A little bit of history on a pub wall and thoughts on how we see the past

Now this is an image I know well.

It comes from the Manchester & Salford Boys’ & Girls’ Refuges and was part of one of the regular campaigns by the charity to raise money for summer camps.

The organisation often features in the stories on Manchester as does the blog of the Together Trust which is the successor to the Manchester & Salford Boys’ & Girls’ Refuges.

But what is slightly odd is that this image is on display in a local city centre pub along with other period pictures.

And it raises interesting questions about how the past is marketed and just what the customers made of this particular appeal.

Not that this is a sniffy rant about how events from the past are presented.  I long ago embraced the idea that if the past is to be relevant, interesting and mean something it has to be accessible.

So the enactment groups along with the historic theme parks and museums have a place in reconstructing how we used to live.

Of course there is a danger that it all becomes over simplified or sanitized which defeats the object.

If we had stood in a crowd from any time before the 19th century I suspect we would have noticed the smell, and likewise a discussion with a group of handloom weavers would reveal that a fair few of them had a wide knowledge of literature and the arts and had an opinion on national and international events.

Often these simple truths are missed as you walk around some heritage sites and in the same way there are TV programmes which just repeat the commonly accepted view of events.

But I guess before people can engage with the messy side of history where the causes and consequences of events are seldom simple you have to first be drawn in, find it interesting and above all want to know what happened.

So with that in mind I would direct you to the Trust’s blog.

That done it would be fun to see how many in the pub made the connection with the appeal for help funding the summer camp with the dire poverty of the period and the lack of government action to address the problems.

And before someone say that this is not an historical approach and you have to accept the thinking and the philosophy of the period, there were plenty who wanted more state intervention and if in some areas it was beginning some argued rightly that it wasn’t happening quickly enough.

Picture; courtesy of the Together Trust

*Getting Down and Dusty, http://togethertrustarchive.blogspot.co.uk/