Oral History Society

Treading the Traces of Discarded History: Oral History Installations Author(s): Alison Marchant Source: Oral History, Vol. 20, No. 2, Making Histories (Autumn, 1992), pp. 48-50 Published by: Oral History Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40179289 . Accessed: 01/04/2014 03:38
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TREADING THE TRACES OF DISCARDED HISTORY: ORAL HISTORY INSTALLATIONS

ALISON MARCHANT

TIMEAND MOTION IN ROCHDALE

Time & Motion was commissioned by Rochdale Art Gallery during the Summer Festival of 1990. For many years I had spoken with my relative, Alice Slater, who lives in Lancashire, about her experiences as a cotton weaver. When Rochdale Art Gallery invited me to create a new art work, Time & Motion began to take form. The conditions of the Rochdale Art Gallery project were that I create an art-work both in the gallery and at a location of my choice, anywhere in Rochdale. I felt that I would like my main work to take place in a local cotton mill, and so the exhibition organiser approached Barchant Cotton Mill in Rochdale, where Time & Motion took place. In the upper disused floor of Barchant Mill I suspended a roll of cotton fabric which cascaded to the floor from a central beam. Projected onto the fabric were huge and haunting grainy images of mill women's faces whose eyes seems to stare out, confronting the viewer. The archive portraits were loaned to me from Rochdale Library. I reproduced details from these formal group photographs onto slides. As projections, the women's faces dominated the factory interior, touching and stretching from both floor and ceiling. Amid the relentless clatterof looms still functioning at Barchant Mill, the projections

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dissolved like ghosted faintness, suggesting the fragility of human experience. Surrounding the projections, the installation spread out across the floor as a complex of discarded clogs, mill workers' clothing, and fragments of past mill activity. Accompanying the visual aspects of the installation was a sound-tape comprising a recording of the Barchant Mill looms, intercut with elements from an interview with Alice Slater, whose voice spoke loud and clear, filling the entire factory floor. She and her husband stood, along with the current cotton mill workers, watching the installation, which took place from the 25th - 27th of August1. In the attic above, from the eaves and lodged in dark corners, were the remnants of past mill work activity: broken bobbin pieces, dusty oily rags, loom-machine belts, pieces of cotton and reels of thick twined cotton thread. This debris was collected and scattered before the viewers, around clogs and museum-like mill workers' clothing, to create an aged effect upon the floor. Onto this debris-stricken floor I scattered a pile of pink printed tags labelled '8s Ring Yarn'. I uncurled loombelts as if to unwind the past, and frantically swept to the sound of looms in motion, my shadow cast onto the projections. I dragged a heavy chain from one end of the space to the next, back and forth. I untangled the threads of discarded cotton reels and placed them within the arrangement. I moved slowly and carefully to the sound of Alice's voice, chalking strike lock-out dates to add a further layer to the installation. The humid air of the mill's upper floor caused the chalked words to fade and be re-inscribed: Drawing attention to a conventional, detrimental process (whereby history is made and perceived as novelty/nostalgia, and emptied of substance) objects and experiences undergo a movement, counteracting the stasis of the museum, to create a web of interacting forces. Time & Motion illustrates a process of shifting; for example, clothing from museums, carrying the imprint of their former wearers, is moved into the disused and desolate work space, creating an ominous presence, a scene of confrontation. The voice of Alice Slater recalls her memory of mill work, adding to the Installation the reality of the compulsion of wage labour. The archive projections are re-represented so that details of faces are drawn out of the posed and formalised photographs to reveal the identities of the women, hinting at possibilities for self-determination, an autonomy from the way in which our lives are determined by work. The Time & Motion' of the title subverts its usual definition; a time and motion study being a means of surveillance of the productivity of individual workers, where the motion of the

Time and Motion

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looms becomes a monotonous, thundering sound. The Installation rejects the confines of these meanings, and moves into real time: the struggle for re-definition, where meaningful relationships and connections can be made. Time and Motion suspends the moment of exploitation, portraying it as potentially paralysed where the only movements are the words spoken and those chalked onto the mill floor, which focus upon the notion of knowledge and experience as defined by the mill workers themselves: I started work when I was 14. We had no choice, you knew you were going into the mill, if you were clever, or whatever, it didn't matter you had to go there. Well it was a bit of a shock the first time I went in, the noise and the dirt and the fluff, it was terrible. I thought, oh, I won't be able to stand this, but you did. We used to start at seven in the morning, and seven till ten in the morning on Saturdays. I worked in the mill forty years, I left to have my children, then I went back after the war and worked part-time ... Nearly everyone went back to work after having their children because they couldn't afford to stay at home. One wage wasn't enough especially if your husband worked in the mill too. When I first worked in the mill I was sort of tenting - we had to do the sweeping for a trained weaver who we had to work for. We had to lie on the floor; sweep under the looms, and we got 6 shillings for doing four looms like that! The fluff was deep, deep and everywhere was covered in this fluff, it couldn't have been healthy. Those were the conditions at the time and we had no protection. Many people I knew had bronchitis and other ailments later in life, and I'm not surprised because all that, was in the air all the time. There were tattlers, managers and bosses higher up. It was very strict, the managers were always looking around, walking around to see if they saw you talking, laughing or minding your work. By talking you did a lot of sign language, so you could talk to someone right across the shed. I think that's why people in Lancashire talk more clearly, because we had to use our lips to pronounce, we would read each other's lips.2

as half-timers, through to contemporary workers who started a few years ago, a near complete picture was mapped out. Like the representation of Alice Slater's accounts in Time and Motion, the Oldham mill workers are portrayed as the historymakers as opposed to the traditional industrial revolution 'pioneers'. At Oldham Art Gallery the Installation was laid out with dissolving slides onto the far wall. Again I re-photographed images from the local archive, collaging threads onto reprinted archive images; these I later produced as slides. I tinted the slides so some were sepia, faint green, blue or grey, adding subtle colours to re-create an atmosphere. The gallery space was long and narrow, so from the projections at the far end wall threads of cotton spanned out, criss-crossing from floor to ceiling, back and forth across the space, until the threads themselves formed a scale equivalent to a loom. Interspersed between the threads were objects from the local history museum which were once used by local cotton workers. The threads and objects criss-crossed over the projections and cast shadows as the oral history tape I had compiled with the local Oldham mill workers played throughout the gallery.

Tying the Threads

TYINGTHE THREADS IN OLDHAM

Tying the Threads was an Installation which took place at Oldham Art Gallery from 18th January - 1 1th April 1992. The Installation combined a small selection of extracts from interviews from Oldham local history library and sixteen extensive interviews of my own with the following local women: Lillian Hirst, Harriet Berry, Alice Whitehead, Alice Tait, Ivy Scott, Doris Bradbury,Sheila Cartmill, Lilly Challkinor, Pat Gormley, Alice Hulton, Olive Jones, Maria Maksymowych, Joan Moores, Alice Partington, Edith Taylor and Ingrid Wilson. Four of the women interviewed were currently working in the cotton industry, so comparisons could be made in terms of the history. While Oldham Museum paints the usual nostalgic view of life in the industry Tying the Threads portrayed a very different reality. By interviewing sixteen women, some of whom began in the mills early this century To the left a window of the gallery was blocked off by cotton strike dates, and the names of Lancashire mill working suffragists. Many early radical suffragists were mill workers - working class women. In 1808 The Times reported: The women mill workers were more turbulent than the men'. In 1834 there was the Eight Hour Riot in Oldham, and among those arrested was Sally Whitehead, a cotton worker. At Peterloo several banners were inscribed 'Universal Suffrage', and sixty-five years later there was a demonstration to the House of Lords - four of the female Peterloo survivors (who were also mill workers) were on that demonstration. They were Mary Collins, Catherine McMurdo, Susannah Whittaker and Alice Schofield. Otheractive suffragists from the Lancashire cotton mills include Sarah Reddish. Mrs Winbott, Annie Heaton, Annie Kenny (born in Oldham), Cissy Foley and Selina Cooper.3 Undoubtedly there were many more, but

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none received the recognition attributedto middle class Theworkingclasses areconstantly womenlikethePankhursts. deniedthepowerof theirown printedwords,so little is known of the few women we can name: Myjob was puttingrawcotton in the backof the rollerso that it comes out as a coil. It was called 'feeding the devil*, and I got bysinnosis. The damagewas alreadydone. I had chronic bronchitis at seventeen, and I had to go into the hospital because they thoughtI had consumption. The Unionjust broughtme small food parcelswhen I hadthis poisoning(I don'thavemuchfaithin unions).It's thedustthat did it. I could feel the dustgoing up my nose andin my throat. Therewere big lumpsof dust always flying about.Breathing problemswere common;a lot of people I workedwith, early on, got bysinnosis. I didn't get compensation because my doctorfirstidentifiedit as bronchitis.But apartfromanything else it gives you a bad heart.I collapsed last Wednesday,and the nurse said I could collapse anytime because my heartis understrainand is not strongenough to help my circulation. I had to be tested in Manchesterand they asked me to blow (into a measure).But I couldn't blow into it at all!4 Harriet Berryis one of manyelderly women I interviewed in Oldhamwho still suffer from the poor workingconditions of the mills they workedin. HarrietBerryworkedfrom 19231937 and like many mill-workerswho suffer ill health from the industryshe received no compensation. Lily Challinorwas born in 1940 and has worked in the cotton industrysince 1958: I began work in the industryin 1958, and early in the sixties therewas a lot of dole, shorttime working.When we went in the mills, the mills were higherwages, that's why we went in. Now, even thoughI have an excellent workrecord,I've never been on the dole, I get 3.00 an hour for doing the same job I've done for thirtyyears. Yes, I have bysinnosis,I got it about6 yearsago, I didn'tget compensationno,just a pension.But it won't get worse as I'm on syntheticsnow, as long as I don't go on cottonit shouldstay the same. It's the fibres in the cotton that hits your chest.5 Maria Maksymowychwas born in the Ukraine in 1930. She has workedin Oldhamin the cotton industrysince 1955: I'm a ring spinner.I've been doing my job for 36 years, ring spinning.Some people get bysinnosis, when you work for a

long time in the mill you have to watchyourself. You always have to wash your hands before you have meals, wash your mouthout, you have to look afteryourself.See everytimeyou have an x-ray in the chest. You have an x-ray every 5 years, I think. They used to come to the mill in the yard, a special mobile x-ray;we used to have so you knew whetheryou got it or not. The machinerymakesa lot of noise andyou have to wearear plugs, because it does affect your hearingif you don't wear them.It's five yearssince they askedme to wearthem.Before we didn't know, nobody knew, nobody was botheringabout hearingaid, but now they do.6 Bysinnosis anddeafnesshave been two commonresultsof hazardousworking conditions in the cotton industry.Often * kissing the shuttle' caused mill-workersto lose their teeth from sucking in dirt, dust and oil along with the thread.7 IngridWilsonexplainedto me thattheoil used in thecotton industry caused skin cancer. Ingrid Wilson was born in Austria in 1931 and worked in the cotton mills throughthe 1950'stol980's: Whenthe men did the oiling they hada certainkindof oil, and when they oiled the spindles,they hadlittle cups andthey had to take the spindles out and put oil in. You had to move because that oil gave you skin cancer. That was when I was still working. There were tapes, and them tapes are turningfour speeds, two on this side, two on the other side. Sometimes the tape the mill you had a big tin roller slips off, because underneath thatwentover, andthey hadto go andcheck that.They putthe machineon, andchecked to see thatthe tape was still on, and the oil splashed.Then they got burntout, they hadmarks.The men had markson their skin on their arms,on their legs and around here (indicates stomach and groin area). They got burntout, but it didn't make a hole, it just left a skin bite, it neverwent any deeper,it always left a bit. Littleringsandthat oil caused skin cancer.8 The aim of my oralhistoryresearchandpracticeis to make work which includesworkingclass people, but which is also availableforviewingandcriticismby workingclass audiences, and is not simply my view of them. [Both Timeand Motion and Tying the Threadsarecurrently available for hire. For further informationcontact Alison Marchant,5 Hillyfields, Loughton,Essex, IG10 2JT.]

Notes 1 Rochdale Art Gallery Exhibition catalogue, Grade Fields Live Art Commissions 1990, pp. 16-17. 2 Interview with Alice Slater, born 1920, Longridge, Lancashire.Recorded by Alison MarchantJune 1990. 3 Jill Liddingtonand Jill Norris, One Hand

Tied Behind Us, Virago 1978. Interview with HarrietBerry, born 1909, Oldham, Lancashire.Recorded by Alison MarchantNovember 199 1. Interview with Lily Challinor, born 1940, Oldham, Lancashire.Recorded by Alison MarchantNovember 1991. Interview with Maria Maksymowych, born

1930, Ukraine. Recorded by Alison MarchantNovember 1991. Informationfrom Oldham Local History Libraryinterview with Minnie Walkden. Recorded by Freda Millet. Interview with Ingrid Wilson born 1931 Austria. Recorded by Alison Marchant November 1991.

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