David Oulsoga, one of our favourite historians, has a four part series starting on BBC2 on Thursday, 4th January. The programmes will trace the history of 62, Falkner Street, Liverpool from the time it was built in 1840 up to the present day: http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/proginfo/2018/01/a-house-through-time. As this is a Liverpool house, built in early Victorian times you can be sure that a ‘trader in slave-produced cotton’ will feature somewhere in the house’s history.
David describes this as ‘a unique television experiment.’ For television, maybe, but there is no doubt this approach has been tried previously in books. There may be many, but one that I have is ‘A House By the Thames and The People Who Lived There’ by Gillian Tindall, which traces the story of a house on the south bank of the Thames opposite St Paul’s Cathedral. There is no Black history connection as far as I recall but it’s still a fascinating read.
Writing in the Observer newspaper, David’s words demonstrate why we like his work so much: ‘History, to me, is all about those shiver-down-the-spine moments … when you hold in your hands an object created hundreds of years before your time and feel the vague presence of the hands that held it in the past.’ In talking about what a historian is, David speaks of ‘early morning trips across overgrown cemeteries’ – we’ve done our share of that (although perhaps not ‘early morning’!), I wonder if that makes us ‘proper’ historians? Apparently ‘Historians also have to be nosy’ – step forward Bill Hern!
David closes his article by saying: ‘the history I was taught at school was largely one of great men and great deeds, a history that took place in palaces and battlefields. It was silent about our shared, inner and domestic history, the stories of the rest of us, the un-great, who live quietly and privately.’
Each and every one of us contributes to history as did each of our ancestors regardless of their class, colour or gender. Long may historians like David strive to bring these forgotten histories to light and, if you ever want to join the Historycal Roots team, David….