11.1 – In the Action on Hearing Loss Library (with BSL)

Posted on April 14, 2014 by mg2990

For the next three days I’ll be in London. Today, I’m in the Action on Hearing Loss (UCL) library which is hidden inside an Ear Hospital near King’s Cross Station. It has loads of Deaf history material, which I can use for the St Saviour’s project.

Historians used to spend a lot more time in archives than they do now – the use of digital cameras means that I can now take photos of all of the records (that aren’t still under copyright) and then look at them back home.

Depending on how I get on here today, I’ll be at the London Metropolitan Archive tomorrow.

10.2 – Post-viral (and with apologies)

Posted on April 9, 2014 by mg2990

Following a tweet from a friend*, I realised that I haven’t put an update up this week. Then, when I put the heading together, and realised I was on week 10 of the project, I did a double take.

I remember being here for some of week 9, but I wasn’t able to do anything other than sit and stare at the screen and wonder when the room would stop spinning.

Here I am, though, back – post-viral and mostly back to normal.

With two things to share.

First – having spent a lot of time in the last few weeks discussing with various people (Deaf and hearing) the need to share information with the Deaf community, and having identified that putting it on the Internet (although useful) doesn’t cut it for anywhere near everyone… we are still not really any closer to knowing how we might do that.

So here’s a cry for help – if you are Deaf, and can talk to us about how you might like us to get this information to you… or have previous experience of successfully communicating historical information like this to the Deaf community… get in touch.

I’m not looking for a ‘one off’ hit… I really do want to start to build ways that we, as academics on a project, can give back the information that we find, in ways that Deaf people will engage with.

We don’t have funding… but we have imagination. And where there is imagination… there are ways. (And where ways work, perhaps there *is* funding in the future.)

Second – I’m heading back to London on Monday next week for another three days in the archives before the Easter break shuts everything down.

I get lonely when the archives are shut. So, if you’d like to meet me while I’m there, either this time, or in the future, to talk about the project… or just spend time chatting… let me know.

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* The tweet was from Rob Wilks. If you don’t know him… look him up. I don’t know him very well, but from hearing up the RAD’s legal services – you see, there had to be a link to the RAD or St Saviour’s otherwise I couldn’t justify the comment – he now has his own company as a consultant solicitor. He’s also – interestingly, just secured a place at Leicester to start a PhD looking at the recognition of BSL and its legal standing. Watch this space.

8.3 – Hints of Deaf London

Posted on March 26, 2014 by mg2990

Yesterday, I posted something about the difference between the ‘upstairs’ and the ‘downstairs’ at St Saviour’s.

Today, I address the question of what happened outside of the St Saviour’s building.

According to one source, Deaf people referred to the church as their ‘Cathedral’ – in other words, a central headquarters which coordinated other services.

Again, in preparation for the presentation next week, I’ve pulled together data that shows where some of those services were. By 1909, the chaplains were running services and activities in Oxford Street, Ealing, Harrow Rd, Deptford, New Kent Road, Brixton, Denmark Place, Walworth, Islington, Tottenham, West Ham and Lavender Hill.

There was also a cricket field used at Neasdon, and picnics at Battersea.

So far, all we know about these locations is that they were sites for religious meetings and other Association-organised activity. But the evidence suggests that these meetings were much more organic (ie, they arose from Deaf people’s own activities) than the ‘Cathedral’ of St Saviour’s.

What we’re discovering are the first glimpses of a wider 19th-century network of London-based Deaf spaces.

8.2 – Inhouse

Posted on March 25, 2014 by mg2990

The University of Bristol has been fighting its electronic file-system for a few days. Something broke last week, and it’s taken them a little while to put the file store back up. In the meantime, I have no access to my working documents.

I’ve used the time to prepare a presentation that I’ll be giving next Monday in what remains of the Centre for Deaf Studies.

Preparing the presentation reminded me of how far we’ve come in only a few weeks, particularly with regards to our knowledge of the St Saviour’s building, and its use.

What’s been really interesting is to see the separation of spaces between the ‘upstairs’ which clearly fulfilled a public role, and remained under the control of the Anglican church establishment and the Association’s board of trustees… and the ‘downstairs’, which was clearly a much more Deaf controlled space.

Here’s the plan of the building. Imagine going in through the doors in Lumley street, and being faced with stairs up to the left, and down to the right.

Plan of st saviour's church showing entrance to Lumley street and outline of church building structure.

“… A descending flight of steps at the general entrance… brings us to the lecture-hall beneath the church. At its north end is a spacious platform, and on the walls on either hand are portraits in oil… principally executed by deaf artists. The room is well furnished with gymnastic apparatus. Here lectures, meetings, tea-parties, gymnastic displays, bazaars, and, usually, the Thursday evening service are held.”

This ‘downstairs’ space was effectively London’s first permanently sited Deaf club, and will be an enormous part of the story that we tell about the church.

7.4 – Patterns in the pavement

Posted on March 20, 2014 by mg2990

Take a look at this… it’s part of the map Oxford Street that features St Saviour’s in the 1890s. You can probably see it better in the banner for the blog.

See how the church provides a curved corner for Lumley Street?

In pictures from the time, you can see that the church was sunk into a trench, with the downstairs floor being a good 6 feet below the pavement.

Now… here’s a photograph of the present-day Oxford Street site, where St Saviour’s used to stand.

P1130739-resized

That paving, with the glass bricks in, is the actual trench that used to follow the shape of the St Saviour’s site.

We’re going to ask the Adidas store if we can go into their basement and take a look!

7.1 – Rotating… rotating

Posted on March 17, 2014 by mg2990

In the old days (and still in some places where the resources are particularly fragile – or the archivist still enforces 20th century rules) you used to go into archives equipped with a pad, a pencil, and a mountain of boiled sweets… and spend the day scribbling until your wrist went dead, your eyes fell out, and your fingers fell off.

No more.

Most document collection now is done with a camera, which allows you to spend a lot less time in the archive, and a lot more time back home reading the material.

To make sure that you get the best possible photo of a document, you generally fit it to the camera screen shape – and since most photos that you take in an archive are of a single page, that means that most photos you come back with are on their side.

The first step is always to rotate them all so that you can read them. Which is easy if you are on your own, and you always hold the camera one way around.

Having returned from the archives with well over 700 photos of books, manuscripts, microfiche and other written material – I’m remembering how long it takes to rotate them all, and discovering that a shared camera means that I have to keep changing my rotation direction.

Almost done, then it’ll be time to folder them up and give them a structure.

5.5 – Back from the archives

Posted on March 7, 2014 by mg2990

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.

Will Deaf people be deaf in heaven?

Posted on February 26, 2014 by mg2990

The Scripture, Dissent, Deaf space project is gradually gathering pace. So far, we’ve spent the month settling into a new office, going through PhD applications, booking archive visits, wrestling with the admin systems of the university (a lot), and working out some initial ways into the data.

We’ve started to pull out lists of who was involved, and when, and where, and what they did. Trying to make sense of it all has generated lists of more things that we need to know. The lists just get longer and longer.

This is a normal part of the process though, so it’s not something to be too worried about at the moment… but at some point, we will need to start defining the edges of the project. We don’t have time or funding (unfortunately) to follow up on a lot of the leads. Those will have to be new projects, and proposals.

I’ve spent more than one afternoon reading previous research to try and locate the period in a bigger picture of Deaf and church history, and national history more generally.

One of the things that we can do to help with that, because the university pays for the library access, is get to historical newspaper records from the time of St Saviour’s to start having a look at what people were writing, and saying about Deaf people and about the church itself.

This is all public domain, and well out of copyright, so we can share some of it with you without fear of breaking any rules.

I’m particularly interested to use the way that people describe Deaf people’s situation, to see how they understood and described the reality of the Deaf community at the time

One of the questions I’ve always had in the back of my mind for this project is “What did people think was going to happen to Deaf people when they got to heaven? Would they sign, would they speak? Would everyone else sign, or speak?”

Well, this is only one clip, but it provides some kind of answer for the moment;

(from the Times, 15th May, 1872)

… He dwelt upon the value of this religious teaching to the afflicted people, as giving them the assurance that the loss of hearing and speech was but for a time, and that in the eternity of the great hereafter they would join with their brethren of the world in praising their Father.

The Bishop of Carlisle comes across as rather a pompous person who knew little of Deaf people. But the suggestion is clear. He believed that Deaf people would be able to hear and speak in heaven, and that this would somehow reconcile them with the rest of humanity around worship.

Introducing the project.

Posted on February 12, 2014 by mg2990

OK, so this is the first time that I’ve ever EVER signed onto a webcam (which turned out to be too slow, and in the wrong place), and put it on the internet (which turned out to be terrifying) – but, in the spirit of doing something new with this project, and not waiting until it’s perfect, I’m going to put my money where my mouth is and publish this.

This is a short BSL intro to our new project. The transcript is below. Hopefully, I’ll find this easier in the future! I’m going to go and lie down now.

Hi, My name is Mike Gulliver. I work at the University of Bristol where I’m a researcher in Deaf history. I want to talk about a new project that’s entitled “Scripture, Dissent and Deaf space”. The focus is on the history of the first Deaf church, set up in London, in 1870.

The fact that it’s a church is important – back then, society was totally controlled by the church. Similarly, the Deaf community was controlled by the church. So, if we want to know what Deaf people’s lives were really like, we have to look at the relationship between the Deaf community and the church.

The project lasts three years… what will we find – we don’t know! But come along for the ride, and we’ll see together 🙂