Bolton Museum

Sports, Spectacles and Spectators exhibition at Bolton Museum

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From Saturday 9th March to  Sunday 25th May

The theme for this year’s Humphrey Spender John Marriot Scholarship for Social Documentary Photography is ‘Sports, Spectacles and Spectators’. This scholarship is supported by Bolton Le Moors Rotary Club and the University of Bolton.

Throughout the Scholarship, photographer Richard Gaskill will explore the interwoven layers of emotion that lie between sports, spectacles and the Boltonians who observe these events. The images in this exhibition are an introduction to this year long project.

The next instalment of photographs will focus on spectators who observe the sports and spectacles within the Bolton area.

Richard is looking for volunteers who live in the Borough of Bolton to work with him on the next part of the project.

To find out more please contact Richard on 07977230172 or visit www.HumphreySpenderScholarship.com.

Anna White

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Anna White was the Spender Scholar in 2010-2011. She used a range of photographic techniques during the year inspired by Humphrey Spender’s photographs of life in the town. As society’s views have changed quite a lot on how acceptable it is to photograph people undercover and without consent Anna used a collaborative approach.This included setting up a pop up studio in the town to make portraits of modern day Boltonians.

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Anna also worked with the local Embroidery Guild who embellished photos printed on to fabric. I’ll try and get some images of these from her to share on here. You can view the rest of her work on her website, and also some photographs taken during a visit to Rachel Spender, Humphrey’s widow, which show the creative detritus of his studio, including contact sheets from the Worktown negatives.

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Foundation Stones

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1993.83.02.21Thanks to blog reader Dennis Pilling who visited St Chad’s Church and rephotographed the foundation stone laid by the then Lord Bishop of Manchester. His photograph shows how time has weathered the stone since Humphrey Spender photographed it in 1937. The Worktown observers attended the stone laying ceremony. We think that Mass Observation’s interest in foundation stones stemmed from leader Tom Harrisson’s fascination with rituals. He was inspired by his studies of cannibal tribes in the South Pacific to look for ritual behaviour in Bolton’s everyday life.

Yesterday 75 years ago…

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On the 27 January 1938….

1993.83.26.24There was a parliamentary by-election in Farnworth. Candidate Herbert Ryan (National Government/Conservatives) was defeated by George Tomlinson (Labour).

1993.83.26.32Children joined in the campaign at a polling station at Moor Hall, on Church Street.

1993.83.06.29And a van overturned on Vernon Street, near Bolton town centre.

The Castle

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It is easy to scan read photographs but if you look more closely there are often details which give a lot more information. We have been hunting for visual clues in the Worktown photographs which would help us to identify when and where Humphrey Spender’s photographs were taken.

castle stripThis strip of 4 negatives showed a pub called the Castle. The Mass Observers in Bolton were interested in pub life and collected information for a book called ‘The Pub and the People’. Spender took photographs for the book although cost prevented their use until later republications. It had been assumed that these photos were part of this endeavour.

1993-83-22-28However no one in the Museum could remember the Castle and its striking frontage so we thought it was perhaps demolished a long time ago. Bolton’s local history archives contain a couple of excellent books on Bolton’s pubs including Gordon Readyhough’s  Bolton Pubs 1800-2000. These books suggested a couple of Castle contenders including the Bolton Castle at the junction of Crompton Way and Tonge Moor Road, named for the Castle Hill district in which it stands. Yet it seemed impossible, even given massive architectural changes that these had ever been the same building.

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The Elephant and Castle on Deansgate was suggested as possibility but this pub had only been given its name after a refurbishment in 2010. So drawing a blank in Bolton we looked again at the photographs to try and find more clues. The Bolton pubs photographed by Spender in the 30s were mostly supplied by Magee Marshall’s Crown Brewery and so we decided to find about Young & Co, the brewery who supplied the Castle.We didn’t have to look hard to find out via the internet that Young & Co’s were originally based in Wandsworth, supplied London pubs and still existed as Wells and Young’s. We began to suspect that these photographs weren’t taken in Bolton at all.

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As the pub plaque was so distinctive we thought someone at the company might know about the Castle pub. Their reply confirmed our suspicions- Spender had photographed the Castle Pub in Battersea not Bolton! The pub he photographed had been demolished in 1963 but replaced by a modern building, with the original plaque incorporated into the design.

Castle Battersea SignThe brewery sent us a short history of the building which contained one detail that the Mass Observers would have loved: when the original pub was demolished workmen found a hoard of gold sovereigns. The coins were declared treasure trove but Young’s bought back a sovereign and a half sovereign and buried them under the foundation stone of the new building. By coincidence this 60s building was due to be demolished the week after we contacted Wells and Young’s. Hopefully they remembered to rescue their gold!

Uncle Bob and his friend Billy

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Earlier in the year we decided that looking for each of the locations in the 930 Spender photographs would be far too time consuming for just the two of us, especially as neither of us know Bolton that well, being a Mancunian and a Wiganer. So we decided it would be good to ask you lot, the members of the public, and so the mini project ‘Worktown: Lost Locations’ was born. Our own searches had revealed that a number of the locations were different from what Spender had titled them as, and some weren’t even from Bolton! So we decided to enter into public engagement with an amount of caution.

In order to stir up public interest we put on a small exhibition in the Worktown Gallery section of Bolton Museum’s ‘Bolton Lives Gallery’, along with this the Bolton News kindly put a full page article about the project and we linked this in with a group on Facebook. Response’s to both the Bolton News article was fantastic, and really helped raise the profile of the Facebook campaign.
Naturally though, having realised that some of Spender’s IDs were wrong (and he took the photos!) we would probably have a bit of work to do confirming the publics suggested photo IDs. We decided it best to double and triple check the suggestions. We weren’t quite prepared for some of the responses we would get.

Having weeded out several strange comments which, the comment on this photograph seemed just as unlikely, albeit rather more normal.

Norman King: ‘The boy on the ledge is my late Uncle Bob…and the boy to the right is his friend Billy’

Of course, we had prove that this claim is true, but how is that possible? The only way would be to have a picture of both Bob and Billy, about the same age as in the Spender photo, facing the camera. Its not very likely that a family in working class Bolton would have had many photos anyway. However, I asked for such a photograph from Mr King. Given how specific it would need to be I believed it would be impossible for Mr King to produce, and so I carried on with the other identifications. How wrong I was.

This photograph came in an email a few days later. I could not have asked for a better photograph. Exactly as I had requested. We began to realise that its possible to identify people in the photographs, even 75 years on, and not just the locations. We decided to ask Mr King and his brother to do a little bit of recording with us at Bolton Museum, recordings which made it into the current Worktown 75th Birthday exhibition.

Caroline Edge took the two brothers to the same spot where their uncle and his friends were snapped playing by Humphrey Spender 75 years ago.

But the story gets better! A message left at the Museum reception desk said ‘please contact Mr Doeg as his name has been spelt incorrectly in the exhibition’. It didn’t immediately click who this man is. We had incorrectly spelt this mans name as ‘Billy Doig’. This man was Uncle Bob’s friend Billy! In the next few months we hope to work with Bill and do a little bit of oral history recording, so watch this space. Who knows, he might even remember Humphrey Spender standing there taking the picture!
I wonder if he would have ever made himself known if we hadn’t spelt his name wrong?