Skip to main content

Dark Tourism: Session 1

Witness Seminar

Published onMay 23, 2022
Dark Tourism: Session 1

Law, Crime and History

Volume 10, issue 1 (2022): 57-96

© The Author(s) 2022

ISSN: 2045-9238

Witness Seminar

DARK TOURISM: SESSION 1

Location: University of Plymouth

Date: 7 November 2019

Organised by: Dr Simone Schroff, Lecturer in Law, University of Plymouth

Chair: Professor Judith Rowbotham, Visiting Research Fellow, University of Plymouth

Abstract

In association with Culture and Heritage Exchange (CHEx) and funding from the ESRC, this witness seminar series on dark tourism addressed the popular demand for sensationalism and the response from tourism professionals and specialists. The discussion included contributions from Chris Wilkes (Bodmin Jail), Ruth Heholt (Falmouth University), Alan Bricknell (Ford Park Cemetery) and business and tourism PhD candidates Andrew Fry and Alex Rowe (University of Plymouth) among others. The discussion focused on a range of issues that included the challenges associated with dark tourism and its ethical presentation. The seminars also focus on tourism in the South West of England and discusses Cornwall’s spiritual connections, Bodmin Jail Museum’s recent renovations, and the effects of mainstream popular culture - such as the recent BBC adaptation of Winston Graham’s Poldark series - on tourism.

Transcript

NAME

CONTENT

Judith Rowbotham (chair)

Welcome everybody to a smaller than originally envisaged Witness Seminar day. What we do with a Witness Seminar actually works with a small number almost better than it does with a large number, so, while I would’ve liked there to be more people here, please don’t think that this won’t form an extremely valuable resource afterwards because there are people here who are going to have a chance not just to give their own issues, their own statements, their own experiences, but also we will have a much better and more fruitful discussion. So, thank you all for coming. I think one of the other things to stress from the start is that a Witness Seminar is about providing a resource. It’s about providing something which goes beyond the official record. So much of what people know, we don’t express, we don’t record in the way that once we would’ve done because we rely on text, on telephones, on a variety of means of communicating which actually leave no permanent record. So, the Witness Seminar idea started with an attempt to recover hidden histories in areas like contemporary politics and things like that and that’s where I became conscious of the way in which Witness Seminars are going to be an absolutely invaluable resource for the future. I realised that it could become much more when I chaired a panel at a conference in Liverpool and that conference focussed on a group of us in the Time-Lock team sitting down and saying that we all believed what we were doing. We were a team. We were working together for heaven’s sake. We had regular meetings and there were my colleagues leaning across and saying “I didn’t know you thought about it like that, I didn’t know that that was your view” and so in many ways, because the Time-Lock team is working in the area of dark heritage by focussing on crime, on law and in particular we have a project looking at penal transportation, it seems that we could benefit and we hope that other people with an interest in dark heritage could also benefit from a panel such as this, a session such as this, where we discuss what we think is going on, we think are the priorities, we think are the issues. I should say that I have been involved in aspects of dark heritage since Kim Stevenson and I first started working together when we were at Nottingham Trent University and we became involved with the Galleries of Justice, which is the national museum of crime and law. We first put together some of the issues that they deal with. I should say that we are not involved with the way that the Galleries of Justice have recently gone. It’s given me, in particular, some shivers to see the way that they’ve done some displays. I am very proud to say, however, that I was one of the key consultants on the Lincoln Castle Reveal project, which worked on Lincoln Prison. So, it’s through that that I’m coming to this particular panel. I’d like to start by reminding people that this is being recorded. The Chatham House rules don’t apply, because apart from anything else, we’re not about sensationalism, except discussing it in a heritage sense and the issues and the challenges. We don’t want to ask embarrassing questions. We only want you to share what you feel comfortable sharing and you get the chance to look at any comments that you’ve made afterwards and to moderate them, adapt them. So, this is not under Chatham House rules, so what you say gets recorded, but it can, if you on reflection afterwards, when you see the transcript, become uncomfortable, it can be redacted. So, that is something which I hope, as a reminder, will aid the freedom and the enjoyment of this conversation. Please for the tape, could you identify yourself or I will yell an identification if necessary, when you speak. What I’m going to do is involve the audience very much from the start, rather than conduct it more formally. So, what I’d like to do is go around the table and get everybody to just briefly introduce themselves and then we can proceed. I’m going to ask Chris Wilkes and Ruth Heholt to take the lead initially with Alan, and then we can proceed on that basis. So, I’m Judith Rowbotham.

Chris Wilkes

I’m Chris Wilkes. I’m the commercial manager of Bodmin Jail.

Andrew Fry

I’m Andrew Fry. I’m a PhD student at Plymouth.

Rob Giles

I’m Rob Giles. I’m a member of the Time-Lock and ChitChat team.

Mike Leigh

I’m Mike Leigh. Retired. Just a member of the general public, along with interest.

Carol Verity

I’m Carol Verity. The same. I’m Michael’s wife. It did interest me a lot actually, the talk, simply because I’ve been to places like the London Dungeon, which not only interested me, but it just shocked me terribly, and I feel that there’s something to do with that in this.

Alex Rowe

I’m Alex Rowe and I’m a PhD student in tourism here at the University of Plymouth.

Jill Annison

I’m Jill Annison and I’m an Honorary Fellow at Plymouth.

Molly Buxton

I’m Molly Buxton and I’m a law student at Plymouth University.

Karen Bond

Karen Bond, very newly appointed criminology and employability project officer here at the university.

Arta Jalili Idrissi

I’m Arta Jalili Idrissi and I’m a PhD student here at Plymouth.

Kim Stevenson

Kim Stevenson and I’m a retired professor of law, crime and history.

Alan Bricknell

I’m Alan Bricknell. I run the heritage team at Ford Park Cemetery as a volunteer.

Ruth Heholt

I’m Ruth Heholt, senior lecturer in English at Falmouth University.

Judith Rowbotham

Kim, before we go any further, could you go and give Michael Kandiah a ring, because he’s just tried to call me.

Kim Stevenson

Yes.

Judith Rowbotham

Thanks very much. Chris, could you say a little bit about yourself in more detail. You said CEO of Bodmin Jail, but, explain a little bit more about that.

Chris Wilkes

Ok. Some of you may have heard of it, some of you may have visited, but Bodmin Jail is the former county prison. It’s been on the same site since the late 1700’s. It was the county prison. Closed in the late 1920’s and was sold by the sector. Since then it’s had quite a chequered history, but throughout that, and literally since the demolition boys bought it in 1929, it has been a site of interest. It has seen 55 executions in or around its grounds whilst in operation and from about 1930 onwards it has been a site of mock executions. As a specific tourist site, that has really sort of grown through the late 60’s and the early 70’s. I joined the team there about 16 years ago where we had around 32,000 visitors and we’ve flexed and grown that to about 76,000 a year now. We were acquired by one of our visitors in 2015 because he kind of quite liked the place and now well through spending somewhere around 42 million pounds of his money renovating and improving the jail, putting in a nine million pound attraction and education centre with an immersive experience within it, and also a 70-room four-star hotel which is to be operated by one of the world’s larger and branded American operators of note, called Interstate. The 70,000-odd visitors we see now, together with an extremely capable marketing and brand visioning team, intend to take our visitor headcount to around 200 to 220,000 a year. We’re putting in a new 300 space carpark with coach handling facilities. The attraction will be open in May and the hotel element will follow in November. So, all in all, if you look at the site, it has an interest, it has a very, very chequered history. Some of it is extremely dark. Some of it is quite humorous. Why do people come and have a look? They want to buy an experience in time. They want to immerse themselves in what went on, the stories, the tales. They want to give themselves a better understanding. Some people come to us because they are actually just genuinely interested. Others, they want to learn specific facts, trace family. Some have a morbid fascination, which is quite interesting actually, and I kind of guess that’s probably what leads into dark tourism, but I guess that’s probably something to come onto a little later.

Judith Rowbotham

Ruth, could you say a little bit about yourself and what the focus of your work and research is and how you feel that relates to dark heritage.

Ruth Heholt

I come from largely Victorian studies, so, I tend to go backwards and look at the rise of crime fiction. Crime fiction in particular, again coming back to what you were saying, just why it’s so interesting and why people are so absolutely fascinated with crime. It’s the biggest selling genre entirely in the UK and probably around the world. Everywhere you look, all over Netflix, all over the best-seller lists, it’s crime and it’s crime and it’s crime again. So, I tend to go right the way back to the Newgate novels, for example. The intersection between real crime and crime fiction, and then how that rose with tourism, and again this site tourism where people come back to the places where things have gone wrong. I’m also going to, probably today, come from a Cornish perspective, where we have the idea of the lawless Cornish and the idea of West Barbary, the barbarian coast, Cornwall used to be called the West Barbary; and dark tourism in Cornwall, which is still to do with crime of the pirates and the smuggling and that sort of thing as well.

Judith Rowbotham

Alan, could you say a little about …

Alan Bricknell

Right, yes. When I retired about 11 years ago, I was looking for a project to immerse myself in. most of my family and relatives are buried up at Ford Park Cemetery, which although it is now a working cemetery, back in 1999 it sort of disappeared under about four foot of brambles, and it looked like at one point the Council were going to turn it into housing, but fortunately as a charitable trust, we took it over and have turned it back into a fully working cemetery. But it is really the heritage that I’m interested in because we have about quarter of a million people buried in the cemetery, going back to 1848. For a period from about 1850 to 1910, it was probably the only place you could be buried in Plymouth, Devonport or Stonehouse because the Council and the health departments had closed down most of the graveyards around the churches for health reasons. So, what we do as a heritage team is, we try and bring back to life the heritage of the people that are buried there. We put on four exhibitions each year from research we have done and with each exhibition, we put on a guided walk around the cemetery relating to that theme. Depending on the theme depends really on how many people turn up. So, if we have a theme on, say, Devonport heritage or sporting personalities, we might get 15, 20, maybe 25 people come along to one of these walks. If it’s a little bit more juicy, shall we say, like accidental death, something like that, we may get 30 or 40 people. Several years ago, we put together an exhibition and a walk called ‘Murder Mystery and Mayhem’ and on the day of the walk, over 100 people turned up, which was quite a shock to us. Fortunately, we have enough volunteers and enough amplification equipment to be able to take that size group around the cemetery, but it was quite an eye-opener to us that on a theme like that there were so many people who were fascinated by this subject. We’ve put it on three times and each time we’ve had over 100 people. At one time we did it of an evening walk where put out 100s and 100s of tealight candles, just to light the cemetery and make more of an atmosphere and everybody absolutely loved it. We also lay on private walks and as I say, we have a number of themes. We offer these private walks on a theme basis and we say, well, here’s 10 different themes, and you won’t be surprised to know that almost without exception, people come back and say we want to do ‘Murder Mystery and Mayhem’. So, that’s really my contribution to dark tourism and obviously we can talk more about that as we progress. Thank you.

Judith Rowbotham

Right, what I’d like to do is start asking Alan, Ruth and Chris a number of questions and getting their comments and reflections and then throw this open to all of the rest of you for your comments and reactions. I’m going to start with Chris. Chris, does the responsibility of making choices relating to aspects of Bodmin Jail’s heritage weigh heavy on you or is it something which you don’t really worry about?

Chris Wilkes

I worry about it constantly. We have to get it right. You have to get it right and that’s at so many levels. If I can sort of wind back, if you look at the base level as individuals, ok, you’ve all sat in a car, gone down a road, there’s been a car crash, what do you do? You rubberneck. You’ve heard of something terrible, you’ve seen it on the telly, a partner, a friend comes home, oh my god, did you see that? You start talking and immersing yourself in the story of what you’ve just seen or heard or whatever. All of that comes into a label. Let’s call it morbid fascination and for some that is a very strong instinct, for others it hardly features. So, bearing that in mind, when we have to think about the stories that we are trying to recount, one, they’ve got to be accurate and if you don’t know, don’t make it up, because somebody reading it might know more than you and then they’re going to get on TripAdvisor and go “that’s a load of rubbish” and you’ve lost your credibility. You are only ever as good as your last lunch. But, if you get it right and you get the balance right, you are retelling history, you are engaging, you are stimulating and you’re creating a discussion. Now for us, that balance has to sit from a six-year-old to an 86-year-old. It can’t be too dark that it gives your children or your grandchildren nightmares. You have to balance that and yet for people of our age or people in their twilight years, they’ve got to be able to come along and actually think this isn’t childish and that it’s right. So yeah, we are custodians of history. It has to be correct. It has to be balanced and it’s got to be told in a way that’s easily digestible and isn’t war and peace. So, there is a great responsibility to get it right.

Judith Rowbotham

Alan. The issues of responsibility. You were talking about the murder aspects.

Alan Bricknell

Yes. The first thing I would say is that we are obviously conscious of the fact that we have people who will come along to these talks and walks who have relatives buried in the cemetery and obviously we must respect that. So, one of the first things that we agreed is that we would not include in our walks people that were buried after the Second World War. So, we only go up to about 1945. So, anything that’s a bit too raw, as it were, a bit too close to home, we avoid. But we do try and tell the stories in an entertaining way and even though they might be gruesome, there can be humour in gruesome as there is in a lot of things that we watch on the telly. So, there is a balance that we have to adopt. There is one story … towards the end of our ‘Murder Mystery and Mayhem’, there is a headstone which says … it’s on this chap’s mother’s grave because he’s remembered there, but it says “murdered by savages on the island of Espiritu Santo” and immediately that invokes all sorts of ideas. I mean savages, people that we would now call, as it were, inhabitants of an island just going about their own business. This chap was actually a slave trader who was taking people off this island and then shipping them to the sugar plantations of Australia.

Judith Rowbotham

A blackbird.

Alan Bricknell

Yeah, a blackbird, exactly. So, it’s a very interesting story. He had his opportunity to recant, as it were. He was taken into custody by the authorities. He was put in jail, but his lawyer got him off on a technicality that he wasn’t actually slave trading, he was offering these natives an apprenticeship, shall we say, for two years, and then at the end of that apprenticeship they were free to go back to their islands. But of course, they weren’t paid, they had no transport and so on. So, his lawyer got him off and instead of thinking better of himself, he went back to his old ways and the islanders finally caught up with him. I was telling this story and we had a group of people along and afterwards two people came to me and said “this chap is related to us” and so I said “have I done anything to offend you?” and they said “no, we were absolutely fascinated by the fact that we have somebody remembered here in the cemetery and now we know a lot more about him that we didn’t know before”. And they wrote me a rather nice email later, a few days later, telling me how much they enjoyed it. So, when we’re telling these stories we to tell them in a way that is respectful as well as entertaining. We do try and take our responsibility very seriously.

Judith Rowbotham

Just maybe helpful to add to that, this entrenches on the work that I did for my PhD back in the dim distant past. We won’t say quite how many years ago, when I was looking at Colonial Office policy and the parliamentary undersecretary for the colonies in the 1870’s, and what was a long-established habit was for people we would now call slave traders. Going to the various Pacific islands and getting people to sign indentured labour contracts and taking them off to work on the sugar plantations in Australia, it was something which greatly exercised the Colonial Office at the time and it led to the Pacific Islanders Protection Act 1872. It would be very interesting to know the date of that because that would tell you a great deal more about whether or not your individual was flouting the Act or whether he was actually operating as part of the run-up to that because there were several scandals that were caused and a great concern in the Colonial Office about the islands like Fiji. It’s one of the reasons why we end up acquiring Fiji. In fact, it’s because Fiji had become an important source for us for high quality cotton. The various islanders were getting a little unhappy and so you were getting various riots. You were getting interruption to trade essentially. That’s what ends up persuading the Colonial Office to first take on Fiji and then they’re able to bring in, along with the various other islands, the Pacific Islanders Protection Act and begin to bring an end to that form of indentured labour. Chris Wilkes.

Chris Wilkes

Thank you. Just picking up on one word in your closing remarks, ‘respect’. It’s something that we have to be extremely careful of as well. You have families researching the history. Some of those families don’t know what they are going to come across. There are specifically two that stand out in my memory. One was a lady that got in touch with me a couple of years ago and when we uncovered her family’s past, she was actually a direct descendant of a child murderer. Now, this was something that, emotionally, she literally could not handle, and had blackened the name and the honour of the family. So, tenderness, sensitivity, respect and the manner of delivery of the information … and again if you are talking about loved ones in your churchyard, same thing. But then, getting it right, the other side … there’s a very well-known case in Cornwall for two gentlemen, the Lightfoot brothers, 1840, a time when death masks were being made. We have a resident model maker and through research actually remade two death masks of these particular gentlemen. The family came along, again researching the history; mum, dad and two children come and see us, asked to view the death masks and again, the lady breaks down in tears because it’s a bang-on facsimile of the relative and a known birthmark they all have, a dimple. So again, dealing with these things in a tender and sensitive way, with respect, is extremely important.

Karen Bond

Can I just say something following on from that? Following on from that, I visited, about four or five years ago, I went to Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin which was a very personal thing for me because I come from a very big Irish family. We had a lot of members of Sinn Fein back in the day, so it was very, very important to me that I went to visit there as part of my trip to Dublin. Respect is the overwhelming theme there. It’s absolutely fabulous. Yes, it’s very dark. There are some very hard things to see and to read about, but the fact that they’ve made the parade ground area where they actually executed the people from the Easter Rising, that is now a national monument. They are very clear when you go in there. There are things that they will not allow you to do. Nobody can eat or chew gum while they’re within the gaol. They’re very clear on that. They’re very clear that this whole place is a national monument. Yes, it is a gaol, but it’s very much about … the emphasis is on the Easter Rising and the aftermath. To me, that actually helped with the history part and it helped, for me, with the reconciliation with the whole Easter Rising and the aftermath and everything that’s happened in Ireland since. It doesn’t take away from the horrors, the same as I also went to the Famine Walk afterwards, along the Liffey and walked through the statues that they’ve built there. They’ve made bronze statues of people who were actually walking to the famine ships to get away from the potato famine. None of that takes away from how horrific it was, but it does add to the feeling of respect and reconciliation for me. I think that’s really important.

Judith Rowbotham

Could I just bring Ruth in here because I think that one of the things that would be interesting to think about is, from your perspective as someone who’s looked at literature and the fiction and the faction, do you think this responsibility, this sense of responsibility and the need to show respect is something that was there in the past?

Ruth Heholt

It depends what you’re looking at I suppose. With a lot of it, no, to tell the truth. With the 1830’s, 1850’s, mid-19th century crime fictions, including Dickens, something like ‘Oliver Twist’, there is a certain amount of respect, but there is, like we were saying earlier, there is quite a lot of sensationalism. We get the Newgate novels of the 1830’s and 40’s, which are directly associated, obviously, with London and Newgate Jail, morphing into the sensation fictions of the 1860’s, and it is all about sensationalism and it’s all about murder, mayhem, adultery and terribleness. However, from my point of view, I think actually that there’s a sort of necessity for it because we’re in a quite tight moralistic, very patriarchal Victorian times and the argument is that actually that sort of sensationalism allows a certain expression and it allows a space for people like women and for other people who often don’t have a voice, including working-class people. Within the crime thing, one of the things we know it does is it sets the boundaries. So, the crime fiction allows those boundaries to be transgressed, which shows up exactly where the boundaries are, where there’s unfairness, where there’s injustice, where there’s poverty, where there’s victimisation and abuse, and so the sensationalism, in a way, the argument is, and I tend to go along with it, is that actually it’s quite useful.

Judith Rowbotham

Chris Wilkes again.

Chris Wilkes

Just picking up on two words, ‘Victorian’, ‘expressionism’. If you ever get the chance and if you haven’t, I strongly suggest you do, go to Highgate Cemetery. That is the most amazing window on everything you’re talking about.

Ruth Heholt

Exactly. I used to live near Abney Park Cemetery. It’s the same.

Chris Wilkes

It’s remarkable. The structures in there, the expense that people went to, to remember the dead. The mausolea with rooflights in them, so on a weekend the family could descend the crypt and take food and be amongst the dead. The Victorian books of the dead, the photographs, the whole lot. Actually, that is morbid fascination. It’s that connection with it. It is the remembering and recollection with the past.

Ruth Heholt

Absolutely.

Chris Wilkes

I actually found it an amazing window. The fact that you read the headstones and it was “Mr Smith of Acacia Street” or whatever it might be, everybody had labels, so, you’re talking about hierarchy, absolutely. I don’t think there is any better display of it than a quick walk around that cemetery.

Ruth Heholt

You’re absolutely right and they talk about the Victorian cult of death and cults of mourning. Mortality, particularly child mortality, was so ridiculously high. It’s a case of living with death. One of the things about dark tourism is that idea that it helps, and it really can help. It can help people to come to terms with death, but also living in amongst some terrible things.

Alan Bricknell

One of the walks that we do around the cemetery is actually themed around Victorian symbolism. We look at the different tombs and the different things they put in terms of roses and flowers and casks. We’ve got one big tomb there. It’s got an enormous cross. It must be about six-foot high and a woman clinging to it sort of weeping. This whole aspect of how Victorians used to use the tomb as very much a place to go and visit. Plymouth, back in Victorian times, there were many slum areas and therefore at that time Ford Park Cemetery was a green space, an open space, where they could come at the weekends and bring their picnics and spend time in there just (a) remembering the dead, but also having some fresh air away from the slums.

Chris Wilkes

I heard a quote yesterday and it was actually a striking one and I decided to write it down. It kind of sums up the woman clinging to the cross – “God is what you choose to believe through faith”. If you go back to the times of the Romans or the Egyptians worshipping the sun, god. So again, a woman clutching a cross, the belief, the faith. It’s symbolism, isn’t it? It’s whatever that symbol is. Interesting.

Karen Bond

Karen again. It’s also what gets you through, isn’t it? You say the cult of death, maybe a better word would be the ‘culture’ of death and how people deal with death. I grew up in Hong Kong and because Hong Kong is such a very small island and so very over-populated, there is simply no room to bury people. They have a festival which is usually around Easter time, on their Chinese lunar calendar, called ‘Ching Ming’. What happens is that after so many years of burial, they dig up the bodies and they clean the bones and they put them in urns and these urns are all kept on great tiered-like amphitheatres. Every year on ‘Ching Ming’ the families go, and they have a picnic. They take all the extended family and they’ll have a picnic and they get the bones out and polish them. It’s their way of connecting with their dead relatives. It’s absolutely beautiful, it really is. I know there are people who if they hear about that would think oh my god, that’s awful. Dark tourism. Why would you go and dig up bones and then polish them? But actually, it’s their way of connecting with their ancestors and it’s absolutely beautiful.

Ruth Heholt

This is Ruth again. One of the things I look at an awful lot is Victorian spiritualism and the idea of the supernatural and the idea of the dead never leaving you and always being there. The comforts that come from that and also, I think, a lot of the tourism in Cornwall is related to the idea of magic and supernatural as well. The standing stones and the witchcraft museum. Cornwall is the land of myth and magic and it all relates back, again, largely to death and how people conceive of it. How they conceive their relatives and their own mortality. Spiritualism in Victorian times, in particular, was about communicating with your dead.

Chris Wilkes

Yeah. Morbid fascination, isn’t it?

Jane Sanderson

Jane. Hi. I was just thinking Ruth, when you said about Cornwall having particular history, would that also possibly be due to its Celtic nature?

Ruth Heholt

Definitely.

Jane Sanderson

You’ve also mentioned about the Irish. Myself also, I’m Anglo-Irish and it’s quite interesting just to observe in my family alone, the different traditions and rituals and how vast the difference can be between the attitude towards death from English or Irish relatives. Funerals. Whether you speak about the person that’s departed or not. They’re kind of like chalk and cheese. The English funeral is being sat around with a cup of tea, not talking about the person or sugar-coating, perhaps, their characteristics. Whereas, like myself, you’ve probably experienced the Irish funeral. It’s very much a celebration of life. You’ll make jokes. Tell stories about them, maybe even call them the odd naughty name. Often, a lot of my relatives would get very much drunk and fall over, which, once again, wouldn’t be the done thing to be done at an English funeral. I don’t feel like it’s a celebration of their life at an English funeral as much as at a Celtic …

Karen Bond

No, it’s about the mourning, isn’t it? If you’ve got a Celtic heritage, it’s more about celebrating the person that was, and as you say, that continues if you believe that they might not be visible, but they’re still there.

Ruth Heholt

This is one of the things about the Celtic fringes, is that they are on the margins. There are different types of … even going towards superstitions, and the idea that they’re not … particularly Cornwall and Ireland too, probably, they’re not really connected with England, they’re sort of hanging off the edge. It’s more to do with the sea, which again, Ireland will be, and those margins and the permeation of those margins, than mainland England and the urban.

Andrew Fry

Andrew Fry again. Can I ask a question because I’m trying to think of questions to ask the people in my research? There seems to be a bit of a recurring theme coming from the people who manage attractions here and that theme seems to be that the people who go there have experienced death or loss and that might be one of their motivators to why, all of a sudden, they’re interested in dark tourism. I sort of want to ask you guys, do you think that that could be the case, and if you were to ask the people who come there have they recently experienced a loss, what percentage of the people that come there do you think would state that that was the case and that they were there because they were somehow trying to deal with that loss?

Jane Sanderson

I think it’s a cultural thing. It depends on which culture the person that you’re asking (a) whether they mind you asking and (b) their reaction to it. Because once again, just from my own personal experience, I think the English side of the family would mind, whereas the Irish side of my family would be more than happy to sit down and talk to you about it at length.

Chris Wilkes

I don’t genuinely think that people come to a place such as Bodmin Jail because they have experienced a passing in their family. Principally, what are they doing? Everybody around this table has enough clothes, you’ve got mobile phones, you’ve got cars, you don’t need things, so, with the disposable income that you have you choose how to spend it, and you choose to buy an experience, be it going to Alton Towers and white-knuckle rides or a castle somewhere, and thinking of medieval periods, National Trust or a county jail. You want to immerse yourself in that because somewhere there is a trigger, there is an interest and you want to learn about it, experience it, have conversation pieces, possibly get a little bit spooked up by it or stimulated. I don’t think bereavement within a family would be a driver for coming to us, unless of course, you were a relative of somebody that was despatched to eternity whilst with us. We do have the only fully working execution pit in the UK. So again, that is treated with great reverence and respect and it does bring around some amazing conversations, but I don’t think that people that have lost family come to us for that reason.

Alan Bricknell

No, I would agree. Even though we are a cemetery and so it is a place where you might think people would want to do that, I think that the people that come along to our walks and our talks are really looking for an entertainment. They’re looking for a story. I mean, instead of reading a book, they’re coming along and wanting somebody to tell them a story. We do try and do that. We try and keep our talks at each graveside to about three or four minutes, just a brief history of that person. I think in the main, it is looking for, as Chris was saying, an entertainment, something to spend their time and learn something new. So, education maybe as well as entertainment.

Jill Annison

Could I come in? Jill Annison. I think all your different scenarios are really quite fascinating. I’m a criminologist and also very interested in family history. I’ve been to various sites that connect with what you’re saying. I suppose one of the troubling things I find is people wanting to romanticize what happened and essentially find a good person when they’re making their enquiries or an intriguing person or a bit of a wrong ’un who didn’t do anything too bad. Certainly, you’ve both given examples where people have been quite troubled with what they’ve discovered. So, I suppose I’ve got an immediate issue and then a follow-up that I may follow-up later, but this issue of romanticization, you know, a lot of what happened in these places was very mundane. Day-to-day experiences, actually, would’ve been quite ordinary. I suppose to go back to one of the earlier points that we discussed, how do you present it, what stories are you putting forward?

Chris Wilkes

It’s a very good point. If you actually look at the history and there are about 30,000-odd custody records, yeah, there were people in for nicking a loaf of bread. There were people in for being drunk and disorderly. There is a tremendous window on history over a couple hundred of years that is very mundane, and you have some of these big murder cases or things … selling your wife at a market because you’d had enough of her. There are just every now and then, snapshot cases. So, it’s just taking a raft of those and interpreting them in a way that is respectful, that actually does factualise it. You are right, you do get people who come along and romanticize. If you think of the world of the paranormal, we get a lot of paranormal visitors that come to us. Some very factual. Some very inquisitive and some with a genuine interest in learning. You will get others who have watched too much of certain tv mediums, and if they could literally buy a colander to stick on their head in the gift-shop and say “do you feel it?” as they’re walking around, they would. No word of a lie. So, you’ve got such a broad church. You’re right, the truth can be so badly deflected by people who are going off on one by what they’re seeing in front of them. But that’s where it’s incumbent upon us, actually, just to make sure the boards are accurate, the stories are accurate and you don’t use that inflammatory language that actually would lead the witness, so to speak.

Alan Bricknell

Yes, I would say the same. We desperately do not try to romanticize anything. We try to provide it in terms of a factual … certainly when we’re doing our exhibitions, the words have to be factual because people are reading them and as you were saying earlier Chris, if you get it wrong, there’s somebody who’s going to know more about it than you. They say “that’s wrong” or “that’s wrong”.

Chris Wilkes

Absolutely.

Alan Bricknell

But we also try to entertain as well. One of the graves we visit is of a policeman that died in the course of his duty, but there was an amusing story that when they came to bury him and there were lots of people at the burial, something like several thousand came to pay their respects, they found that they hadn’t dug the hole wide enough and so they had to stop everything while they re-dug the hole. Then there was an escaped cow that came and caused mayhem in amongst all the people. Now, you know, it was a sad occasion, but also there was some dark humour in it as well and when we tell that story, it always create a laugh, but it’s not a laugh in disrespecting them, it’s just that these things happen. You’re reflecting something that probably gave people a laugh at a solemn moment as well.

Judith Rowbotham

Kim Stevenson.

Kim Stevenson

Sort of following on a little bit. A couple of things keep running around in my mind and that’s the sort of the right to be forgotten, and the incidents at other institutions. Maybe this is a question more for universities and academia, as well as visitor attractions, that almost trying to rewrite or silence history. I’m thinking of the controversies about the Gandhi statue at Manchester, the Colston at Bristol, the Rhodes at Oxford and this kind of wanting to almost delete or redact the things now that we’re very uncomfortable with from the past. You were talking about the slave thing, I think, earlier, as well. So, I just wondered how can you manage to deal with that? Are you feeling that kind of pressure if you are? Where’s it coming from and how do we respond to that or who should respond to that?

Judith Rowbotham

Can I actually use that to go on, because my second question for this session was going to have a play with the issue of you tell the truth and nothing but the truth, how much of the whole truth is it incumbent upon us to tell when we are dealing with issues relating to dark heritage? You’re talking, for instance, about cruelty. You’re talking about the ways in which you can challenge methodology, should you? I was for a period of time not at all popular in Lincoln because I shot down somebody who had been in recent years mythologised. The delightfully named Priscilla Biggadike. Priscilla was hanged for murdering her husband and it turned out later that her lodger, who was also her lover, had in fact been the person who had administered the arsenic to the sugar bowl which the husband consumed, gurgled and died. Now, should I have done what I did do as a responsible historian and absolutely insist that the [inaudible] and the executed Priscilla did not present her as some kind of wronged heroine. I regret now using the phrase in one presentation that the modern term for Priscilla would be the ‘village bicycle’. That was not, but I was somewhat provoked, an attempt to create her as a wronged and innocent damsel. I find it still very difficult to believe that she did not have a shrewd idea of what her lover, who happened to be the local rat catcher, was up to in doctoring the sugar bowl. Where does honesty begin? I mean there was considerable cruelty in that murder, very considerable cruelty, because this is a man who died of arsenic poisoning administered via a sugar bowl over a considerable period of time. Do we disguise that kind of thing? Do we not disguise that thing? Where do we draw the line?

Chris Wilkes

Can I jump in? Because actually you’ve just hit on the name that I’ve written down and above it was a discussion that you and I had had about Calcraft. There are a number of executioners throughout history, some of whom were not very good at the job, Mr Binns. Others who potentially knew exactly what they were doing, but were somewhat cruel. Mary Ann Cotton executed by Calcraft, short rope, he then got down on his hands and knees and pushed for how minutes to finish her off?

Judith Rowbotham

Three.

Chris Wilkes

Three. So, you count three minutes to finish off … that’s the sort of thing that you may decide, depending on the audience that’s in front of you, to actually stop before you talk about. You will mention Calcraft. You will look at a picture of him. You will discuss his work in the jail in Cornwall, but you may not go on, depending on how the audience is made up, to talk about him then pushing a woman through a hole for three minutes to finish her off. If you have an audience that are in front of you who are there for something a little more juicy, and they are old enough to take it, then that is the sort of thing you might keep as your throwaway comment. Actually, something that Kim said, the right to be forgotten. That is also important. The last execution in Cornwall in 1909 of a 24-year-old miner. We used to actively physically demonstrate that to assembled audiences over the summer, with respect, and if you want to understand this is how it was done, we will explain it to you. We actually stopped doing that because the three of us that did it, after the -enth time, actually you could almost hear it in your head. No more. Enough, enough. So, then we just stopped doing it because we actually just didn’t want to anymore. So, you’d stand, and you’d actually just verbalise it rather than show it.

Andrew Fry

Andrew Fry. Going back to what Judith was saying, I turned that question around in my head and I said “why would we not tell the truth, why is it our responsibility to not get the truth out?”. I disagree a little bit with what Chris said because if I was standing in that audience which they assumed was someone who didn’t want to know and I knew that person was helped to die, e.g., they were pulled down, I’d be standing there thinking you haven’t told me the whole story yet, clearly you lot don’t know what you’re on about. Is there some way that we have assumed that that audience can’t take it or shouldn’t be told the truth?

Chris Wilkes

No, because I think if you’ve got a 10, 12, 14-year-old child there, then it’s not my decision to tell that part of the story because the mother or father or guardian or whatever responsible person might come up to you afterwards and say “cheers mate, you have just created me two weeks of nightmares and terrors”. So, we have a responsibility actually to try and balance, as you do, the delivery of the message that’s coming out to the audience that is in front of you, which is why I then said if you’ve got an audience that doesn’t contain youngsters or doesn’t contain people that are quite clearly in a vulnerable state, then it’s a judgement call as to whether you put that in as an ad lib at the end or whatever. So, it’s judging accordingly. If you find that you have a very knowledgeable audience … I did a car club a couple of years ago, a very expensive car club, and the number of judges and retired magistrates who were in it was large. Their sport for after lunch on a Sunday was let’s see what the guide knows. Luckily, I knew. You just had to judge your audience.

Andrew Fry

Andrew again. I saw something the other day which I shouldn’t have watched. I’m a teacher as well as here. It was around the time that girl hung herself and put the video on Facebook. A learner said to me “this is on Facebook” and I said “no, don’t be stupid, it’s not on Facebook” – “yes, it is" and I was like “don’t be so stupid” and she said “I’ll show you” and she showed me that video which the girl did put live on Facebook. I watched it and I saw this girl hang herself and she died. For me, it freaked me out a little bit because I saw how she died and how she hung. It was very different to how I thought it was going to be. That learner was not impacted by that at all. She didn’t seem to see the life drain out someone and that valuable gift …

Chris Wilkes

Ok. That one individual, you might be right, but the person sat either side of that individual, may have been absolutely changed forever by that picture. I believe, and I might be wrong, I just think you have to be so careful. I’m not the parent. I’m not the guardian. I’m not responsible for you or your child or whatever. So therefore, I cannot blast everything out because I might do damage. I have to balance it – don’t chew gum, show respect, same, you don’t want to offend people. It’s a real hard minefield to know where the boundary of that is. You can only use common sense and gut instinct.

Andrew Fry

Andrew Fry again. Sorry, I’m just going to go back to my original question, what I said earlier. Now, I think that that impacted me more because I have experienced death. I’ve lost all my grandparents now and friends of mine have died. I know what it’s like to lose someone and I’ve gone through that heartache and it does break your heart and at some point, you feel that part of you is missing. Some of these youngsters, because they haven’t experienced that, they’re just able to watch that and be like oh yeah, that’s sad, and put it down. That’s why I said to you guys, do you think anyone is affected because they’ve experienced death, which means they know the value of life and once you know the value of life, you know what it is to lose that or experience watching it. That’s why I sort of brought those two across, just because it’s maybe what I’ve seen over the few years of teaching students and even taking them to sites like Auschwitz, where the youngsters haven’t particularly been emotionally impacted, but I take the older ones back on the bus and not a sound. They don’t say anything for hours. Then I have to stand there and have talk to them to make sure everyone is ok. Very often over the last few years I’ve thought what is it? What’s their internal watchman that says I’m not impacted by this?

Chris Wilkes

Do you understand the value of death?

Andrew Fry

Exactly, and do you need to experience death to understand that and understand life? Maybe I’m looking at it from the wrong way.

Simone Schroff

This is Simone. I’m a German and as children we go to concentration camps a lot and we know how we’re supposed to react. We’re supposed to be sad, but we were too young to really understand what is going on. I don’t think it is an experience of personal loss. I have not lost, ever, a close family member, but I have matured since then. When I went to Auschwitz as an adult, it was an entirely different impact looking at the same shoes that I’ve seen before at other concentration camps, because I now realise that every single pair is a human-being. As a youngster, you just do not understand. I don’t think she’s not impacted as such, your learner, it’s more about you know you’re supposed to react in certain ways, and you mimic what is expected of you. We were quiet on the bus, as everybody expected of us, but we also knew it was the adult expectation of us, more than what we actually felt. We walked through [inaudible] and we didn’t understand that every single name on that plaque means they didn’t come back. We stood in front of the crematorium and we didn’t understand what it means to put a body inside. You have to always tell the story age appropriate. There is no point in traumatising people for the sake of it, just to see if they really get it. I think maturity brings the impact, more than personal loss. It’s just that at some point you realise that every person you see is a whole life story and as a youngster, you just do not understand that, you’re just too self-focussed, and all of us were like this, I think. It’s normal. It’s the way we develop.

Judith Rowbotham

I think what is interesting, coming out from what you’ve just said Simone, is the idea that perhaps one of the things we should be promoting with dark heritage, dark tourism, is if you go to a place, such as Bodmin, a site of execution or a concentration camp, not that we have those sites of remembrance in this country, that perhaps it’s a question that we have a responsibility to make sure people come back, if they go once when they’re younger, that you have to do that. I have, in my possession at home, something which used to intrigue me when I was a child. It’s brought back by a missionary relative and it is a pair of shoes. It’s a pair of shoes that were … you can see these aren’t ornamental, these were actually worn, and they are a pair of women’s shoes, the tiny footbound shoes. Now, I just thought they were so pretty when I first saw them, which was coming back from the Far East, Singapore, Malaya, so, I recognised the embroidery. I would’ve been about 11 the I first saw them. I thought they were so pretty, and I wished I could have shoes like that. Seeing them again, 15, 20 years later, I actually found I couldn’t look at them. I’ve got them, but they are wrapped in the old silk and they’re tucked away in the bottom of a drawer because for me, having taught Chinese history to students as part of world history courses, particularly women and things like that, seeing the x-rays of women’s deformed feet, I just find I cannot look at those shoes. I cannot, also, bring myself to do something like dispose of them on eBay because … these are a real woman’s shoes which were worn with all the pain and cruelty and everything else that goes with them. I can’t destroy them, but I just can’t bring myself to sell them onto somebody who might see them simply as a curiosity. They are, in a funny way, absolutely beautiful. The beauty of the embroidery. The craftsmanship. But, as I say, I think that’s where it goes, the truth, nothing but the truth, but how much of it.

Jane Sanderson

Why don’t you donate them to a museum?

Judith Rowbotham

Largely because there isn’t an appropriate museum in this country that wanted them. Pretty though they are, they are not that unusual. They are worn, so they’re therefore damaged. So, conservation issues come into that. If I had a means of donating them, somewhere that would display them appropriately, then I would, but that’s unfortunately …

Jane Sanderson

But it’s your fear that they’re not going to be displayed appropriately, that is holding you back more than the conservation.

Judith Rowbotham

Yes, because if I put them on eBay, they might well be bought by somebody for display, but I would not have any control over how they were displayed. So, just for me, that’s part of the thing. I would show them to members of my family or friends or something like that. I’d be perfectly prepared if we had an appropriate session down in Plymouth, at the university or something like that. I’d be perfectly prepared to bring them and show them under those circumstances, but it would have to be for me, those circumstances.

Alan Ramage

Alan Ramage, a member of the public. Can I challenge you on that? I watched the film that you superbly narrated yesterday about Nancy Astor and it was really enjoyable, but on display in ‘The Box’ are going to be Lady Astor’s jewels, aren’t they? Which are magnificent. Under what conditions were they extracted?

Judith Rowbotham

That is a very considerable issue, but I think …

Alan Ramage

I just wondered if there were parallels.

Judith Rowbotham

Yes, there are parallels, undoubtedly. You have to look at the things like [inaudible], but actually, you don’t know. There is a greater gap, I think. For me, if the shoes were not showing such signs of having been worn, it would be a different matter. If they were in immaculate and beautiful condition, I would not feel the same way about that pair of shoes. It’s because you can see that they’ve been worn that it brings, to me, the individual. With something like Lady Astor’s diamonds, it’s more difficult to make something that is so clearly personal … I would make a difference, for instance, between a piece of jewellery that was known to be associated with somebody who had been murdered or something like that or a ring, ear-rings, bracelet, whatever, that had been worn by somebody and there was a personal story of tragedy with that. There I would feel a degree of discomfort.

Alan Ramage

I understand. What I’m thinking is ‘The Box’ is going to be the first of a very modern museum and in order to have principles, regarding its display of artefacts, which in some circumstances the British Museum has returned to the country of origin. I think there might be a principle that deserves consideration by this group and perhaps putting forward to ‘The Box’ that it’s going to display artefacts like that, which do have historical origin, which may not have that personal link that you have, with an individual. That origin needs to be stated clearly.

Ruth Heholt

Ruth Heholt. I completely take your point, but I think it’s something that happens all the way through tourism. For example, as Chris knows, in Cornwall we’ve got a lot of ancient burial sites, which are treated entirely differently for touristic purposes than your own cemetery. There’s an allowance, I think, but it happens, of more romanticism. You’re talking about truth. It appears the further back you go, the more romanticism is allowed in a way. So, with things like, again coming from the Cornish point of view with the pirates and the wreckers, there was considerable cruelty. There was some terrible violence and there were some terrible things done, but the way that it’s presented is through the romanticized lens again.

Chris Wilkes

The last 20 minutes of conversation could surely all be summed up by Simone’s words, ‘to understand the value of death’.

Molly Buxton

Molly. Sorry, I just have a question about that because it’s very difficult for me to understand the reality and where we draw the line at that. So, at what age do we understand the value of death? Could it be 30, could it be 40, could it be 50, could it be 10? You know, I can only say from personal experience, we went to Auschwitz when I was 13 and I absolutely understood how horrendous and horrific it was. I remember vividly a lot of us were crying during walking through the exhibits, but I do also remember that some of the exhibits were closed off and I can understand that a lot of Dr Mengele’s sort of side of things were closed off and you couldn’t enter that for a reason. But I also remember vividly that we walked through the torture chambers of the different rooms. I sort of wonder at what point can we sort of say there’s an age limit or an age sort of restriction, or how you understand who can and who can’t.

Simone Schroff

This is Simone. I think it’s not about age. It’s about maturity and how much information you have been provided. Back to my example of Germany, you are doing Nazis and concentration camps at all ages, from first grade onwards, but always with more detail as you go along. You get different tours according to the age group, but they are presuming … like you’re classified according to five-year age brackets. Also, because there is a child protection issue here, there are laws about this. But I think there is a point in your life where everything makes sense. There’s a lot of things you’re told as a child that you don’t understand, and you don’t understand the impact, and at some moment it just kind of falls. For me, that was Auschwitz. At some point everything I had learnt in my life, from biology to German literature to history, all of these things at some point just fell into place and I understood why I had been told these things throughout my life at different stages. We don’t read just Anne Frank. We read a Nazi resistance book every single year. I’ve never understood why I had to read all of those until I stood there and literally, it all made sense. I think you just reach that point where all of the information you get with different tourist things, different educational offers, etc, where they just link, and the last gap is bridged.

Chris Wilkes

Chris. Be it your shoes, your trip, your understanding of value. Be it us, who are delivering to a broad age group where you have to be careful and mindful of the audience you’re delivering to. At some point, yeah, all of it will fall into place and become joined up. When you’re delivering, again, is it our right to? It is gut, it is judgement call. If you go too far, then you’ve actually done everybody, your audience, a dis-service. So, it is a fine balancing act. There is no prescribed rule. There is no prescribed rule that says an 11-year-old that comes to you can take it, because some will and some, absolutely, you will cause them nightmares and shatter their little world. So, you have to just balance it out and use gut instinct, judgement and rough parameters.

Simone Schroff

I don’t think your aim is actually to make everybody understand. The aim has to be to provide enough information that at some point it makes sense, but you cannot aim for everybody in the group will understand what an execution means. Right here and then. If you aim for that, all you’re going to do, probably, is either have a lot of bored people or a lot of traumatised children, which neither one of those sounds very encouraging to me.

Chris Wilkes

Well, so far, so good. We do around about 3000 children of school age plus universities a year. I have only had one class in the entire time I’ve been doing it where the headmistress has rung us and said “look, I just want to give you the heads-up, we’ve had a few nightmares”. One class out of 3000 a year, certainly for the last six, seven years. So, if you get it right, exactly, a percentage of what you’re telling will stick and over the years that knowledge base will grow until it’s all joined up and people are old enough to take it.

Simone Schroff

I walked through [inaudible] as a fifth grader, totally untraumatised because they are very clear about what they show you and what they don’t show you. I probably have to explain, German’s do class trips for a week every year, but in order to stay funded you have to go to a concentration camp. So, we go every single year as part of a class trip. So, you do a lot of them, but they are very good at targeting and without trauma. It’s the one thing they don’t want to do. Don’t traumatise. Provide information continuously over the years. This is how you make sure that something sticks. That’s their approach.

Molly Buxton

Sorry, just really quickly, how old were you at fifth grade? Because I know your grading systems are different to ours.

Simone Schroff

Ten.

Molly Buxton

Ten. Thank you.

Judith Rowbotham

Jane.

Jane Sanderson

Thank you. I wanted to ask you Simone how the Germans have come about that system. Is it through feedback, research and studies?

Simone Schroff

No. In 1945 they made the [inaudible] next to concentration camps take a look. Look at what has happened here. This has really happened, and you guys closed your eyes on purpose. Germany’s whole system is based on never again. From the constitution to the political system everything is never again, and this is done with education too. That’s why we don’t just do Nazis in history. We don’t justify Nazis like English people do. You will never have a question of, why did the Nazis come to power, because that’s a [inaudible] question that makes that understandable. No, Nazis are bad, that is it. This is streamed through all subjects. We do racial theory in biology to show it’s wrong. We read books in German literature to show this is the experience at the time. They are targeted at different levels. You read Anne Frank after you read something called ‘When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit’, which is essentially about a girl that has to flee. She doesn’t die, but she has to move to different countries and her experience of this running away. But that, we read in fifth grade, whereas Anne Frank we read in seventh grade, and you read ‘The Wave’ in eighth grade. All of these things are built on each other and a lot of people has spent a lot of thinking about this, but it is not a coordinate we had to study, this is what children can take. It has more evolved around this and it’s taught in parallel with [inaudible] and the GDR and the crimes they have committed. So, it is guarding against both extremes. That is the aim. It doesn’t always work, but you get continuous feedback on both of these extremes.

Rob Giles

Rob Giles. I’ve got something I can probably add to this because I spent a number of years recreating murder scenes for court cases. So, when we use the word ‘truth’ … in fact when you depict truth in any kind of way, it’s amazing how much you can’t put in because you would have to qualify every single element that goes in. So, having created many of these depictions of truth, the lack of glamour in any of this, the lack of politicisation in any of this, actually removes much of what Chris would need to attract an audience; much of what you would need on your tours to actually stimulate an audience. In fact, it would become so bland and so qualified, that you wouldn’t have an audience. There would be a lack of interest if you had to qualify every single part of what you were giving to that audience. So, I think you have to understand that there is an element of entertainment. This has become an entertainment, this dark tourism, and it is an entertainment business that you guys are all in.

Alan Bricknell

Alan. Yes, I would agree with that totally. We’re really just giving a three or four-minute snapshot, telling a story in such a way that yes, we’re there to entertain. We do tell the truth, of course, but you don’t have to tell the whole truth, as it were, because it is just a small story and then you move onto the next one and it’s another small story, just like a short story you’d read in a book. You’re just trying to compartmentalise and give enough information that says this is of interest.

Karen Bond

Karen. I think that absolutely goes back to your original question, which telling the truth, how much of the whole truth do we tell? What is the truth? Is it the absolute truth? I went to Kilmainham Gaol. Yes, I had an agenda, very personal to me and my feelings about people who were executed there are very personal to me. However, I completely recognise and understand that other people would go and still consider them to be terrorists. Nelson Mandela, freedom fighter or terrorist? Truth is very subjective, and I don’t think we’re ever going to be able to change that, even if it is the absolute truth.

Judith Rowbotham

Which leads me actually, very conveniently, onto another question where I’d like to start with Ruth because it was the Victorians, in many ways, who created so much of the mythologies that we inherit and take on, which shape our understanding of our pre-Victorian heritage traditions and things like that. Why do mythologies about real events, about superstitions, about stories that do rely on romanticism, why have they become so central to our sense of heritage?

Ruth Heholt

The main idea is that it comes from the oral traditions. We’ve always told ourselves stories. We’ve always told each other stories. We’ve been around the fire and what do we want to do? We want to scare ourselves. What’s the best thing to do? Have your ghost stories. Have your stories of the child-snatchers. So, it’s the idea of stories. It’s also the idea which we’ve been playing with all the way through of what I would call affect, which is how we are literally bodily … how our bodies react to these stories as well. So, we want the shiver. We want the hairs on the back of our neck to stand up. We want to be uncomfortable and to feel maybe there’s something behind me.

Jane Sanderson

Like an adrenaline rush.

Ruth Heholt

Absolutely right, yeah, absolutely right. So, we’re talking about the oral histories. We’re also, I would say, talking about folklore. An awful lot of this comes back to folklore and folk tales and the idea of the folk horror monster as well. So, it’s something that we find deeply attractive and we like being scared and we like the dark side of things and we always have … again, we’ve been talking about it all the way through, this idea of storytelling. Truth on one hand, fiction on the other and the two coming together into various types of narratives that stimulate the imagination at the same time.

Simone Schroff

Simone. I have a question to this. Do we actually like to be scared or do we like to know that there’s bad stuff out there, but it’s not happening to me?

Ruth Heholt

It’s going to be both. I think a good part of it is yes, we’re sitting nice and cosy around the fire telling these stories, but it’s not happening right here, right now.

Simone Schroff

I think the Grimm fairy tales, for example, are really dark in their original version and part of the attractiveness of the old ones is it tells you what can happen to you, but it’s not happening to you right now. It’s more of a warning than anything else.

Ruth Heholt

Yes, and it’s setting those boundaries again. Here is where we should go up to, look what happens if you go over that. But it’s still extremely attractive to look over there and see the extremes at the same time.

Chris Wilkes

Chris, just jumping in. We always want to tell ourselves stories. We want the shiver and as you’ve just said, mixing fact, fiction, folklore, myth and all that, oh it’s right, isn’t it? We’ve got cases where, allegedly, there have been witches in the jail. There have been witches that have been starved to death in the jail. Their bones have then been hung onto so that governors of the jail can have seances and the bones have not been interred correctly afterwards. Well, if you actually dig into those and you look at the names associated with them and you look at the times and you actually do a forensic on it, nah, it doesn’t hang together at all, none of it. But then you look at the character names in histories and you can quite clearly see that actually a senior registrar in a local lunatic asylum has been associated with being the mayor of the town and the governor of the jail. So, these stories around the campfire at night have actually, through time and retelling, become fact.

Jane Sanderson

Jane again. Aren’t you always going to get that?

Chris Wilkes

Yeah, you will.

Jane Sanderson

Chinese whispers.

Chris Wilkes

Absolutely. Elaborate story telling. Fiction then turns into a fact.

Ruth Heholt

Ruth. From my point of view, it doesn’t really matter.

Chris Wilkes

No, it doesn’t because it’s just something that’s associated with.

Ruth Heholt

And it’s also, again from literary studies points of view, it’s the stories that tells us about ourselves. So, the fact that they morph, and they change … the main idea is that we get the monsters for our times. So, what does scare us and what is associated with dark heritage and dark tourism now, can reflect right back on our society, on our values and on who we think we are, and that changes.

Chris Wilkes

Yeah, absolutely. Interesting.

Alan Bricknell

Alan. I think that’s very interesting. Over the years I think we’ve become more and more of a protective society for our children. When I was growing up, you had breakfast, you went out. You came home for lunch, you went out. You came home for tea, you went out again until it got dark. Your mother didn’t know where you were, but people didn’t worry about that so much. You were told don’t talk to strangers, but you were still out there. You were playing with your friends. These days it seems to me … I mean, I don’t have children, so I can’t be definitely … but it seems to me a lot of children these days are kept in. They don’t go out. They’re sat on their computer, they’re sat in their bedrooms, and maybe that idea of becoming more protective now is why we want to have these things to frighten us in a different way.

Simone Schroff

Simone. That may be connected with the whole media attention to ongoing crime. Because crime levels have been falling, as far as I’m aware. But if you look at newspapers and the general media reporting, it always gives an impression that it’s increasing and it’s getting more violent. Like it seems like murder is becoming more common. More children are disappearing etc, which I think makes parents really nervous. It is this reaction to more widespread media consumption, I think, probably.

Chris Wilkes

Chris, from the jail. Is it actually … bearing in mind something that Judith said a long time ago … early journalism, court reporters then becoming newspapers journos? Is it not just actually the style of reporting is, yet again, going through a period of being sensationalised? Very key trigger words are being used. You watch the evening news and it’s those single big impact words or little phrases that are being popped in that actually do that sort of thing.

Simone Schroff

Yeah, and it creates a bubble, I think. I use my sister’s phone on Facebook. The amount of crime stories she gets is amazing. You would think the city she lives in is crime-ridden and everybody is getting killed, whereas I lived in the same city at the time, but I have a different media behaviour. I didn’t get any of these stories whatsoever. I was on the other extreme, but I suddenly understood why she was so nervous.

Judith Rowbotham

Jill Annison.

Jill Annison

Jill Annison. Just following on from that and looking back, I was really struck by you saying we don’t want to get caught out because other people might know more about the truth than we do. Given our discussion now, I think it’s very interesting to think about these different perspectives on the truth and Rob has alluded to that. I suppose what it set me thinking is how many sources are now available via the internet, very readily available. How ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ on the television has encouraged people to look into their family history. That’s become a commercial enterprise in itself, which I guess draws people to come to your venues. So, I suppose my thoughts and questions, and it does link with fiction as well, is actually there are a variety of truths. Then to go back to Kim’s point about is there a right to be forgotten as well. Because you find this source, does it mean that you automatically bring it into the public domain or tell a relative about it or whatever?

Kim Stevenson

Kim. It’s about rehabilitation. The law has rules about rehabilitation if you’ve committed offences. The whole area is so … I don’t know, unless you know more Simone, about what can go out and what can’t, but it’s all really, really grey at the moment. Where do you go to, to check whether it's ok to put these names out?

Chris Wilkes

Exactly, but can I ask all of you esteemed professionals in academia a question? If you were to take the last 10 years and look at a graph, is there a greater hunger for learning?

Simone Schroff

You are asking the most biased group. [laughter]

Chris Wilkes

If you were to look at admission rates, the types of courses that are being offered, the success rates on those courses, I think, if you look at the population in general … now, you’ve got things like ancestry, now you’ve got some of these wonderful television programmes that are going out there, has it actually started a hunger in the population for knowledge, for learning?

Simone Schroff

For quick knowledge.

Judith Rowbotham

I would make a distinction between learning and information. In my experience … I’ve taught for quite a few years, as indeed has Kim, you are seeing, I think, an increasing number of students coming who want to have a knowledge base that they already have confirmed, possibly extended. What they are not always happy to see happen is for that knowledge base, that they think is so secure, to be challenged. To have unsettling information that says the version that you have, the methodology that you have, in fact, is different. As I say, I found that when I challenged the Priscilla Biggadike story because somebody had come across the story and had written a play which had become a feature of Lincoln’s sort of cultural mythology, cultural heritage. It’s a pretty name, Priscilla. Biggadike is unusual and she was apparently very pretty. So, all of that helps. There was a lot of criticism of what I did in upsetting that local historical mythology by saying “well, she was not a very nice woman”. I would say that my experience … it first came home to me when I was teaching at the School of Oriental and African Studies, when I was responsible for British Imperial history and I was dealing with the transatlantic slave trade. A student came storming into me after one of my lectures and said “I do not want you to tell me things that I already know and know differently to you, I have not come to university to be upset”, and that was very unusual when I first started teaching. Now, it is much more the norm, sadly.

Simone Schroff

It is not a UK phenomenon only. I had the same thing in Japan. I had the same thing in the Netherlands. I obviously don’t have the long-term trend thing, but for law at least, what I’ve seen a lot is the students want information and they want it quickly. Tell me the information what I need to know, to get to the next level. Actually learning and actually acquiring the skills to do it themselves, they have no interest in, except for a small minority who use everything we offer to the most advantage and they excel. For them, the modern technology, all of our databases really take them to an unknown level, like entirely two levels above everybody else. For the majority of the students, they have no interest in learning as learning.

Chris Wilkes

Right. So, give me knowledge and help me learn are two totally, totally different baskets.

Simone Schroff

And don’t give me knowledge I don’t need.

Chris Wilkes

But how do they know what they need?

Judith Rowbotham

They think they already know. They want something to confirm an existing story.

Alan Ramage

Alan again. Two things. First of all, I attend a lot of university events. It’s my university of the third age and I thoroughly enjoy them. I sit in auditoriums, often with younger students, and when it comes to question time, very few hands go up. I’m usually the first to ask a question. Once my hand goes up, the lady down there will confirm, then people around think well if he can ask a question, I’ll ask one and I sort of trigger that. I’m quite well known for that. I’m quite curious about that. Why so many young people don’t seem to have … I used to teach English, so I always got them to ask questions. That sort of thing, I thought, was important, question. I wonder how far academia infiltrates that questioning spirit of the mind. That’s my first point. The second point is, be careful about deciding to facilitate the right to forget and that sort of thing because that’s the prerogative of government and the very extreme spectrum. They want to rewrite history in their way. Be careful of that. It can be corrupting. Myths and mythology, Norse sagas and so on, they’ve all served a purpose, and they represent their heroes in a way that celebrates their country, understandably. I think the Norse sagas, which I’ve read recently, from a book club which I’ve organised … this hero, he found that he had to kill somebody and even though it was totally inappropriate to do so, he still had to go ahead and kill him, otherwise he would’ve been dishonourable had he not done so. Now, I use the word corrupting because if we give too much attitude to our desire for entertainment, the misrepresentation that will involve, and the exaggeration to source involved, it can be corrupting of the truth. I’m going to relate back to what the lady said about pirate tradition, piracy. Plymouth has a piracy week or something like that, and there are all these jolly pirates and there’s a ship that comes in and I think that does a great dishonour to the sailors who served in the Royal Navy who combatted piracy, combatted the slave trade. Where are they honoured in Plymouth? Where’s their record made public? Ok, if you wish to have that side for tourism purposes and so on, at least have the decency and honesty to recognise the very honourable … the sacrifice that was made by those people who served …

Rob Giles

Quite often they were the slave traders and the pirates themselves.

Alan Ramage

You see, there’s a conversation that hasn’t got going. What I’m saying is it’s undeniable … perhaps you’re going to correct me, the slave trade was combatted by the Royal Navy. Piracy was combatted by the Royal Navy.

Judith Rowbotham

Absolutely. What would be very interesting to do here in Plymouth is to tell the story of British involvement in slave trading because it starts here in Plymouth, but you’re going to find it difficult, I think, to convince a lot of people to do it because … which direction is Drake Circus from here? Just there. We have all those lovely stories about Francis Drake, who with his brother-in-law, John Hawkins, started the slave trade, and was not a very nice man when it comes to his slave trading proclivities. So, in a sense, you could talk about a story of Plymouth as a story of atonement. Plymouth plays a very major part in the slave trade, both the dark and the light. The Royal Navy … it’s no coincidence that since the Royal Navy, post-1914, very substantially reduced its anti-slave trading activities, but slave trading, not just slavery, but slave trading around the world has expanded and not enough attention is paid to the sterling role. I’m sitting here with my little poppy with my naval badge. My grandfather was a naval officer and we have a naval tradition going back, including Admiral Byng, and yes, it would be an interesting story to tell, but how willing …

Alan Ramage

‘The Box’ is the place where perhaps, with the most modern values to integrity, could represent, and there’s a challenge to the tops to do that.

Judith Rowbotham

Yes, but there again, will ‘The Box’ do it? Who funds ‘The Box’?

Kim Stevenson

The Council, and the Council would perhaps be reluctant with the kind of negative connotations that would come out. We’re not saying it shouldn’t be done, but just looking at experiences we’ve had … even with Nancy Astor, there’s resistance in certain parts of the city to things that might potentially come across as negative. That goes back to the questions I asked earlier about Robert Rhodes and Colston and the others. There’s this reluctance to promote and kind of support anything that …

Alan Ramage

That’s where the advice of the university comes in.

Kim Stevenson

Absolutely, and this university and any university should.

Judith Rowbotham

Why do you think we carried on against considerable opposition with Nancy Astor? Believe me, if various people in the university, in the Council outside, would’ve had their way, that film last night would not have been shown.

Alan Ramage

Tell us.

Judith Rowbotham

The details are small and petty and they’re not in place. I will happily share them with you afterwards.

Alan Ramage

Thank you.

Judith Rowbotham

But trying to keep this back on track as dark heritage, there are real challenges and that is another area. How willing are we to be made uncomfortable? How willing should we be?

Simone Schroff

It’s not the job of ‘The Box’ to shoulder all of this weight by themselves. This is what we have research councils for. This is why academia is something different from museums. Museums are locally funded, usually, or national government funding, but there’s always a political agenda. This is why research councils and funding for history is so important. There is where you get the academic freedom. There is where you can do the challenge of history. It then trickles down into the museums. Asking a local museum to just kind of shoulder and revel in the history and showing all the negative stuff, it’s a recipe to get them closed. I think a lot of people have very high expectations for ‘The Box’ because they’ve got so much money to do a new building etc, it’s actually really unfair towards them because they are now on the frontline for something they haven’t asked for and they cannot possibly deliver. This is why there’s a whole university here.

Jane Sanderson

Trying to maybe come back to Alan’s questions, I was at the Underwater Cultural Heritage seminar yesterday, and the shipwrecks history for The Sound project had obviously artefacts that had been collected locally, including artefacts that have come from slave ships, and on the other side Alan, obviously they’ll have Royal Naval artefacts. So, in that respect, I’d like to think that they’ve got the dark and the light side, and they are putting together a small finds exhibition in conjunction with the local Plymouth College of Art, where I believe that both … let’s say, potential extremes of artefacts will be displayed. With regard to your question about people asking questions, from my experience, that can be a generational thing. I think, like Simone said, with maturity comes maybe the confidence to ask questions. I also sometimes think it is, once again, a cult rule thing. It’s a very English, British thing to hold back and be reserved. I observed at the seminar workshop yesterday that sometimes English people would hold back. They don’t want to be the first person to take a sandwich out of the buffet. When somebody else has started the buffet, that’s fine, they’ll go in. Once again, from the dual nationality that I have, it would be a free-for-all with my Irish relatives.

Simone Schroff

But it’s also the school culture. When you’re a teenager in school, you don’t want to ask stupid questions because everybody’s going to make fun of you. I spent a lot of time in my first year on if anybody is making any fun of anyone, you’re facing me. You have to give them the freedom to ask the stupid question because half of the room will have exactly the same question. But it’s not something that is encouraged in the schools anymore in the same way as when I was younger. I’m not that old, but it’s something going on. The schools are very target driven now and they don’t let the students question in the same way anymore.

Alan Ramage

That’s why I was saying wouldn’t it be good if the university lecturers made a point in their course tuition …

Simone Schroff

Most of us do.

Judith Rowbotham

We do!

Kim Stevenson

We do. We desperately, desperately try and do.

Alan Ramage

It’s good to hear you say you do because my way of thinking is, well, don’t they? The evidence suggests you don’t, but you do.

Kim Stevenson

We try.

Judith Rowbotham

We do. We try. We persist in trying.

Kim Stevenson

It’s hard work.

Judith Rowbotham

The attempt to challenge to make unsettling what we teach is a major part of teaching technique in virtually any subject that I know. You should challenge. You should actually upset students because if you don’t upset a student, sometimes at least, then they are not going to revisit and re-evaluate what they believe they know.

Kim Stevenson

But we’re getting pressure on actually doing that, aren’t we?

Judith Rowbotham

Yes.

Kim Stevenson

Even this year I’ve heard, very close to home, where subjects have been cancelled because they’re too sensitive … these are adults.

Simone Schroff

I have to put trigger warnings on half of my cases for a single student in the class because she refuses to read anything related to that. So, I have to provide separate teaching for her simply because she refuses to engage with any of it, and she happens to do law and criminology. If you have some kind of trigger thing with a certain type of crime, you may actually want to re-evaluate what you’re going to do in your second year.

Karen Bond

Why study it?

Simone Schroff

For the first time now, she’s phasing me. So, I’m now bearing the brunt of this, but I think a bigger problem is that students don’t actually show up. We’re supposed to challenge them. We’re supposed to be engaging, etc, but they don’t get up in the morning and come to class.

Judith Rowbotham

Can we have a word from Michael Kandiah?

Michael Kandiah

I run the research ethics for the non-biomedical students in King’s College, London, and one of things we have to be concerned about is people’s vulnerabilities. This is an interesting problem because on one hand you don’t necessarily want to wilfully upset people, but at the same time, they’re getting very concerned with these expressions of upset because the reality is a lot of history is quite unpleasant. What do you do about it? It's something that has to be solved. So, it’s not at all clear exactly what’s happened. In some cases, we don’t understand. I don’t think university teachers are pulling back, but we do have to also appreciate that students, if they are saying they are in some distress, they may well be in distress. So, we have to be careful.

Alan Ramage

There was a student in the news, just a few days ago, tearful, saying that he didn’t want to be told about the Second World War. Would you feel you had to honour and respect that or would you say no, this is something you need to have the maturity to deal with. How do you respond to that?

Michael Kandiah

Well, in a university setting, you would say you do need to [inaudible] it. But we also have to understand that people can be upset. It’s a very difficult balancing act. Sometimes we do also have to accept [inaudible] in general. Over the decades that I’ve been teaching, I sometimes will give very provocative lectures, with the intention of provoking the students to get some sort of reaction. So, we have to pitch it correctly.

Alan Ramage

Thank you.

Jane Sanderson

Jane here. Have we not kind of come full circle with regards to sensationalism?

Kim Stevenson

Yeah.

Jane Sanderson

You think the same Kim. If you’re giving lectures almost to invoke a reaction, is that sensationalist? I don’t want to put my head too much above the parapet in defence of current media, I agree they do sensationalize things, but equally in picking stories from a cemetery or from the jail that are going to interest your audience, are you not also sensationalizing history in it’s form for entertainment purposes?

Rob Giles

And that’s exactly the problem. That’s exactly it.

Chris Wilkes

But I also think … words used there … provoke to get a reaction, yes, sometimes you have to stir things up. There has to be a bit of a balance because you don’t want to create far more damage, but enough to shake people, shake your audience, to actually get them thinking, get them learning and get them taking in the subject matter.

Kim Stevenson

How else would they be resilient? Part of our role as lecturers and teachers is to help the students be resilient for their lives in the future and part of that is having to try and get them to face some difficult sensitive things that they maybe don’t want to confront, but hey, life’s like that and you’ve got to send them out ready to be able to deal with it.

Jane Sanderson

Absolutely. Jane again. But does that come back to what Ruth was saying with the fairy stories or the ghost stories sat around the campfire. You’re almost preparing young ones for possible worse case scenarios in the future by recounting these sensational tales.

Andrew Fry

Andrew Fry. How do you put mythology in this? When I started looking at mythology, I started looking at Hades as the person in the Underworld and then Cerberus as the gatekeeper and if you look at other cultures you’ve got Ah Puch, who’s the god of death and decay or Izanami who’s the Japanese god of death as well. So, is it because we look at depictions of these people as monsters? If you look at Ah Puch, he’s shown as a skeletal being; Cerberus with the three heads and the tail, does that then cross into monsters? Like you said, in the news we glorify it and we use words like he was a ‘monster’. In our head, what is a monster?

Ruth Heholt

This is Ruth. I think you’re talking about initially the idea of architypes. So, with the monster and the hero and this sort of thing. Contemporary mythologization, I think it does it somewhat differently. I think it will be more about stories of our times. One word we haven’t mentioned at all today, which I think is important is ‘identity’. The idea of who we are, what we are, how we identify, who we identify as and who we identify with, will come through our contemporary mythologies more. That again, will relate back to the sites that we want to visit and the sites that will resonate with us and the sites that we feel reflect who we are, to some extent. This will come with the jails and this will come with the cemeteries and everything we’ve been talking about, about the personal aspects and what we relate to and how we identify.

Andrew Fry

Andrew here. So, we all have our own monsters. When we hear the word ‘monster’, my monster is different to Chris’s monster.

Kim Stevenson

No. Some monsters we would all agree with. The child murderer, there’s nobody around this table that probably wouldn’t think a child murderer is a monster. Your monsters from the past are representations, maybe, that amongst any of us, could be that horrible monster that can do something extreme and kill. These messages are a way of kind of reminding us that it could be anyone of us.

Ruth Heholt

It’s also a case that they change the monster. The monsters change and the monsters change quite radically throughout history and throughout time. So, yes, we will always have our own personal monsters and our own personal demons, but they will be reflected in the society and the times that we live in.

Judith Rowbotham

I’m going to suggest we break for lunch and then resume again afterwards please. But I’d like to just leave you with a thought when it comes to monsters. A good friend of mine, Jean La Fontaine, who is an anthropologist, was entrusted by the government to conduct an inquiry into satanic child abuse. The Orkney Cleveland and other cases. Apart from the issues that came up of false memory and things like that, one of the things that really stood out for her, in her investigations, was that there had not been what in an independent technical sense could have been called satanic child abuse, what she insisted was that that did not mean there had not been child abuse, but that in trying to make sense of what had happened, the children used images derived from various things that they had seen and encountered. The breakthrough for her came when I was reading, at her request, a bit of testimony and I said that sounds so like this early computer game that my nephew, Jason, was looking at and which he used to scare us with and get the adults to play with him. It was all about a gatekeeper luring somebody in and I said that’s just like that. So, she then went and explored that issue. She found that infact the children who used this particular image, these Nottingham based children, had all been playing that particular game. They were trying to explain horrors that had happened to them in the only way that they could. They didn’t have the words to describe it in terms of what had actually happened to them. So, they interpreted it through a particular monster mythology that had been presented to them. So, I would like very much, after lunch, to resume and to feature our two PhD students as the headliners then.

Ruth Heholt

This is Ruth. Just before we break can I just make one point about monsters, which is we also historically have made monsters of people we see as other. That’s just really worth remembering, that monsters might actually not be monsters at all.

Judith Rowbotham

Yes, but that’s a major problem with dark heritage. So, again, if we can come back to that after lunch. Lunch is lurking over there with fresh tea and coffee, I hope, because I saw the thermos’ being brought in. I know some of you may not be able to stay after lunch, but I hope … at least stay for some lunch before you go.

Kim Stevenson

What time do you want to resume Judith?

Judith Rowbotham

If we resume, I would say in about 40 minutes.

Chris Wilkes

Monsters may not be monsters at all, it’s just how we see them.

END OF RECORDING

Comments
0
comment
No comments here
Why not start the discussion?