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UCL Special Collections Launches Lates Programme
By Helen F Biggs, on 11 March 2019
We are excited to be launching a series of evening talks for 2019, starting this month and running through to the next academic year.
We’ll be hosting sociable, relaxed after-work events, perfect for anyone who is interested to come into UCL to learn about the wonderful rare books, archives and manuscripts that we hold here. Each evening will present a particular topic or theme; talks and collection displays with wine, soft drinks and nibbles for all. What more could anyone want?!
Our first Late will be ‘Protest! Voices of dissent in art and text’. Guest speakers Egidija Čiricaitė and Susannah Walker will join us to explore this theme through their fascinating research and corresponding collection items.
Although all of our Lates events will have academic research at their core, they will be accessible and are open to all aged 16+. We hope you can join us for the first of what will be a regular series of talks and evening events to inspire, intrigue and amuse!
Protest! Voices of dissent in art and text
Date: Tuesday, 26th March, 6.15-8pm
Venue: UCL Haldane Room, Wilkins Building, Gower Street, WC1E 6BT
The Small Press Project: In Conversation with Egidija Čiricaitė and Liz Lawes
The Small Press Project from Slade School of Fine Art takes inspiration from UCL Special Collections’ small press collection each year. This year’s project, Visions of Protest: BLAKE THE MARCH, has been used as a critical lens through which artists, academics and students can focus on what connections exist between the democracy of print, their aesthetics and the autonomy of artists’ books and publishing. The project is formed through a programme of workshops, performances, screenings, talks, collaborations and interdisciplinary practices involving non-academic institutions and the public. Egidija Čiricaitė will be in conversation with Liz Lawes, our very own small press collections expert (and UCL’s Subject Liaison Librarian: Fine Art, History of Art and Film Studies).
Egidjia Čiricaitė publishes books, exhibitions, and book related projects. Although firmly based within contemporary artists’ books practice, her varied interests can be loosely divided between book history and contemporary metaphor theories (in linguistics). Egidija is co-curator of Prescriptions project of artists’ books and medical humanities (University of Kent). She is co-curating Artists’ Books Now events at the British Library and is currently studying for her PhD at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL.
Printing Peterloo
On the 16th August 1819, a peaceful protest for electoral reform at St Peter’s Fields Manchester was suppressed. The large crowd, assembled to hear the orator Henry Hunt, were charged on by the local yeomanry cavalry resulting in casualties and injuries. The events became known as “Peterloo”, an ironic reference to the Battle of Waterloo of 1815. This was a pivotal moment in the histories of democracy, protest and “working class politics.” Peterloo inspired political pamphlets, poetry and caricature and most recently Mike Leigh’s film of 2018. This session will consider the memory of Peterloo in print using objects from UCL Special Collections and The British Museum.
Susannah Walker was a Teaching Fellow in History of Art at UCL from 2014 to 2018 specialising in Print Culture and Romanticism, and is currently working as a curator in the British Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings. Her recent work has involved cataloguing and researching a range of political pamphlets produced in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars.
Wine (or a soft drink) and nibbles are included with your £3 ticket. Click here to book your place.
BBC Broadcasts and ‘Back in Time for School’
By Nazlin Bhimani, on 1 March 2019
Back in Time for School takes a group of fifteen children and their teachers back through time to experience what schooling was like at different times, from the Victorian period up to the 1990s. Last summer, I was involved in doing some research for the second episode on the ‘King’s English’, which was a speech and language programme that began in the interwar period. To do this, I used the BBC Broadcasts for Schools Collection which I have introduced in an earlier post on the IOE Library’s blog, Newsam News.
The BBC introduced wireless lessons for schools during the interwar period, the earliest of these date from 1924. Schools were expected to adapt their timetables to accommodate these lessons and the BBC were keen on the ‘wireless teacher’ and the ‘class teacher’ collaborating so that both the children and the class teachers would ‘enter into the spirit of the lesson’. Class teachers were also expected to use the pamphlets produced by the BBC as guides and to make time after the transmission to answer questions that may arise. This would, according to the BBC, ‘treble the value of the lesson’! [1] Teachers were to report to the BBC any difficulties they experienced with the broadcast transmission and to comment on the content of the lessons.
The ‘King’s English’ began life as ‘Our Native Tongue’ in the 1920s. The title is representative of the focus on the importance of English as the language of the Empire and the necessity of ensuring young children learnt how to speak the native tongue. The programme had several name changes: In 1927, it changed its name to ‘Speech and Language’; from 1931 to 1934, it was called ‘King’s English’; and subsequently, it became ‘English Speech’.
In the early days, the programme was presented by A. Lloyd James who was a lecturer in phonetics at the London School of [African and] Oriental Studies (SOAS). Lloyd James was a Welshman and a founding member of what later became the BBC’s Advisory Committee on Spoken English.[2] In the 1927 volume of the schedules of school broadcasts, Lloyd James explained to teachers:
The object of the talks is to arouse interest in the sounds of our native tongue, and to give some practical training in hearing and making these sounds. Each practical lesson will be preceded by a little talk on some aspect of the subject. Very elementary notions of the history of our language may form a part of these talks, and may occasionally be read in the actual pronunciation of Chaucer and Shakespeare to give the children some idea of what English sounded like in those days.
Nothing in these talks will be said that will reflect adversely upon local dialects, and no invidious comparisons will be made between class dialects. Good northern English is as good as good southern English, etc.[3]
Lloyd James was clearly celebrating the glories of a richly diverse range of forms of English, as embodied in Chaucer and Shakespeare inviting children to become fascinated with the varieties of English. He was also at pains to point out that these lessons were not meant to reflect adversely on local dialects or to make comparisons between class dialects, and that northern English was as good as southern English. But the reality of this couldn’t be further from the truth. Children who spoke well were likely to have a better chance of getting employment in the professional sphere (instead of manual or factory work) and thereby having the chance of climbing up the social ladder.
By the 1930s, the programme was well established in the lists of courses offered by the BBC to schools as it followed the guidelines recommended by the Board of Education which urged that ‘standard English should be taught’ without suppressing the peculiarities of dialect.This reference was from the Newbolt report on the teaching of English which was published by the Board of Education in 1921. Taking into consideration the ‘valuable constructive criticism’ from teachers, in the 1930s, Lloyd James (now referred to as ‘Professor’) modified the course to include rhythm and intonation, in addition to the practical drill in pronunciation of separate sounds. [4]
You can watch a short documentary on the Broadcasts for Schools in the second episode of Back in Time for School (on BBC iPlayer), get a taste of what the ‘King’s English’ sounded like and hear a wireless lesson from the interwar period at 33’50”. You may end up giggling with the children as you try to purse your lips to speak R.P. (Received Pronunciation) or the ‘King’s English’. I wonder though if this will bring back memories of school for some of you.
If you miss the broadcasts, you can catch up on Box of Broadcasts for which UCL has a subscription. You may need to access this from Desktop@UCL Anywhere
REFERNCES
[1] Lloyd James, A. (1927), “Foreword to Teachers” In: BBC Broadcasts for Schools, Vol. 1, pp. 7-8.
[2] Mugglestone, Lynda. “Spoken English and the BBC: In the Beginning.” AAA-Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 33, no. 2 (2008), 6. Unfortunately, Lloyd James’ career ended in the 1940s when he bludgeoned his wife to death – see more here, especially the newspaper articles about this sensational crime.
[3] Lloyd James, A. (1927), “Foreword to Teachers”, pp. 7-8.
[4] BBC, Broadcasts for Schools: April 18th April to 17th, 1932. Vol. 9, p. 21.
Special Collections for Schools: a continuing programme
By Helen F Biggs, on 25 January 2019
January is always a good time to reflect on our achievements and look forward to our upcoming plans and projects. Read on to discover some of the Outreach team’s highlights from last year’s Special Collection’s schools programmes – and what to expect from them next…
Teacher CPD with First Story
Helen Biggs from UCL Special Collections and Jay Bhadricha from First Story preparing for the visiting teachers.
Last year we built on our valuable relationship with the charity First Story to devise a CPD event for GCSE English Language teachers. The event sought to help teachers develop ways of enabling pupils to write creatively on topics they know little, or nothing, about (in response to current GCSE examination expectations), using Special Collection items as examples of prompts.
We’re running this event again (only bigger and better!) on the evening of Tuesday 19 March. If you are a Secondary school English teacher and would like to attend, you can get tickets here.
Curriculum Support for Secondary Schools
Our vision for 2019 is to develop school relationships in a strategic way. We want to reach as many young people as we can, sharing the incredible collection that we look after, with meaningful, enriching experiences; one way to do this is to develop a ‘menu’ of curriculum relevant workshops that schools can book with us.
We have a team of volunteer researchers helping us to find unique items that are relevant to curriculum areas and once we have made the resources and planned the workshops we will pilot them with the schools with whom we have a close working relationship.
A slide from the PowerPoint for the Year 11 session on Stevenson’s ‘The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’. It features a section of a Toxicology lecture from UCL (Christison, Robert, 1831, Christison Lecture Notes, MS ADD 316) regarding gentlemen’s recreational experimentation with Cyanide. This was found by a volunteer researcher.
An example is our session for GCSE pupils that explores the context of Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
We recently piloted it with Year 11s at East London Science School.
We have also developed a workshop on the context of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Our vast collections covering British and European medical history have meant the session features unique resources; surprise and intrigue abounds in Year 10 classrooms as they learn about the practice of body-snatching, and just why Carswell’s drawings are so important!
School 21: Real World Learning
For the second year running, we are working with School21 in Newham to participate in their Real World Learning programme. This provides both students and their host workplaces with something that is more meaningful and authentic than a traditional work experience programme. For a term, two Year 12s are spending half a day each week with UCL Special Collections, solving an authentic problem for the department.
Last year’s participants worked to develop a crowdfunding campaign to raise funds to conserve and digitise selections from UCL’s collection of student magazines (from the College Archive). We’re excited to see what their successors Munna and Umar will do this year; we have given them the task of creating welcome resources for a new landing page on our website.
UCL Special Collections Summer School – Protest in Print
After the success of 2018’s UCL Special Collections Summer School, we are happy to announce that we were successful in our bid to Widening Participation to run another programme this summer.
Work produced by students at last year’s Summer School, focussing on an item from the Small Press Collection
This year we are taking inspiration from the Slade Small Press project Visions of Protest, which aims to provide a forum to examine the status of contemporary protest in Small Press Publications. UCL Special Collections’ Summer School, Protest in Print, will be a smaller, more compact and easier to access iteration of this.
Protest in Print will offer participants an opportunity to be creative and hands on, applying what they learn about small press publications (such as those in the Little Magazines and Alternative Press collections) archives and rare books in practical ways. The result will be a public exhibition of their work alongside a display of examples of collection items that have inspired their work in the South Junction Reading Room – watch this space for dates and times!
Shrouds of the Somme
The biggest achievement of the Autumn Term was also undoubtedly our highest profile project to date: working as partners in the Shrouds of the Somme installation at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, alongside other organisations such as the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and the London Legacy Development Corporation. We delivered an education programme to schools in the Park’s neighbouring boroughs, reaching almost 1000 pupils. We wrote a blog about this project as part of our department’s Advent Calendar – to read more, click here.
Text by Helen Biggs and Vicky Price.
Special Collections project selected for Laidlaw research fellowship
By Tabitha Tuckett, on 9 January 2019
The prestigious international Laidlaw scholarship scheme has this year selected a UCL Library Services project to be among 33 research opportunities on offer to exceptional undergraduates across UCL.
The project is a collaboration between Rare-Books Librarian Tabitha Tuckett from Special Collections, and Professor Adam Gibson from UCL Medical Physics And Biomedical Engineering. It offers a current first-year undergraduate the opportunity to research the cutting-edge use of imaging techniques and analysis to answer historical questions about rare books, archives and records.
Using Optical Coherence Tomography to explore the 1st printed edition of Euclid’s Elements (1482).
The work will make use of UCL Digital Humanities’ new digitisation suite, and will build on collaborative research with Special Collections that has already used medical imaging techniques in innovative ways to explore damaged text, hidden manuscripts, early printing techniques, the materials of rare books, and more. Read about some of this research here.
Interested students can find out more about the opportunity with Special Collections here, and should apply by 20 January, indicating project 13. Under the scheme, selected students are paid to undertake supervised research for six weeks during two summers, as well as receiving leadership training during their undergraduate career.
Twelve drummers drumming
By Christopher J Fripp, on 25 December 2018
Twelve copies of The Drummer from the Alternative Press Collection. Founded in the 1967 and originally called Distant Drummer, the newspaper reported on Philadelphia’s radical/hippie community and served as a forum for commentary on local and national politics as well as the city’s music and arts scene. From 1971 until its demise in 1979, it was known simply as The Drummer.
