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Archive for September, 2009

I’ve been hoping to get one of the participants to start blogging about how the exhibition group is getting. Thrilled therefore to have just got this through from Liam:

This is the fourth week I’ve attended Lawrence Cassidy’s local history sessions. The Wednesday sessions are open to all Salford residents or anyone with an interest in the city of Salford. Everyone is engaged in research to try to put together a brand new exhibition about Salford in the Working Class Movement Library.

This week’s session was extremely busy with about 25 people dropping in at some point. The sessions are situated in a large bright room at the front of the library on the ground floor. The table is spread with local history books, maps and photographs. Some new photographs that stand out in particular are images of miners from Agecroft pit before they went on Strike in the late 1970s. Paul who is sat next to me is a former miner from Agecroft who is campaigning to get a memorial to the pit.

People are chatting about their memories of Salford. One woman recounts her story of being a conductor on Salford buses. A group of people on a tour of the Working Class Movement Library joins in and adds to the throng of people.

Alice is a development worker and author of a book on Kersal Moor and its links to the Chartist movement (amongst other things). She tells everyone about a film screening of Ken Loach’s film ‘Which Side Are You On’ which was dropped by ITV because of its highly partial view of a the 1984/85 miners’ strike. The talk around the table turns to another controversial topic… socialism!

Another interesting person I meet today is a geography student from University College London who is writing his dissertation about re-development in Salford and using the session to get eyewitness accounts.

There is talk about the Clowes family, famous C19th landowners in the Broughton Park area, and Mandelberg’s Raincoat Factory. The library’s education officer invites everyone in the group to a banner making course run by the Workers Educational Association. She points out that it’s not just for women though.

12 visitors. Brilliant to see Paul come back – a former Agecroft miner who just happened to call by the library last week, to see what we’ve got on the miners’ strike (answer: loads, but – oddly – not much about what happened locally, so his input will be really valuable), and whom I introduced to Lawrence’s group who are building up our exhibition about Salford. Naturally, it being Salford, it turns out Lawrence knows Paul’s sister…

Anne worked in Mandelberg’s Raincoat Factory in Salford, and found an image of it in the Salford Champion.

Joan and Jacqueline disucssed living in Salford 6. Lawrence brought out the maps the Library has of compulsory purchase in Salford, and the group discussed these in relation to their lived experience.

The woman from last week’s tour and her friend came in again, this time to join the group who are looking at our Salford material and will be making an exhibition from what interests them out of what they find. The exhibition will start in January. Eight people in total came along today.

Roy photographed the bobbins we have which were from the local mill run by the father of Friedrich Engels.