Spalding Gentlemen's Society photograph archive tells our social history story far better than paintings
The eternal appeal of old photographs is not difficult to understand. Eyes stare out at us from a long-gone age, the lengthy film exposure seeming to freeze a moment in time.
History somehow feels more real, more tangible, once we reach the moment when it started to be recorded by the camera.
A stilted portrait painting of a Stuart monarch is never likely to affect us in the same way as a grainy photograph of Queen Victoria. A landscape painting showing farmhands at work, however naturalistic, cannot match the emotional power of real rural workers, faces darkened by the sun, posing with the tools of their trade in an authentic pre-industrial farmyard.
The collections of the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society contain a number of photographs taken in Spalding which illustrate this. The first shown here is dated around the turn of the 20th century and according to the inscription on the back shows part of the gardens of Ayscoughfee Hall, in the area where the tennis courts are now located.
Over a century ago, this was the site of the surveyor’s yard of the old Spalding Urban District Council, which disappeared in the local government reorganisation of 1974. The steam-powered tractor on the right would not have lacked in power, but must have been a beast to manoeuvre in confined spaces. In the centre and to the left, we can see that steam had by no means entirely replaced horse power.
The second photograph shows a hiring fair in the centre of Spalding in 1908.
Hiring fairs, also called statute or mop fairs, were events at which farmworkers and servants gathered to present themselves to prospective employers, often carrying some token of their trade, such as a sponge for a groom or a mop or pail for a cleaner.
By bringing together large numbers of workers, they also not surprisingly generated something of a festival atmosphere, as this photograph conveys. The fairs feature in several of the novels of Thomas Hardy, where they serve as a handy narrative device for bringing characters together on the same page. Older readers will recognise in the background the Corn Exchange, demolished to make way for the South Holland Centre.
In the third example, some would say that the very presence of street-sweepers makes this photograph a piece of history!
The picture is undated, but is again presumably from around the turn of the 20th century. The arcadian setting is in fact St Thomas’s Road in Spalding, with the buildings of Spalding Grammar School in the background. In contrast to the first photograph here, it appears totally unstaged, the workmen set to one side of the frame and facing away from the camera, as if merely to give balance to the composition. The piles of leaves at the roadside indicate that the season is autumn.
The Society’s museum in Broad Street, Spalding, holds a number of photographs and postcards illustrating all periods of our history. The museum will next be open to visitors on Sunday, from 2-4 pm.
Details of our open days can be found on our website http://sgsoc.org , our Facebook page and in the pages of the Free Press and Spalding Guardian, or email us at info@sgsoc.org for more information.
On Saturday, SGS is hosting a symposium: “Understanding Fenland Landscape and Society: Past and Present”.
This one-day event will offer insights into the latest research into the landscape and society of the Fenland from the Roman to the Early Modern period. It will also highlight the role of Spalding Gentlemen’s Society as a centre for local research and recent projects that have developed out of the Society’s museum, library and archive collections.
Places are strictly limited and registration is essential. The registration fee of £20 (£10 for students) includes lunch and a tour of the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society. A few tickets are still available via the Society’s Eventbrite page. Details and the link for tickets are available on our website http://sgsoc.org under the ‘News’ tab.
