Home town history III

8/6/2016 0 Comments

Home town history III

Goodness me.
I just spent an interesting couple of hours at Whitwick historical society, which is located in the old railway station hut, and is run by several lovely, helpful ladies. They were making me laugh with some of their own historical familal anecdotes. One was telling me about an old female relative who had somewhat haughty pretensions and made out she was something special, but on her birth certificate it said, ‘born in a caravan in squalor’ and she was mortified when someone found out, and it subsequently became common knowledge.

Picked up some interesting information on:

The Whitwick 1851 census – names and ages of children and their employment.
The Whitwick frameworkers enquiry – all about the investigationa (and subsequent prosecution) into the bad treatment and poor pay of the framework knitters of Whitwick.
Several unpublished autobiographical texts.

That should keep me busy for a while.

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I recently completed an academic research project (MPhil) about working-class women’s autobiographies. Now I’m writing my own...

To cut a long story short:

My dad and both my grandads were coal miners. I was born in Coalville. I belong on this website.
I returned to education as a mature student: got a couple of A-levels, went to university; got a BA, an MA, a PhD, and an MPhil. It was not as easy as that. It was not as quick as that. But I did.
I have spent most of my adult-life studying something. Generally something to do with English literature: mainly something to do with working-class women. My MA is about Women and God – inspired by and emotively written through my experiences as a pupil at Catholic primary and secondary schools. My PhD and MPhil projects are about working-class women writers – inspired and emotively written through my experiences as a working-class woman in a materialistic and class-ridden society. When I was an undergraduate at university, there wasn’t a module about working-class writing. There just wasn't. I didn’t study any working-class texts. I just didn’t. I once gave a research paper about my PhD (ie: talking about my work) and I remember someone laughingly said, ‘Was there a recession in the 1980s? I must have missed that.’ That just about sums it up.
I have had no working-class peers. I found them in my reading and writing. In my reading and writing I found myself.

Welcome to my blog.
It's basically about me.It’s called ‘My Travel Blog’ (because I’m time travelling through my memories of the past). See what I did there?

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