Category Archives: Uncategorized

100 Years: T.S. Eliot and The Waste Land

Posted on by
Reply

T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is one of the world’s most popular and most studied poems, published 100 years ago in October 1922 in the first issue of the literary magazine, The Criterion. Our new exhibition celebrates the centenary of the publication of this remarkable poem with a display of archives and rare books from Special Collections and Archives.

We will be launching our new exhibition, with accompanying poetry readings, on Monday 12th December at 1pm in the Templeman Gallery (Templeman Library, A block, Floor 1). All welcome – please join us.

The exhibition will be on display from December 2022 until April 30th 2023. Anyone is welcome to view the exhibition, please see the Templeman Library visitor guide for more information. 

 

Image of front cover of the first edition of The Waste Land by T.S Eliot - which has blue marbled cover papers

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, Hogarth Press: 1923.

The exhibition features a rare first edition of The Waste Land printed by the Hogarth Press, alongside the extraordinary portrait of T.S. Eliot by Patrick Heron, and the bust of T.S. Eliot by Jacob Epstein. We explore the history of the poem, what inspired The Waste Land, and how it was critically received. We also consider the role of the editor and contributions of Bonamy Dobrée and Ezra Pound to the manuscript of the poem, as well as the role of Eliot as an editor himself. We also explore the experimental poetry of T.S Eliot, Gertrude Stein and John Ashbery as part of the exhibition.

Our display highlights examples from the works of T.S. Eliot including unique material about his play “Murder in the Cathedral” with correspondence showing how the play was commissioned for the Canterbury Festival in 1935.

The T.S Eliot works are displayed alongside notable examples from the incredible Modern First Editions Poetry collection held in Special Collections and Archives. The items on display have been selected to highlight the significance of the collection and showcase some of the rare and fascinating small press poetry that forms the nucleus of the collection.

The University of Kent has a close link with T.S Eliot, having named our first College – Eliot College – in 1965, the year that T.S Eliot died. We are displaying some unique items from the Eliot College Archives that reveal the history behind the T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures and the University’s T.S Eliot Poetry Prize.

The exhibition has been co-curated with the Department of English at the University of Kent, and we are grateful to all our contributors for their help and support.

With thanks to Dr Ben Hickman, Professor David Herd, Dr Paul March-Russell, Miguel Santos, Beth Astridge, Christine Davies, Clair Waller, Karen Brayshaw, Matt Wilson and Fran Williams.

 

The caricature of T.S. Eliot that features in the logo for the exhibition is by John Jensen, and was donated to the University in 1973 as part of a series of four representing the names of the four Colleges – Eliot, Rutherford, Darwin and Keynes.

 

2nd Annual Shirley Lecture

Posted on by
Reply

On the 12th October, the UK Philanthropy Archive hosted it’s second annual Shirley lecture, and first to be held in person on the University of Kent’s Canterbury campus. Following on from the success of last year’s online event where Dame Stephanie Shirley launched the series by talking about her life, and what has influenced and driven her philanthropy, this year saw Fran Perrin of the Indigo Trust speak on the importance of open data in the philanthropy sector.

Fran Perrin is the founder and director of the Indigo Trust, which works to fund access to justice in the UK and in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as tackling the causes of blindness in sub-Saharan Africa, and working to promote more effective grant making within the philanthropy sector. She is also the founder of 360Giving, a charity that helps foundations make their grant data freely available to support informed grant making across the sector.

Fran discussed the current issues around data availability, and how the lack of accountability and transparency is a rectifiable problem in the philanthropy sector. She also  spoke of her own journey through the philanthropy sector, including how her own experiences of giving money when there was little data to help inform her decisions drove her to found the charity 360Giving, how the work of 360Giving has made an impact on the sector, and the future plans for the charity. A fascinating example was the creation of the Covid 19 Grants Tracker, which allowed philanthropists to see where emergency funding was being given, which in turn allowed for informed decisions on next steps in donating. It shows geographical areas in receipt of donations, the type of recipients and givers, and the variety of amounts being donated.

Audio of the full lecture, plus the question and answer session that followed the lecture, is available to listen to on our website, alongside a transcript of the lecture.

Missing Voices from the British Chinese Community

Posted on by
Reply

Research and Curation Group Blog Series Number 3:

The third in our blog series from members of the Research and Curation Group features the research and selection of items by Christopher De Coulon Berthoud.  Christopher was interested in looking at the content of Special Collections and Archives to see not just what could be found in the collection, but what was missing. 

 

I noted the exhibition’s mention of the Chinese chip shop owner, but the absence of any interviews or depictions of them, although the website for the original exhibition does address this issue. Reflecting on a wider absence of the British Chinese community’s voice in British culture, I chose a selection of British newspaper cartoons spanning a 60-year period.

In the 1930s Chinese restaurants were a rarity in Britain, and located mainly in London. The Good Food Guide 1955 listed only single examples of Chinese eating-places in Brighton, Liverpool and Manchester. A decade later as many as thirty-one per cent of British people who ate out had visited Chinese restaurants.

All of the cartoons selected caricatured Chinese people as restaurant owners or waiters, and it is interesting to note that while the stereotypes employed remain quite similar, the sense of racial animus becomes more marked over time as the size of the immigrant population increased. A Joseph Lee cartoon from 1936 published in the Evening News titled “Honourable diner eatee up chop-sticks” (Ref: JL0644) suggests the butt of the joke is the British diner unused to an unfamiliar cuisine. Later, an example from 1992 demonstrates no such finesse while employing a crude racist stereotype of dog-eating Chinese people. (Tom Johnston cartoon published in The Sun newspaper, 11th November 1992 Ref No 38714).

The cartoons illustrate what would become commonplace in the depiction of Chinese diaspora as a community, often problematically ‘other’ from British culture, using the restaurant as shorthand for a whole group.

The selection gives us an opportunity to note the role of the cartoonist as someone who both reflects, but also moulds and guides public opinion.

Christopher de Coulon Berthoud

 

Click on the links to see images of the cartoons in the British Cartoon Archive catalogue. 

 Nay, lad. No hard feelings about pud championship… [London, 1970] – [Stan McMurtry], Ref No: 17686]

A response to the ‘Great Yorkshire Pudding Contest,’ which took place in Leeds in 1970 and was won by Mr. Tin Sung Chan, a chef from a local Chinese restaurant, over a field of British contestants.

Although a generous reading of the cartoon suggests that the council member’s depiction as bad losers makes them the object of ridicule, it remains an illustration of the catch-22 situation facing immigrant communities. The stylized racial caricature presents the immigrant simultaneously as someone incapable of assimilation while also being penalised for doing so too successfully.

Colour washed image of the interior of a Chinese restaurant in which a male customer is sitting next to a female customer and flicking an object using his chopsticks so that it hits the head of the Chinese waiter who is walking away from him

Flicking bamboo shoots at the waiters is a damn childish way of retaliating for the Hong Kong riots. [London, 1967] Ronald Carl Giles, Ref No: CG/1/1/2/700

Flicking bamboo shoots at the waiters is a damn childish way of retaliating for the Hong Kong riots. [London, 1967] – [Ronald Carl Giles, Ref No: CG/1/1/2/700] 

and

As a protest against China’s record in Darfur I shall not be using the chopsticks [London, 2008] – [Matt (Pritchett; Matthew), Ref No: 90084] 

This pair of cartoons, created four decades apart but remarkably similar in content, illustrate a refusal to recognize migrant groups as really British. The identification of a diaspora population with the perceived political faults of China weaponizes the trope of divided loyalty, a recurring theme in xenophobic discourse.

 

Worse news, Prime Minister… they’ve just eaten Chris Patten! [London, 1992] – [Tom Johnston, Ref No 38714]

Perhaps the most crudely racist of all these cartoons comes from 1992 in the lead up to the transfer of Hong Kong’s sovereignty to China. This cartoon unashamedly draws on one of the oldest racist clichés weaponized against Chinese people in a cartoon commenting on an accusation by an Australian diplomat that the British Governor’s missing dog had been eaten.

Nautical Playbills and The Sea Around Us

Posted on by
Reply

Research and Curation Group Blog Series Number 2:

Elizabeth Grimshaw writes the second in our blog series from members of the Research and Curation Group. Elizabeth tells us about her selection of items for the Reflections on the Great British Fish & Chips exhibition, which included some playbills from our theatre collections, and a book by Rachel Carson. 

I had the pleasure of digitizing Dickens playbills while completing my Master of Arts in Victorian literature at the University of Kent, and was so pleased to work with the Research & Curation group to revisit some of these incredible archival resources.

This fantastic 19th century playbill should call to mind two very different songs: the classic anthem Rule Britannia, and the Beatles hit For the Benefit of Mr. Kite.

Historic document, a playbill, for a performance of The Waterman in 1829

Playbill – Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. For the Benefit of Mr Braham. “The Waterman”
Reference: POS/LDN DRU/0599532

In 1829, Britannia indisputably ruled the waves. Not only across an Empire through the might of the Royal Navy, but also here her cultural capital takes centre stage. The Waterman is an opera based on the annual race on the Thames that began in 1721, providing entertainment and sport for the ever growing London population. After this play was performed, vocalists in naval uniform, aboard a realistic Man of War, sang nautical tunes, blending fiction and reality at the height of England’s global powers. Invoking the mythical sea king Neptune for this feast aligns with the divine power of the Crown that would change drastically in the years to come. Britannia used to rule from shore to shore, with the sun never setting on the empire. Rule, Britannia! has been sung since 1740, but today should be modified to include and celebrate former colonies in its patriotic performances. The Beatles drew inspiration from a similarly busy playbill to write the lyrics for their hit 1967 song, taking these types of 19th-century entertainments into the 20th century.

Black and White plate from Rachel Carson's book The Sea Around Us

Plate illustration Part 3: Man and the Sea About Him, in Rachel Carson “The Sea Around Us”
Classmark: GC 21

I wanted to end with Rachel Carson’s landmark 1951 environmental text, The Sea Around Us. Her work emphasizes not one country’s mastery over the ocean, but places humanity within an ecosystem we all must support and share. Environmental degradation endangers all living creatures, from the depths of the sea, to the ever changing landscape of tidal pools, to the communities who are reliant on these shoals for survival. This classic work is a timely reminder of how precious the planet is that we all share. The sea supports us, connects us, and sustains us, but can only do so if we care for it. We can take Carson’s text as a guide to connecting with others and protecting the vulnerable, especially as the climate crisis escalates.

Elizabeth Grimshaw, University of Buckingham 

Great British Fish and Chips

Posted on by
Reply

Special Collections & Archives are delighted to be hosting a new exhibition in our Templeman Library Gallery – Great British Fish and Chips, which will run from 22nd June to September 2022.  

Colour illustration of a plate of fish and chips with condiments labelled with their place of origin, such as cod from the Faroe Islands, vinegar from the United States and lemon from Spain or Turkey

Copyright: Olivier Kugler and Andrew Humphreys

 

The exhibition, originally commissioned by Counterpoints Arts, explores how the history of Britain’s favourite dish is rooted in migration, movement and global trade. Reportage artist Olivier Kugler, and writer Andrew Humphreys, reveal everyday stories of migration through illustrating the lives and experiences of fish and chip shop owners across Kent.  

To complement the exhibition we are looking for people to join us in exploring our Special Collections & Archives in relation to the themes of migration and movement.  

This project offers a unique opportunity for participants to join a Research and Curation Group to learn more about archive practice and gain skills and experience in researching and working with archive collections, while sharing perspectives and experiences in a safe and supportive environment.  

The group is open to members of the public across Kent as well as students and staff at the University of Kent. We especially would like to encourage people with lived experience of migration to join the group and explore the archives. Weekly sessions will include tours of the collections, with practical sessions of different aspects of researching and working with archives.  

Group members will co-curate a display of original items from the archive collections that will be displayed alongside the existing exhibition boards. They will research and write captions to describe their chosen items, develop blog posts and social media content about their experiences in the archives, and lead tours of the displayed archives.  

Places are free but numbers are limited so please get in touch to secure your place. Please note that to join the group you need to be able to take part in all three weekly sessions, taking place on Wednesday 8th June (10am-1pm), Wednesday 15th June (10am-4pm), and Wednesday 22nd June (10am-4pm).    

For more information about the project or to request to join the group please contact Beth Astridge or Karen Brayshaw in Special Collections & Archives: specialcollections@kent.ac.uk  

This project has been funded by the University of Kent Migration and Movement Research and Engagement Award Fund 2022.   

The original exhibition The Great British Fish and Chips was commissioned by Counterpoints Arts in partnership with Turner Contemporary and Canterbury Cathedral and was displayed in locations around Kent from June to November 2021.