Last night [Wednesday, 3rd September] saw the last of the At Home in Scotland events this summer with 'PhD in an hour', held at Lovecrumbs on Edinburgh's West Port. As I chatted with visitors about my research on the jewellery craft in Scotland, a clear theme emerged on the idea of a sense of place.

The working lives of jewellers in Edinburgh - the historic and administrative centre of the industry in Scotland - played out in the streets and closes surrounding the West Port. The lives of these jewellers, and indeed of their fellow craftspeople throughout Scotland, looked very different at the end of the eighteenth century to how they did on the outbreak of World War I. New technologies brought about by industrialisation, the irruption of wealth, emerging groups of middle-class consumers and the decline of the aristocracy from the 1880s, saw the industry experience profound transformations.

Objects made by Scotland's jewellers - their materials, design, making and wear - can tell us about these changes. In addition, they can speak of much wider stories that take us across UK, Europe and across the world. In doing so, they represent a nexus of space and place concerning rural and urban, home and away.

The metals, gems and stones used in their production came from caves, mines, mountains and rivers in Sutherland, Montrose and the Cairngorms, as well as Africa, India and South America. The transformation of these raw materials into finished objects takes us through cutters and dealers in Amsterdam, and the centres of fashion in London and Paris, and back around to shops and workshops throughout Scotland.

But the life of a jewellery object did not end with the making of a crafted piece, fitted in its box or displayed in a glass cabinet, ready for sale. The biographies of pieces of jewellery intersected with the life-cycles of the individuals who bought, gifted, owned and wore them. They symbolised friendship, love, marriage and family ties. Owners carried their rings, pendants and brooches and bracelets on bodies, coats and dresses with little regard for geographical boundaries.

Thinking about the stories contained within jewels always brings me to a quotation from Sherlock Holmes in 'The Blue Carbuncle'. As Holmes surveys the rare stone, holding it up to the light, he says:

... just see how it glints and sparkles. Of course it is a nucleus and focus of crime. Every good stone is. They are the devil’s pet baits. In the larger and older jewels every facet may stand for a bloody deed.

Holmes uses the blue carbuncle to highlight how the timelessness of jewellery objects enables them to build histories of their own; to contain traces of the people, places and events of their past. His observation draws attention to the troubling, more brutal aspects of the British empire and reminds the reader that the stories contained within material things often concern death, the destruction of communities and landscapes, and the insatiable human desire for increased wealth and status.

Jewellery objects functioned not only as markers of money and status, but as expressions of self adornment and as a facet of property relations. At a time when women, particularly married women, had few rights to their own wealth or assets, items of jewellery were particularly important items of property as well as important personal possessions which symbolised their biographies. These ideas are evident in the memories contained within the jewels of Scottish author, philanthropist and advocate of women's rights and social reform, Lady Aberdeen, which were stolen during her honeymoon. In Lord and Lady Aberdeen's joint autobiography, "We Twa", written over 50 years after the theft, she speaks with striking clarity about the things that were lost, which included highly valuable family jewels and wedding gifts made by Scottish jewellers, as well as:

the articles of less intrinsic value but possessing associations which made them irreplaceable.  … a very pretty christening locket given me by my godmother, which I had worn continually as a child, and a lovely little old chatelaine given me by A. on our wedding day, in the form of an enamelled egg, inside which was a miniature globe representing the world, inside that again a blood-red heart. I had worn it till that very morning, when I put it back into the drawer, because a fastening was loose.

She describes the colours and form of these objects, and the deeply personal memories and attachments contained within them, with striking clarity. In doing so, she highlights how the things taken contained traces of the people who were special to her as a child; how they charted her journey through life; and how they symbolised her new status as a married woman. Thus, she highlights the different ways in which things contain both financial and symbolic worth and documents the life-stories of individuals and the traces of the people who have made, gifted and used them.

The work of nineteenth-century jewellers in Scotland's towns and cities tells us many different stories of home and nation, space and place. The objects they made, sold, altered and engraved contained layers of meaning, and individual and collective memories of real and imagined people and places. They tell us about gender and class experience, and illuminate details about the place of Scottish people and things in the wider world during a time of deep and wide-reaching economic, social and cultural change.

Sarah Laurenson  | @reformlane

How do you establish trust from a distance, with correspondents whose expressions and reactions you can’t vouch for? Perhaps you have to create an epistolary place, a shared space of correspondence in which both correspondents feel at home.

The basic techniques for this can be blunt and simplistic. Sign-offs, for example, are surprisingly crude. When someone wishes you “all the best”, they are making a generic, replicated statement of affection, which is in itself essentially meaningless – but its removal would be significant. Similarly, if you routinely sign off your personal e-mails with two kisses, a reduction to a solitary “x” would seem hostile. By negotiating such clumsy conventions, correspondents construct a mutually acceptable structure, albeit a basic one, in which to interact.

The eighteenth-century letters that I read in the course of my own PhD research are often dull, dry, stiff and formal. The vast majority are matter-of-fact business exchanges which succumb to all the unimaginative conventions of eighteenth-century letter writing. The correspondence archives of Enlightenment Edinburgh bookseller John Bell, for example, are dominated by business invoices, and the details of orders and deliveries. A long day in the archive can be considerably enlivened, then, by the discovery of some creative or literary flair, or even the faintest trace of a story: for example, a hastily scribbled note from a Robert Trotter Esquire of George Square, requesting that two “new comedies” be delivered to him at home as “a cure for the heart ache”.  From a mere scrap such as this, especially on a particularly boring day, the imagination can run wild.

The breakdown of Bell’s relationship with the London bookseller John Murray, a man with whom he corresponded almost entirely through letters, is also fascinating to trace from its warm and intimate peak to its frosty denouement. In 1774, Murray becomes exasperated with his counterpart’s absent-mindedness, and he adopts an occasionally passive-aggressive tone. He wishes Bell well on a new publication, adding: “perhaps you would have done as well had you confined yourself to one London publisher – any of the three would have done.” He signs off this letter with a particularly naked plea for Bell to “Command any services here & believe me to remain, Dear Sir, your affectionate, humble servant”. Two months later he uses the unprecedented sign-off “very sincerely yours”; but shortly afterwards, their relationship has clearly soured, and any meagre correspondence between them takes the form of generic, impersonal business invoices. The epistolary structure remained essentially the same, but the tone became hollow and cold.  

It is the subtlety of letters – their hints and traces of intimacy and emotion – that can make them so powerful; and I am struck by the power of epistolary dialogue to drive a story. And it is not a dialogue like any other. It is a less immediately reciprocal form of communication. Unlike the listener in a face-to-face conversation, readers cannot use their physical responses to encourage or discourage their correspondents. Nor can they interject or contribute to the conversation at will; they are bound by the structure of the message that the writer intended.

Nevertheless, letters resemble “real life” interaction in the sense that they generally have to adhere to certain mundane formalities before the more intimate exchanges can occur. A show called Letters Home, part of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, explores this idea beautifully. Unlike site-specific theatre company Grid Iron’s previous work, which made the settings of their performance a distinctive feature of the drama, Letters Home uses empty spaces and non-specific locations to transport the audience to this imagined epistolary place, where dialogue flows freely and the facts of geography and physical distance are secondary to the stories of love, longing, and loss. The epistolary form allows for the primacy of language, in all its agile glory.

In Letters Home, stage directions are few, and perhaps the most effective part is when the audience listens, blindfolded, to disembodied voices, the dialogue alone driving the story. In the drama, each correspondent waits patiently for their turn, as layer upon layer of intimacy is added, each correspondent responding to the boldness of the other in revealing their feelings, and revealing hints and traces of a wider story along the way.

The weaker parts of the drama, though, are spoiled by attempts to counteract the supposed limitations of epistolary dialogue. Ham-fisted stage decoration and absurd over-acting are particularly distracting in one of the four segments, a clumsy attempt to obviate the criticism of a straight dialogical drama as “dull”, a symptom of the director’s lack of trust in the audience’s imagination. But, more pertinently, the whole suffers from the unnatural insertion of context and background. Sections when the characters on stage are addressing not each other but the watching audience, making sure that we understand the context of the scene, are jarring.

Of course, letters are “limited” in some crude sense. Unadorned and contextless in the archive, their meaning can be unclear. Performed theatrically on stage, they offer only a partial picture of a wider story. But while the insight they offer isn’t complete, it is rich, deep, and extremely valuable. Letters act as a powerful imaginative spur, an inspiration to explore the epistolary place that distant correspondents have created, and to construct a story from its fragments.

Phil Dodds | @PA_Dodds

Like several At Home in Scotland participants, I attended storytelling training sessions in May. The workshop leader, Dr Michael Williams, argued that storytelling was one of the best ways for researchers to communicate their findings, but I was not sure how storytelling might relate to my research. I study early nineteenth-century charities and spend a lot of time reading their administrative records. These records often contain ‘personal’ stories but there is something unsatisfactory about them. Reports of the Edinburgh Society for the Relief of the Destitute Sick, for example, described the lives of the individuals aided by that charity, but these descriptions were limited, formulaic and sanitised. They were included merely to tell donors that the charity assisted the ‘right’ sort of people. The At Home in Scotland Project has demonstrated how storytelling can capture complexity and diversity, but nineteenth-century philanthropists often seemed more interesting in producing a single narrative, with little reflection on the individuality of those they aided. 

This somewhat bleak conclusion raises a question: why would I be interested in these organisations at all? Thinking about this made me realise how stories have been central to my research. My overall motivation and my specific research questions have been greatly influenced by personal accounts written by the recipients of charity. It would be naïve to think that personal narratives provide unrestricted insight into the ‘real’ experiences of their authors, but they do highlight the multifaceted nature of historical charities. They reveal the many interpersonal interactions among donors, managers, employees and inmates, which characterised these institutions. They also emphasise how charities often had a profound effect on their wider societies.

Bella Aronovitch’s little known memoir Give it Time, An Experience of Hospital 1928-32, is probably my favourite example of such a story, even though it is set almost a century after the time period that I study. It details the four years that she spent in London hospitals following a failed appendectomy. Aronovitch’s vivid descriptions of contemporary voluntary hospitals encouraged me to discover more about how these institutions functioned. I want to find out how charitable hospitals affected the lives of all those associated with them, including patients, administrators and medical staff. The hospitals’ reliance on voluntary contributions meant that their doctors were under severe pressure to discharge patients like Aronovitch, who were seen as a drain on resources. Give it Time highlighted the power that the hospitals’ lay governors exercised, it described the deference that they expected from both doctors and patients and it showed how individual patients could become problematic ‘statistics’. Being shuttled between five different hospitals made Aronovitch’s experience unusual, but this is what made it so valuable. It allowed her to provide a fascinating comparison of the standards of care in different contemporary institutions. Focusing on a single personal experience allowed the book to successfully communicate the gravity of the decisions made in these hospitals. Two of the institutions described in the book were former Poor Law infirmaries. They mainly catered for incurable patients, and their doctors almost decided that Aronovitch, too, was beyond help. Only her transfer to yet another charitable hospital led to her cure and eventual discharge. Aronovitch’s story deserves to be more widely known and I highly recommend Give it Time to anyone who wants to find out about healthcare before the NHS. It was through reading personal accounts like these that I realised that pre-Welfare State charities were fascinating, complex institutions that are worth exploring further.    

Give it Time, An Experience of Hospitals, 1928-32 was published in 1974 and can be accessed in the National Library of Scotland, extracts from it and from other accounts of hospital care can be found in Deborah Brunton (Ed), Health, Disease and Society In Europe 1800-1930: A Source Book (Manchester, 2004).  

Joe Curran (@JokeCurran)

...And windows and doors, and books and papers, cutlery and crockery, needles and thread, hats and shoes, necklaces and rings, armour and weaponry, pots, pans, hats, gloves, trinkets, coins, stamps, postcards, mirrors, candles and all manner of ordinary objects from daily human life- if any of these very everyday objects could give voice to their existence, what many hundreds of stories might they tell? Of the many hands and lives through which they passed; of the many different adventures, whether upright or underhand; of the letters they wrote, the battles they fought, the scenes they lit and the bodies they adorned. And now, in a time more material than ever before, if our vast treasures of personal odds and ends could speak- what stories might they tell about us?

Certainly, there is a power to be felt in the presence of an object, no matter how seemingly mundane, when we know that it has a story to tell. We encounter coins upon a daily basis, and they are therefore nothing short of ordinary- but what of a coin exchanged in remuneration between an Edinburgh doctor his and murderous accomplices? Between a publisher and a soon-to-be famous author in exchange for their latest novel? Furthermore, objects are not only eternal ‘witnesses’- they frequently have a far more active and even pivotal role in the unravelling stories. What of the sword which sealed the fate of King Charles I so long ago- and changed the course of a nation’s history in its wake?

A great part of my doctorate research focuses upon the power of the object in the telling of stories- stories of time and of place, but most crucially, of people. I focus on one particularly eighteenth-century practice of material culture- the practice of antiquarianism- and through this antiquarian lens I explore the works of nineteenth-century Scottish author Walter Scott. Scott was an avid antiquarian collector himself, boasting in his expansive collection at Abbotsford House the sporran and skene-dhu of Rob Roy; a crucifix carried by Mary Queen of Scots on the day of her execution; an oatcake found in the pocket of a deceased Highland soldier after the battle of Culloden; the door of the Old Tolbooth prison and countless other relics and remains. Scott surrounded himself with these objects, most often objects providing a material testimony of a chapter of Scotland’s past, and through the contemplation of these threshold presences he entered a romantic world of Scotland’s past which he wrote into his many fictions. Indeed, amongst the pages of his poems, novels and scholarly writings are scattered the material relics and remains of Scotland’s past- and very frequently, those objects were artefacts which were in his possession at Abbotsford.

Yet I think that Scott’s enthusiasm for unravelling the stories deeply entwined in the material remains of the past is an instinct alive in each of us- from family stories and personal trinkets, to the great archaeological discoveries that significantly change our knowledge of a time and place- in each case, our desire emerges from a wish to know the story hidden away, which reveals something of the past to the people of the present. And a part of this desire perhaps too comes from the hope that one day, it will be the small and trivial, grand and monumental objects of our lives under a similar scrutiny for story.


Lucy Linforth

Contact the Elderly is a national charity that changes the lives of lonely older people. Many people over 75 spend their days alone - isolated from family or friends, and are often too frail to leave home without a bit of help. We have small local groups all over Scotland, England and Wales, with 8 groups in Edinburgh, each with about 6 to 8 older guests and 4 to 5 volunteer drivers. One Sunday afternoon a month each local group meets for tea, cake and company. Our volunteer hosts take it in turns to welcome these older guests and drivers into their homes for a couple of hours, and our drivers pick up 1 or 2 older guests, take them to the tea party, enjoy the cakes and fun with them and drive them home safely afterwards.

I got involved as a volunteer about 5 years ago, having responded to a radio appeal on how lonely many older people were. I thought I could host tea parties as we live in a bungalow so no stairs to climb, [and I enjoy eating cake!], and I could also be a driver as one afternoon a month didn't seem a big commitment. Of course as I saw what a difference these outings made to so many older people I got more involved as a group co-ordinator and then 2 or 3 years ago as the Edinburgh Area Organiser. My role [still as a volunteer] is to make sure our existing Edinburgh groups are supported and that guests or volunteers who leave or move are replaced quickly with new people. I also help to start new groups, recruiting volunteers and identifying older people through referral organisations or following up enquiries from older people or their families/friends. We have now grown from 3 to 8 groups.

The best part of my role is going to meet all the potential new volunteers and older guests in Edinburgh who apply or are referred to us, and talking to them about what we do. I then see them taking part in a group usually a few months later and having a lot of fun...yes, the volunteers and the older guests. It really does make a huge difference to us all. As we say in our publicity, "Life fills us with stories, stories fill us with life". We volunteers love hearing all the amazing stories of all our older guests, once they start telling us about their lives, travels, families, jobs, war experiences, Edinburgh years ago...

We not only have tea parties in people's homes but some companies, hotels and the Lord Provost have also hosted tea parties for some or all of our groups. We were very pleased when a group of Edinburgh University student volunteers hosted a tea party for 3 groups in March, and are really looking forward to the June tea party hosted by the PhD researchers for this project. One lady of 93 told me after the student volunteer party that she felt rejuvenated by talking to all the students!

Contact the Elderly is very keen to develop links with Universities to promote inter-generational links and friendships between older guests and students or staff at tea parties, bring university campuses and local communities into closer contact, provide an enriching volunteering scheme that fits into university life and help students' CV and career prospects.

Anne from Contact the Elderly. Visit Contact the Elderly's website here.

(@contact_teas)

As you may have read on Alex’s post last week, recently we on the At Home in Scotland scheme have been attending and participating in a number of workshops designed around the idea of storytelling. We have learnt about the importance of landscape in our storytelling, explored the idea of quests and trials in stories (fairy tales and episodes of Emmerdale!), and discussed the benefits to be drawn from framing your research in a story-like way. However, the part that I found the most interesting (in a slightly narcissistic way) was the bit featuring me in a leading role.

One of the activities that we did in the storytelling workshop was based around the standard trope of many fairytales and myths: THE QUEST.

I was (obviously) the hero of the story. During my quest, I had to get through a series of ‘trials’ - gate keepers, monsters, and ogres (played magnificently by my fellow workshoppers) blocked my path to the Goddess and therefore to my transformation from everyday PhD student to…well I’m not sure, but I’m going to assume Goddess PhD student. The form of the trials: an interrogation into why I thought I had the right qualities and knowledge to continue on the path that I had chosen. The questions ranged from technical questions about my methodology to personal questions about my previous interactions with violence. Most of the questions revolved around why I thought that I should be the one researching this topic, and whether I had enough passion and resilience to continue on. It got me thinking…Why Me?

Firstly, it has to be said, I am no stranger to the ‘why’ question. Let me explain.

I am researching militant nationalism in the Irish diaspora during the nineteenth century - basically, why did some people in, for example, Chicago, decide that they wanted to use their money to fund armed rebellion and dynamite campaigns to try to intimidate the Westminster Government into giving Ireland political independence? And why did others, in my case in Melbourne in Australia, decide that the best option was to give money to political groups to find a peaceful way of achieving Irish independence?

If I was Irish, and possibly male, this subject probably wouldn’t raise many eyebrows. However I’m English – with few discernible blood ties to Ireland – and female. One of the first things people ask me is if my parents are Irish. Usually straight after this is ‘so what got you into Irish history?’ My motives are relatively dull - a rather vocal Irish community kept popping up whenever and wherever I studied history: British, American, Australian (okay, they didn’t get into the Japanese history that I studied but that’s not the point). I’d been interested in The Troubles when I studied politics at school, and this interest just continued to grow – and regress a century – with all the references to the Irish throughout my undergraduate studies. I’m not sure where the interest in violence came from, I don’t want to blame it entirely on ‘Criminal Minds’ and other such shows. Maybe it’s because, especially with political violence, for me since 9/11 it’s always been there. Lurking. For my parents it had been the IRA attacks. Before that the Cold War and the threat of nuclear warfare. Every generation in practically every country since the late nineteenth century has felt, even if it’s not an everyday worry, the backlash of political arguments played out in the streets - attacking civilians and public monuments. This age of the ‘terror alert’ is not new and it’s important to realise that.

I love listening to how people came to their research subjects - how did someone from Cork get into researching the music of East and West Germany? How did someone from North Carolina become so passionate about Medieval currency systems in Britain? Sometimes it’s just one overheard comment that spurred them on, sometimes it’s a personal experience that led them there, a story that they heard which made them want to dig deeper. We’ve joined this scheme to tell stories about our research, but I think it’s important to remember that the story that got you here can be truly enchanting too.



Sophie Cooper

(@SophcoCooper)

A lot has been happening as part of the At Home in Scotland project since the last post. There was the well-attended symposium on stories of place last Friday and two separate storytelling workshops for project participants this week. 

The symposium welcomed speakers for short presentations on their research with the theme of story and place. We heard a wide variety of interesting projects, everything from the stories of Scottish Italians during the war to modern theatre to archaeology. A point repeatedly stressed is that when it comes to education and engaging the public, telling a good story is invaluable regardless of whether you are in a museum, library or archaeological dig. A second point common to many of the presentations was the responsibility you carry when listening to, or repeating personal stories. Stories can be intensely personal and need to be handled with care!

The second event I attended was a storytelling workshop led by Dr Michael Williams. This was a day of learning how to tell better stories. Now, oral storytelling isn’t my cup of tea. There is something uncomfortably intimate and group therapyish about sharing stories with near-strangers that I find awkward and at odds with my sense of personal space and ‘proper’ emotional distance. I’d rather read a book. However this workshop was excellent. I was already convinced by the value of a good story in engaging people with what you have to say but it was very useful to get some practical guidance on storytelling. We covered how and why you might choose to tell stories in academia, some practical techniques, and a bit about the underlying structure of a good story.

If a story conforms to our preconceptions of how a good story should unfold it is more satisfying and engaging. This is just as true when communicating research as it is with fairy tales. A story a very human method of communication that is much more likely to be talked about and shared which is often what we want in academia. Of course an academic paper should conform to certain strict standards and for good reasons, but when you are presenting something at a conference or down the pub, a good story can be the better choice. The very best and most engaging of the TED series of talks are good, simple stories.

I have only recently started my research project looking at at enabling the location-based searching of books so I don’t have much of a story to tell yet, but when the time comes to communicate the value of what I do, I will be looking to the Hero with a Thousand Faces for some guidance.

We all know that maps can help us to tell stories. I have spent many happy hours watching and listening as people point out the street they grew up in, their school, favourite beach, settings for bicycle adventures – you name it, I’ll want to see where it happened. And the maps themselves have stories to tell: whether it’s a 1920s globe featuring long-gone countries, or the ripped city plan of Budapest that I snatched all too vigorously from my boyfriend during a navigational mishap, it’s just a matter of looking.

But as well as the finished product, I want to think here about the process of mapmaking, and the stories that yields. Throughout the nineteenth century, maps were usually made in a painstaking process of engraving copper plates and transferring the resulting image to paper. If you turn over an engraved copper plate, you’ll probably find that the back of it – which you’d expect to be smooth – is marked with little hammered dents. Every one of these indents marks a place where the mapmaker has changed the map.

Why would part of a map need to be hammered out and started again?  Of course, cities change, and maps have to be up to date, but big changes such as significant urban growth would be likely to result in an entirely new map, or series of maps, being made – maybe based on the original engraving, but still a new map in its own right. These little visible edits are the result of smaller changes.

At the Edinburgh firm John Bartholomew & Son, the draughtsmen, who drew and lettered the maps, but also collected information on locations, would send an edited version of an existing map to the engraving department, at which point the changes would be hammered into the plate. This usually happened as the result of some sort of dialogue.

From 1898, Bartholomew had a formal relationship with the Cyclist’s Touring Club, who kept the firm up to date with the actual state of roads in exchange for discounted maps. Cyclists in the club used Bartholomew maps on their trips, and if they found a mistake, would write to the firm. This correspondence (and much more) still exists in the National Library of Scotland’s Bartholomew Archive and provides not only a great insight into the firm’s commitment to accuracy, but also into the way roads and paths have been used, understood and recorded. Town planners often come under fire for seemingly ignoring bicycles in their design of transport networks, so it’s especially interesting to note that mapmakers, at least, made significant use of cyclists’ superior knowledge of the roads.

A somewhat quirkier example comes from Park Road, just behind Arthurs’ Seat. Bartholomew moved to premises here in 1889 – but at this point, it was called Gibbet Loan. As cartographic legend has it, John George Bartholomew didn’t think this street had a suitable name for his company. Consequently, as any enterprising mapmaker would, on his next map of Edinburgh, he simply changed it to Park Road. It stuck.

So, a mark on the back of a copperplate provides a tantalising hint that something has been altered. But used in conjunction with the maps that these plates would go on to produce, we can begin to think about how the places we know now have changed throughout time – both in the way they are represented in maps themselves, and in the very act of documenting this spatial knowledge.

Anna Feintuck (@AnnaFeintuck)