Project week 5, day 5.

We spent the first three days of the week in a variety of archives in London, looking for information on St Saviour’s, and reading about what happened (particularly in the set up of the church).

Monday – we were at the UCL Action on Hearing Loss library, where (amongst other things) they have the chaplains’ newsletters from the church, the Deaf and Dumb Times (mouthpiece of the early BDDA), and some journals by one of the church vicars (Gilby) which detail his experiences of the church.

Tuesday – we visited the site of St Saviour’s in Oxford street. And then went on to another church (this time a Baptist one) that was built around the same time. Although St Saviour’s isn’t there any more, the pavement still shows the original shape of the plot.

Tuesday afternoon was spent in the London Metropolitan Archives looking at the annual reports of the Royal Association for the Deaf (RAD) which was the overarching organisation that administered St Saviour’s.

Wednesday – we went on to Acton, where the church that replaced the original St Saviour’s is built. St Saviour’s Acton is up for sale by the RAD, and it was good to see it, and to see what’s inside it, before it goes. I was honoured to be able to interview an elderly Deaf man there who was born in 1910 (yes, really – he’s 104) and had living memory of the original St Saviour’s even if it was only for a couple of years (1921/22).

We’ve come back with nearly 700 photos of archival data, which is quite enough to be working through for a bit. John and I were able to spend the evenings talking through our findings, and we’re already beginning to think about the structure of what we’ve seen.

I’ll post up information from those findings, and more info on the project and the project team next week.