From my notebook... ESSHC2016

I recently attended the European Social Science HistoryConference in Valencia. I presented my own paper, ‘‘IDEAL HOME’ OR ‘HOUSE OF HORROR’? DOMESTIC MURDER SCENES IN POST-WAR LONDON’ as part of a panel called ‘Crime and Domesticity’ chaired by Heather Shore that included Annmarie Hughes, Charlotte Wildman, Louise Settle and Eloise Moss. Our panel was well-received and an interesting discussion and feedback followed. See a Storify of the live Tweets about it here: https://storify.com/HistoryGirrl/crime-history-and-the-lifecourse-panel-at-esshc201

I really enjoyed the other panels and papers I went to see at the conference, and they helped me to think through and connect some issues that I've been dealing with in my research-life and personal-life. I'm blogging about them here partly as part of an exercise in writing. One of the ‘top tips’ I've been able to pass on to other PhD students since I submitted my thesis and successfully passed my Viva examination is ‘keep writing’. By this I mean that writing as a task can seem daunting and anxiety-inducing if you haven’t done it for a while, that it’s a good idea to practice writing as much as possible even if it’s in a less formal format than that required for academic work. In fact, a less formal format can be helpful since we’re constantly demanding such high standards of ourselves and any writing we produce for consumption by other academics, which we tell ourselves has to be the best that we are capable of. This less formal format could be a blog or diary or simply notes to help structure thoughts… BUT I realised that I haven’t recently been practising what I preach.

Since my Viva exam I've given three papers, which have required a lot of writing labour, but my main academic work has been on the corrections to my thesis, which I have to get done in three months. I've been reading a lot, but so far writing very little. And that's OK, I'm not ready to do the writing part yet. But I want to keep up the habit, as per my own advice, so I decided it's time to pick up my blog again. And what better time than right after a conference when I'm feeling inspired and reinvigorated?

The panels I went to see at the conference included… 

1. ‘Crime History and the Life Course: New Findings and New Dialogues’ which included some really interesting papers by David Cox, and Pamela Cox and Zoe Alker. This panel was united by approaches to prosopographical history and similar, which interests me because it combines biographical information of interest to family historians and genealogists with the (arguably, and more on this later) more ‘critical’ archive work of the academic historian. As one of my previous blog posts explains, it was family history research that first got me interested in returning to education as an adult to study history at university. My PhD thesis also benefitted from some rooting around on Ancestry.com to find additional details for the before and after stories of some of the people featured in the case files I use. Most of this didn’t make it into my thesis but I’m really interested in the possibility of more biographical writing in the future, especially on particular individuals for whom a wealth of information came up. 

      2. ‘LGBTQ Heritage and History Across Twentieth Century Europe’. I have Storified the live Tweets for this panel here: https://storify.com/HistoryGirrl/lgbtq-heritage-and-history-across-20thc-europe-pan The speakers in this panel included Claire Hayward and Alison Oram, who I've heard speak at a Histories of Home conference in the past. The content of their papers was fascinating, and to me particularly highlighted developing public histories of LGBTQ communities. However, they also indicated a considerable gap in heritage relating to Trans* communities. I don’t work specifically on Trans* histories myself but it’s an issue that has become personally really important to me in recent years. Claire’s and Alison’s presence at the conference also made me realise how important it is to take advantage of networking opportunities at conferences and similar events. I wished I had made myself known to them when I'd had the chance in the past! Claire gave me some really useful advice based on her recent experience (immediately following the conference her corrected thesis was accepted), and she and her friend Adam kept me company on the very delayed flight home. It would be great to work with Claire on a project in the future. She and Alison are currently working on the ‘Prideof Place’ project together and it combines queer history and heritage and geography. I was really pleased to hear that the project has included the site of TransPride Brighton, I feel like this will be a really important place in UK Trans History in the future. 

      3. ‘Storytelling as History and Interpretation’ Linked to both the panels described above, this panel gave me plenty of food for thought. Firstly Marja Javala’s paper on Emotions in Historiography also highlighted the importance of emotional interpersonal relationships in academia. Javala talked about relationships and communications between colleagues, as well as emotional feelings about and in our historical work that made me reflect more deeply on the issues of reflexivity I’ve been asked to develop in my thesis conclusion. (My internal examiner, Lucy Robinson, has written a great blog post about reflexivity, incidentally.) Is my research a mirror of my self? The hierarchies of historical subjects Marja touched on is a topic that Alison Twells also touched on and one I’ve given some thought. In an economy where funding is tight, is my very narrow and specialised (and possibly controversial) topic as worthy of funding as certain other types of subjects? Will potential colleagues see my topic as something more suited to ‘popular’ audiences and less of a serious academic area? 

      The other papers in this panel also explored ‘more critical’ or ‘more traditional’ types of history, and processes of narrativisation or characterisation, that tell stories of the past. There was a lot of debate after the papers about what this meant and how it was embedded in the sources and techniques, or not, that historians use in their writing. Will Pooley talked about characterisation and how we already do this as historians but we should give it more consideration. His sources, which included a crime and crime scene photographs, much like those I use in my research, included personal charactizations. The individuals about which we write have notions of their own identities, senses of their own characters, that we can choose to include or unpick, nod to or ignore, for examples. Alison Twells talked about her Aunt Nora’s diaries – families and diaries and history and knitting in one paper? I was in heaven. My Mum would have loved this paper too, I can’t wait for the book.

      Alison described how she wanted to tell a story that her Aunt would have recognised as her own, whilst acknowledging some difficult areas in the narrative, for example that this was clearly a case of sexual grooming. For me, this was a really fascinating story through which important issues in twentieth century British history were explored in a micro and macro way. And it was particularly important to me that Alison mentioned the significance of history beyond the university. My Mum has been with me in various ways throughout my academic journey and she is really into history too. She gets excited about social history like I do, but has her own interests. She doesn’t have three degrees in history but she reads critically, and she’s interested in the ways working class people have been written about and historicised in the past. For me, any academic histories that acknowledge their potential to reach people outside of the academy have something really powerful to say. As Will Pooley put it in one of his Tweets about Alison’s paper ‘Despite the emphasis on ‘impact’ we seem to have lost our focus on, and for, people.’ 

      Helen Rogers also spoke about similar issues with narrative and audience and using literary techniques in historical writing. I plan to follow up on some of the points Helen made to explore future directions for my own research. Narratives are very clear in crime histories but they are narratives that are shaped by the story defendants or prosecutors need to tell to make their story fit a preconceived notion of guilt or innocence or culpability or legal constructs such as ‘diminished responsibility’ or ‘insanity’. In my own work I tell these stories but I have to ask myself how I intervene in them, and whether I do so for the good of the story, the defendant, the victim, or the consumers of my research.

After the panel a variety of interesting and provocative discussions arose, and one of the things that came out of it for me linked many of the topics Will, Alison and Helen had covered but that was articulated most clearly in Marja’s paper… I’ve been so lucky in my time at university/ies to be taught interesting and important social historical methods, to learn from left-leaning historians of working people’s histories, and used them to think about the histories of working people in my family and in the wider world, that I often take for granted that this is not necessarily how all historians see things and do things. This isn’t the baseline for historical analysis. The way I do history is the result of my personal experiences and my interactions with other historians, and I’ve learned from them how to do history in a way that is derived from all their left, queer, urban, rural, working, underclass, digital, qualitative, narrative, gendered, weird and wonderful ways! I prioritise certain types of historical subjects and methods. But that’s not how everyone does it and I need to recognise and remember that.

I have Storified the live Tweets for the whole of this panel here and they make for really interesting reading: https://storify.com/HistoryGirrl/storytelling-as-history-and-interpretation-panel-a 

4. 'Police, Justice and Populations’ was very interesting, not least because it meant I got to see Joanne Klein speak about police training. This is an area highly relevant to my PhD research but also I really like meeting historians whose work I’ve read and used in my own research. Ditto Chris A. Williams on police bureaucracy. Williams’ observations supported some of the arguments I made in my thesis about the significance of police bureaucracy such as forms and files. He argued that changing police practices often addressed specific issues with the ways evidence was used in court or used by the public to support their own efforts, an area that I hope to elaborate on in relation to crime scene photographs in my own work later on. 

5. ‘Looking Backwards: Postwar Queer Britain and its Histories’ was great. I’ve heard some of the material Matt Cook (my viva external examiner) in a Podcast for the Mass Observation Archive but it was great to see it developed since then and for a new audience. It was also really nice to chat to Matt at the bar later in a less formal setting than when we met at my viva! I really appreciate Matt’s communication style, he’s really engaging and genuinely interested in people’s research. This meant a lot to me at my viva and I’d urge anyone thinking about choosing their external examiner to think not only about the links with their research and that of potential examiners, but also to think about the ways they communicate, particularly if they suffer from anxiety or worry about making themselves understood like I do. Both my examiners were so patient and understanding. In most situations I worry about finding the right words for things, about tripping up or sounding stupid, especially in stressful situations, and I simply didn’t need to worry with Matt and Lucy. They were incredibly professional, and they challenged me, but they didn’t intimidate me. My viva wasn’t about proving my worthiness of the PhD from scratch but about building on the work I’d already done in the thesis.

Meeting Brian Lewis in person was great as I’d recently read his edited collection, and Chris Waters I’ve been reading since undergraduate days (particularly his ‘Dark Strangers in Our Midst’). He was such a warm and lovely person, I wish I’d had more opportunity to talk to him but there was a lot of beer and tapas and socialising to be done at the bar after and it kept him and me busy with other people.

6. ‘Families and Their Archives: Ways of Remembering and Creating Family Histories and Identities’ was possibly the most personally invigorating panel of the conference. Check out the Storified live Tweets here: https://storify.com/HistoryGirrl/families-and-their-archives-panel-at-esshc This panel gave me a lot to think about personally. About what families choose to record and choose to discard. About the family photos, events and memories that people are included in and excluded from. It so moved me that I’ve written a separate blog post about it which I plan to publish soon. Watch this space...

History-inspired jewellery

It's been a while, but in my last post I described how House Histories have inspired some creative projects as well as academic ones. Months later, I'm finally able to reveal the results.

I took two courses in 2014 at City College, Brighton: Jewellery Making in Metal for Beginners, followed by the Advanced class. Both were taught by local jewellery designer and maker Jo McDonald. Jo taught me how to set round and oval cabochons into silver by making bezels. I really enjoyed using saws, hammers, files and FIRE to bring my designs to life.

I made some pretty basic items for myself first, to practice the techniques, and then began designing a pendant around one of those little broken pieces of porcelain I found in the ruins of Peewit (see my last blog post). A fragment of painted saucer or plate that my ancestors owned and used in the past, set in silver, would make a lovely Christmas gift for my Mum, I decided.

It was a complete surprise for her when she came to visit me in Brighton over the holidays, and she was really pleased with it. I'm so glad.

The first house I ever researched (no murders here, that I know of)

My journey to becoming a House Historian or Historian of Home had many starting points, many roots (see my last post). But the first house I ever did any research on/into has been inspirational in a number of ways, and left a permanent mark on me.

After I left school (where I didn't study History at GCSE or A-Level) I began researching my family tree including my grandfather's father Wilfred Gurney Balls Neale (fantastic name, eh?) who was born in a house that his parents, his father's parents, and his father's mother's parents (William and Sarah Balls) had lived in, and possibly further generations before them. The Neales and Balls were all rural tenant farmers, "ag-labs", sheep-dippers and well-sinkers. According to various censuses, trade directories, voter registers, tithe and OS maps, the building was called "Peewit", sometimes "Peewit Farm" or "Peewit Hall", and it was near Balls' Lane (named for the family) between the villages of Thursford and Great Snoring in Norfolk. But modern maps and aerial images showed no building or access road, and my Granddad (born in the 1930s) didn't know what had happened to it.

A couple of trips to Norfolk Record Office and a few excursions into the countryside and I found what remained of Peewit. It had been a vernacular flint (or bungaroosh) and brick building, the materials of which had largely been removed and likely recycled when it was demolished around the middle to second half of the twentieth century. I found a small piece of flint and mortar and took it to my Granddad, and he was very pleased to have a piece of the building his father was born in and where generations of Neales had lived.

Masonry at site of 'Peewit', photo by Alexa H.L. Neale, 2010.

The building was likely called Peewit after the birds that inhabit the area, so called colloquially because of their call (which sounds like "pee-wit"), they are more properly called Lapwings. I heard some of them when I visited there, they're really beautiful birds. In honour of my ancestor's house, I had a peewit tattoo made in 2010 by Ollie Jerrold at Hope and Glory Tattoo in Swaffham (since moved to Bury St Edmunds), less than 20 miles from the site of the house called Peewit.

Peewit tattoo by Oliver Jerrold, Hope & Glory Tattoo, 2010. Photo by Alexa H.L. Neale.

When the building existed, it was right up against the river Stiffkey (locally pronounced "stookey"), which at this point resembles less of a river and more of a brook of barely a few feet deep. Having read and researched some nineteenth and twentieth century domestic archaeology, I believe that it was common practice for householders to throw broken domestic objects (plates, cups, glass etc.) onto the garden, or into the privy in the garden/yard. A chat with Alastair Owens, and an article he wrote with Nigel Jeffries, Karen Wehner and Rupert Featherby confirmed this for me. The article offers an academic perspective on what discarded household objects might be able to tell us about the everyday lives of owners/inhabitants.

The place that residents discarded broken household crockery at Peewit would have likely bordered the river, and pieces of household detritus drifted down onto the banks. I believe that in the years since the building was dismantled, the landowners have dredged or deepened the river, dug out the loose mud at the bottom and sides, probably in order to deepen the water and prevent the field on the other side to the former house from flooding (it's very marshy, down-slope from a crop-field, and almost certainly a floodplain). The material from the river has then been thrown up the banks, some of it into the floor of the former building, what remains of the walls and foundations providing a useful stop to the re-drifting of the material back down the banks. This explains why the floor and foundations are still there, but are covered by a thick layer of china- and glass- flecked mud, in which now grows a huge tangled bush of nettles, brambles, wild shrubs and small trees. It no longer resembles a house or farm but a really massive, seemingly-impenetrable bush. On one visit I crawled around in here and found little broken pieces of painted and glazed porcelain - fragments of cups, saucers and plates that my ancestors owned and used in the past.

It's my intention to eventually set some of these little pieces of history in metal to make some jewellery. I'm learning to make jewellery in metal at evening classes in Brighton, taught by local jewellery designer and maker Jo McDonald. She makes porcelain into beautiful and unique jewellery for her own collections.

I now collect things with Peewits/Lapwings on (brooches, prints, bags). By coincidence, my favourite yarn-manufacturer, Rowan, have a range of fine sock yarns named for different birds. My favourite colour, green, is named 'Lapwing' so of course I had to buy it for my collection of Peewit things. I'm teaching myself to knit socks at the moment, and planning a pair for myself for the winter in 'Lapwing'.

As you can see, I find Histories of Home inspiring in lots of different ways - academically, intellectually, creatively - jewellery, tattoos, knitting, all sorts! I'm sure there's something to be written here about senses of place and the past, about material culture, identity, historians with tattoos, and remembering my family's past... But for now, watch this space for my historical jewellery and Peewit socks...

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...

Why "Domestic Murder..."?

I've named my blog '"Domestic Murder," She Wrote' because I write about murders that occurred in domestic settings (in homes or dwellings) in the past for my PhD thesis. My research in this area makes me feel a bit like an amateur detective sometimes, not because I'm trying to find out 'whodunnit', but because I'm trying to piece together clues to answer questions about the case files for murder trials that I use in my research. (More about them later.) I hope I don't bear too many similarities to the character of Jessica Fletcher from Murder, She Wrote, other than, perhaps, the fact that I ask a lot of questions in the process of researching for my PhD.

If you have the answers to any of my questions, please feel free to comment on my posts or send me your contact details. Right now, in Summer 2014, I'm trying to find out as much as I can about how the files I use, and the individual documents in them, were made and by whom. I'm eager to make contact with other researchers working with similar files, so please get in touch if you are. I see my research as constantly evolving and I love to share it and talk about it, so please do get in touch if you've anything to say about any of my posts, academic or otherwise.

As well as using this blog to ask questions about the files I use in my research, I also intend to write about interesting things I've read or found and written about in my notebooks over the last few years since I started researching using these files. Feel free to comment on these posts too, I hope you find them interesting.

You can find out more about me and my PhD research via my academic profile on the University of Sussex website, or my Academia.edu profile. I'm also on Twitter as @HistoryGirrl . If you'd like to cite or refer to my blog, please use my full name: Alexa H.L. Neale.

First post

Hello. I'm new to blogging and I'm looking forward to keeping this blog as a notebook of my progress and my ideas through my PhD research. Click here for more about me and my research at the University of Sussex.