Museums

Lord Clark of Windermere Excerpts

Tuesday 15th November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Clark of Windermere (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to follow the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, for I have been very much aware for the past 40-odd years of his deep commitment to the cultural history of this country. I am also very much indebted to my noble friend Lady Royall, who has proved such a worthy successor to my noble friend Lord Monks as chair of the People’s History Museum in Manchester. We are all indebted to her for calling this debate, and I thank her.

This also gives me an opportunity to thank the staff of the museums, archives and indeed libraries whom I have bothered over the past 50 years and met with nothing but kindness and assistance. We are all indebted to them as well. I will not press this too far, but I listened attentively to the early part of my noble friend’s speech when she talked about the concern within museums, archives and libraries about the Government’s cuts, which, frankly, are decimating many of those services. I hope the Government will take note of that.

We in this country have not been particularly well served by history. Many of the people of this country have felt that history did not touch them because in many ways, especially in the way that it was taught in universities and schools, history was a top-down subject. This struck me forcefully in the 1960s and I wanted to challenge that. I would go to the funerals of lifelong suffragettes and trade union or labour pioneers. A bit of time afterwards, I would approach the family and say, “What about the records that I know Jane or Tom had?”. They would say to me time and again, “Oh, no one was interested in that. They were no use so we burnt them”, or, “We put them in a black bag”. Gradually, though, we have won that battle; people have begun to realise that their lives and those of their families are critical to understanding the nature of this society, this country and our democracy.

Perhaps I should declare an interest as a visiting professor of history and politics at the University of Huddersfield. Huddersfield is quite important if we are looking at Labour and suffragette history. Indeed, the University of Huddersfield has probably one of the finest archival establishments anywhere in this country thanks to the generosity of the Heritage Lottery Fund, which has given millions to that establishment. It is wonderful.

I mention Huddersfield because, when I was Member of Parliament for Colne Valley, my experiences at funerals caused me anxiety. The Colne Valley Labour Party was the first constituency Labour Party in the whole of Britain. If that was not strong enough, it had the minute books of every meeting, from its inception on 21 July 1891 right through to the current day, of the executive and general management committee—my Labour colleagues know what I am talking about here —which were stuck away in a corner. I was terrified that, with changes of secretary, we would lose them, so I managed to persuade the University of Huddersfield—this was in the 1970s, before the National Museum of Labour History, as it became in 1990, was established—and we got the histories of the Labour Party in Colne Valley, Huddersfield and a number of other areas. Since then, it has added to its deposits the papers relating to Robert Blatchford, whose book, Merrie England—I am looking at the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, who knows what I am talking about—sold millions of copies and created millions of socialists in this country; it was quite a phenomenon.

I am very proud of that, but it makes the point mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Cormack: all the museums, libraries and archives are interlinked. I talk about Huddersfield, but Bradford is just up the road. Half an hour by rail is Manchester, with the People’s History Museum and the superb Manchester central ref, which has so much suffrage history. Then one thinks of the great institutions nationally, such as the LSE and Warwick University. My point is that we need more interrelationship between museums great and small, national, county and local—they are all part of the understanding of the peoples of Britain.

I would like to finish on the internet. The internet has the propensity to revolutionise research in this country, if it has not already. By clever use of the internet, you can get into local archives as far away as New Zealand. That can be very valuable, but it is very expensive. I would like the Government to consider finding ways of funding the digitisation of many more records.