Heritage Quay’s latest exhibition explores the life and work of Derek Bailey (1930-2005), 
a guitarist who was a major force in the development of Free Improvisation.
Bailey’s remarkable musical journey began in Sheffield, with a young lad entranced by the music he heard on his uncle’s radio, and fascinated by the guitar. After leaving school he began to pick up work as a musician, and by the 1960s was playing for big names including Shirley Bassey, Dusty Springfield and Morecambe and Wise. Around 1969 he left behind this successful – though always precarious – career as a commercial musician to concentrate solely on Free Improvisation. Intent on a sort of music which went beyond style and genre, he worked with people all over the world, ran a record label, Incus, and brought very different people together for spontaneous, organic music-making.
Heritage Quay’s latest exhibition tells this story, using photographs, notebooks, letters, programmes, and the plectrums Bailey made himself using dental acrylic. Many of the items on display have never been seen by the public before. They are all part of the Derek Bailey Archive, which is cared for by Heritage Quay.
The exhibition is part of our Kirklees Year of Music series. It is free, and open Monday to Saturday from 14 August to 30 September. Heritage Quay is at the heart of the University of Huddersfield Campus, and there are details of how to find us here: Directions | Heritage Quay
final year history student at the University of Huddersfield who has been undertaking a work placement as a cataloguing assistant for Heritage Quay.
shoot became a display of the discipline and effort these athletes went through as discussed in their interviews in newspapers, magazines and reports alike. Going through this archive gave me a new perspective on the sport I was certainly aware of but not particularly familiar with. It taught me the history of an international force built on the foundations of 
in the mid-2000s. History, and more broadly, time is always moving, and through cataloguing these items I was seeing first hand revisions and versions of history being made. When I handled official documents from World Netball, I was getting to see through their eyes what the last 30 years of progress has meant. It has been said history is written by the victors, but working at Heritage Quay has shown me it is more true that instead history is written first come first served, and that often people, organisations or other third parties will already have their thumbs on the scale. My time with the archive team has involved practical experiences as well, from handling items, cataloguing them, and wrapping and protecting larger items for storage.
In the early 1970s, Clare Druce and her mother Violet purchased four live ‘spent’ hens from an East London butcher’s shop. They took them, uninvited, to the Ministry of Agriculture’s Animal Welfare Department in Surrey, along with a reporter and photographer from the Surrey Comet newspaper. The ‘invasion’ (as the press called it) earned them a front page spread in the Surrey Comet. Over the years, they took part in further campaigns and acquired the help of other animal rights campaigners, eventually naming their small pressure group Chickens’ Lib, which later evolved into the Farm Animal Welfare Network.
producer and TV studio to make a short programme about the group. The programme came out live on BBC2 at peak viewing time and earned Chickens’ Lib more than 500 letters of support.
These campaign documents also include an expert witness personal statement written by Clare Druce, highlighting her qualifications as an expert in the McDonalds libel trial of 1996 (item ref: 
In the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the area around Huddersfield was home to the best handbell teams in the world. These groups, which were mostly male and often pub-based, rehearsed, performed and competed with the same seriousness as brass bands. Their story, however, is much less known.
Our biggest cataloguing achievements have been to make two major collections accessible for the first time: the 
There are now 38 boxes of archives about women’s rugby league!
