Lessons in writing history …..

I was going to add to the title “the arrogance of the historian”, but in deference to all those fine historians I admire,  I will leave the comment hanging in the air, and come back to it later.

Instead, I will start with history itself, which is the story of the past, and for those of us who made a career in teaching the subject, the more exciting you can make it so much the better.

After all, a wet Friday afternoon, with a class of 12 year old’s grappling with the messy details of Henry V111’s search for a male heir will only work if along the way there is the bit about the executions, premature deaths and possible infidelities of some of his wives.

But that then begs the question of where the story comes from, the accuracy of the story and the degree to which that story has been manipulated.

And here on que comes the historian who will tell you that the story comes from the sources, which can be written, oral or pictorial and which have to be carefully assessed, matched with others and evaluated.

That evaluation involves examining them for bias, and accuracy, which makes the process a detective story, which along the way can be exciting and fun.

I have never lost the thrill of holding a document from the past knowing that apart from the person who made it, few others will have scrutinized it in perhaps 200 years.

But here is the first hurdle that many of us have to overcome, which is simply that the material is not easily accessible, either because it is not in English or that it is deposited far away.

This I know because when writing my first book, I had to draw on online copies of the Parliamentary Reports of the Poor Law Commissioners, which had been digitized by Google from copies sitting on the dusty shelves of university libraries in the mid-west of the United States.

Some historians might judge this as lazy, but then as the airfare to those universities is quite prohibitive, these sources would remain unread.

Equally there is a bit of sniffy ness about other online sources like Wikipedia, which can be as good or bad as any “authoritative” history book or encyclopedia. I read somewhere that it rarely advances sources, and particularly primary sources, which it does in plenty of cases.

And that brings me to those social media sites which offer up opportunities for people to write about the past, and gain an audience which would other wise be denied to them.

The best stories I have read are dispassionate accounts, carefully sourced and referenced and are both a joy to read, but in turn spark a series of responses which advance the  original story.

But there are those who in their enthusiasm to make a contribution, lift material, including pictures which are not attributed and so cannot be evaluated.

Worse still these are sometimes copyright and have been taken from some one’s research and hard work with no mention of the author.

I remember a case in point of a picture of a cinema I had sourced from a collection held in east Scotland.  

My story included the name of the photographer, the date that it was taken, the location of the collection and that the picture had been the property of an iron foundry.

And it was the iron foundry which was the key to the understanding of how the image came about, because the picture gave prominence to the glass and cast iron canopy which fronted the cinema’s entrance, made by the Lion Foundry of East Scotland.

All of which was lost when the image was reproduced on social media, with no date, and no context, just a title, “A Chorlton cinema”.

Not that I want to deter anyone’s enthusiasm only that when the source is attributed, and referenced it gives it a validity which makes the history worthwhile.

Which brings me back to “the arrogance of the historian”, who doesn’t not always recognize the amateur as worthy of being considered seriously, and who is quick to dismiss popular online historical platforms.

Leaving me just to comment that the images in the blog story are drawn from a variety of original material which in the case of Mr. Booker’s account of Chorlton and Didsbury was based on a range of primary material.  Sadly his work as been pillaged over the years by writers who have made no attempt to acknowledge his work.

As for the other images, most are mine, from which the reader can draw their own conclusions as to the message if any they offer up.  And in the case of Mr. Tidmarsh were produced for a book on Manchester written at the end of the 19th century and crop up time and time again often unreferenced leaving the viewer to make of them what they will.

Pictures; Manchester street sellers by H.E. Tidmarsh from Manchester Old and New, William Arthur Shaw, 1894, front piece of  A History of the Ancient Chapels of Didsbury and Chorlton, Rev. John Booker, 1852and from the collection of Andrew Simpson, 1979-2019

*The Story of Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Andrew Simpson, 2012,The History Press