North West Sound Archive- by Mimi McGarry
Looking back over our blog today, I noticed how we have visually focused on spaces, shapes, architecture, industrial landscape, mood and machinery. A highlight and the first woman we introduced so far is Nana Moores whose voice you can listen to by clicking play on the sound link in the "port of call" post.
It is about time to introduce more women, and I would really like to do so today, as well as talk about the exceptional North West Sound Archive. Along our path of research the archive has been a generous source of material and especially influential are the female voices on record here and the stories they shared in their interviews (sadly the archive has been dispersed across different libraries and archives in the region; yet the online archive still exists; it is a gem worth a visit). We managed to arrive at the NWSA with a pre-selection of interesting interviews in mind, which we had found listed in their online register; Andrew proved a real hero when it came to suggesting other important clips and recordings to us. He seemed forever rushing in with more cassettes, or even old school reel to reel audio tapes for us to listen to. All this accompanied with honest commentaries and jokes and continuously referring to us as the "weird artistic type people".
From the moment we had first looked over the index list of the archive we had very much looked forward to Betty Tebbs's interview about her involvement in the union, so we started our archival research by listening to her incredible voice. As a young woman she worked in a paper mill, and she describes extraordinary details in the process and physical requirement of her work. She enthusiastically speaks about her role in the union and her work for the international bureau fighting for international womens' rights. Her description of her beliefs and efforts rooted in supporting colleagues at the paper mill who were unjustly sacked, her progression towards representing the fight for equality at work, her deep belief in communism and her faith in socialism as presenting a solution against unfairness and finally her hope that after the second world war everything would become better.
We also hear about her influences and inspirations, e.g. the excitement about meeting Valentina Tereshkova, first woman in outer space, who she recalls as "beautiful inside and out".
"Sorting the paper, when it came to them, cut into different sizes, they just had a rubber on their middle finger, and you brought each sheet down into a bracket, and anything that was the tiniest spot or anything, you’d just throw it out at the side, and then it was all perfect in lines.Then it was piled on a table, and you used to work in groups of 7, and 1 woman used to count it out into reams, now that was quite a skilled job. Well I became what they call a finisher. You were a sorter or a finisher, so I became a finisher. And what you did, you just fanned it up, and then you put each thumb and finger in four sheets, like that, and when you’d done that twice and 2 more, that was 50 sheets, and 500 was a ream. And you used to be able to do that in a minute, 500 sheets in a minute.
It was skilled work, and in that factory, all the women, we were all in the union."
How exactness and speedy these movements needed to be also shows the intensity and value of this craft, and leaves me in awe at how physically demanding, exhausting and with which high level of skill this work needed to be done by the women working in this department. There is a great sense of community, and every one engaged to fight for change and control over the work conditions. Shared struggle, shared pride. It is a memory worth spelling out as exceptional and therefore deserves being treasured through recording, developing, remembering and presenting again through our work.I would like to conclude with and stand alongside the following statement found on the NWSA website:
We strongly feel it is the ‘woman and man in the street‘,"whose story needs to be told and preserved in order to capture the essence of the era." And through the work of this archive we managed to find recordings of voices and stories by women across the Lancashire regions and industries which are an important influence in the development of our own material and work, which will pay tribute to the rich and real history itself. Therefore we want to thank the archive and its treasures.
http://www.nwsoundarchive.co.uk/default.aspx
