Following the General Election result of December 2019, the spectre of the ‘Working Class Tory’ has forcefully re-materialised, sparking questions about the relationship between class, identity and politics. This is a question that is particularly virulent in the North East of England, where constituencies in County Durham and Northumberland have voted for a Tory government for the first time in living memory. The initial reaction of the left is to charge this as a ‘false consciousness’, an inability of a class-in-itself to work as a class-for-itself, to use Marx’s terms. We are left to wonder how constituencies that had experienced the onslaught of Thatcherism, the destruction of their proud industrial economy and tenuous reliance on investment strategies of mobile capital could act in such as way? And, in a sense of political déjà vu, we are left pondering what’s to be done? Should we double-down on efforts to educate the Tory working classes in the error of their ways so they can fulfil their destiny as an agent of historical change? Or are other approaches needed that are sensitive to, tune in if you will, the lifeworld of these class traitors? One candidate for the Labour leadership has nailed her colours to the mast by declaring, in a turn of phrase that runs perilously close to national socialism, a ‘progressive patriotism’, hoping to embrace the ‘Working Class Tory’ loves of Queen, Country and the Military to the cause of returning a Labour majority.

The presence of the ‘Working Class Tory’ in the North East troubles the liberal intelligentsia of London, but it is a phenomenon that has troubled me for a while, not simply because the vast majority of my immediate family and many of my closest acquaintances outside of work inhabit this political stance, but because there have been allusions to it in the work of my direct ancestor. It chimes with a phrase from Robert Gilchrist that I’ve winced over once or twice and certainly not yet given enough thought, his profession to be “an antiquated Tory”.

I’m troubled by this too because in the historical scholarship of popular music that mentions Gilchrist, predominantly in the work of the leading authority on Tyneside song, Dave Harker, he is cast in the role of a petty bourgeois cultural slummer who brushes through the narrow streets of lower town Newcastle and its salty quayside in search of portraits to amuse the polite society of the upper town (Harker, 1981). Robert Gilchrist is planted on the wrong side of working-class interests and is certainly not for Harker a herald for social and political change. I have been troubled by this analysis, not for its historical inaccuracy per se, but, in terms that Harker would undoubtedly approve, in giving fair attention to new sources and scholarship that can help us appraise the songwriter and their culture more stringently (Harker, 1996). The time is ripe for a look again at class, identity and the politics of the Tyneside songster. And I feel the current political conditions, with a return to a concern with the making of the ‘Working Class Tory’ and the sentiments held – whether to a parochialism, nationalism, or sense of regional English pride, even its virulent strains of anti-foreigner discourse  - provides a lens through which to mount this project and which gives it a sense of urgency.

My starting point as an historian is to seek to better understanding of the lifeworld of the petty bourgeois artisan. In mindful that I might be using context to ‘explain away’ a political identity, but I think there is something about the nature of the Tyneside economy in the long eighteenth century and its bearing upon cultural production of songsters like Gilchrist that merits deeper examination. What I want the biography to show, following revisionist arguments forwarded by historians of the working-class since the 1980s, is the importance of other markers of identity to the formation of the songster. The period in which Robert Gilchrist lived and worked was not fully formed into distinct class identities and relationships. It was intersected by other identities and traditions, including non-conformism, occupational identification within a pre-industrial workshop economy, and a nascent sense of North East regional Englishness. Gilchrist as sailmaker cannot be easily enrolled into EP Thompson’s depiction of the artisanal tradesmen as a precursor to the fledged working-class. As Geoffrey Best makes clear, in reviewing The Making of the English Working Class, Thompson ignored the "flag-saluting, foreigner-hating, peer-respecting side of the plebeian mind", placing emphasis on a small number of artisans (Best, 1965: 278). There is a case to be made that Robert Gilchrist is precisely this type of artisan songster that Thompson overlooked.

​The biography will look closely at the work of Gilchrist, alongside the communities he belonged to, his political and civic roles, and his involvement in events such as the Barge Day celebrations, as evidence of this socially conservative artisan at work. I want to reappraise his output not in spite of but in light of these allegiances, to look at the opportunities they afforded a sailmaker with ambitions to write, perform and amuse. Even though some of his output was at the expense of the poor and vulnerable I will be showing that Gilchrist was active in negotiating his class relationships with civic elites. I will be arguing that his identification with a civic elite was not passive or uncritical, as he used his song writing to satirise the elites – especially their corporate profligacy, an issue that would later dog the case for municipal reform. Though whether this was because of a cosy clubbability with the company in which he mixed is a moot point and one I’m continuing to ponder.

One of the main reasons for writing the biography, in terms of its intellectual contribution, is to move Gilchrist to within the inner sanctum of a regional canon. Perhaps even to restore his place. Harker’s recent works, his scholarly biographies of Ned Corvan and Joe Wilson (Harker, 2017a, 2017b, 2019), reinforce a canon of North-East songsters central to the emergence of a proud working-class voice. I want to think more about the “alternative tradition”, which whilst not counter-hegemonic or politically radical, was indeed present in the life and times of Newcastle in the early nineteenth century, forming part of the amusements enjoyed by Tynesiders, and which in its own ways had a voice that mattered. The biography will be an important addition to an overlooked history of the making of a leisure culture and might indeed provide some clues, or hopefully draw some parallels, on the quest to understand the formation of North East Working-Class Toryism.
 
References
Best, G. (1965) 'Review: The Making of the English Working Class', The Historical Journal, 8(2), pp.271-281.
Harker, D. (1981) ‘The making of the Tyneside concert hall’, Popular Music, 1, pp.27-56.
Harker, D. (1996) ‘Debate: Taking Fun Seriously’, Popular Music, 15(1), pp.108-121.
Harker, D. (2017a) Cat-Gut Jim the Fiddler: Ned Corvan’s Life & Songs. Newcastle upon Tyne: Wisecrack Publications.
Harker, D. (2017b) The Gallowgate Lad: Joe Wilson’s Life & Songs. Newcastle upon Tyne: Wisecrack Publications.  
Harker, D. (2019) Tyneside Song From Blind Willie to Bobby Nunn. Newcastle upon Tyne: Wisecrack Publications.

In this first blog post I want to consider whether the writing of a biography on a distant ancestor can in any sense be considered as a collaborative enterprise? This thought comes from reading Jane McVeigh’s excellent book In Collaboration with British Literary Biography (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) in which she describes the relationship between the biographer and their subject as an “ongoing collaboration” to “make the subject’s voice heard, to set them talking”. I’m struck by this statement. It recognises that the subject has a voice, though they await a skilled biographer to amplify it. McVeigh works through a series of literary biographers who deal with the second aspect, the biographer as conversationalist. This is what she writes about John Milton Cooper who “suggests that “biographers engage in conservations with their subjects” (2004: 90), as they listen, question and talk back to them “by explaining their actions, motives, and thoughts””. Following Cooper, we can think of biographers developing a familiarity or intimacy with their subject, getting under the skin and into the mind, trying to figure them out.

This meets the definition of collaboration in its meaning of 'to work with', if we think of the biographer or historian working with materials from which a wider psychology can be rounded.  But it is a position which misses the sense of ‘collaboration’ as meaning 'to work together', a close association that produces a thing held in common. Indeed, McVeigh concedes of an important asymmetry in this relationship, one provoked by where the biographer and subject are temporally located. She writes, “the collaboration becomes an opportunity to understand the present of the biographer in the context of the past of his or her subject” (2017: 2). This is not the intimacy suggested by ‘collaboration’ as the reflexive becomes foregrounded and the study of a past life is mounted in order to better understand the present day.  The risk here, noted too by scholars who have employed collaborative autobiography (Goldman, 1993), is a collaboration in which the voice of the biographer becomes dominant over the subject, controlling the narrative.

Whilst I find McVeigh’s use of the term ‘collaboration’ unsatisfactory I feel that the social principles underling a collaborative process, as ‘working together’, need thinking about. A couple of years ago I co-wrote a paper, published in the Qualitative Research Journal, on 'Collaborative Stories Spirals' (CSS). This is a conceptual framework for a co-designed method for qualitative research that brings together academics and community-based practitioners (e.g. youth workers) in order to create and share new stories about the life of a community. The paper had much to offer in terms of thinking about the process of storytelling and I’ve been asked at several conferences to clarify what we meant by ‘spirals/spiralling’ (I’ll set the record straight on this one in a future blog post).

The CSS model proposed four different stages of what this process entails, which we boiled down to situating, generating, mediating, and remediating community narratives. This is, in brief: 1) to ‘situate’ a community narrative is to seek an understanding of social, temporal and spatial contexts and the part played by organisations and individuals in fashioning these contextual meanings. 2) We wrote about ‘generating’ new stories through participatory methods and archival research in order to capture, create and narrate stories deemed significant to the life of the community. 3) ‘Mediating’ is a phase where a narrative begins to be told within a community and starts to be received by a reader or audience, who may contest and alter the story as further information, insight and perspectives come to the fore. The narrative is necessarily incomplete or unsettled at this stage. 4) ‘Remediating’ is the stage at which a reasonably settled narrative returns to the public through different media outlets and participatory activities (e.g. workshops, heritage trails, teach-outs).

The paper discussed the process involved in the acts of knowledge gathering and creation that would lead to new narratives. We established too some principles around co-design based on non-hierarchical organisational relationships between academics and non-academics in which the skills and approaches of each party would be utilised and shared as part of the research process. We noted the difficulties inherent in the positionalities of each party as part of the methodological challenges of doing participatory research. Recognition of these disparities, we argued, was key to making co-design work, key to ‘working together’ and this process would be oiled through moments of coming together to assemble narratives and through, down the line, ‘letting it go’, moving the stories back into the community and professional lifeworlds of each partner, recognising the need not to produce a standard form or output. We wrote: “our role is, through sensitive and non-hierarchical practice, to release control of the process so that the boundary can be shaped and formed, but within limits that respect the community’s wants and needs.”

Toward the end of the paper we spelled out the ethical and social principles for doing collaboration:
“Thus whilst the boundary object creates an arrangement for doing things together, the process requires time for assembly, trust-building, contemplation, remembrance (and even argument and dispute), alongside other forms of emotional and embodied engagement. These social foundations for dialogue are necessary not only as part of the epistemological frame and methodological process but also in meeting ethical demands to equip participants with the confidence to speak, willingness to share and the sense that they are being listened to.”

But what if your collaborator is dead?

Here I think collaboration, as ‘working together’, finds purchase in the process of generation as outlined in the CSS concept. Generation is not just about creating new stories through a participatory phase of research with living persons but works too with documents that have recorded critical incidents; situations, events and happenings that have been recalled and written down for posterity. It is here that collaboration extends across generations and bridges the dead and the living. But these events were not told with us in mind. As McVeigh (2017: 1) notes “We all tell stories about our own lives and those of others, but the story may have a slightly different focus or emphasis depending on who is telling it, whom they are speaking to, when the events discussed in the story took place, and how the story is told.” The critical events in a life that are recorded and make it down to us, we should remember, have been self-fashioned by the biographical subject; created to suit the identity they wished to create for themselves.

Let’s take an example. In 1843 Robert Gilchrist wrote ‘Sonnet on the Shortest Day’, which was published in a local newspaper.  


I always lov’d the shortest day,

Though dull the aspect of the year,

Each hearth beams forth a kindlier ray,

Reminding us of Christmas cheer!

And friends assemble far and near,

With lightened hearts and humours gay;

And dearest ties seem still more dear,

Rang’d round the board of Christmas Day.

Long may such scenes on England smile,

As times and seasons pass away,

And still more free from guilt and guile,

Lur’d by the Star of Bethlehem’s ray,

To where is neither storm nor strife,

Nor shortest day, nor longest life.

​
The poem includes elements of the Victorian Christmas tradition that Charles Dickens would go on to popularise through his A Christmas Carol, incidentally also published in 1843: the family gathering, warm fireplaces, bountiful food and drink, merriment and festive spirit. Robert Gilchrist imagines a Christmas scene, but the poem is written in his time and he marries together a secular vision of hospitable gathering with a sacred message of eternal life through Jesus. In our post-Christian society I find the sonnet comes up short. When I’ve read the lines at our own Winter Solstice gatherings of friends and family, I feel a sense of disappointment that the final six lines segue into the religious at the expense of a more sustained description of hospitable customs being performed at Midwinter. Yet, when the sonnet has been reprinted it has been presented as a reminder of the importance of Yuletide custom in the life of the nation. This excerpt comes from the Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 22 December 1941:

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Thus, whilst a key event – Midwinter – can be shared by both of us, the textual mediation of Robert Gilchrist’s original composition betrays the acute socio-cultural and historical conditions that render us apart, that arrest a coming-together of subject and biographer.

However, I think this point misses something deeper about collaboration-as-togetherness in how we remediate stories and produce new biographies. The significance of thinking about the nature of collaboration in biography, I feel, is that it gets us to focus us on the human connection between biographer and subject. This is more than a connection born from the research process, where the biographer-as-researcher uses sources in order to access the inner life of the subject, to better understand their reactions to happenings, to explore how their personality worked at given moments, to trace linkages between cause and outcome. I think the connection runs deeper and that work on affect in human geography gives some clues on how to think about this connection (though my thoughts here are tentative and not yet fully explored).

In a collection of essays called Non-Representational Theory: Space/ Politics/ Affect (Routledge, 2008), the geographer Nigel Thrift discusses Paul Ekman’s neo-Darwinian understanding of emotional descent and the communication of emotion as common to the human condition. Ekman’s studies revealed different types of universal emotional expression (including sadness, shock, loneliness, and fear) but one expression was pleasure. Ekman recognised that emotions could be mediated by cultural and historical conditions, writing “Social experience influences attitudes about emotions, creates display and feeling rules, develops and tunes the particular occasions which will most rapidly call forth an emotion” (Ekman, 1998: 387, cited in Thrift, 2008: 181). So, we should be wary perhaps of the cultural conditions for the production of emotional response. But the point that found fame was that emotion could be viewed as a universal physiological phenomenon, though influenced by our cultural experiences.

What I take from this is thinking about ‘collaboration-as-togetherness’ is a way that can bridge seemingly intractable temporal rifts in the dead biographical subject and living biographer through realisation of the affective form of events shared in the life of the biographer and subject. In the example given, collaboration becomes possible through thinking with Midwinter rituals as they are culturally shared and have elicited moments on joy across the generations. Our commonality is pleasure found in the moment of the occasion. This point of emotional connection is one which I feel, in hindsight, we missed in discussing the process of collaborative storytelling in qualitative research, and in part this can be excused because we were thinking of collaborative relationships between the living.
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As I prepare to write the biography I’ll be thinking about other episodes of affective togetherness and the spaces and times that constitute and make visible particular affects – amusement, loneliness, pride, sense of achievement, sensory pleasure – which may be shared in different ways by the subject (Robert Gilchrist) and his descendant (Paul Gilchrist). I feel biography can emerge as a collaborative enterprise if we remain attuned to these episodes of affective togetherness.
 
References

McVeigh, J. (2017) In Collaboration with British Literary Biography. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Cooper, J.M. (2004) ‘Conception, conversation and comparison: my experiences as a biographer’, In Lloyd E. Ambrosius (ed.) Writing Biography: Historians and Their Craft. London: University of Nebraska Press, pp.79-102.

Gilchrist, P., Holmes, C., Lee, A., Moore, N. and Ravenscroft, N. (2015) ‘Co-designing non-hierarchical community research: the collaborative stories spiral’, Qualitative Research Journal, special issue on arts practice as methodological innovation., 15(4), pp.459-471.

Goldman, A.E. (1993) ‘In that what she said? The politics of collaborative autobiography’, Cultural Critique, 25: 177-204.

Thrift, N. (2008) Non-Representational Theory: Space/ Politics/ Affect. London: Routledge.