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Children of the Sun, Mass Observation, and Cinema Going in Bolton.
Tom Harrisson was an anthropologist in the 1930s who had made several
'scientific' expeditions to the Artic and St.Kilda, Borneo and the Western Pacific
together with two years in the New Hebrides in Melanesia. It was here he
encountered the 'Big Nambas of Malekula', who, apparently, were cannibals. Despite
this, Harrison found them to be pleasant and no more difficult to live with than the
English, Irish or Welsh. So, it slowly dawned on him, that while anthropologists had
been generously financed to study the 'so-called primitive peoples of the world', no
one was making a study of ordinary people in his native land. Harrison determined,
therefore, to return home to study the 'cannibals of Britain', particularly those living in
a place that was 'strange' to him in the industrial north of England - Worktown - the
fictional name given to the study of Bolton and Blackpool.
It was in Bolton that he spent his first few months of anthropological study,
working in different jobs, trying to 'pick up the threads of mass life in Britain in much
the same way as one does when visiting a little known country'. Harrisson relates
that after he had been doing this for about six months he met a newspaper reporter
from the Daily Mirror, who was also a published poet, Charles Madge. Both were
Cambridge 'drop-outs'. The eminent historian, poet and highly respected literary
scholar, Angus Calder, described them as ‘children of the sun’ It was Madge,
however, who persuaded Harrisson that the best way to make studies was through a
nation-wide system of voluntary informants, reporting on themselves, rather than by
specialised study on the spot. Indeed, Gary Cross in his Worktowners in Blackpool
claims that Madge announced the formulation of 'Mass Observation' and that
'Harrison soon joined'. Thus it was that Mass Observation was born by 'a
heterogeneous group of leftish middle-class intellectuals' in early 1937 and based
itself in a rather dilapidated terraced property in Bolton in Davenport Street, in an
area that was within easy walking distance of the town centre. The street still exists
but is not the row of Victorian houses that it once was being now part of the local
authority housing stock having been ‘redeveloped’ in the 1980s.
Besides Harrisson and Madge, the 'heterogeneous group' comprised the
painters Graham Bell, William Coldstream and Julian Trevelyan, the photographer
Humphrey Spender and the writers, John Somerfield and Bill Naughton and poet,
and later documentary film director, Humphrey Jennings. Also in the group in its early
days were Kathleen Raine, Stuart Legg, David Gascoyne and William Empson.
Support for the project came from such luminaries of the time as J.B.S. Haldane,
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Julian Huxley, J.D. Bernal, Bronislaw Malinowski and H.G. Wells and was partly
funded by the publisher Victor Gollancz. It was Gollancz who commissioned four
books on Bolton - politics, religion, the pub and leisure (including Blackpool). Only
one, however, The Pub and the People, actually appeared in January 1943.
83-87 Davenport Street in August 1960 from Britain Revisited.
The aim of Mass Observation was to produce a 'people’s anthropology' in
which ordinary people were asked to write about their daily lives and the events in
their community. In many ways they succeeded although reports, collected by
Harrison and co, were invariably written by middle class people that, undoubtedly,
coloured the representation of working class life. A number, however, were written by
working class respondents and in that way their own voices can be discerned from
the evidence, sometimes directly from autobiographical writing, sometimes from the
‘silences and omissions (that) have to be dramatised in the reader’s imagination’.
Mass observation was not without its critics though, from popular newspapers
through to academics. For example the leader of the Bolton Evening News on the
27th of June 1937 called it an ‘unequalled opportunity for the pettifogging, the
malicious, the cranky, the interfering and the mildly dotty’. The Mass Observation
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Studies of the 30s do, however, give us some insight into working class behaviour in
Bolton at that period, particularly with regard to working class institutions such as the
pub, the annual holiday treat and cinema going.
Charles Madge and Tom Harrisson
More recently the Marriot trust have sponsored mef to give a more
contemporary voice to Boltonians fond memories of cinema-going in the town.
Thankfully, many of my fellow Boltonians have been only too willing to share them.
Many memories surround individual cinemas and so each cinema has been located
and described and memories of them shared through oral recordings, interviews,
articles and correspondence from contemporary Boltonians. Their voices are used in
an attempt to weave a sophisticated narrative of ‘leisure lives’ of the twentieth
century in the town and, as such, eye-witness participants have recalled the events
of the past for the purpose of historical reconstruction aimed at producing a cultural
history of Bolton from those indigenous peoples, or members of cultural minorities,
whose voices have seldom been heard. At the same time, it highlights the complexity
of the oral history relationship and the extraordinary variety of ways of interpreting the
past, and of making histories using these sources. The monograph then contains
original material of those oral recordings, etc. juxtaposed alongside historical
research from 20th century local newspapers, journals and books together with a
unique collection of photographs ranging from fairground stalls exhibiting the newly
invented Kinetoscope in the early twentieth century through to images of the shells of
long gone picture palaces.
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The Rialto Cinema on St. Georges Road. Photo courtesy of the Cinema Trust.
In all spheres of academic life debates take place that attempt to establish an
exact picture of the material or social world. This is probably an unattainable aim but
nevertheless scholars and academics continue to strive towards the nearest
approximations of that exact picture. The cruel paradox, however, seems to be that
increased knowledge brings in its wake yet more questions, so that the goals that
once seemed within easy grasp lurch away into infinity. Indeed, this may be the
nature of the journey undertaken in this monograph as it attempts to give voice to
previously unheard memories of contemporary Boltonians and their leisure lives in
the twentieth century. Almost inevitably, from the voices that have been recorded
more questions are raised than answered as, necessarily, a limited number of people
are included. The excluded majority would certainly have coloured the portrait of
leisure life in Bolton with a different hue. Nonetheless, the effort to write this
monograph has been undertaken with enthusiasm as it is seen a valid historical
exercise underpinned by the idea that there can be an adequate correspondence
between people’s oral evidence and the truthful knowledge of the past. Cinema-going
is, hopefully, the first is a series of studies of leisure in Bolton across the twentieth
century that includes specifically women’s rounders, dancing, dog-racing, football,
cricket together with other sports, recreations and hobbies such as bowls, table
tennis, tennis, darts, rambling, angling, amateur dramatics, boxing, wrestling, etc.
Dr. Peter Swain
April, 2011.
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