By the press will our deeds be known, a new blog post on the work of the Manchester Refuge

I am always pleased when another story from the Together Trust Archive gets posted, and this one is particularly interesting.*

The media has always been a powerful vehicle for alerting the general public to the social issues of the day and in turn the voluntary agencies have never been backward about using the press to highlight their work.

All of which  is the subject of this month’s blog post.

Now as ever I am not going to rewrite a piece of research and will just direct you to it at the link below.

But  I have always been interested in how organisations get their message across and would love to have met the people responsible for working with the media when the Manchester and Salford Boys and Girls Refuge began their work.

There is a particular skill in getting the right stories in the right way out through the newspapers and magazines while at the same time not alienating the reader of the journalist.  Today people are paid lots of money to do just that but I suspect back in the late 19th century it was more a question of who would take on the responsibility on top of all their other tasks.

Looking at the image of Emma before and after admission is to see not only the work of the Refuge but the thinking behind picture.  It isn’t of course an original idea but is no less powerful for that.  And I doubt that the viewer would pause to think it had all been seen before in other papers and in other charitable material dealing with abandoned and destitute children.  Just like today “care fatigue” does not stop us from committing money, time and emotion into campaigns to help the less fortunate.

And there is a real case to be made for saying that all this did was allow the State to walk away from its responsibilities of care and social justice which was being made at the time.

But and I accept the but, while campaigns were waged to elect political parties who would make the right changes, children would still be sleeping in doorways, suffer beatings and remain exploited.

Changing a social system takes time and many of destitute young people didn’t have the luxury of time.  So credit has to be given to the work of the Refuge who did make a difference to peoples’ lives.

And here in these newspaper accounts are just some of those stories, described not just in pictures like that of Emma but in the minutes of countless meetings, decisions at the end of long complex debates and extra tasks that many of the volunteers undertook.

So it is well worth the read.

Picture; courtesy of the Together Trust

* http://togethertrustarchive.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/our-history-through-newspapers.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed:+TogetherTrustArchive-GettingDownAndDusty+(Together+Trust+Archive+-+getting+down+and+dusty!)