Even Steam Engines are "racist" it seems

I think you could probably do both, but you'd have to be really on top of your game. For example, many railways have attached museums, and the more serious interpretation could be there. As an example, I'd seen lots of locos on display that say what their TE and weight is, who designed them and so on; rather less about what the working conditions were like in the workshops or on shed at the time they were built. There's space for both.

Or to give a C&W example: a notice in a carriage may mention that it was made of teak and mahogany; a really advanced notice may say that such woods are hard to source now, but can be replaced by iroko and sapele; but very few would go into why it was in Victorian and Edwardian times we had ready access to good quality teak and mahogany. Actually there is a good story there: why were pre-war carriages made of teak, but post war they had to resort to cheap wood painted to resemble teak (or just not pretend at all)? That's an interesting story that goes beyond the pure engineering.

I'd also point out, à propos your comment about railways not wanting to put uncomfortable messages in front of visitors just out for a good time: generally railways want to get a couple of messages in front of visitors:

1. Hope you had a good time. Please come back, and please let your friends know you had a good time
2. Everything you see around you exists because of the hard work and dedication of a mostly volunteer workforce, supported by donations from generous donors. Would you like to help, by volunteering or donating?

So "there's an uncomfortable history to these wonderful machines being made by often very young labourers working very long hours" might then be no better than third on the list ...

(Disclaimer: my great grandfather died in an industrial accident at Horsted Keynes while maintaining the railway: taken railway wide not an uncommon experience at the time. But the railway doesn't;t have a good explanatory section in the museum about the conditions under which manual maintenance work was carried out, nor the gradual development of improvements in health and safety (better regulation, shorter hours etc) over that time. In as much as railway history tends to explore safety , it tends to be very signalling focused - i.e. accident A led to rule X and development of safety system Q.)

Tom

 

I'd like to see that balance too, I'd say there's room for it on heritage lines but getting the balance right and using the right language and tone is of paramount importance. I think once you've reassured the visitor that they're allowed to have a good time and a fun day out, and you as the museum/heritage official aren't seeking to prohibit that, then following on from that, you can open the door to a sensitive conversation about some of troubling aspects of railway history and how items/artefacts on the line are part of that.
I'd say don't necessarily make it feel like a lecture, just give them food for thought and make them curious to find out a bit more in their own time.

Attached museums on heritage lines would be an interesting place to start. To be frank, some of them can sometimes feel like forgotten little corners in station yards on their respective lines, but there are some very good railway museums out there. The Museums of Scottish Railways at Bo'ness is certainly a strong, promiment example and would be a great candidate for such an exhibition space. As you say, the statistics regarding the mechanical properties of rolling stock are often easy to find, but giving the visitor an accurate view of life inside a railway works is often not shown that well. The noise, lighting, smells and dangers just don't come across when looking at a vehicle in a prototypically-clean, well-lit exhibition hall.

The teak story would be a great one to discuss in a museum context. Especially given that deforestation in the 21st century is a very big topic that regularly reppears in debates on the world stage.

Yep, I'd agree that 'having a good time' and 'would you like to volunteer/donate' are probably the 2 main messages you get from the typical day out on most heritage lines. But there's certainly the possibility of a well-organised heritage line trying to carefully get across some uncomfortable history here and there, just as long as those two main messages arent compromised or sacrificed in the process of doing so.

A select few people in our society like to highlight the navvys and workers of that time and then suddenly add this bravado-fuelled message of 'back when men were men' or some other tedious rubbish. They seem to think that dangerous health and safety regulations and long working hours that frequently lead to illness and/or death were something to be proud of. Which baffles me no end, I just can't fathom how they get to that conclusion.
There's a rather good Twitter account called OldRailwayAccidents (@RWLDproject) which often looks at smaller-scale incidents involving individual workers, as opposed to simply examining big crashes and the reforms that came after. Although I can appreciate that sort of content to, and can also therefore highly recommend Dan Fox and his 'Signals to Danger' podcast if you want bigger railway disasters/incidents and how they caused reforms to the system.

 

And thus this thread shows that it has achieved its intention, to make the perpetually angry even angrier.

Entirely coincidentally just a couple of minutes ago this popped up on Facebook....

 

What do you mean, you've never read the Railway Navvies of the SVR page on the unofficial SVR Wiki?

It's open edit. Much of this work was done by a volunteer, Graham Phillips.

Patrick

 

By any standards, it seems to me that 'First of Class' was decidedly arbitrary especially given that subsequent class members may well have distinguished themselves in various ways, Mallard being the most obvious example

 

No, the museums just need to return the items to museums in the states from which they were looted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benin_Bronzes

Here's the thing - the UK is **** hot on teaching children about other people's slavery. C19 US history right up to and including the Civil Rights movement is a staple on school curricula. Same for any discussion of the Roman Empire. Slavery and Britain the narrative is 'every one was doing it, [don't blame us] but WE abolished it first' [aren't we great]

That's great. It ought to be a display front and centre at the engine house. 'The people who built the SVR'.

There is a wealth of information there. With my critical hat on - and this is just where I think things could be fleshed out a bit - there is the discussion from the census data about where the navvies comes from. It would I think help to make sense to put it into the bigger picture about why there were so many Irish navvies.

It is worth noting that the documentary evidence means we see the navvies through the eyes of the state - court cases and accidents. And yet we are dealing with a group that is very much outside the system. Three things leapt out at me that could be expanded on explained - poaching is a common crime (add in the class dimension implicit in this). Why so much poaching (because wages are so low) the need to provide food? The place of children - there is the accident involving the child - so are they outside the education system? Finally, women clearly we have a mix of family groups and single men - what happens to a family if someone is sent to do a months hard labour in jail - does the workhouse beckon?

(An alternative argument would be to see poaching/theft etc as a typical 'weapon of the weak' but harder to demonstrate)

So I'd like to maybe see the causal and consequential mechanisms developed. It is the kind of stuff that adds the critical depth and the nuance to tell a complex story. (Which is what all history is about)

Finally there is of course a paradox here, on the one hand the narrative we have is of rural society being largely static with little movement, and yet here we have a huge number of itinerant workers and we can also observe the pressures that it puts on local state and society which is helps to situate the SVR in its wider local context.

 

I’m sick of the terms “revisionism” and “revisionist” - only ever in use by people not interested in doing any serious research to challenge their views. I’m sure this happens in all walks of life but discussing history it is uniquely parochial in railways to its detriment.

I am doing a treatment for a potential book on the railways of Palestine and am encountering similar attitudes in literature to that we’ve seen here.

 

Absolutely

This is why I mentioned it's open edit (hint) and an unofficial volunteer project. Someone would need to want to do it, and have the time to.

I think there's an exhibition at The Engine House 'Restoring Falling Sands' - "Discover the history of Falling Sands Viaduct and how the Severn Valley Railway worked hard to restore this feat of Victorian engineering. Plus, you’ll have the opportunity to hear the stories of those who worked to build the Viaduct originally!" Not quite 'history from below', but welcome all the same.

The SVR's also recently done some 'pioneering volunteers' oral histories, which I think is important.

Patrick

 

Ah, maybe you can discover the true story of the three 0395s which were sunk en route.

 

Thompson, Bulleid and now Palestine.... you do pick 'em don't you!

 

Just an observation - if the only place an object can be displayed is where it originated, that has interesting implications for how cultural knowledge is shared across the world.

Part of the value of many museums is trying way in which they bring together artefacts from many places and cultures and enable comparisons and contrasts.


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'Sharing' tends to imply 'choice' doesn't it…? If I share my food with you, it's an offer I make. If you take my food off my plate without my permission, that's hardly sharing, that's stealing.

I agree that it should be encouraged to show artefacts of interest around the world, and many museums have got very good at that over the years (I vaguely remember some steam locomotives making a long journey for an appearance here not that long ago). But that's a bit different from the 'finders keepers, losers weepers' approach some countries/museums have practiced over the years…

Simon

 

The issue is that they were stolen/looted. They should be returned for that reason.

No one is saying that artefacts can only be displayed in place of origin.

 

That’s why I say it’s a difficult question. The looting is a problem (though the definition of “looting” is itself problematic, as meaningful questioning over the Parthenon marbles highlights), but the question then starts to involve not just the moral benefit of repatriation but also the costs of taking those items off display where they are at present.

There are statutes of limitations in many places because it’s recognised that time is a factor in justice; this is IMHO one such place where time does matter.


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I'll remember that next time I nick someone's telly. 'Yes I know its stolen, but its way too expensive for me to take it off my wall and return to its owner'.....

 

Not what I meant, nor a fair comparison.

Taking the Benin bronzes as an example, the looting was late 19th/early 20th century - so at least a century ago. That begs questions about to whom restitution is made, and how the benefits of restitution fall.

If the effect of restitution is that they cease to be in public view in places where they are currently in public view, what does that say about the visibility of the culture that begat them?

It's also worth note that, if the artefacts are buried in museum storerooms somewhere, then my arguments for retention fall - this is about how world cultures are made visible.

 

Does this argument apply to the families of people who had things stolen by the Nazis?

As much as those who've benefited from stolen property (land, lives, resources, art etc) may wish it, there is no statute of limitations on restitution for injustice.

What happens to something after it is returned to its rightful owner is neither here nor there. If the families who had art stolen by the Nazis wish to sell it immediately on the open market (cf the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer) then so be it. If someone whose land has been stolen chooses not to farm etc and leaves it to return to nature so be it.

 

In answer to the direct question, then my honest answer is "I don't know". It should for those who were directly deprived, and the Nazi thefts raise some particularly difficult issues given the murders of both those whose property was stolen and some of their immediate families. However, in a related field - copyright - a result of generous provisions for creators is that descendants and those the copyright have been sold to have benefitted, undermining the claim in favour of copyright to encourage creativity.

I used the examples of the Benin Bronzes and Parthenon marbles because they highlight the challenges that exist. The Benin Bronzes were removed before the lifetime of any living person, so restitution is less personal and more collective. Similarly, Lord Elgin purchased the Parthenon Marbles from the Ottomans (then ruling Greece), but the evidence for the legitimacy of that purchase is debated and probably unknowable at this remove.

However, I come back to my more basic objection to the arguments being advanced for restitution - that they deny the possibility of parts of culture being of universal value. A week after the end of Black History Month, I'm particularly interested that an effect of the argument over the Benin Bronzes is that visibility of this culture may be significantly reduced.

 

Not really. If you want to own and display artefacts then you pay for them and acquire them legally.

 

Isn't that something for the current descendants or representatives of that culture to decide ? We have no automatic right to intrude into other cultures however interesting they may be. To suggest otherwise once again displays the arrogance of the colonialist mentality.