The Director of the People's History Museum responds

Today, Luddite Bicentenary, Luddites 200 Organising Forum & Huddersfield Anarchist League received a response to our letter and action at the People's History Museum last Saturday from the Director, Katy Archer. It's reproduced below. We will have a response in due course.

Thank you for your recent letter regarding the inclusion of the Luddites in the People’s History Museum. I am sorry that you felt it necessary to send and publish a letter of complaint without first speaking with me or other members of the museum team to clarify our position on the subject.

We are in no way saying that we consider the Luddites to be unimportant or that they were not part of working class history. The People’s History Museum is the national museum of democracy and our role is to engage, inspire and inform all audiences by showing that ‘there have always been ideas worth fighting for’. In order to tell the national story of the development of democracy in Britain over the past two hundred years with the space we have available, we are unable to include all elements of this story in detail and there are a large number of events, individuals and groups which we have not been able to include in our exhibitions.

When recently redeveloping the museum (which reopened in early 2010), we intentionally took a collections based approach to our exhibitions, aiming to showcase as much as possible of our unique and designated collections. With only two items in our collection (one of which is actually on permanent display in the galleries) with any connection to the Luddites it would have been impossible to explain such a complex theme without more objects. As many Luddites were members of trade societies (such as croppers) we were able to cover those in more detail because we have fuller collections related to such societies.

As we are unable to tell a full and comprehensive story due to the constraints of space, resources and collections, as all museums are, we also refer people to other museums such as the Tolson Museum in Huddersfield or the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, where they can find out more about the subject.

I can assure you that the exclusion of the Luddites, or any other group, has not been done intentionally by the museum. Both EP Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm have been supporters of the museum in many ways over the years and we do not reject either of their approaches at all.

You are of course correct that the Luddites do not make a specific appearance on our timeline in the museum’s reception area. Again, it would have been impossible for us to create a timeline of the development of democracy over the past two hundred years without having to make some difficult decisions about what to include. We decided to include the ‘Industrial Revolution’ on the timeline rather than cover the whole period in detail as other industrial museums cover the subject more comprehensively than we do.

As part of our process of reviewing and updating the museum’s exhibitions and content, we will of course bear your comments in mind for both the exhibition galleries and the timeline.

With regard to an event to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the uprisings in 2012, we are in fact already exploring the opportunity to host a performance next year of Mikron Theatre’s show ‘Can You Keep a Secret? The Rise & Fall of the Yorkshire Luddites’. As the museum is an independent, registered charity, this will be dependent on funding, as will our ability to make any changes or developments to the museum in the future. If you would be willing to work with the museum to fundraise for, and organise, an event and performance of ‘Can You Keep a Secret?’ in 2012, I would be very interested in working with you on that.

I hope that this letter has answered your concerns. I hear that the Manchester and Salford Anarchist Bookfair was a great success on Saturday 3 December and I’m very glad to hear that you got so many visitors. We hope to be able to host another Bookfair again next year.

Luddites 200 Organising Forum change history at the People's History Museum

During our little action at the People's History Museum in Manchester yesterday, we made a video to preserve our attempt to re-orient history and rescue the Luddites from the "enormous condescension of posterity" as EP Thompson would have put it.

An open letter to the Director of the People's History Museum, Manchester

Dear Katy Archer,

We, participants in the workshop on the Luddites' 200th Anniversary at the Manchester and Salford Anarchist Bookfair, wish to protest about the People's History Museum’s (PHM) exclusion of the Luddites from its scheme of working class history. Not only does the museum have no plans to celebrate this important anniversary, but the Luddites are absent from the timeline of 19th-century working-class history in the lobby, and from the Museum’s permanent exhibitions.

This exclusion of the Luddites is absolutely unacceptable, and we cannot believe that it is accidental. In our view it is no better than Stalin's removal of Trotsky from early group photographs of the Russian Communist Party. It is absolutely contrary to any museum's duty to present an unbiased historical narrative.

We would guess that the reason for this is that the PHM shares the popular and outdated misconception of the Luddites as ‘reactionary’, as well as somehow not ‘really’ being part of the organised working class, despite the efforts of Marxist historians like EP Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm to situate the Luddites firmly within working class and trade union history. We agree with EP Thompson's view that the Luddites were a crucial stage in the formation of the English working class, and we are inspired by their example of workers and communities rising up against oppression. We believe that the Luddites' example and philosophy are increasingly relevant in the current crisis of industrial capitalism. Whatever the rights and wrongs of this issue, it is not the job of the PHM to pass judgement and then pretend that a major historical movement for workers’ rights never happened.

For this reason we have taken the opportunity to correct the timeline in the lobby, and we demand that you do so on a permanent basis. We also insist that the museum create a section in its permanent exhibitions devoted to the Luddites. Finally, we ask you to organise events over the next few months to commemorate the anniversary; we will be happy to work with you on this.

Yours,

David King (Luddites200 Organising Forum)
Richard Holland (ludditebicentenary.blogspot.com)