It had been a proper northern funeral: all wisted suits and ham cut for company.
Always a sad occasion, of course; especially when, as here, the final struggle was protracted and touched b scandal. Some spoke of foul play, but the DPP has declined to prosecute.
Now the crumbs and serviettes are pushed aside, and the family solicitor clears his throat. Older mourners, who knew the dear departed well, are suitably sober. The youngsters, less attached, less sentimental, try to hide their excitement.
"The whole estate," says the solicitor, peering over half moon glasses, "is to be left jointly and severally to every one of you...And it's all in the attic!.
There follows an undignified scramble upstairs: creaking hinges; cobwebs; the squeak of disturbed mice. As the motes settle in the slanting sunlight, the protests begin.
"It's just junk!" The shuttle of a loom is angrily tossed aside. "Just rubbish!"...a pair of clogs.
"Rubbish!"...a docker's hook.
"Is this"' (in unison) "all there is?"
In the doorway stands the solicitor, an ambiguous smile on his lips.
"It's all here and it's all yours. This is what the deceased had to pass on to future generations. It's your heritage."
As he turns back towards the stairs, he stoops to finger some faded scraps of painted and embroidered silk. A word or two can still be made out: something about `fraternity' and 'solidarity'.
It is the richest of history's current ironies that the most visible legacy of our decaying industrial culture is...a culture industry. Wherever weavers once wove, coal heavers heaved, or dockers docked, there are now literally hundreds of museums, craft centres and 'heritage' centres. The workplace of our parents and grandparents have become our pleasure domes. The life and labour of just yesterday is today's museum exhibit. Communities that used to be devoted to the production of goods are now attempting to rescue themselves from economic oblivion through the production of history.
This is true of the whole of Britain where now, on average, a new museum opens every fortnight; but it is particularly true of the heartlands of the industrial revolution, where an ever-widening passion for physical conservation has joined hands with hard-headed commercialism in order to service changing patterns of leisure. Throughout the north of England the descendants of industrial workers visit, for entertainment, consumption and instruction, the places where their forebears simply laboured.
Today's visitors to Orwell's fable Wigan Pier, for example, shuffle through a reconstructed coalface before spending an ambivalent half hour in a late Victorian schoolroom, whose bossy 'Mann' still manages to send a shiver down the spine of anyone educated before the early 1960's. In the boutiques of Liverpool's Albert Dock, one can buy the smartest knitwear. In Hebden Bridge the Morris dancers amongst us can watch their clogs being made. Leeds and Halifax have memorialised the manufacture of woollens; Macclesfield, that of silk. Traditional ropemaking continues in Wensleydale, and visitors to St. Helens can learn the history of glassmaking from the Phoenicians to the Pilkingtons. At Quarry Bank Mill, in Styal, the weaving shed sounds just like it always did and smells the way your dad's over alls used to smell. If you go there on 'Apprentice Day' and dress your kids in rags and yourself in the top hat and frock coat of a 'Mester', you can get in free. Wherever today there is industrial decay, obsolescence, failure and fragmentation, tomorrow there will be a museum. One can only assume that even now, someone in Cambridge is planning a model assembly line of Sinclair C5 electric cars and a heritage exhibition of early microchips.
Most ironic of all, this new generation of working museums provides somthing for some of the dwindling band of craftsmen and women a last remaining chance to practice their trade. People who, in their youth, were part of a labour force which claimed to clothe Britain before breakfast and the rest of the world in the remainder of the day, now weave calico for the gift shop's aprons and tea towels, watched by visitors wearing National Trust de signer green wellies. Our industrial heritage has turned out to be 'the heritage industry'.
This determination to pick over the debris of our industrial legacy is of course but one fragment of a much broader obsession with the national past. The most expensive and popular television programmes continually revisit Brideshead or plunder once again the Jewel in our Imperial Crown. The tabloid press pays rapt attention to the monarchy - the most traditional element of our constitution. As interest in old stones and ancient deference reaches fever pitch, so grows the membership of the National Trust (now in excess of one and a half million). Labourer's cottages - the older the better - command ludicrous prices amongst BMW drivers.
It is not difficult to explain. The sub-title of Robert Hewison's critical survey, `The Heritage Industry' is 'Britain In A Climate Of Decline". In common with several other cultural critics and social historians, Hewison believes that this nation al mania for the past arises from the discontents of the present. Recent perceptions of national decay coupled with the dislocations of post-war social change, have bred a nostalgic yearning for certainty and continuity. "In the face of apparent decline and disintegration," says Hewison," it is not surprising that the past seems a better place."1
Nor is it surprising that left historians such as Hewison have given the advent of the heritage industry a less than luke-warm reception. Half-a-dozen spinners performing their craft for the benefit of tourists hardly makes up for massive job losses in the textile industry. Selling knick-knacks to dockland visitors cannot seem like real work to men who have to turn sideways to get their shoulders through doors. South Tyneside is going to have to shift an awful lot of bus tickets for the Catherine Cookson Heritage Trail if it is ever to see glad confident morning again.
Always and everywhere the left has defined itself as being progressive and future-oriented. In Western societies, it has seen its historical task as the completion of modernity, with the industrial working class as the prime agent of social change. Tourism and leisure are industries generally associated with 'developing' societies, whose attraction for visitors depends upon the 'authenticity' of pre-modern native cultures. In this perspective, the growth of a British heritage industry is seen as doubly regressive: a return to a pre-industrial economic activity which celebrates the very past we most need to transcend.
"There is no denying," says Hewison, "that the erasures of modernisation and recession have been an enormous disruption, but if we are to make any sense of them, they must be confronted, however painfully. It is no solution to retreat into a fake history: we need to recover the true continuity between past and present by coming to terms with previous failures. If the disrup tions they have caused are so great that it seems impossible to make sense of them then we must make new meanings, not retrieve old ones."2
In other words, the heritage industry both fails to offer an adequate economic solution to our industrial decline and simultaneously constitutes a cultural impediment to our finding one. "The true product of the heritage industry is not identity and security, but entropy," says Hewison. "If history is over, then there is nothing to be done."3
This idea that history is `finished' and that our present social arrangements are therefore unalterable, is one of the classic hallmarks of what Marxists call ideology'; and the notion of heritage easily attaches itself to ideological thought. Its use glosses over and obscures social differences, whether of class, gender, or ethnicity. It pretends that all of us share a 'common' heritage (in our country, land or nation) and that this is equally embodied in country houses, redundant cotton mills, St. Paul's Cathedral and the Lake District. Where social inequal ities cannot be ignored, as in the 'Upstairs, Downstairs' dis tinctions of the country house and its estate, then these are presented as being 'natural'. Whatever is hallowed by time and tradition, however inequitable or oppressive it may be, is right.
Tourist-guide phrases like 'our national heritage' or 'our shared heritage' sink the differences between country-house gentry and domestic servants, between industrial owners and their workforces, between men and women, between white `hosts' and black immigrants. Conflicts of interest, contrasting experiences of ex ploitation and subordination, workplace struggles , political contests, all are neatly side-stepped by the suggestion that we are all now, and always have been, part of a single, organic community and that we share a common legacy from this undivided past.
Moreover, and this must be of special concern to historians, the forms in which these notions of 'our heritage' are presented to visitors and audiences, often assume that the telling of history is a simple, unproblematic business. The advantages of the modern heritage centre over the older museum are clear. Gone are the glass cases, the small print, the jumble of more-or-less random collections of objects. In their place we have real working machinery, careful reconstructions of working and living spaces, even, - as at Wigan - professional actors, playing out the daily life of what used to be a remote and untouchable past.
And yet it is these very virtues that constitute a problem. By comparison with older museums, heritage centres are lively, involving and entertaining. Consequent ly, they are also very persuasive. The danger is that exhibitions which were intended to stimulate historical enquiry will actually bring it to an end. As Neil Ascherson has put it:
"The heritage industry is a fraud. What happened to the people living in these islands can't be dug up, polished and sold. The past is not recoverable like some diamond broach from the Titanic, partly because it is alive within us. It follows that the 'here is our past' display of heritage is not only a deception, but - more dangerously - a wall built across our awareness of history, and across the links between past and present."
Thus, the very title of the main exhibition at Wigan Pier - 'The Way We Were" -implicitly assumes that there is only one way we were, and that, as visitors wend their way through turn-of-the-century signal boxes, coalfaces, schoolrooms, front parlours and sculleries, they are somehow being given direct access to this difmitive account. Those who are persuaded by the 'realism' of the past, may well conclude that they need to look into it no further. 'History' then becomes fixed, singular and finished. It is something that was made in the past but which cannot be remade in the present. It is interesting, but uncon nected to our daily lives. As Patrick Wright has observed:
"For many tourists these new lime-capsule' displays may just give boredom a mildly interesting new form, but they surely also mark a developing perception of history as a miraculous impression that can best be sensed within separate and hermetically sealed enclosures."5
It is not difficult to conclude, therefore, that in the Big Red Rewrite of 1066 And All That, 'Heritage' is going to be deemed a bad thing. After all, a notion that is so redolent of Victorian Values, Jingoisim, Pax Britannica and Loving a Lord, is unlikely to go down well with folks for whom Thatcher, Falklands, Murdoch and Back woodsman are all terms of abuse.
However understandable this response may be, though, it may equally well turn out to be mistaken. 'Heritage' is a complex phenomenon, capable of yielding more than one version of the national past, and of telling it in more than one accent. It contains nothing which inherently defines it as 'vulgar English nationalism' (Ascherson's term).6 Nor is it irretrievably indentured to the Right. In itself, it is not so much a weapon in the ideological war which is being fought, as part of the terrain over which the battle is taking place. And it is nearly always a bad idea to concede defeat in a battle without properly considering whether the ground might not be won.
The problem is that many Left critics seem to have taken the notion of 'heritage' at the face value offered by its most ardent Right supporters. Propagandists of heritage speak about it as though it were a single, unified phenomenon. That is, after all, both the function of any ideological term - to deny conflicts and differences -and it is the content of this one. The notion of 'heritage' always carries, spoken or unspoken, the prefix 'common'. To admit that there are different heritages within a single society and that to lay claim to one of them often means denying another, immediately robs the term of much of its ideological force.
But the truth is that the heritage industry is far from being an homogeneous entity. English Heritage (or the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England, as it used to be called in less trendy days), Wigan Pier, the National Trust, the Jorvik Viking Centre at York and the Merseyside Museum of Labour History are all, at one level, in the heritage business; but the differences between the conceptions of heritage that they foster are at least as profound as anything they hold in common.
Indeed, these differences exists even within the operations of a single institution. National Trust members living in or near Cheshire, with stamina, a car and uncomplaining children, can easily spend Saturday morning at Tatton Park Mansion (`Brideshead' - live animals outside, dead ones inside), then take a picnic lunch on Alderley Edge (woodland) and finish off the day at Quarry Bank Mill (early cotton manufacture). All these are National Trust properties; all can be construed as part of the national heritage; but all raise quite different questions about what heritage is, who built it and who should inherit.
The first task of further enquiry in this field ought, therefore, to be to deny what `heritage' says about itself: that it is unified, undifferentiated and homogeneous. We should in stead highlight difference and diversity. Heritage needs unpacking.
Nor should we do this merely as an exercise in academic analysis. There is a further, more politically strategic reason. Whenever we suppose that 'heritage' is a singular phenomenon and the 'heritage industry' a unified enterprise, we are in danger of assuming that its cultural 'effect' (or, to speak more bluntly, its ideological significance) is also uniform and homogeneous.
Many of the standard accounts of the heritage industry (Hewison's book is a clear example), offer detailed analyses of the exhibitions involved, but take the response of visitors entirely for granted. It is assumed that once the malign nature of exhibits has been demonstrated (they romanticise history, play down social conflicts, foster a reactionary nostalgia for the good old days, etc.) then the audience's acceptance of all this can hardly be denied. It is rather like the Mary Whitehouse school of television criticism that devotes its energies to documenting instances of television sex and violence, believing that all such images carry the same message, and that audiences are uniformly subject to 'corruption' by them.
This seems unlikely. Neither television audiences nor those for heritage exhibitions are homogeneous, and it is doubtful that viewers' and visitors' opinions and behaviour are uniformly shaped by what they see. Nobody comes naked to either television or museums. They bring with them already-formed frameworks of ideas, beliefs, attitudes and memories within which this new experience can be judged and evaluated. Heritage centre visitors are not passive morons, they are active, selective, critical - and diverse. The average shop steward is no more likely to leave Tat-ton Hall complaining that you can't get good domestic staff these days, than the average stockbroker is likely to emerge from the Merseyside Museum of Labour History and send off a subscription for Militant.
The point is that no cultural artifact, whether book, film, television programme or museum, can guarantee its ideological 'effect' upon an audience. If we seek to understand the nature of the heritage industry solely by 'reading' and criticising its exhibitions, as we might read a book or criticise a film, we are thereby led towards a profoundly deterministic (and, for the Left, a profoundly pessimistic) view of the relationship which people have to their culture.
Instead, we must extend the analysis beyond the object itself and include its audience. If we want to understand Wigan Pier (or Beamish Open Air Museum in County Durham, or the Iron bridge Gorge Museum at Telford, in Shropshire) we must not only ask what view of 'our heritage' is presented there, but what people make of it.
As soon as we start to ask that question, we shall discover that whatever 'inherent' meanings we may have found in the exhibits, we can be certain that at least some sections of the audi ence will have understood them quite differently. Conservative and reactionary objects will be read in progressive and radical ways; appeals for deference will be met by rebellion; whatever is offered as dominant will be resisted.
To be sure, different constructions of 'heritage' set different agendas. It is more difficult - but by no means impossible - to end your day feeling that history is on your side if you have spent it in Tatton Park Mansion rather than in the Mersey side Museum of Labour History. A day in the Lake District does not sit well with an Engelsian view of the central importance of manufacturing industry.
Nonetheless, when we discard the notion of homogeneity of the heritage industry and the uniformity of its 'effects' on people's thinking, we can see that although its radical potential varies widely from instance to instance, even the most unpromis ing of these carries the possibility of resistance and subversion.
Let us take as examples two elements of `heritage' which, at first blush, appear least auspicious: the country house and rural preservation. The country house stands for a way of life which has been the focus of much reactionary nostalgia, especially in the wake of the over-respectful treatment of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. There are, clearly, serious battles still to be fought here. One of the merits of Robert Hewison's work is to remind us that the majority of country houses still remain in private hands and that for much of this century the policy of the National Trust has been to secure agreements that will allow owners to continue living in their homes in return for often quite limited rights of public access.7
Furthermore, the ways in which country houses are presented to visitors are often paradigm examples of ideology at work. Brochures and guides frequently display a most nervous accommoda tion with the exploitations of the past.
"Notice the flagstone floor along the servants' corridor," we are instructed by Cheshire County Council's guide to the Mansion at Tatton Park; "the stone was easily kept clean by scrubbing, a job for the maids."8
This bland effacement of domestic labour is followed in short order by several others; "Servants were given a generous supply of beer and ale, hence the large number of barrels; although their table beer differed considerably from their master's!"9
"Notice how the lower part of the window has frosted glass - to prevent the maids from looking out and obscuring views of servants' activities from the gentry."10
"The other staff spent their brief periods of free time in the nearby Servants' Hall, which was simply furnished with a scrubbed pine table, benches and chairs."11
All of which sounds suspiciously close to suggesting that domestic service at Tatton Park was indeed the life of 'peace and plenty' proclaimed by the plaque that still survives on the kitchen wall, and that the Tatton's aristocratic employers wanted nothing more than to cater for the ease and comfort of their staff, mindful of their privacy and generous with the booze and Habitat furniture.
However anodyne the formal presentation may be, though, there is one element of our experience of the country house which radically upsets it - our simple presence. Governments, the National Trust and the great and good may all contrive to con serve the rights of property and antique social relations, but God is a Fabian, and with the inevitability of gradualness, family lines die out and the community comes into its inheritance. The intention maybe, in the words of the former National Trust expert on interior decoration, to present the house as though it were "one where the family had just gone out for the afternoon," but we know better.12 They have gone - and not just for the afternoon - and we are here. There are no more Egertons at Tatton, no more Molyneux at Croxteth; and when the Scouse kids play football on lawns that were once exclusively reserved for the Earls of Sefton, the shouts of "Here we go, here we go, here we go..." can sound like "A bas, les aristos!"
Since the mid-1930's, the most prominent preserver of country houses has been the National Trust, but this was not the original purpose of its founders, whose prime concern lay with the preservation of open countryside. Despite early Fabian in volvement in the Trust, enthusiasts for modernity, of both Left and Right, have generally shown little warmth towards country life. As far as Marx and Engels were concerned, urbanisation was one of the Good Things for which the capitalist ruling class deserved a measure of credit:
"The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life."13
`Non-Communist' economic and social historians have been almost equally dismissive. Walt Rostow limited his interests in agricultural society to its role in the preconditions for economic lake-off; and Martin J. Wiener believes that Britain's poor economic performance in the twentieth century can be traced to the late-Victorian failure to jettison the values of the rural past for those of industrial progress and technical innovation:
"An 'English way of life' was defined and widely accepted; it stressed the nonindustrial non-innovative and non-material qualities, best encapsulated in rustic imagery..."14
Nor has this attitude been limited to academic historians and social theorists. For most of us, modernity begins with industrialisation and urbanisation. The countryside is a sign of 'the world we have lost'; it is the setting of a former mode of production, transcended social relations, outdated technology and redundant cultural forms.
Yet there have always been other ways of appropriating the rural, and today these are regaining their currency. Green politics, elements of Scottish and Welsh nationalism and current conflicts surrounding the `gentrification' of the countryside should all alert us to the fact that rurality has its radical, as well as its conservative inflections.
Indeed, it is worth remembering that, as recently as the early 1930's, access to the countryside was a significant issue of class politics, especially in the north of England,where working-class ramblers seeking escape from the great conurbations came into inevitable conflict with titled landowners and grouse-shooters. In 1932, Benny Rothman, secretary of the Lancashire branches of the Communist-inspired British Workers' Sports Federation (BWSF), led a mass trespass on to Kinder Scout in the Peak District. There were some scuffles and fighting with gamekeepers and Rothman and four other ringleaders were subsequently gaoled.15
It may be that we can overestimate the significance of the 'Battle for Kinder Scout'. As John Lowerson has shown, the strug gle for access to the countryside during the 1930's was conducted by a plethora of groups inspired by a whole range of political and social attitudes including middle-class paternalism, Fabian reformism and - as war loomed ever nearer - official concern for the physical fitness of future troops. The BWSFs class-conscious challenge to the 'rights of property' was only one strand amongst many. Nonetheless, the Labour movement of the inter-war period regarded leisure as an important dimension of political work, and the history of the Youth Hostels Association, Ramblers' Associa- tion and Clarion Cycling Clubs cannot be separated from those of the trades unions, the Labour and Communist Parties, the I.L.P., the W.EA., the Co-operative Movement and many others. For some of those involved, of course, cultural work was merely an oppor tunity for fund-raising and recruitment; but others like Benny Rothman saw the need for working people to define their own space in a cultural and physical terrain which was denied them."When we entered the rambling field the rambling clubs that already existed in the north, apart from Sheffield which is one exception to the rule, were mainly middle class in origin and outlook. Not only were they middle-class, they were specialists - botanists, zoologists and archaeologists. The ordinary working- class ramblers were shunned, they were looked upon as dirt, they weren't wanted. We filled the gap, you see, this is why we were so successful."16
The condescension of which Benny Rothman complains, still persists today. Beneath many of the current criticisms of the heritage industry one can catch the familiar whiff of intellectual snobbery. "The new Wigan Pier's cousin is not the museum," declares Waldemar Januszczak , "but the fairground."17
Well, so what? Even if this is wholly true, why is it a Bad Thing') The terrain of popular consciousness is not the seminar and library but precisely the fairgrounds of popular culture. Surely it ought to be thought a gain to have even an ersatz and one-dimensional view of history presented there, than none at all? And surely it is peculiarly perverse to complain about a popular hunger for history in an era when professional historians have virtually abandoned any attempt to cater for one?
Januszczak's 'fairground' analogy assumes that a 'history' which becomes part of popular culture as thereby debased, so if he had carried on from Wigan to Blackpool, he would doubtless have been horri fled to discover a Heritage Room in the tower, a new 'heritage pub' at the Pleasure Beach, and a basement Museum of Entertain ment of By-Gone Blackpool in Coronation Street. But even the most ascetic advocate of 'rational recreations' must find it difficult to argue that these pleasures are less elevating than quelling to watch the Rector of Stiffkey starve in a barrel, which was the Golden Mile's chief attraction in 1932.
In fact, of course, these truly 'fairground' instances of heritage are as open to different levels and forms of appropriation as any other. What they all have in common - even the 'King Cotton' pub at the Pleasure Beach - is the potential to provoke memory and enable discussion. Ordinary people are not merely passive consumers of popular culture, they are its active participants. They are not simply brainwashed by its products, but use its forms in ways that express their own experience.
Let us take as a final example, the exhibition which has become the paradigm `bete noir' of critics of the heritage industry - the Wigan Pier Heritage Centre. In his lengthy account, Robert Hewison rarely refers to other visitors, noticing only in passing "the pensioners who seem to throng to the centre," with out offering much evidence that he ever actually spoke to any of them. Their understanding, their experience, is ignored in favour of his.18
But if one troubles to ask those pensioners what they are king of their visit,
then you find that they are engaged in something much more active than just gawking. Many are reminiscing, remem bering 'the way we were'; but this is much more than a passive acquiescence in what is being presented to them. People do not just accept these proffered representations of their own history; they make use of them to manufacture their own. When people are actively reminiscing, the reconstructed schoolroom, the pit, the scullery, cease to be finished articles and become instead points of departure. It is said of Marcel Proust that he was inspired to write Remembrance of Things Pat by the sight and smell of a favourite childhood cake. We can hardly be surprised if memory also works in a creative way for the rest of us.
This is not to suggest that the heritage centres of the north west are crammed with elderly revolutionaries, all quoting Marx, and offering sophisticated critiques of the conduct of the General Strike. Far from it. Most people's reminiscences can be characterised by two favourite academic swear-words: they are 'personal' and `contra dictory'. Invited to think about the past, people begin with their own experiences, and the conclusions that they draw from these are often contradictory or ambiguous. (Academics, incidentally, do much the same, except that they are able to manipulate language in ways that offer the appearance of a resolution, at least to their own satisfaction).
Thus, people will indeed seize upon the dolly-tub or mangle "just like we used to have". Or the demeanour of the actress playing the strict schoolmistress, will trigger a stream of reminiscences, half-loathing, half-admiring, of the tyrants of childhood. And these will, in turn, elicit the current ideologies of 'law and order'. "We daren't have behaved then like they do today," people will tell you, before launching into graphic descriptions of the summary justice meted out in their days by police constables, schoolmasters and heavy fathers.
But there is another theme - sharper, more radical - which emerges time and again during discussions at Wigan Pier and the Merseyside Museum of Labour History: the loss of 'community'. "Times were hard then," people will say, 'but we helped each other." Prompted to think about the current prevalence of nostalgia, older people will explicitly contrast the materialism and selfishness of the present with "the closeness that's gone."
Here we have a construction of the past which neither obscures the deprivations of the present nor invites us to acqui esce to them. For older working people, the notion of 'community' stands at the heart of the world they have lost. Its remembered forms provide the critical yardstick by which we may judge the present and act to change it. That is our heritage.
Footnotes
1 R. Hewison, The Heritage Industry, (1987), p. 43.back
4 N. Ascherson, Why 'Heritage' is right wing, The Observer, Nov. 8, 1987.back
5 P. Wright, On Living in an Old Country, (1985), p. 73.back
6
N. Ascherson, 'Heritage' as Vulgar English Nationalism, The Observer, Nov. 22, 1987.back 7 Hewison, Chapter 3, esp. pp 54 - 72.back 8 Cheshire County Council, Tatton Park: The Mansion (1987), p. 38.back 13 K. Marx & F. Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, (1848) in Collected Works Vol. 6, (1981) p. 6.back 1414 M.J. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Indust rial Spirit<back