although it is local history it is covering national themes.  There is nothing besides thatching and wheel making and tannery to cover the period between Alfred and the Victorians, which is an obvious hole, but in terms of historical narrative that is fairly much how Wantage sees itself.  Its famous sons were King Alfred and Lord Wantage who founded the Red Cross, helped to launch tramway and canal in the town and generally had a view to improve the place.  He sited his Victoria Cross Gallery on the site of notorious pub the Red Lion. The other local reformer was Reverend Butler who founded the convent and was influential in establishing religious communities elsewhere and who also founded the town’s King Alfred Academy.  Also celebrated is the Williams F1 team with its headquarters down the road in Grove.   Lord Wantage clearly saw himself as  a second Alfred a “King” over his locality and this is why it is his face which is carved in stone depicted as King Alfred in the market place.  He sought to be a reformer for the town bringing to it improvements in transportation and employment and creating on his own estate a model village which was meant to model farming and social improvement for the employees,  both he and  Reverend Butler found it to be an ignorant poverty stricken and benighted place in need of education, transportation and general upgrading.  

This focus does give a somewhat paternalistic viewpoint for the museum although viewpoints of others in history are covered through recorded first person accounts but much is centred on the Ardington Estate.  Its interesting that the workers’ viewpoint is mainly from the skilled class with the influx of Irish workers being blamed for most of the social evils in the town. This is somewhat surprising and not much given in way of evidence, since the period of the 19^th Century was turbulent for many reasons and I would have expected some more consideration of displacements and poverty caused by enclosure where common land or strip land which was farmed by individuals was redrawn to maximise income and left many with no income at all.  Fortunately for the reforming Lord Wantage, this occurred prior to his taking over the estate so he could not be blamed for it.  Threshing machines were produced down the road in Challow, so some Luddism in protest might have been expected and the poverty and disease of the time and general availability of alcohol would all seem to have added to the mix. Sixteen people died of Cholera in the town in a short period of time. I doubt that Irish workers could directly be blamed for that. 

So I would like to investigate the gaps in the narrative, the untold stories that come to mind are:

Elizabethan Wantage.   Architecture and tanning as a primary industry are covered, but there isn’t much that is human story – how people lived, what they believed, how they celebrated etc.

Women’s contribution to the town.  Behind every man there is a great woman . . . maybe or maybe not in Wantage!

The history of the Red Cross in Wantage beyond its benefactor – what difference did this pioneer group make to the town and what contribution is it making today?

The development of non conformist churches in the town – I’m keen to know how marginalised or central to the town they were.  Were they a response to Tractarianism?

The development of the Catholic Church and it relationship to the Church of England – its interesting to me that there is a Catholic Church here when the Oxford Movement was such an influence on the Town’s churchmanship – it remains true to this day that Wantage is very high church.

Irish migrant workers and their family life in and around the town during the development of Railway and Canal

Why people  left and went to Canada in 1831 – much promoted by Reverend Butler – were the Cholera deaths influential in this decision?

His Story: Helping my toddler learn about the past

Discovering Vale and Downland Museum with my three year old was a very joyful experience, despite the compromises the museum was having to undergo with the enforced remodelling of their building to house a store for their 5000 or so artefacts of which maybe 10% are on display.  The café was in the middle of things, which I quite liked in my funny way because it was the first thing we saw on entering, warm and inviting.

Edward was thrilled to see that there were drawers at his height to open which had cushioned linings in which nestled fossilized ammonites, nautilus, corals and sponges.  He loved talking about how these had once been swimming creatures and being able to hold and handle them.  The steps in the little auditorium were fun for climbing up to visit the couple of stuffed animals  there and take an interest in them too.   He was less impressed with Mr Attenborough’s films about the area and we wandered on in to the Anglo Saxon Room. 

The skeleton isn’t all that shocking to a very young child, because first of all they have no idea what it is.  Unfortunately, if they ask about it not long after a family bereavement this can lead to some unsettling conversation – for the adult.  For the child it seems to place a context to the abstract “death” and helps with the idea that the soul and the body are not one and the same. 

I think most world views concur, whether or not they believe in life after death, that the life before death is more than the body and its internal mechanisms or outward appearance.   This skeleton was a person though and this is something with which a small child really connects.  My toddler asking me if it was the person we had known was in that moment shocking and unbearable, but actually it re-humanised the exhibit. People, whether they live now or thousands of years ago are valuable and we should value them for more than what they can tell us about the period in which they lived and, like a small child, regard them with some compassion.

We talked about how her family felt when she died, which wasn’t quite where I had expected viewing this exhibit to go.  Then I steered this to how we all have skeletons on the inside, and then we talked a bit about heaven and then we talked about how we don’t know whether or not this person is in heaven now, but we know they are not in this skeleton.  To which the response was “She’s in heaven now. And much happier there”  and that we agreed on because the skeleton was a damaged one, so death was caused by injury in a time before there was anything that could be done for pain relief and with death all pain was over. 

So then we moved on and looked at the Alfred Jewel puzzle where children can fill the empty spaces in the jewel with coloured pieces to fit their own preference.  He worked at fitting the pieces in, despite not initially finding it easy and was very pleased with it when it was finished.

We went through the market place and other rooms at top speed so on this first visit we missed most things! But we did pause at the racing car and at the trains.  Pushing a button and watching the train go made him very happy. Upstairs we looked through the microscope which he found fascinating  and less fascinating but quite fun we hooked ducks. Did not make much connection with the letcombe brook display or water wildlife though! The jigsaws up there were too tricky.  Then we went and had something for snack in the café.  I think that was when I decided I would like to volunteer at the museum.

In subsequent visits he has spent longer exploring – less running and has so many questions. He especially likes the tram which somehow we missed or was not working when we first came to the museum. He has learnt the names of the engines, between the museum display and books I have brought home from the library about the tramway – from the adult reference section because there is no such thing as pre-school factual local history!

Following that visit, I emailed a request to volunteer and began to discuss the possibility of an under fives group.

The Formative Years

Sharing History  -  the formative years

The reason I chose to do a heritage degree must have been a lot to do with the fact that my GCSE history class was taught by an inspirational teacher when I was at secondary school.  We had had some very mixed experiences in history teaching before she taught our class, further down the school, with substitute teachers and others whose first subject wasn’t history at all -  but it all came good for the 2 years of the GCSE.

She had an amazing passion for history and for politics and, due to something about the mystical art that was 3^rd year options, our class for History had only 8 pupils while the other history class had 30 or more.  This meant that we really immersed in the subject and that nobody could coast.  You couldn’t pretend you turned in homework when you did not, you couldn’t hide at the back and not answer – we all sat in one row in front of the teacher.  It made for a great immediacy. And our teacher did not suffer fools so you needed to smarten up and pay attention in her class.  But the most momentous day in my history class was Margaret Thatcher being ousted from office. The lesson was changed from whatever was planned to simply listening to the radio giving the full account – this we were told was history in the making and much more relevant than anything else we could learn that day. 

And so it was for a generation who rather regarded the iron lady as an immoveable rock standing in the way of compassion, fairness and common sense.  It seemed frankly unbelievable that she should go and shocking both to those of us weaned on the belief that democracy puts the right person in power and to those who by way of Sunday school upbringing believed that people in authority were put there by God.  Did God change his mind?  Is the voting public foolish and liable to self-interest to their own future detriment?  I had often prayed that she would go.  Very shocking when she did. It was as if the Berlin Wall were coming down . . . another historic event that was unthinkable right up to the moment when it happened in 1989.

So GCSE History was an excellent experience.  And then A Level History was taught by MF – who had very twinkly blue eyes, a sporty MG and an ability to write beautifully with his posh pen. I particularly liked that he penned about me “In many ways Mary is Natural Historian”.  The course he taught was 100 per cent research based – that is 50% of the A level was to write a long essay on local history, the other 50% was to listen to Mr Dreary.  Sometimes he would actually teach us.  Sometimes he simply handed out his undergraduate essays  and then spent the rest of the lesson reminiscing.  There were not many of us in the class and he enjoyed our chats.  Our grades were Ok because when he did talk about the subject in hand though he could be quite dull, he usually highlighted what the exam board would be most interested in.  It was from day 1 a revision class led more like a university seminar than a school lesson. The balance between these two teachers was curious, but it must have worked. 

I loved the research we did every week with Mr Foley at the record office in Bury St Edmunds, it was a thrill to handle original documents and I particularly enjoyed researching how national legislation in 1870 in developing school boards and making schooling compulsory impacted on local schools in reality. It was a good introduction to handling evidence and politics at once.   Again it was more like university level study – aside from “checking in” the direction was light, to help rather than restrict the focus.  When I was looking for a university place, I was determined to again undertake self-supported study with a course tutor like MF if possible!  I wasn’t interested in reading secondary sources, I wanted to get my hands on those original documents again!

So I spent a lot of time in the careers library researching universities looking for one where there was a dissertation element preferably with a focus on local history. This was not easy.  Undergraduates are not often trusted with self-supported study.  Several university professors were perplexed that I should consider it. When I went to the University of Kent at Canterbury open day and heard about the Heritage Studies degree, I thought I had found exactly that.

I had also applied for Cambridge University, but not for history: there seemed to me to be a lack of opportunity to study primary sources or self direct my study in the history degree so there I opted for English Literature which included handling ancient texts like Beowulf (albeit that I might only have managed it in Penguin paperback).  They were not very impressed with that.

I wouldn’t have made the grade any way, but I remember being stunned at the English Professor at Downing College wanting to question why I had not chosen on my UCAS list simply to choose the same course at each university.  I thought it was surely obvious that if you don’t get your first choice you want your next best choice to be the one with the content and teaching you most want to experience.  That might not be the same subject because in History and in Literature the course content varies remarkably.  I don’t suppose I gave a very coherent or satisfactory answer.

What I had not considered, in the slightest really, was what doors would then open or close for me depending on what and where I studied. The idea of studying heritage in historic Canterbury under staff who encouraged research felt like a gift to me.  I also paid little attention to what was happening to “unfashionable” courses and departments like Economic and Social History, Theology, Classics and so on.  I wish I had.  By the end of my degree these departments had closed and only two of us graduated from Kent in 1996 with a Social History and Heritage Studies degree.  The professors were put out to pasture or moved to another department.  I also failed to realise that open days are the car show room for universities.  It all looks very shiny but when you actually sign up and go to drive forward with the thing it turns out bits don’t work or drop off ie: sections of the course don’t run at all, or not as advertised. 

The self-supported study was not as self-supported as I would have liked. Whereas the only restriction on what we could study back in A Level was the accessibility of the documentation, in Kent it was the predilection of the course tutor and maybe his publishing schedule that dictated the subject and the range of sources to be examined. I remember how disgusted I was that a 3^rd of the reading list on any given topic was designated ESSENTIAL but basically geared towards  “buy and read my book” and then found having read the book that it was not the seminal work and was not referred to in any depth in the seminars.  

We were asked to study Edwardian Elites on the Kentish Coast and the subject was tedious, mostly trawling through sycophantic press reports of the parties of the great and the good. There was no opportunity to really engage with first hand accounts, letters or otherwise and there was no sympathy on my part for the people who were the subject of this dissertation. They all seemed supremely vacuous.  Supervision was poor.  I regretted my choice of university in this respect.

However there was another dissertation to be written and this one was on local history publishing. I was not enthusiastic when again, I was landed with a project with no primary sources and solely the interest of the Course Tutor, but actually I really enjoyed it. This was a heritage study placement. I was given a desk at the Council Heritage  department in Rochester (opposite the prison) !  It was a train ride away which in itself was a wonderful thing and to have your own desk when you aren’t even yet ready to think of yourself as a grown up? Amazing.  So I wrote the required dissertation. I found it fairly tedious, but the encouragement of my mentor there was inspiring. I decided I would quite like to work in publishing. But not local history. My study in summary showed that aside from photographic books sales of local history books were poor and unless local history could be sold as a clear narrative in novel form (Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale for example) it wasn’t going to work.

This was before the phenomena of the internet or I suspect my research would have concluded that local history enthusiasts should publish on the web, and the council could foster that by providing secure blog space and ensuring that anything they allowed to be published on their heritage blog space was properly researched and referenced and editorially of a reasonable standard. Unfortunately I think my conclusion at the time was that local historians should self publish and market their works unless they were producing something heavily photographic, in which case they should go to a professional specialist publisher.

Therefore, when I graduated with a reasonable honours degree in Social History and Heritage Studies, having decided not to aim to be a curator based on 6 years more study and no income, I tried to get into publishing.  One month in after two job applications I realised I would always be rejected due to a lack of experience. About the only organisation that would give me a job would be one I was already working for: but I couldn’t get a job. 

I had 12 weeks where I could pursue trying to get a graduate job and  long before that was up I was willing to work any where at all, locally or nationally.  Nothing though.  In the 12^th week I got a letter from an international charity I had been interested in as a student through my voluntary work in the Christian Union as a secretary.  The role was junior, experience was preferred, but crucially not essential. So I wrote an application and got called to interview.  Roll forward to 1997. I am now married to a fellow graduate from UKC, he’s an astrophysicist now working on the on board computer for the now past-historic Ariane 4 Space launcher. I decide I have had enough of my two-bus journey over an hour long 7am then 7pm commute and it’s time to go back to the publishing preference which if successful will take me to central London – much easier.

I write to all the publishers A-C in the writers’ yearbook with no exception.  I get interviews at Cassell and Church House Publishing.  Cassell have by far the better office in the Strand, grand and intimidating but it is a bit like going to see the wizard of oz. The computer software is dated even by the standards of 1997 – wordperfect in DOS! The offices are a vast open plan area punctuated by odd cubicles which are meeting rooms but are as cramped as photo-me booths. I sit perched on a swivel chair in the centre of this enormous room as two interviewers come up behind me talking about how I will faint with shock if they swear at me.  I decide I don’t want the job, not because I am intimidated, but because they seem such dried up miseries that I can’t imagine much happiness to be had working there quite apart from the poor computing equipment!

Next an interview at Church House Publishing.  The best location in London to work, serene lofty well-lit rooms looking out on to the quad beside Westminster Cathedral.  Happy friendly urbane people who treat me rather as if I have popped in for tea instead of being interviewed.  All but one.  He’s there on behalf of the Human Resources and I don’t feel any love lost between the rest of the panel and him, so I ignore him as everyone else does – just flashing a “please give me the job” smile every now and then.  

Roll forward a fews years and three sideways(?) promotions: I am leaving Church House Publishing because we are moving out of London with the notion of starting a family.  The notion arrives in 2002, but so does the end of the Ariane 4 launcher and Marconi who go up in smoke or so it seems along with a laughable employee share offer that promises riches not long before the share value floors unbelievably.

I am not eligible for maternity leave so financially things start to look shaky. Chris is applying everywhere and nothing coming up. Our rent for the gorgeous Edwardian mid terrace in the village of Windlesham starts to look ridiculously unaffordable. I find a job but its below half what our previous joint income had been and well below what Chris had brought home from Marconi. But we’re ok, the job is interesting and it helps me develop more skills in the field of marketing and tendering. It’s not so far removed from publishing and in terms of developing a narrative of what leisure ought to achieve through partnerships between public and private sector it is very much of a new labour era.

But we FOOLISHLY tell the landlady about this financial struggle, and rather than help us by reducing the rent, she sells! She doesn’t hurry us, we find a new place to rent which is not much of a saving despite additional pokiness and then she sells.  On deposit and removals we lose money.  So feeling the pinch then DH takes the first job going and we are off to Dorset. Wimborne Minster is a place that drips with history and the Minster became our spiritual home, both as worshippers and by the fact that when DH gave up the new job in disgust a few months later I began work in the estate agents opposite. The Priest’s House museum is a source of happiness for me and my little daughter.

On the move again and into the wilderness years for us. We move to Crewkerne and I love both the Crewkerne local museum.  It has a beautiful poster of all the Georgian front doors and it has some lovely spots, but it is about the most depressing place to have lived which is probably why I also often escaped with my little one to the Chard one, and of the two probably the Chard one was best with its focus on the invention of flight. Not the Wright brothers at all who should be credited . . . To quote: The first aircraft to fly under its own power was flown by its inventor, John Stringfellow, in Chard in 1848.

The new job also fails. I take on a temp role which pays some bills, but is excruciating. Its not long after the Victoria Climbie case and I am working as an admin support assistant to social workers in a Childrens and Families department in Chard and discovering how very few of the recommendations of that inquiry have been implemented effectively in this beacon status department.  I finally quit emotionally drained and traumatised by the case files and despairing of common sense ever gracing the minds of senior staff who appear to me to have been given beaurocratic roles to ensure they inflict least damage.

We take a family holiday then with no job between us and it is then that Chris gets the call to go work for Airbus. Here our fortunes change.  We move to Melksham as the thought of moving to Bristol is horrendous and finally we are savvy about moving into an economic area with a wide variety of work possibilities across a widely reachable driving distance rather than close to the current potentially unstable employment.  We don’t plan to move out of Wiltshire.  Chris thinks after a few years with Airbus he might return to the space industry, but later as his job wobbles precariously close to the time we are told our landlady is selling our home and I am pregnant again . . . the option disappears.  There is nothing available locally so Chris looks for something not more than an hour away and this is how he comes to be working at Williamsin Grove as history is made with the development and real world implementation of the Williams Hybrid Flywheel.  Its not close to home though and the hours he is away are no good for family life. So having lost grandparents on both sides of the family some inheritance arrives for our parents, so despite the strings attached  when we are offered help to buy our home nearer to DH’s work we jump at the chance. 

Meanwhile, I am finding my employment options have vanished. But there’s a decent little museum in Wantage and my baby is now 3 years old.  I imagine David Cameron with his spuriously philanthropic Big Society mantra had mums with no work opportunities in mind when he said that we should all consider volunteering . . . I suggest to the museum that I might be able to run an under fives group and they are pleased to help me get started. This then is where my personal history ends and the development of sharing history with under-fives begins with some tangents into other areas I am discovering along the way.