Changing fortunes for Hull's history

After twenty-two years, Hull’s Local History Unit has come to an undeserved end after Hull College withdrew its funding and Kingston upon Hull City Council made no effort to take over what was probably the most successful community local history project in England.

The Unit, supervised by the ever enthusiastic Chris Ketchell, spawned countless local history courses, walks and numerous other events, and helped many individuals to reclaim their lives in the most unexpected ways. At its heart was Chris and his team of workers, recruited from the ranks of the unemployed, who later became volunteers and were with him until the end. The fact that they intend to continue as an independent local history research group had not diminished their deep sense of loss when I met them a few days before the doors of the near derelict James Reckitts Library, which had become a temporary home to the Unit’s huge collection of documents and publications for the last few months, were locked for the last time on 31 July 2006.

It was in 1984 that the late Dr Eric Sigworth came up with the proposal for a Community Programme (CP), within the then Humberside College of Higher Education, to produce ‘Jackdaw’ packs for use by local students and teachers. Chris was employed to supervise the CP workers in 1985, one year after the project started. He was unemployed at the time, but had recently obtained the Certificate in Regional & Local History from Hull University and was Chair of East Yorkshire Local History Society, so he was well qualified to manage the Unit’s six researchers (their official job title was ‘archive assistant') and one admin worker.

Within a short while of joining the Unit, Chris found himself, for all intents and purposes, in charge. At the time the Unit’s location was less than ideal and, although part of Humberside College, the Unit was actually part of Humberside County Council's CP Agency. In January 1986 Chris published the Unit’s first newsletter, which was later re-named The Local and subsequently appeared regularly until 2006. In 1987 the Unit was involved in starting a local history bookfair, which is now organised annually by the East Riding Library Service. In 1989 the Unit moved to the Park Street Centre, which was part of the then Hull College of Further Education (now Hull College), by which time the project had become an ‘Employment Training’ (ET) programme (known among participants as the ‘Extra Tenner’ because it paid those taking part £10 more than they got on the dole).

Throughout the 1990s the Unit continued to thrive and began publishing ventures with the Hutton Press. It took a special interest in the history of local pubs and breweries and in 1993 started its ‘Walk Right Back’ local history walks around Hull. In 1997 four adult education classes in local history studies were begun and gave rise to Chris’s ground breaking and ever popular series of ‘Know Your Place’ local history classes. The level of activity sustained by Chris and his volunteers in recent years has been truly remarkable by any standard and should be acknowledged by the local history community as a whole. Looking back, Chris believes that the Hull Local History Unit may well be the only local history related project to have survived so long with a life of its own.

Over the years, Hull has featured regularly within the pages of Local History Magazine, thanks largely to the efforts of Chris Ketchell. From time to time his name has even appeared. The first mention appears to be in Issue 18 in June 1988, when, surprise, surprise, the then ‘Humberside Local History Archive Unit’ was facing closure because of a funding crisis. It survived thanks, in part, to the support it received from the National Union of Public Employees (now part of Unison). Our news item in Issue 18 included the comment that ‘(Humberside) College was quite happy to enjoy the goodwill it derived from the Unit and the County Council appears to have made no efforts to incorporate the Unit into either its education or library services’ (18 years later only the names have changed, but the charge against the college and the local authority remains the same).

When we heard from Chris that the Unit had finally come to the end of the line and was about to smash into the buffers, I decided that I had to pay him and his colleagues a visit, so that this unhappy event would not pass unacknowledged. The very least we could do in the absence of our Premium Bonds coming up big time was to record the Unit’s passing.

Talking to Chris on the telephone, then meeting him and some of his volunteers, I could see sadness in their eyes, despite the brave smiles and a determination to create a successor group, the Hull & District Local History Research Group in, literally, the last days of the Unit. The Group’s first Chair is David Sherwood from Beverley, who came to the Unit via the Community Action programme in 1995 and has stayed ever since. ‘Working with Chris helped me through difficult times’ David told me. He has had five books published, including Complete Streets of Beverley, published by East Riding of Yorkshire Council Library & Information Services in 2002, which documents the names and origins of all 1,100 streets in the town. He also writes articles for the match programmes of Hull Kingston Rovers Rugby (League) Club, with over 100 articles about ‘Matches from the Past’ published to date. His research into Beverley street names has led to a continuing research project into the life of a 19th century town butcher, George Robert Armstrong. The new group has appointed its first officers and is in the process of writing a constitution, before seeing if it can apply for funding as a new organisation. Once we have more news about the group’s progress, we will make it available. In the meantime, you can write to David at his home address: 9 Simson Court, Beverely HU17 9ED.

English Heritage and the National Trust have just launched a national 'History Matters' campaign, while the Heritage Lottery Fund is claiming that Local Heritage Initiative grants over the past six years have changed the face of local heritage for ever and that, for the first time, communities are taking an interest in the history on their doorstep. But the irony in Hull is that work on a new £10.7 million history and archive centre will start in 2007, with completion in in summer 2009 — £7.7 million is coming from the HLF — at the same time as the Local History Unit is being closed.

Of course the History Matters campaign is a great idea, while the LHI has pumped millions into local heritage projects around the country and Hull’s new history centre is going to be a marvellous facility, but what none of the media packs or press releases from these organisations do is to acknowledge those individuals and groups already working to conserve and protect the local historic environment in all its manifestations. Talking to David Sherwood and Chris Ketchell, the realisation dawned on me that many us have not learnt to 'spin'. If we had, we would realise that heritage is ‘good’, but history can be other things as well – ‘embarrassing’ for instance.

The Hull Local History Unit have been fighting for funding since day one and, despite a fantastic track record, have always fallen foul of funding rules which look for new projects, so that boxes can be ticked and the government or funders can be told that so many new projects have started; no one ever asks how many have closed because the money has run out. Hull’s new history centre will almost certainly have a team of outreach workers to ensure that the social inclusion agenda is addressed, but none of this is likely to happen for the next three years. In the meantime a project which has been achieving all these objectives, and more besides, for the last twenty-two years has been allowed to die, with its huge collection of documents and papers to be picked over and what others regard as unimportant consigned to the dustbin!

Hull College have chosen to stay mum and appear to have given Chris Ketchell little time to try and save the Unit from closure. Despite numerous attempts to find a spokesperson at Hull College to get their perspective on why the Unit’s funding is being withdrawn, I have been unable to make contact. In Local History Magazine No.99 (Nov/Dec 2004), I wrote a full page news story, ‘Funding cuts could be good news’, which explained how the government’s Learning and Skills Council (LSC) was under instructions to concentrate funding on raising literacy, numeracy and IT skills among 16–19 year olds. As I wrote at the time, ‘The days of public funding for local history courses are all but over’ and that it was also an opportunity for local historians ‘to take local history learning along new and exciting pathways to a brighter and more enriching future for participants from all sections of our wonderfully diverse society’. In the next issue of the magazine (No.100), William Tyler, a former Principal of Manchester's College of Adult Education, took me to task and asked ‘where, without the infrastructural support of universities and colleges, will the resources and expertise come from to reach into non middle class and ethnic areas of our inner cities?

In the circumstances, Hull College should be praised for managing to find the money to keep the Local History Unit going as long as they did, but it is a pity that no one at the College has the wit or wisdom to give Chris the time or help needed to find a source of new funding. Nor should Kingston upon Hull City Council be allowed to put their hands up and say ‘nothing to do with us’. Someone had the vision, the time and resources to put together a major HLF bid and they also realised that to talk up the bid they would have to mention the importance which they placed on social inclusion, yet they either forgot or chose to ignore the obvious plight of Chris Ketchell and the Local History Unit, for they allowed it to languish and die in the back room of a crumbling library when, relative to size of the HLF bid, for a few pounds they had a ready-made social inclusion outreach team in place! Hull history’s changing fortunes should be about transition and progress, not needless closures and cancelled local history classes.

Surely, it isn’t too late to save Chris and his team, even if it takes the form of giving the new Hull & District Local History Research Group funding to employ Chris and act as an embryonic local history (or ‘heritage’ if that gets the money) social inclusion unit until the new history centre opens in 2009?

Robert Howard

A model of the proposed new Hull History Centre by Pringle Richards Sharratt Ltd. Construction is due to commence in 2007, with completion in summer 2009.