All My Yesterdays

One of my favourite television programmes of all time has got to be "All Our Yesterdays". If you weren't watching television between 1960 and 1973 (or during the programme's brief resurrection in the late 1980s), the format of the programme was simplicity itself. Each week it would present edited excerpts from the cinema newsreels of exactly 25 years previously, linked together by a simple commentary. What the programme managed to do for the first time was to introduce the idea of film as an historical document and in so doing to launch a new, innovative, accessible and exciting approach to the study of modern history. Why the series came to an end I do not know - it must have been relatively cheap to make. There have been some modest experiments with a similar format (BBC's Rock and Roll Years was one of the better examples) but they have not had either the depth or the breadth of the original series. It was the fact that All Our Yesterdays looked back on every week - whether anything momentous happened or not - which made it compulsive : true history can always be found in the cracks between the big events.

The BBC is currently trying out another interpretation of the format. As part of their "1968 - Myth or Reality" season, every day for six months Radio 4 is recreating 1968 in sound - drawing on the BBC and other news archive and the music of the time. The individual segments are broadcast each day and a weekly omnibus edition is broadcast each Sunday. The programmes can also be accessed via the BBC website. And the best news of all is that the weekly omnibus edition is available as a downloadable podcast (unfortunately it is only available to people in the UK, although quite how it knows where you are accessing from is beyond my limited technological understanding).

It is, of course, not film. Nor is it open ended - it only has a six month run. But in its sweep and in its choice of material it is close to the original "All Our Yesterdays" concept. Listening to the weekly compilations as I walk Amy through the woods, I am transported back to a year when everything seemed to happen. And for that reason "1968 - Day by Day Omnibus" is my Podcast of the Month for April 2008.

Defining Moments

Just how many defining moments are there in a person's lifetime? In asking this question, I don't mean personal defining moments - the birth of a child, the death of a parent - but those moments when something happening in the outside world has such an impact on us that it leaves an indelible impression. These are the moments when, forever afterwards, you are able to say what you were doing the precise moment you first heard the news.

I was started on this thought process by one of those "Today in History" features I am so fond of. Forty-nine years ago today the American Government published the list of airmen who had been chosen to become the first group of "astronauts". From amongst the so-called "Mercury Seven" would inevitably come the first American in Space. I looked at the list of familiar names but had difficulty in remembering which of the seven went on to don that crown. Have a try yourself : M Scott Carpenter, L Gordon Cooper, John H Glenn, Virgil I Grissam, Walter M Schirra, Alan B Shepard, and Donald K Slayton. The first American in Space found his way there on the 5th May 1961. My difficulty in remembering his name is because that was not a defining moment. But what happened 23 days before was.

On the 12th April 1961, Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin became the first man in space. I discovered the news as I was heading home from school. I changed buses in Halifax and there, on a newspaper bill-board outside what used to be Whittakers' Brewery, was the placard "Man In Space". I checked my pockets to see if I could put together enough money to buy a paper. Between us, me and Malcolm Stocks had enough coins, but the newspaper seller had long since sold out and therefore I had to wait until I got home to see the reports on television news.

It must have been my first defining moment. I had lived through things like the Suez crisis and the Cuban revolution, but I can't remember them from an individual perspective. It was, of course, the first of several defining moments. By there very nature, such moments must be the shared experience of millions and millions of people: the assassination of John F Kennedy, the first man on the moon, the death of Elvis, that car crash in the Paris road tunnel, 9/11. They are markers, not only in the history of our lifetime, but also in the history of our lives. The fact that so many of them are tragedies makes one reluctant to ask : "when will be the next?".

The first American in space was ...... Alan B Shepard.

Back To The Workhouse

I used to work with a chap called Jim Seddon. Jim was a great character who could tell a story like few others. I was young and just starting out, Jim was old and approaching retirement. He would tell me about his working life which had taken him from being a nurse to being a Senior Lecturer in Management Studies. However, his first job, he would tell me with great pride, was as an Assistant Taskmaster in a Workhouse. I never knew whether to believe him or not - you could never clearly identify the boundary between truth and invention in his stories : but that was half the delight of them. I always intended to check up on this story when I got the time an opportunity - could anyone have worked in a Workhouse in what would have been the mid 1930s?

This morning, my wife Isobel had a hospital appointment and I went with her. In addition to providing company and moral support, I had a reason for making the journey as the appointment was at St Lukes' Hospital Bradford. This is the hospital where I was born some 59 years ago and - to the best of my knowledge - I hadn't been back since. And just twenty years before I was born there it had been Bradford Workhouse. The building has changed little - the above photograph was taken just a couple of hours ago - and as soon as you enter the hospital gates you know that this was built as a serious institution.

According to the excellent http://www.workhouses.org.uk/, the Bradford Workhouse in Little Horton Lane was built in 1852 at a cost of £7,000. Designed by a celebrated firm of Workhouse architects it had that severe, institutional look of all such buildings. However, shortly after it was opened it was described as "a spacious, handsome, and admirably arranged building. It has room for about 350 inmates, and attached to it is a spacious infirmary". Within the next thirty years it must have expanded somewhat as, at the time of the 1881 census, there were 725 residents listed. Reading through the 1881 list you get a true feel of the tragedy of such places : women and children living their lives out in poverty and shame. The full list (which can be found on the above mentioned site) also provides a clear indication of why people ended up in such places. It is made up of three main groups : widows or unmarried women with children, the old and the disabled. The census list records the "disability" : the largest group being "inb" (or "imbecile"), but there is also a fair smattering of "deaf" and "blind" as well. Further research reveals that the workhouses themselves came to an end in 1930 when the various Boards of Guardians were abolished by the 1929 Public Health Act. But many of the institutions continued as "Public Assistance Institutions" with few changes right up until the National Health Service was introduced in 1948 (the same year, and indeed the same month, that I was born in St Lukes).

So the answer to that question which has been at the back of my mind for the last thirty years is "yes", Jim could well have started his working life in a "Public Assistance Institution" or workhouse. Indeed, had I have been born a few weeks earlier maybe I would have been born in the workhouse! Looking back at that list of 1881 inmates, looking back at that list of deaf, blind and disabled people, I feel a kind of bond with them. In a way it's part of my roots : a part I am quite proud of.