Who stole my history? ………….

It’s not so daft a question because for most of us the story of who we are and more importantly the stories of our families stretching back through the centuries are not there to be read.

Detail from Equality of Sacrifice,, a 1931 

Now, given the sheer number of members of just my family I understand why, and I concede it is possible to piece an individual’s story back to at least 1837 using government records and further back with the aid of parish records and if you are lucky family documents.

But for most of us, we don’t feature in history other than as a walk on part carrying a spear or a washing basket, leaving historians to write about the good and the great, along with the not so great and the bad.  

This did change at the beginning of the last century and really got into its stride in the middle decades when school text books began to feature the lives of “ordinary people”.

But even then the battles were always the achievements of the generals, and the great scientific breakthroughs were down to clever men, while the advances in social and political legislation were attributed to caring and far sighted politicians who in some cases “saw the light” after a chance encounter with the poor, the sick or the unjustly treated.

And it was almost always men, not women.  

One history textbook covering the 18th and 19th centuries, in its fifteen chapters offered up just two women, one was a servant and the other was Marie Antoinette whose contribution to the events in the chapter was to demand some cake and have her head cut off.  

To be fair there was a picture of a group of angry French women storming the Palace, but the student was left to draw their own conclusions about why they were there.

The book remained in use well into the 1980s.

All of which will not be a surprise to many today but was how we got our history until relatively recently.  It wasn’t so much that history ignored them it was more it just didn’t recognize them.

Chorlton Row, circa 1880

In the same way our history is often distorted by those who post “olden day pictures” of some place vaguely familiar with no reference to a date, an exact location or where it came from.

This is as useful as using the newspaper wrapping from yesterday’s fish and chip supper as an in depth guide to the events of the day.

And now there is AI, which is in the news as I write.

My Wikipedia tells me that AI is about “perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by humans or by other animals. Example tasks in which this is done include speech recognition, computer vision, translation between (natural) languages, as well as other mappings of inputs”. *

So far so good and recent news reports suggest that it offers stunning opportunities for medical break throughs and is already becoming integrated into how we do things. **

Ploughing Row Acre, circa 1892

But and there always is a but it does seem to lead to some odd, misinformed, and downright silly offerings.

Last week I reflected on one offering from an AI source*** on the history of Chorlton, which was so wrong on so many counts that it had me doing a history walk in 1848.

Added to which it authoritatively reported that Beech Road “was also home to several laundries, which gave it its nickname 'Washhouse Lane'. One of these laundries was converted into a restaurant called The Laundrette in 2013, which still retains some of its original features”.****

Of course, given the dire warnings of some about AI its ability to leave a false trail of how we lived is small beer.

I am reminded of a 1970s cartoon by R. Cobb which shows a robot called “Automation” turning  to a university graduate still wearing a mortar board and clutching his degree certificate, and commenting dismissively “Oh … haven’t you heard?  The Industrial Revolution is over …. We Won …”*****

Taking the holiday snap, date unknown

I await developments on just what AI will do, but if it continues to rewrite history, all my fears of a twisted Establishment version of the past where families like mine are written out of history in favour of a handful of clever Kings and Queens assisted by generals politicians and the odd scientist will be the least of our “historical” worries.

Location; Now and then

Pictures; detail from Equality of Sacrifice, Will Dyson, a 1931 election poster for the Labour Party, Chorlton Row, now Beech Road, date unknown possibly, 1880s, courtesy of Miss. Booth  and ploughing  Row Acre, possibly for the last time, courtesy of Mr. Higginbotham, circa 1892, courtesy of Miss. Booth from the Lloyd Collection and detail form a picture postcard, location and date unknown, from the collection of Ron Stubley

*Artificial Intelligence, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence

** New superbug-killing antibiotic discovered using AI, James Gallagher, BBC News May 25th, 2023, New superbug-killing antibiotic discovered using AI, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-65709834

***How not to write a history of Chorlton ….. or when dinosaurs roamed Beech Road …… and Batman opened a bar, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2023/05/how-not-to-write-history-of-chorlton-or.html

**** ***A History of Chorlton,  March 24th, 2023

*****The Cobb Book, Ron Cobb, 1975