These activities are simple and straightforward to do, since we’ve all got pens and pencils lying around the house, but still offer a chance for kids to get their creative juices flowing. Click on the images to download.

Rugby League colouring sheets. Parents can have a go at this one too as a bit of colouring in is a good stress-buster. These colouring sheets are inspired by our Rugby Football League collection – stick to the colours of your favourite team or if you fancy having a go at fashion design, think outside the box (or the lines).

Make a Victorian-style newspaper advert for a weird and wonderful invention to solve a modern-day problem.

Take a picture of your finished artwork to share on our social media with #HQatHome and tag us in @Heritage_Quay

As part of our series of Heritage Quay at Home activity packs today we’re looking at the theme of Build it!

These hands-on projects show you how to design and create your own buildings from materials that you probably already have at home.

These activities were originally inspired by an exhibition at Heritage Quay about local buildings but are just as relevant now. Click on the images to download the instructions.

Think like an Architect

Build Queensgate Market Hall from LEGO

Create a Cardboard Town

Take a picture of your finished architectural masterpieces and share it with us on social media using #HQatHome and tag us in @Heritage_Quay.

Home schooling and teaching remotely under lockdown can be a challenge – as can keeping the kids entertained. So at Heritage Quay, we’re offering a free package of fun (but educational) activities for children to do at home or at school, as part of our Heritage Quay at Home initiative.  

We’re uploading a series of worksheets that children can do either on their own or with parents. The activities are inspired by our collections, and influenced by successful workshops and outreach projects previously held at Heritage Quay in partnership with schools. You might want to use them to supplement your lessons, or just for a bit of a change!

Some of these worksheets are targeted at specific key stages and cover a range of subjects, including English and History. They include creative writing challenges and building projects that give children the chance to be architects (with Lego and cardboard rather than bricks and mortar, that is!). 

The activities are grouped under four themes and you can find out more and download the resources by clicking the links below.

Build it!

Tell it!

Draw it!

Discover it!

You can also follow us on our social media @Heritage_Quay and share your experience learning with us with the hashtag #HQatHome

Sometimes when we catalogue a collection, an interesting story appears as a tangent. The life of Arthur Arathoon Paul is one of those stories.

We’ve recently been working on the Society for the Promotion of New Music archive. Amongst the papers was a box of creative writing from someone called “Arthur Arathoon Paul”. His unusual middle name was intriguing, particularly as a quick search seemed to suggest that he wasn’t a professional musician, or composer. As I love a historical puzzle, I decided to look a bit deeper.

Helpfully, a colleague had come across some more clues – it seemed that Arthur had left the SPNM around £100,000 in his will (about £1.7 million today) in 1967. And there seemed to be a connection to a G. Paul who was involved in music in some way. Thus armed, I took to the internet. A quick websearch suggested that that unusual name, ‘Arathoon’ was Armenian in origin. Thanks to a well known genealogy website, I found an Arthur in several British records and followed the breadcrumbs. This is his story…

Who was Arthur Paul?

He was born in 1896 in Singapore, in the Straits Settlement (part of the British Empire) to Thaddeus Paul and Mary Pauline Arathoon. Arthur’s parents were both from important Armenian families in Singapore, a small number of whom (including the Paul, Arathoon, Sarkies and Stephens families) had built properties including hotels, churches and were merchants and traders.

Check out this great article all about them.

It’s worth noting that these “Armenians” were actually from the city of Isfahan, which is in modern-day Iran.

The first we see of Arthur in British documents is the 1901 Census. He appears to be staying with his mother and older sister Mary Sophia in Dulwich, London (helpfully for us), with the Stephens family.

By 1911 the Pauls (now with younger son Gerald but not Thaddeus) were living permanently in Hampstead, London, with a small staff of servants. They lived alongside merchants and stockbrokers, and the odd celebrity.

Arthur next appears in 1915 when he joined the 28^th London Battalion (the ‘Artists Rifles’). Incidentally, their headquarters in London is now a venue called The Place which hosted SPNM concerts.

He enlisted on the 11/12/15, went to France on 5/3/16 and was sent home 6/7/16 then was then discharged in September 1916! So he had a pretty short war. The reason for discharge was “being no longer fit physically for war service”. Considering that the 1/28 Rifles were running an Officer Training Corps base at the time, it looks like he was injured in a training accident. From the dates in his creative writing books, Arthur spent the rest of the war staying at Selma and East Cliff Manisions in Bournemouth writing jocular romantic short stories.

After the war Arthur became an independent gentleman. When asked to give a profession, he used ‘merchant’ (perhaps when helping with the family business) and ‘author’. A selection of his poems was published in 1929 but the rest seem to be unpublished. He also had a go at writing music in the 1940s and we have his manuscript book with this work.

Arthur never married and died without a direct heir (more on that below).

Arthur’s Family

So what about his family? His elder sister Mary married a Mr Galistan/Galestan (another prominent family from Singapore).

Gerald, his younger brother, was born c. 1904. Gerald trained as a barrister following education at Pembroke College. He worked for a firm called Escombe, Mcgrath and Co before quitting to run the family business on the death of his father Thaddeus. In his spare time Gerald was a songwriter.

In the 1920s he collaborated with Billy Mayerl on the compostion of songs like, ‘Love’s Lottery’ ‘Did Tosti Raise His Bowler Hat (When He Said Goodbye)’, I Loved, I Lost‘, ‘Lullaby Baby’ and Georgie Porgie which was a big hit. He was credited as the lyricist Gee Paul. He also wrote the song Never Again on his own.

In 1938 a song he had written was personally selected by Gracie Fields for inclusion in her new film Keep Smiling. Unfortunately Gerald didn’t live to see the premiere.

Arthur’s immediate family faced almost complete tragedy in the 1930s-1940s.

Mary Sophia (already a widow) died in 1930, leaving a small fortune to her father Thaddeus. He then passed away, in London, the following year. Most tragically, Gerald died of heart disease, still in his 30s, just before Christmas 1938, leaving a small part of his own fortune to a charity helping poor or sick musicians. He died shortly before the premiere of Keep Smiling, and so never got to see his song on the big screen. Finally, Arthur’s mother Mary died in 1942. Arthur was the only one left.

However, one last breadcrumb from the archive shows that he still had some family in Britain.

Arnold (1909-1971) and Cecil (1913-1983) were the sons of Mary Arathoon’s sister Lily and were Arthur’s cousins. Both lived in the North of England.

We still haven’t completely solved the mystery of why Arthur left a fortune to the SPNM, but they were very glad he did. Following years of financial insecurity, the money allowed them stability at a crucial time and contributed to the future careers of composers such as Peter Maxwell Davies. If you know anything about this fascinating family please get in touch!

Visitors to Huddersfield Art Gallery this October (2018) can see a selection of Heritage Quay’s archival collections on display as part of a new exhibition called Look Twice

The centrepiece of the exhibition is a new work created by HOOT Creative Arts which was inspired by items from the Sally Jerome Archive, which is kept by Heritage Quay. Supported by the ROTOR team from the School of Art, Design and Architecture, participants from HOOT visited Heritage Quay to explore Sally’s portfolios, before making their own work using similar themes and techniques.

On show from Heritage Quays’ collections are some of the artworks that HOOT found most inspirational and archival documents which tell the story of Sally’s life.

The exhibition is on until 3 November. The Sally Jerome archive is available for all to view at Heritage Quay.

Archivists are careful to record as much information as possible on the sources of new material arriving, as knowing the provenance of records or rare books adds to our understanding of them. Knowing exactly who created and used particular records gives us insights into how those people worked and what they might have thought. Knowing where a collection has come from helps us to decide how much to trust a particular historical source. It can also help us decide how relevant a particular record series might be for our research. A series of photographs of a business’ premises taken by the marketing department is going to show different things than a series of photos taken by an individual employee on her retirement, for example.

However, sometimes things turn up that have been in an archive for years, but not yet documented. Perhaps they were mislabelled or housed with other things before there was an archivist to catalogue them! One such little collection that turned up in our move to Heritage Quay was a group of reports relating to trade unionism. These have just been catalogued and are now available to use in our searchroom.

The reports fall into three series: Report of the Annual Trades Union Congress (TUC) 1916-1969, Reports by the Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress (1906-1918), and International Report of the Trade Union Movement (1903-1911).

The first step was to check for signs of where these reports might have come from and how they came to us. Several issues were stamped Huddersfield College of Technology or had the College’s bookplate pasted into the cover. The reports therefore belonged with the Institutional Library: publications that used to be part of the University of Huddersfield’s main library and have been kept as Special Collections. They would have been acquired for the use of staff and students researching and studying here in the past.

Obviously given the size of the University of Huddersfield’s library, and its history dating back to its days as the Huddersfield Mechanics Institution in the Victorian era, we can’t keep a copy of every book or report our library every held! So how do we decide what to keep?

The ‘new’ reports add to our political collections, including the archive of the Huddersfield Labour Party, the papers of Sir Joseph Mallalieu MP, and the library of famous statistician G.H. Wood. There were already a number of other left-wing serial publications catalogued within the Institutional Library, such as ‘Labour Weekly’ and ‘Labour Research’, so the provenance made sense. These links to our other collections were part of the reason for deciding to keep these reports.

We also look for how rare items seem to be. Searches of the COPAC library catalogue showed that 12 university libraries in the UK hold printed copies of the Report of the Annual Trades Union Congress. Not all of these hold complete series. The TUC has digitised their holdings and made them available online. The International Report is much rarer: WorldCat shows only 17 libraries holding copies worldwide, none of them in the UK. This might reflect its being published in Germany, not long before the First World War.

Another consideration we take into account when deciding which publications to keep is the potential usefulness to researchers. As Huddersfield’s political history is one of our collecting areas, we attract historians, students, local people and other users wanting to know more. These reports will certainly be of interest. Many of the reports date from the First World War, and cover issues such as assisting Belgian refugees. With lots of research still being generated in the centenary of the war, and plenty of interest in politics, economics and social history the reports certainly have the potential to be great source material for a range of users now and in years to come.

If you want to find out more the main TUC archive is here