History has been a passion for me ever since I was a child. Sunday evenings were spent watching Time Team, and weekends would be filled with visits to museums, castles, forts and stately homes. This passion never went away and I ended up studying History at Lancaster University. I enjoyed talking and discussing History with people who were as enthusiastic as me, and decided that I would like to try and find a job where I could continuing doing just that.
The many museums that I frequented as a child must have had an impact, because that is where I began to seek work experience. After three years of work experience placements and volunteering roles in places such as Tullie House in Carlisle or Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire, my time as an undergraduate was at an end and I was ready to move on to the next chapter in my life: being a Masters Student reading Museum Studies. However, I had an entire summer idle to fill.
This was when I found out about the Citizens800 project, and the various internships they were offering. The one that immediately caught my attention was an internship based at the Parliamentary Archives, in Victoria Tower, in the Palace of Westminster. I had visited the Archives very briefly when researching my dissertation, and was fascinated by the idea of spending a summer there doing far more in-depth research.
My application proved successful, and in June I began working in Parliament for Citizens800. My task was to collate together primary resources from the Parliamentary Archives on the theme of “Power and the People”. The documents had to in some way relate to the idea of how throughout history ordinary people have tried to effect change. From the Parliamentary perspective, this meant finding examples of genuine legislative changes being made as a result of public campaign or protest. The Parliamentary Archives hold records dating back to 1497, so I had a lot of material to sift through.
I had some guidelines of specific events and time periods to look at, such as the Civil War and the American Revolution. Events such as these are where the Parliamentary Archives truly shine, as Parliament is often at the heart of them. The Archives hold the Death Warrant of Charles I, as well as a copy of the American Declaration of Independence sent to England when war broke out. Apart from first-hand accounts, these documents take us as close as we can as modern viewers to these notable events.
Also at my disposal was the vast online primary resource platform ProQuest, which has digitised documents such as Select Committee reports, reports on petitions and Acts of Parliament. These were very useful for researching Parliamentary action in response to public campaigns such as the reduction of working hours for children in factories. The Sadler Report, as it is colloquially known, was a Select Committee investigation led by the aforementioned Sadler (MP) that examined the conditions of children in mills and factories. The contents of the report were shocking to those with no experience of industrial working class life, and can be listed as one of the causes of the eventual Factory Act which limited the hours a child was legally allowed to work.
Another key way that people attempted to influence Parliament was through petitioning. Even today petitioning is an important way to show mass support for a cause and try to change the opinions of legislatures. In the past, petitions were presented in physical format in the Commons. The one pictured below is a petition from around the 1830s, requesting for voter rights to be extended to all rate-payers. This was in an era when Chartism, a call for more rights for the ordinary classes, was in full swing. Whilst the famous ‘People’s Charter’ signed by 1.3 million presented to Parliament in 1839 has since been lost, the petition from the Inhabitants of the City of Gloucester shows what a widespread campaign Chartism was.
The petition also carries various signatures, some written quite well, others poorly, and others simply marked the paper with an ‘X’ and had someone else spell their name for them.
From humble workers, to Lords and Statesmen, the petition was a vital way to directly force a debate in the Houses of Parliament.
When peaceful means failed, Parliament was also the stage for violent protest to seek legislative change. As I was working with the Vote100 team, the campaign for Women’s Suffrage was something I wanted to include in my research.
The Vote100 team has been working for four years to create events, information and an exhibition surrounding the 100th anniversary of the 1918 Representation of the People Act which for the first time gave some women the right to vote in a general election. All the work that they have done set me in good stead to find out more about the Women’s Suffrage campaign and Parliament. They showed me a whole collection of Police reports from the early 1900s detailing the various incidents in Parliament involving suffrage protests. From women chaining themselves to statues to men firing blanks in the chamber of the House of Commons itself, the reports showed the wide range of tactics used by various suffrage groups. They also showed how as a symbol, Parliamentary buildings were a target for political activism.
My work with Vote100 also gave me the opportunity to take part in public events for the Archives. As part of the ‘Parliament and the First World War’ exhibition, the Archives held a public event where historians from the History of Parliament trust gave talks on the theme of the exhibition. My third year dissertation just happened to be about a curious part of the Defence of the Realm Act, and I was invited to speak.
I spoke about how DORA introduced state management to pubs in areas around key munitions factories during World War One. What is even more remarkable about this was the fact that state management continued in Carlisle and some parts of Scotland until the 1970s. The talk was very well received, mainly due to the fact that state management is such an unknown facet of World War One policy. It was also a pleasure to be able to share with the public the details of my dissertation.
Working with Vote100 gave me another public speaking role. I was invited to speak to the Women’s Network (a Civil Service organisation) at the Department for Communities and Local Governments. This is significant because that department was responsible for planning the new Millicent Fawcett statue to be unveiled next year. The talk at DCLG gave me the opportunity to meet one of the people working on the Millicent Fawcett statue, as well as spread the word of what the Vote100 project is about and its aims.
To get the chance to work in Parliament for one summer has been a wonderful experience, made even better by the warm welcome I received from the staff and volunteers there. But what has really made this summer so special was that I had an opportunity to examine some of the most famous and important documents in British history. The wide scope of my research task was both a challenge and a joy, as I had to look at parts of British history I knew very little about. But it was the fact that I was sometimes out of my comfort zone that made the research so exciting. This internship with Citizens800 has given me so much experience and confidence to try new things, be inquisitive and excited to learn new things.
By Chloe Bowerbank
Chloe is a Citizens project intern working with the Vote 100 team at the UK Parliamentary Archives.
For more information:
Parliamentary Archives: www.parliament.uk/archives
Parliament’s Vote 100 Project: www.parliament.uk/vote100
