Education has been central to the development of Huddersfield for nearly two hundred years. The archive of the University of Huddersfield reflects both an historical interest in giving the working classes a good education, and the philanthropy of local businessmen and land owners, who supported the reading rooms of the mid-19th century. These were the catalyst for the Huddersfield Mechanics’ Institute and the Huddersfield Female Educational Institute, both of which initially taught basic skills to local people on a subscription basis.
Plan of main Huddersfield Mechanics Institute Building, opened in 1861Image of Huddersfield Technical School, opened 7 July 1883
Educational trends then moved toward vocational education, and the institution evolved into the Huddersfield Technical College, which offered day classes to younger students and evening classes to those employed on a full-time basis. Other educational collections include Holly Bank (Technical) Teacher Training College, which focused on producing a new generation of skilled vocational teachers. The records of the West Yorkshire College of Health, the National Adult School Union and the Open College Network are also held in the archive.
Huddersfield Polytechnic charter, 1972
The collections also reflect some areas of research and inter-disciplinary studies (Canter Environmental Psychology; Cullingford and Booth printed collections; Buck Architectural archive).
The Mikron Theatre Company Collection is a fascinating archive of a mainly canal based theatre company, who have been performing in pub gardens and village halls across the canal network of the UK for over forty years. It contains records of actors and those involved with the running of the company, everything from scripts to research and development folders for shows, their programmes, backdrops and advertising materials. It also charts the administrative story of keeping a small independent theatre company in business through fundraising and funding bid applications and reports.
Mikron Theatre Company production posters
We also have a collection of material and objects from the Huddersfield Amateur Operatic Society, now the Huddersfield Musical Theatre Society. Dating from the beginning of the 20th century, programmes and administrative files tell an official history, but this archive also contains objects, from conductors batons, to dolls used as show props or costume tests.
The repository also contains some excellent nineteenth century collection examples covering the Arts. The Fine Art and Industrial Exhibition was a grand exhibition held to mark the opening of a new Mechanics Institute building, and featured many rooms of material, from grand art old masters, to the latest technology in weaving and chemistry. There are also collections spanning some of the intellectual societies of the town in the nineteenth century, including the Foreign Library Society and the Literary and Scientific Society.
Coming into the 20th century, we have an interesting book collection of the Left Book Club, containing a range of well-known and lesser known socialist themed literature. The records of the local theatre, the Lawrence Batley, are also lodged with us, and we have a large amount of material also relating to theatre in Huddersfield in the 1920s – 1950s in the Kirklees Theatre Trust collection. These collections reveal a side of human expression and emotion across two centuries expressed by both the professional and amateur sphere of Huddersfield society.
Membership pin badges of the Huddersfield Amateur Operatic Society, 1912-1938Dame Judi Dench lays foundation stone of Lawrence Batley Theatre, 11 September 1993
On Friday 20 November, almost a year after opening, the home of the University of Huddersfield Archives were invaded by a large group of enthusiastic 13 year olds. The group roamed throughout Heritage Quay all day, finding their way into the strong room, getting hands on in the Listening Room, interrogating staff and visitors, and handling fragile documents from the archive collections.
But don’t worry! These were students from the Netherhall Learning Campus History Club, and they were here as part of the national Takeover in Museums Day campaign, which is run by Kids in Museums under the Children’s Commissioner’s Takeover Challenge.
The archives team led the students through some of the tasks that are essential to the running of Heritage Quay. Lindsay, our Assistant Archives Manager, explained why and how collections are protected and preserved and set the group to work on identifying pests before packaging awkwardly shaped items which might be vulnerable to damage. This activity was particularly popular as it required the wearing of lab coats and gloves – CSI style!
Another group were taken in hand by Rob, our Collections Access Officer, who introduced a range of audio formats, including vinyl records, Betamax and cassettes. Records were unfamiliar to many of the students, and with Rob’s help, they learned how to transfer a 30s dance tune, The Crocodile Hop, to digital format, coining a new word in the process – digitilisation!
Dave Smith, Heritage Quay’s Participation Officer, explained the importance of engaging with the public and the different ways of doing this. He supervised a group of roving reporters who provided images and commentary on social media throughout the day, and it is their photographs which accompany this blog.
Finally, I took the whole group up to the students’ union to do some market research and discover if people are aware of Heritage Quay and what it’s all about. This involved approaching university students, HQ clipboard in hand, smiling and asking a few questions. This exercise was really daunting for some of the group and it was great to watch their confidence grow as they initiated conversation with strangers. Although I did think we might have lost the entire group when we passed by a student stand which was giving out free sweets…
After lunch the students hosted an open hour session, where they shared their newly acquired knowledge with visitors to Heritage Quay. This tested their patience while waiting for visitors to arrive – and gave them a chance to practice meet and greet skills when they did. Fielding questions from the public and learning that it’s okay to say “I don’t know” were useful experiences too.
Heritage Quay’s first Takeover Day was concluded with certificates awarded by the Assistant Archives Manager. Thanks to the Archives Team, and our volunteers Caroline and Richard, the event was a great success. We’ll all remember Matthew’s fancy footwork to the strains of the Crocodile Hop, and have adopted two new words into the HQ lexicon – digitalisation and stronghold! We shall definitely be repeating the Takeover experience next year – will you join us?
.Quotes of the Day
“Netherhall Learning Campus have arrived at Huddersfield University for the Take Over day. So far we have learnt about the big curvy screen which is very interesting as we have never seen anything like that before! Before we got here we thought it was going to be boring and just full of old boring books, but it was really unexpected and we found so [much] entertaining things with technology.” Takeover Day Social Media Group
“I learned that you keep water away from old things.” Takeover Day Archives Group
“It was great to see the kids’ enthusiasm, and interesting to see the knowledge they picked up, and how they used research skills they learned during the day.” Assistant Archives Manager
“We went to the stronghold hunting for pests which damage the products. We have learnt about digitalizing an audio tape to the computer so we can have the tape for ever (until Armageddon of course) so other people in 100s of years can check it so they know how it was like.”
Takeover Day Digitising Group
Has Takeover Day made me think about a career in history?
With the new school term well under way, here at Heritage Quay we’re looking forward to welcoming lots of new faces onto our schools programme for years 4 to 8, with workshops such as Find It! Draw It! Play It! and Build It! All our workshops are linked to the History, Geography, Technology, English and Drama curriculae for key stages 2 and 3, are great fun and completely free!
The Archives at Heritage Quay will be celebrating The Big Draw during October with the launch of an arts based workshop, Draw It! which draws inspiration from two local historical figures, Victor Grayson, M.P. for Colne Valley in the early 20th century, and Susannah Sunderland, “Yorkshire Queen of Song”, the founder of the choral competition which will be familiar to many Huddersfield schools.
In November, Heritage Quay will be handing over control to students from Netherhall High School’s history club as they take over the archives on Friday 20 November, as part of the national Kids in Museums campaign. They’ll be undertaking some research of their own as well as taking on the roles and tasks of Archivists.
We’ve already got some role play experience under our belt through our theatre workshop Play It! which took place back in June. This drama workshop takes the Rugby League collection at Heritage Quay as its starting point. Supporting History and English curriculum objectives, Y6 children from Lindley Junior School re-told the story of the birth of Rugby League and its impact on local communities. They were led through a range of dramatic techniques by professional actors from Chol Theatre along with Huddersfield University drama students. The pupils and their teachers learned a lot about acting and rugby – they thoroughly enjoyed dressing up, handling artefacts from the collection – and wearing false moustaches! Here they are posing at the end of their performance with the 1892 Yorkshire Senior Competition Shield.
Our schools workshops support National Curriculum objectives, last around 3 hours, can include a campus tour, and best of all, are completely FREE!
So if you would like your class to discover their inner thespian, architect, researcher or artist, drop an email to T.Wells@hud.ac.uk or give her a ring on 01484 473 168.
We look forward to seeing you this term at Heritage Quay!
This month our fantastic team of student helpers have completed a huge sorting and repackaging project that has brought together all of the scores held within the British Music Collection for the first time in the Collection’s history! This is a fantastic achievement that has been 48 years in the making! To celebrate this fact, here’s the history (with a few photos ) of the British Music Information Centre, the organisation that founded the Collection in 1967.
The BMC fully sorted & repackaged for the first time…
…that’s over 850 boxes of scores, recordings & archives preserved & accessible (and looking rather beautiful!)
The British Music Information Centre (BMIC) was founded in 1967 by the Composers’ Guild of Great Britain within the Guild’s central London office of 10 Stratford Place, which was also the home of The Royal Society of Musicians. The Centre was formally opened by Lord Goodman on 7 November 1967 and was established with the assistance of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the Arts Council, and the Performing Right Society. The BMIC was founded as a charity and its work was dependent on grants and the external financial support that it received.
Founded at a time when national Music Information Centres were rising in popularity (following the formation of the first Centre in the USA in 1939), the BMIC was established as a drop-in centre where users could go to see and hear 20th century British classical music, and to research contemporary composers and their works. The primary function of the Centre was to act as a voluntary library of deposit where composers and publishers of 20th century British classical music could deposit scores and recordings of their work, which allowed would-be performers access to these works to study and play. All works were acquired by donation, and the collection was initially just restricted to the work of members of the Composers’ Guild, and later BASCA (British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors) concert music members; this restriction was later removed. The Centre defined ‘British’ music as being composed by an individual born or living in the UK. The initial core of collection was founded on the deposit of The British Council’s sheet music collection in 1967, which included material dating back to 1900. By 1969 the Centre already held 8000 scores of both published and unpublished works, as well as tapes and reference material for consultation and study. Although initially some publishers were opposed to the Centre because they believed it posed a threat of competition, over the years the BMIC gradually became accepted by more and more publishers and the Centre began to accumulate increasing amounts of published material. This made the library the only permanent collection of both published and unpublished contemporary British music and it significantly contributed to the growth of the collection in both size and diversity throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
By the 1990s the acquisition policy of the BMIC stipulated that eligible works included: work that is published by a major publisher (e.g. Boosey & Hawkes, Faber Music, Chester Music); unpublished work by professional composers of significant standing (e.g. frequently commissioned or performed by leading orchestras); work by full members of a leading professional body (e.g. BASCA, including shortlisted works for British Composer Awards); work commissioned by the BMIC as part of its projects and professional development programmes (e.g. Adopt a Composer, Embedded…); and work commissioned or funded by leading commissioners or funders (e.g. BBC, Arts Council England, PRS for Music Foundation). The Centre was aware that subjectivity influenced these criteria but in practice any disputes over inclusion/exclusion were resolved by the Director of the BMIC or by reference to the composers on the BMIC Board.
Recordings started to enter the collection during the 1970s, firstly on reel to reel tapes and vinyl records, and later on audio cassettes and CDs. The recordings in the collection included both published and private recordings donated by publishers and composers, recordings of concerts and events that took place at the BMIC and the Society for the Promotion of New Music (SPNM), and recordings of BBC Radio 3 broadcasts. A joint project with EMAS (Electro-Acoustic Music Association) in the early 1980s resulted in the Centre starting to acquire recordings of British electro-acoustic music, while during the mid-1980s the BMIC’s reel to reel tape recordings were transferred to Betamax tapes during a migration project funded by the British Library.
By 1885 over 6000 people a year visited the BMIC, with even more users contacting the Centre remotely by letter and telephone.
In addition to the Centre’s primary role as a contemporary music library, the BMIC also ran numerous projects, events and performances in order to promote contemporary British music. By 1985 over 80 events were being held annually, with performers including Michael Finnissy, Jane Manning and John McCabe, and premiers of work including music by Peter Maxwell Davies, Judith Weir, Michael Finnissy and Chris Dench. Some performances were also preceeded by talks. The BMIC’s Salon series of concerts ran for 30 years until 2003 with an emphasis on programming first performances, experimental music and neglected early-mid 20th century repertoire. From the 1980s onwards, the BMIC’s rising profile and increasing number of projects resulted in the Centre working more collaboratively with other organisations to promote contemporary British music, particularly SPNM, EMAS and The Place Dance Services (TPDS).
Lennox Berkeley visits the BMIC in the 1980s
Dame Elizabeth Maconchy at the BMIC during the 1980s
In 1999 the BMIC established The Cutting Edge, which was an annual thirteen-week concert series held in the autumn. The Cutting Edge series, based mostly at The Warehouse, Waterloo, aimed to put contemporary music from the UK in an international context, and from 2001, each series was followed by The Cutting Edge Tour that took place May-December of the following year. The Cutting Edge Tour showcased up to 20 concerts taken from the previous year’s London series at locations across the UK, along with workshops and learning events. Also in 1999 the BMIC established the New Voices and Contemporary Voices composer support schemes. These schemes provided print, distribution and promotion services for composers at both the beginning and middle of their careers, and intended to fill the gap for composers who were looking to publish independently.
From the late 1990s onwards, with increasing pressure on finances and the rising costs of housing the collection in central London, the staff and Board began looking at alternate locations and organisational structures to manage the Centre.
In 2004 Arts Council England (ACE) instigated a proposal to create a new higher profile body for the new music sector from the merger of a number of music organisations that received funding from ACE, including the BMIC. The original idea to merge a number of music organisations into one larger body had been discussed within the sector since the 1980s but ACE initiated the 2004 project for two main reasons; firstly ACE identified the opportunity to have shared facilities within in a new building in central London (King’s Place, near King’s Cross), and secondly ACE was looking to redress the role of the Contemporary Music Network within ACE. Initially ten organisations were approached about the merger, including the African and Caribbean Music Circuit, British Music Information Centre, Contemporary Music Making for Amateurs (CoMA), Contemporary Music Network, Jazz Services, the Society for the Promotion of New Music and The Sonic Arts Network. This project, initially called The Kings Place Initiative and later The New Organisation (TNO) Project, resulted in the creation of Sound and Music from the merger of the British Music Information Centre, Contemporary Music Network, the Society for the Promotion of New Music and The Sonic Arts Network in 2008. Upon creation, Sound and Music was temporarily located in British Music House, 26 Berners Street, London, before it moved to its current location of Somerset House, The Strand.
Throughout the course of the reorganisation project both the BMIC’s collection and the financial burden of accommodating it continued to increase. The limited space and financial constraints meant that in 2002 sections of the collection had to be moved to alternate premises. Works by composers who had died before 1960 were moved to the Royal College of Music (RCM) Library, and works written before 1960 by composers who had died between 1960 and 2002 were moved to a storage facility belonging to the Performing Right Society (PRS). The material sent to the Royal College of Music Library could be accessed by researchers on site, whereas there was no public access to the PRS’s storage facility and this material could only be consulted through prior arrangement with the BMIC. In 2004 the financial pressures meant that the BMIC moved premises from 10 Stratford Place to Lincoln House, 75 Westminster Bridge Road, London. In 2007 the BMIC could no longer afford to house the collection in central London and so it was sent to a storage facility in Southend. This is where the collection remained until it was transferred, along with the RCM and PRS material, to the University of Huddersfield Archives in 2010. The collection then moved into the University’s new state-of-the-art archive facilities at Heritage Quay in 2014.
With all sections of the British Music Collection now fully catalogued, reintegrated and repackaged into archival-quality materials, the collection has never been more accessible and safeguarded for the future, so what are you waiting for! The catalogue for the Collection can be found here, and all the details that you need to know about how to visit the Collection can be found here. Enjoy!
Unfortunately due to important IT maintenance work, both the the Heritage Quay online catalogue (www.heritagequay.org/archives) and the History to Herstory website (www.historytoherstory.org.uk) will be unavailable from Tuesday 14th July 16:30 BST until Wednesday 15th July at around 10:00 BST, please accept our apologies for any inconvenience that this may cause.
We are very pleased to announce that the archive of Sir Joseph Percival William Mallalieu (18 June 1908 – 13 March 1980) has now been fully catalogued and made accessible for the first time.
To say that ‘Bill’, ‘William’ or ‘Curly’ Mallalieu (as he was known to various people) had an interesting and varied career would certainly be an understatement! And to prove it, here’s a biography of his life that we’ve pulled together using the records that are now available in the archive.
JPW & Rita Mallalieu with Mr & Mrs Arthur Gardiner, c1950s
JPW Mallalieu was born in Delph, Saddleworth, on 18 June 1908 into a Nonconformist family with a rich political background. His father, Frederick Mallalieu, was Liberal MP for Colne Valley from 1916 until 1922, when he was defeated by Philip Snowden, the first Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer. While his brother, Sir Edward Lancelot ‘Lance’ Mallalieu, was also Liberal MP for the Colne Valley constituency, 1931-1935, before he joined the Labour Party and served as MP for Brigg, Lincolnshire, from 1948 until he retired in 1974.
Like his father and brother, JPW Mallalieu studied at Dragon School, Cheltenham before going on to Trinity College, Oxford where became the first person in history to win a Rugger Blue and be president of the Oxford Union. After Oxford, Mallalieu won a Commonwealth Fellowship in economics at the University of Chicago and spent two years in the United States engaged in economics research. While in America Mallalieu underwent a political conversion from Liberalism to Socialism after witnessing the depravity brought about by the Great Depression; this led him to join the British Labour Party from Chicago in October 1931. During his time in America Mallalieu also began his career as a journalist, working on local newspapers in Kentucky, including The Lexington Herald where he covered stories such as the Police beat and sports, notably American Football and ice hockey. He then spent six months in South Africa and seven months in continental Europe, mostly in France, before returning to Britain in 1932 and being appointed American Editor for The Financial News in London. Mallalieu was then made political correspondent for the paper and spent a year and a half reporting from the House of Commons. Mallalieu continued to write for London newspapers from 1933-1942, including The Financial News, The Evening Standard, The Daily Express, he also wrote sports journalism for the Spectator.
Upon his return to Britain at the end of 1932 Mallalieu joined the Holborn Labour Party. He was then adopted as the Labour candidate for Huddersfield in 1936 but because of the intervention of war it was another nine years before he got the chance to fight his first Parliamentary election.
Mallalieu started the Second World War as a Conscientious Objector which he said was ‘entirely for political reasons’ because he didn’t believe in the Chamberlain government of the time, but he quickly changed his mind upon realising the intent of the Nazi leadership. He joined the Royal Navy in 1942 as an ordinary seaman and rose to the rank of Lieutenant by the end of the War. His active service involved protecting the convoy routes to Russia through the Arctic waters, he served on board a destroyer which was camouflaged as HMS Meltham. During his service he wrote the novel Very Ordinary Seaman (1944) which was based directly on his experiences of serving in the navy during wartime. The navy had appointed him to the role of Commander’s Messenger, Portsmouth, and gave him two months in which to complete the work; the only condition was that the book should be ‘broadly favourable to the navy. Not a whitewash but not a hatchet job either’ (On Larkhill, p.204). The book proved to be very popular, selling 64,000 copies in hardback and many more in paperback. Speaking to Yorkshire Life magazine in 1979, Mallalieu answered the question of why he had chosen that title for the book, ‘Because that’s what I was, a very ordinary seaman. I couldn’t even tie knots properly.’ (Yorkshire Life, March 1979). The royalties for the book would see Mallalieu through his election campaign in 1945 when he had no other source of income.
JPW Mallalieu, naval seaman, c1942
Very Ordinary Seaman was Mallalieu’s third book. He had written his first, Rats, in a London air raid shelter during the blitz. The book was a criticism of big business that profited from the war (e.g. munitions companies), and was published in 1941 under the pseudonym, The Pied Piper. He wrote his second book, Passed to You, Please, in 1942 in a Huddersfield nursing home where he underwent an operation shortly before he enlisted in the navy. This book was a criticism of the bureaucracy, red-tape and inefficiencies of the Civil Service.
During his naval service in Portsmouth he met Rita Tinn (Harriet Rita Riddle Tinn) who was an officer in the Wrens (Women’s Royal Naval Service). Rita was the daughter of Jack Tinn, manager of Portsmouth Football Club, and prior to the War Rita had worked as her father’s Secretary, where she was the only female executive in football at the time. Mallalieu and Rita were marred in 1945 shortly before the General Election took place on 5 July. They went on to have two children; Ann Mallalieu (later Baroness Mallalieu QC) was born on 27 November 1945 and was Christened at the House of Commons in the same year (photos of this occassion can be found within the archive); and Ben Mallalieu, who wrote the tailpiece to his father’s final book On Larkhill.
JPW Mallalieu left the navy as a Lieutenant to fight the General Election as the Labour candidate for Huddersfield. Throughout the election campaign JPW and Rita Mallalieu stayed with Arthur Gardiner who was Secretary for the Huddersfield Labour Party and Mallalieu’s agent and friend. Upon opening his election campaign at Northumberland Street School in June 1945, Mallalieu declared that ‘I have not the slightest intention of sailing under any false colours. I am a Socialist, and it is as a Socialist and nothing else that I am going to ask for your votes on July 5.’ Mallalieu won the election, achieving the biggest swing of votes in the country, converting the previous Liberal majority of 13,000 into a 9,000 majority for Labour. On the day that the result was announced he addressed a crowd in Huddersfield’s Beast Market estimated to be 20,000 strong.
Of his work in Clement Atlee’s post war government (1945-1951) Mallalieu said that it was ‘A really exciting period… we had a tremendous programme and we worked steadily through that torrent of legislation. I suppose it really spoiled us. There was nothing like it again… I remember one week when we had three all-nighters in a row. One evening I went on to the Commons Terrace for a breath of fresh air, sat down on one of the benches and was awakened next morning by the sound of traffic going across Westminster Bridge. It was 11am, and I suddenly realised I had slept on the terrace all night!’ (Interview published in many national newspapers on 14 Aug 1978).
Upon reaching parliament Mallalieu gravitated to the left of the party, often following the movements of Aneurin “Nye” Bevan, which sometimes brought him into conflict with the rest of the party. After voting against the Ireland Bill in 1947, he was sacked as Private Secretary to John Strachey, Ministry of Food. He also found himself in conflict with a large section of the Party in 1953 when in an article for The Tribune he suggested that many Labour MPs only pretended to agree with left-wing policies in public but secretly voted with the right wing of the Party in parliament. He argued that to prevent this Labour MPs should vote on policy decisions by voice rather than secret ballot, which was against Labour Party rules. This resulted in an NEC meeting to discuss whether he should be expelled from the Party, but Mallalieu managed to retain his position by apologising for his comments.
JPW Mallalieu went onto be Member of Parliament for Huddersfield 1945-1950, and then for Huddersfield East, 1950-1979, following boundary changes to the Kirklees area. In 1964 Labour won the General Election for the first time in 13 years, and Harold Wilson appointed Mallalieu to various ministerial positions over the course of his term. First Junior Navy Minister (1964-1966) and then Minister of Defence for the Royal Navy (1966-1967), before being appointed Minister of State at the Board of Trade (1967-1968) and the Ministry of Technology (1968-1969). During his time as Minister of State at the Board of Trade, Mallalieu instituted new safety measures for merchant shipping and trawlers at a time when ships were being constantly lost at sea. These measures centred around the idea of having a “mother” ship in the middle of any shipping fleet that was captained by a naval officer who had the authority to return ships back to port if the weather became too dangerous.
Mallalieu fitted with parachute at visit to British Overseas Airways Corporation as Minister for Transport, c 1968-69
Throughout his political career Mallalieu continued as a writer and journalist. In the 1950s he continued writing sporting essays for the Spectator and wrote political commentaries for the Tribune and the New Statesman. On radio he was a regular member of the Any Questions? panel for over 20 years, and on television he was one of the first members of the Tonight team and one of the four regular presenters of What the Papers Say on Granada TV during the 1950s. He also went on to publish four more books, Sporting Days, 1955, and Very Ordinary Sportsman, 1957, were collections of some of his favourite sporting essays, while Extraordinary Seaman, 1957, was a biography of Captain Lord Cochrane, 10th Earl of Dundonald who had a successful and eventful career within the British, Chilean and Brazilian navies during the 19th century.
Mallalieu’s final book was On Larkhill, an autobiography that covers the years of his life before he became an MP. Mallalieu died before he could complete the first draft of the book but it was published posthumously in 1983. According to Ben Mallalieu’s Tailpiece to the work, his father’s intention for the book was to ‘write about his times and his background and what had led him to be standing in the 1945 election as a candidate on the left wing of the Labour Party.’ (On Larkill, p. 206)
JPW Mallalieu retired in 1979 after nearly 34 years in Parliament and was knighted in James Callaghan’s resignation honours list. He is Huddersfield’s second longest serving MP (after Barry Sheerman), having kept his seat through all eight General Elections that took place since 1945. He held his 397th and final surgery for constituents on 6 June 1979 in the Labour Rooms, Station Street, Huddersfield. Mallalieu was appointed the first Freeman of Kirklees on 27 Jan 1980 in a ceremony that took place in the Great Hall at Huddersfield Polytechnic University. He was also made a life member of the Press Club, the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) and the Huddersfield Branch of the NUJ. He was a keen sportsman, playing cricket until he was 58, for both the Lords and Commons teams, his Buckinghamshire village (Ickford), and he organised the Tribune v Statesman matches. He was also a dedicated fan of both Huddersfield Town Football Club and Yorkshire Cricket Club.
Joseph Percival William Mallalieu died on 13 March 1980. The address at his funeral was given by Michael Foot, MP, who had been a very close friend of Mallalieu’s throughout his literary and political career.
JPW Mallalieu after receiving his knighthood at Buckingham Palace, 3 Nov 1979
Charles Schulz’s views sum up the hurdle facing heritage officers when it comes to providing outreach activities for schools. It’s a challenge for any setting to meet the expectations of children who view the words “school trip” as shorthand for non-stop entertainment, whilst at the same time reassuring teachers that enjoyment need not be a barrier to achieving national curriculum requirements.
During March, we ran 3 primary school sessions at Heritage Quay under the title “It’s never too early to think about University.” We wanted to raise awareness of our collections and promote aspirations of university amongst primary age children. Our objectives were to introduce the archive service, provide opportunities for handling original artefacts, and offer campus tours led by current students. All to be done in two and a half hours, and with maximum enjoyment had by everyone!
Our Rugby League collection provided the ideal starting point for activities to engage the children’s interest. Colourful Rugby international caps, gleaming trophies and the blood and mud stained England Rugby shirt belonging to Dai Jenkins, all helped bring to life Heritage Quay’s role in preserving this important aspect of local and sporting history. Meanwhile, other groups quizzed members of the Heritage Quay team about what happens in the search room, why the strong room is so cold and how you play music on a record player. Everyone enjoyed the curvy screen, and the campus tour also went down well, with the school students relishing the opportunity to ask student Ambassadors such questions as “do you get a free iPad?” and “Have you ever regretted your choice of university course?”
It’s early days, and similar workshops showcasing other collections and meeting other national curriculum requirements are under development. However, the pilot activities have gone down well, and even Charles Schulz might have been happy with feedback from the children such as: “It was such a great trip…I was learning and having fun at the same time!”
Trizia Wells Heritage Quays, Learning and Engagement Officer
