UK Disability History Month: Accessibility and Archives: Deaf Londoners in the 1660s
Accessibility and Archives: Deaf Londoners in the 1660s
In this, the second in a sequence of blogposts for Disability History Month, Prof Kate Loveman (Principal Investigator for the Reimagining the Restoration project), talks about work done by the University of Leicester and the Museum of London to create more diverse teaching materials on the Great Fire of London and, in particular, to provide resources that incorporate Deaf history.
Samuel Pepys’s diary of the 1660s offers vivid accounts of the people who lived in Restoration London. I’m a researcher working on this period. Of late, my work has included tracing the range of people mentioned in the diary and talking to the public about Pepys. The section of the public who have most to do with Samuel Pepys are, it turns out, five- to seven-year-olds and their teachers. This is because the Great Fire of London in 1666 is one of the most widely taught history topics in primary schools. It’s a favourite example of a ‘significant event’ on the History National Curriculum Key Stage 1.
In 2022 I joined up with the Learning Team from the Museum of London to devise new teaching resources on the Great Fire as part of the ‘Reimagining the Restoration’ project. Our work was financed by a research fellowship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. This included funding the post of a Learning Manager, James Harrod, to co-ordinate Museum activities. We wanted to produce resources that better represented the people who lived in 1660s London and that would excite primary school children as they encountered seventeenth-century history for the first time.
Among the many anecdotes in Pepys’s diary is one that particularly caught my eye, as I have a long-standing interest in seventeenth-century Deaf history. Two months after the Great Fire, on 9 November 1666, a deaf young man arrived at a party and signed news about a large fire in London. Pepys, who was among the partygoers, couldn’t understand the conversation but was intrigued – although not intrigued enough to record the young man’s name. This is one of the first detailed accounts of a signed conversation in English, recorded well before British Sign Language (BSL) began to develop in earnest. As part of my research, I had been tracing the people at the party, trying to find out as much as possible about life for deaf people in Westminster in the 1660s. The episode seemed like a great way to introduce children to Deaf history, and one which could be easily linked to existing lessons on the Great Fire or to other curriculum topics.
The ’easy linking’ was important. Primary school teachers and Teachers of the Deaf have a limited amount of time to plan lessons or to innovate. Our materials needed to fulfil the curriculum objectives and build on what was already working well for teachers. The first step was therefore to hold focus groups with primary school teachers and teachers working with deaf young people (including teachers whose first language was BSL). Both groups wanted a strong emphasis on visual sources and all the teachers were keen to see a wide range of figures portrayed, especially children. One suggestion from the teachers working with deaf children was to produce a comic.
It was also clear from the focus groups and our own research that there were few existing online Deaf history resources aimed at UK schools – we would be testing ideas as we went. It was therefore tremendously helpful that we had three schools for deaf children involved in the project, through history workshops that we were running. These were a BSL-first school, an English-first school, and a bilingual school. This proved important for getting feedback as the resources developed, and for thinking about representation and inclusivity in them. For example, the resources feature historical deaf people who signed and other deaf people whose primary communication method was speech. We were also able to consult with experts from organisations such as the British Deaf History Society and the National Deaf Children’s Society on the resource content.
The project ultimately created two sets of online teaching resources hosted on the Museum of London’s website. One is a page on teaching the Great Fire of London at Key Stage 1. It has three short animations about London in the 1660s, teachers’ guides, and classroom activity sheets. The people shown in the resources include women who ran pubs and bookstalls, a young Black man who lived next door to Pepys, and young servants – including the unnamed deaf ‘boy’. A teachers’ guide introduces these historical figures and includes some of the new research done for the project.
The other page of teaching resources, ‘Deaf Londoners in the 1660s’, has an online comic about three deaf people. This was illustrated by the artist Garen Ewing. The comic features Jane Gentleman (a hard-of-hearing chambermaid in Pepys’s household), the deaf boy Pepys met at the party, and another young man, the artist Framlingham Gawdy. There are an accompanying teachers’ guide, a BSL-interpreted video of the comic, activity sheets, and images of historical documents from the time – such as a letter written by Fram Gawdy which is shown in the comic. Deaf children often need longer to develop their reading skills than their hearing peers, while some of the places where Deaf history most readily features on the curriculum are with older age groups. This set of resources therefore has a wider age, not just five- to seven-year-olds.
One of the most enjoyable – and challenging – parts of creating the resources was adapting research to the younger age groups and to their teachers’ needs. Primary school children are grappling with the idea that their granny wasn’t alive 300 years ago; that everything wasn’t in black and white then like old films; and that Samuel Pepys didn’t have a mobile to film the fire. Showing children examples of documents and objects – the types of evidence that tell us about the past – was therefore crucial.
It's not just children who have difficulty understanding evidence from the seventeenth century. Even experts find this a challenging period in which to research Deaf history. Much of the excellent work on deaf people’s lives that has been done by Deaf historians focuses on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: this is when BSL was developing, when schools, and clubs for deaf people were active, and when campaigning for Deaf rights was underway. By comparison, few deaf people in the Restoration were able to leave records of their lives. For the project, I spent time fact-checking existing work on Deaf people in the seventeenth century and following new leads in the archives. Mapping the residences of deaf people in London was one approach that proved fruitful, since it turned out that two of our figures from the comic were literally round the corner from each other.
Providing teachers’ guides was crucial for expanding the use of the resources and for grounding them firmly in history. It meant we could offer the kind of explanations that teachers or carers with little or no previous knowledge of Deaf history would need to use the resources. It also allowed us to outline the decisions made in adapting the archival research for school-age learners. For example, the deaf ‘boy’ in Pepys’s diary is likely to have been in his late teens, but he has been shown as younger in the comic to suit a primary school age group. The teachers’ guide also give examples of how we went about illustrating signs in the comic when there is limited information on the signs that deaf people were using in the 1660s. This kind of context was important, both for credentialling the history and for identifying those aspects where creativity was employed – as we wanted to try and avoid the latter being recycled elsewhere on the internet as fact.
The resources were published online in time for the new school year in 2023, and we’ll be tracking how they’re used, not least so that feedback can inform future work. It’s already clear that there are points where comparatively small changes might have made an activity more useful and, too, that the materials can be used in some surprisingly ways. We’re looking forward to finding out how they are employed.
I’d be happy to hear from anyone who has questions or comments on the teaching materials.
Contact: pepyshistory@le.ac.uk
Contributions to this series are welcomed, particularly if you have experience of creating learning resources including past Deaf and disabled people. in the first instance, contact diversityandinclusion@archives.org.uk .