From my notebook #1: Crime scenes and case files (April 2012)

'Crime Scenes and Case Files - Sources for studying Domestic Interiors' study day at The Geffrye Museum of the Home, London, Monday 2nd April 2012.

This is where it all began. Sort of. I was finishing the taught element of my AHRC-funded Masters in Contemporary History at Sussex and had applied for AHRC funding to do my PhD there. My proposed PhD research project was about the 'place, space, and materiality of home', in much the same way as my research outline currently describes (see my Sussex or academia.edu profiles). Only I planned to use a variety of sources including the Mass Observation Archive, where I had also been volunteering and working behind the scenes, as well as researching there for postgraduate essays (in fact, I was only a few weeks away from presenting a paper at their Anniversaries Conference). My MA dissertation, at this time, was going to be a sort of micro-version of my proposed thesis, focussing on the kitchen, using various sources including Mass Observation.

This study day at the Geffrye Museum changed all that. I'm so grateful to them and to the Histories of Home SSN for organising it. I will, of course, still be using the fantastic Mass Observation materials in my research, but in a way that supports my main sources, which were inspired by two of the presentations at the study day:

Bernard Jacque, Curator of the Musee du Papier Peint, described his research using Paris Crime Scene photographs. These were 'metrique' system Bertillon photos (Alphonse Bertillon was mostly known for developing a system of recording Anthropometric measurements and mugshots of suspects in order to aid identification but he also pioneered this method of photographing crime scenes using scales to measure the distance between items in the pictures). I've looked for Jacque's research since, he was calling it 'Blood and Wallpaper' but have not been able to find anything. His presentation explained how he was using the photographs to examine which wallpapers in his archives at the Musee had made it on to walls, how and where, and how long after they were published.

Then Chris Heather, Modern Domestic Records Specialist at the National Archives gave a presentation. He explained that he was more used to giving presentations about crime sources for family history researchers, and regretted that he was not able to be more helpful - but he was very helpful to me! He indicated a few collections at the National Archives where photographs of (or relevant to) domestic interiors could be found, including crime scene photos, and showed a couple of examples.

I was hooked. How fantastic, I thought, to see photographs of actual interiors rather than aspirational ones from advertising/catalogues/exhibitions etc. This was a problem I encountered in my secondary reading in preparation for my masters dissertation: histories of home and of interiors seemed to be dominated by the kind of sources that showed what people might want their homes to look like if they bought everything brand new when they moved home, which I was pretty convinced wasn't the reality for most people throughout the twentieth century.

I visited TNA a few weeks later and was delighted to find that the depositions and other papers in the files (which varied depending on the collection) were often rich in details and descriptions about the homes and who and how people lived in them as well as photographs of interiors and exteriors. When I found out a little later that my application for funding for my PhD had been successful, my supervisors agreed that I would be able to change my main source to the ones I had identified from the National Archives.

More on the process and where my research is currently taking me later...