Accessibility and Archives: Breath. Blood. Bone: ‘You were dead. And yet, here you are.’
In this guest blog, Sasha Callaghan revisits the story at the heart of Breath, Blood, Bone (an art project that was inspired by a 1904 news story). Her research revealed that this one episode of a single individual’s mental illness fits into a broader story of a family disabled by infection.
On September 14th 1904, a farm worker, Ted Higham, found a dead body behind Moss Lane, New Longton, then a rural area near Preston.
The smartly dressed man had bullet wounds to his head and in the pocket of his overcoat there was a note.
‘In Loving Memory of Harry Place (Edward Henry Place) who succumbed to nervous debility and severe mental depression. Born January 29th 1874.’
By the next morning enormous excitement had been generated and the Lancashire Daily Post ran the story with banner headlines:
A Mystery
Body In A Wood
A Mysterious Woman
Supposed Suicide Writes Own In Memoriam Notice
I came across Harry Place’s sad end completely by accident about six years ago when I was working on ‘The Roaring Girls’, a Facebook page, recording 365 acts by extraordinary women, one for each day of the year. This sounds a lot easier than it actually was and by the finish I’d resorted to randomly trawling the British Newspaper Archive for possible content.
During one search I typed ‘mysterious woman’, yes I was getting desperate, and this was what came up - headlines from the Preston Herald, for September 17th 1904.
From there it was down the rabbit hole, as I began looking for more stories about the ‘Body in the Wood’. There were several other reports of the ‘mystery’, each with slightly differing details but with a common thread. They all mentioned that the Lancashire Constabulary were trying to trace the young man’s relatives but so far without success.
Whilst the ‘memoriam notice’ was unbelievably poignant, it gave me enough information to locate Harry Place within minutes, rather than the five days it took Police Constable Sutherland. Beginning with the 1881 census, I tracked Harry’s zigzag wanderings from his birth in Folkestone, on the Kent coast to his death in Longton Wood thirty years later.
And of course it didn’t stop with Harry. I found him, then I found Rosalind, his elder sister, then on and on until eventually there was a Place family tree with 202 entries. By this point, I believed I’d discovered a lot about what had happened to Harry and maybe some of the why’s but so many questions remained unanswered.
Fortunately, I was selected as one of Disability Arts Online Associate Artists for 2022 - 2023 and also received a Stephen Palmer Travel Bursary for Visual Artists from Engage Scotland, both of which helped me to research Harry and his extended family in more depth. After visits to the Kent county archives in Maidstone and London Metropolitan archives, I was able to fill in most of the missing pieces of the puzzle.
Once the majority of the research was completed, there was the challenge of what to do with it. Rather than a traditional one dimensional family tree, I decided to tell the Place’s story in a more imaginative, immediate form. To achieve this, I created and assembled ‘Breath. Blood. Bone.’ - forty one individual collaged pieces made up of textual intervention, photomontage and mark making, including primary sourced handwritten and printed texts.
Inspired by the ‘cut and paste’ novels of Valentine Penrose and Max Ernst, ‘Breath. Blood. Bone.’ similarly draws together all kinds of ephemera - newspaper stories, census returns, street directories, work house registers, photographs - to create a visual response to the history of the Place family, tracing their journey over two centuries from rich city merchants to asylum inmates, whose descendants have played their part in building contemporary, multicultural London.
The aim has been to challenge viewers to see beauty beyond the mainstream, so each image is a mixture of the uncanny and the everyday, combining local landmarks with dream landscapes and wise, sometimes fantastical animals, birds and butterflies. Not forgetting ghosts, flying fish and eerie flowers.
Now, the project has developed into a series of interlinked images, a spoken word performance with embedded audio description, a blog, a zine and a practical step-by-step guide to tracing family and disability history.
‘Breath. Blood. Bone.’ is a real-life Edwardian mystery told primarily in collage form. It’s a remarkable tale of lost fortunes, a found child, secret marriages, sensational scandals, strange disappearances. And even piracy… But most of all, it’s the story of a family torn apart by the ‘White Death’, Tuberculosis, a pandemic which also had a huge impact on my own childhood sixty years later, as an asymptomatic carrier of the ‘contagion’.
What happens next?
Hopefully, ‘Breath. Blood. Bone.’ will become an exhibition. Everything’s ready to go, all that’s needed is a suitable venue. It would be a wonderful if Harry weren’t forgotten and his name stayed alive. I’ve never been able to locate his grave, presumably he had a pauper’s burial, but this would be meaningful way for him to be remembered.
I’ll also keep searching for the ‘mysterious woman’ who started me on this journey. When I find her, I’ll be happy.
Contact
Email: sabencallaghancreative@gmail.com
Social Media
Instagram: @SashaSaben
Blog: Breath. Blood. Bone. - October Research - Disability Arts Online
Guest blogs are welcome. Please email diversityandinclusion@archives.org.uk. We would also like to hear from you if you have found one of the Allies’ blogs helpful to your work.