Living Museums is dedicated to history and heritage projects - created with and for young people
The Rise of the Lancashire Textile Industry
and the Cotton Famine 1861-65
In 1984, Dorothy Heathcote led a three-day project at Higher Mill Textile Museum in Helmshore, Lancashire. Some of her M.Ed. students worked in role. The drama was about life for workers in a mill like Higher Mill in the 19th century.
Some 500 children took part. Rick Lee recalled that
the mill was so powerfully and richly present, that we had to work extra hard to create a drama about a mill, precisely because we were in a mill.
The children who took part were given a role (or "frame"). There were three different “frames” for the older children (age 14-15):
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1. Sociologists investigating the phenomenon of longevity “round here.”
2. Researchers resurrecting a 150 years-dead “woollen" ritual.
3. A group of “show-ers” who could re-enact small incidents around the mill, based on partial evidence.
The last frame suggests that the participants were acting as historical re-enactors, using evidence to demonstrate incidents or work practices – as museum workers in a “living history” museum might do. This may also have been the case with frame #2 – the participants were not “living through” an event, but recreating and demonstrating it (possibly with a future audience in mind).
This is in accord with one of Dorothy’s principles in the teaching of history:
If you're going to study history, you can only do it from your own time. That’s all you've got… you can never know it as the people who lived there, then, knew it. That you can apply your imagination, you can scrutinise the evidence, but you belong to the 20th century... We cannot live the lives we didn’t. (1)
The younger children (10-11) already knew the mill. They were framed as:
1. Mill workers
2. Mill families
3. Police officers on a refresher course, exercising their investigative skills on a 150-year-old “cold,” “unsolved case.”
This was the guiding principle behind the work: "All these frames enabled the mill to be investigated, not shown around."
This is a key element in Dorothy's approach: students should not simply be “shown round” museums or heritage sites, they should investigate.
Sources: “Two Mules Waiting” by Rick Lee, in Drama Broadsheet (NATD, Winter 1984), except (1) Making Drama Work: In the Classroom, Tape 2 (University of Newcastle, 1992).