by Clare Hunter
Kathleen has chosen the blue and gold ribbon from which hangs the valour medal awarded to her grandfather in the First World War. She inherited it when he died and keeps it in her handbag as a talisman to protect her against her own uncertain courage. Flora is wearing the 200-year-old skirt she inherited, woven and worn by one of her crofting ancestors, before her family were forced off the land at the time of the Highland clearances in the eighteenth century. She has traced their exodus to America, the waves of the Atlantic Ocean embroidered with the Gaelic words for loss. Eve holds up a pair of child’s denim dungarees that she re-fashioned in the 1960s from her own pair of jeans. They were made for her toddler son, a task of thrift when she was a young mother struggling to make ends meet. He is pictured on her panel as a child and again fifty years on, surrounded by replicas of the pattern pieces she used, made ghostly in net fabric.
The originators of the final panel, Jim and Bill, cannot be here to unveil their creation. Jim died just two weeks ago at the age of eighty-seven and Bill, now ninety-six, is in hospital after a fall. The young community worker who brought them together, Ryan Mackay, will be their voice to tell us their story. He talks about their experience of growing old, of how in widowhood both men became socially isolated. Jim, in his later years, had been the main carer for his wife until her death. Looking after her had meant relinquishing the social activities and network of friends they had enjoyed over the years. He was devastated by her death and hadn’t the spirit to pick up the pieces of his old life. Instead, he got stuck in loneliness. Bill, living alone with his family at a distance, had lost his social confidence bit by bit, until he found himself marooned, cut off from the community life. They had both become members of the Older Men’s Health and Well-Being Group run by the Pilmeny Development Project (PDP), a community support organisation based in Leith, a dockland area of Edinburgh just five minutes from the city centre. When the PDP discovered that Leith had the highest suicide rate of men over the age of seventy-five in the Lothian region, it decided it had to find a way to mitigate the social isolation of its ageing male population.
The Older Men’s Health and Well-Being Group became a weekly fixture for Jim and Bill. Programmed by the group itself, it ran a range of activities: trips out, quizzes, classes in simple cookery, Desert Island Discs events to which members brought along their eight favourite pieces of music and talked about their lives. Jim, still driving, had offered to collect Bill, who no longer drove, and drop him back home after the group’s sessions. They became friends. They came not just to the Older Men’s Health and Well-Being Group, but also joined PDP’s New Spin inter-generational group, at which teenagers and older residents got together on Friday afternoons to have Lego challenges, play dominos and photograph the local area. When Ryan, then on a student placement, came to run an Anti-Sectarianism Project, Jim and Bill signed up. It turned out that they came from what had once been opposing religions: Jim a Catholic and Bill a Protestant.
It was Bill’s story about his mother that had made Ryan suggest they get involved with Material Matters. She had been an ardent follower of John Cormack, the leader of the Scottish Protestant Action Group, which during the 1930s had incited violent riots against Catholics in Scotland’s main cities. One of his sharpest memories had been the sash she wore to attend Cormack’s meetings and demonstrations. This had cost her ten shillings, an extortionate amount of money in the days when, with the family living in near poverty, ten shillings, as Bill said, ‘would have bought a whole lot of stuff.’ A sash remembered so acutely because of the family sacrifice it represented.
Jim had his own story, of a sister who, with her sweetheart soldier about to go to war, had agreed to marry him quickly in the Registry Office. When their local priest discovered she had married outside of the church, he excommunicated her. Jim’s mother was so outraged by the priest’s lack of compassion that she removed them all from the church. Jim was forced to leave his local Catholic Primary School and was sent to the Protestant School down the road. There, he said, he was not shunned, but rather ‘set aside.’ Like Bill, he came from poverty, recalling having to carry the load of family washing for his mother to the communal wash house each week and, one winter’s morning, barefoot and hungry, fainting on the roadside.
The men shared a history of early deprivation, service in the Second World War – Jim to the Air Force, Bill to the Navy – and a return to a world which had little opportunity for either of them. Jim took himself off to Canada for a while but, unable to settle, came back home. Bill found work building the Pitlochry Hydroelectric Dam in Perthshire: two years of sleeping rough in tents with thousands of other men. But somehow they made it through, married, had families, survived, grew old.
They had lived long enough to see religious prejudice if not eradicated, at least no longer a barrier to friendship. This is what they chose to depict on their panel: how divided lives, such as theirs had been in their youth, could come together later in mutual support. They titled their panel IDENTITY. One half had its cream background flecked in green thread, the Catholic colour. It contained images of the Catholic faith, Jim when he was young and Jim and his wife. The other half was flecked in the orange of Protestantism and showed Bill as a young naval serviceman. There was a replica of a poster of John Cormack, his fist raised against Popery. The title was embroidered in the two colours to symbolise a merging, faiths reconciled, sectarianism diminished. At the bottom was a photograph of the two friends sitting side by side, reproduced on fabric. It had been taken by me at one of the early Material Matters workshops. Jim is leaning forward on his stick enthusiastically, Bill is settled back in his chair, more considered, sporting a crisp shirt and well-ironed jumper. Since Material Matters was unveiled, Bill, too, has died.
With the panels unveiled, I invited the audience to tell their own stories of textiles they cherished. People had brought samplers and tray cloths, old dolls and embroidered jeans. Anne Munro of PDP had brought a patchwork panel with eight squares, each depicting a different scene of community life in Leith from thirty years before. I had been involved in its making as a follow-on from a project I did in Leith, a banner that had been my first community commission when I returned to Scotland in 1985.
The Pilmeny Development Project in Leith was set up in 1979 and, during the last thirty years, has remained true to its founding principle of helping local people identify and resolve problems that limit their wellbeing, issues common to many urban neighbourhoods in the western world: inadequate housing, the vulnerability of the elderly, cultural exclusion of immigrants, inter-generational distrust and community stress played out in drug or domestic abuse. These are issues that affect how people feel about themselves, their neighbours and their community. In the forty years since its inception, the PDP has spent its hard-won resources on servicing its community rather than expanding or enriching its own administrative base. It still operates from a small office in Buchanan Street and a one-room drop-in centre a few doors down, which acts as a social hub, meeting room and workshop. It still has Anne Munro, the original community worker, who was only twenty-two when she joined in 1979, now supported by a part-time youth worker, bookkeeper and administrator. It was Anne who helped to organise my first community textile project in Scotland in 1985, a banner for the Buchanan Street Housing Association.
Anne has witnessed the changing fate of Leith over the last three decades, a change in community fortune experienced by working-class inner-city areas throughout the industrialised world. She took up her post the same year that Britain voted in a Conservative government with Margaret Thatcher as its first female Prime Minister. For the next eighteen years, Conservative policies encouraged wealth creation at the expense of those unable to invest in upwardly mobile ambition. The government had inherited rising inflation from a Labour administration and came to power when the world’s economy was shifting on its axis. Western manufacturing companies and heavy industries were discovering more profitable enterprise in the east. New technolog
y was speeding up production and drastically reducing workforces. Unemployment in Britain escalated. By 1983 there were over three million people in Britain without jobs.
Young people who had grown up expecting to follow their parents into local work – into the factories and industries which, while low-paid, offered stability – were hit particularly hard. These young people emerged from education into a decimated job market, bereft of opportunity. Without the means to live independent lives within their community or leave, many young people in Leith turned to the salve of heroin, which was readily available through local dockyard imports from Pakistan. Drugs offered an alternative escape route. The experiences of Leith’s young unemployed are forever fixed in celluloid in the film adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, which used Leith as its backdrop and its young people as its cast of characters to tell a story of nihilistic addiction. To Anne it seemed extraordinary that just five minutes away from the historic commercial honey-trap of Edinburgh’s city centre, its young people were living such desperate lives. With no jobs, no money and no sense of their own worth they were roaming the streets, dicing with death on demolition sites, taking whatever drugs they could muster to escape their present and be somewhere else for a brief respite.
But local events such as gala days, street festivals, talent competitions, persisted. Anne remembers a local act that, for her, summed up Leith in those days. He called himself the Burning Buddhist: a hopeless fire-eater who nonetheless was determined to entertain, he walked on burning coals and burnt his feet, he ate fire and torched his mouth. It was, she said, an act of not simple bravado but visible defiance. He seemed to be a symbol of Leith itself.
There were other pressures on the community. Historically, Leith had always been a place of varied cultures. Employment in its docklands had ensured a continuing cultural mix of residents who shared the same working-class experiences, belonged to the same unions, had a similar pattern of working shifts and leisure time. But when the docks closed in 1981 there was no work to share. Immigration continued, largely from Asia, but for these newcomers there was no work-based socialising to ease integration. Instead they became marooned in separate cultures. The social restrictions on Asian women exacerbated their isolation. The community was in danger of becoming fragmented.
It was in housing that the deprivation in Leith was most keenly felt. A programme of demolition of some of the older council housing – the densely populated tenement blocks – led to a rise in homelessness and the dislocation of families. Many of the tenements that remained were unfit for modern living: they were dilapidated, cramped, with outside toilets, no hot water, most without baths or showers. In the Lorne area of Leith, where Buchanan Street is sited, things came to a head in 1979, the year Anne took up her post and Thatcher came to power. For years, the council had been trying to shore up the foundations of its housing stock, foundations that, in the nineteenth century, had been built over streams and, during the Second World War, dug out to create air-raid shelters. But on New Year’s Eve in 1979, a stairwell in 2 Buchanan Street crumbled away and the building collapsed. Two streets were certified as unstable, the families living in them evacuated, their homes – 1,000 in all – scheduled for demolition. Overnight, the PDP had queues of people at their door in need of help, a bed for the night, redress from the council, rescue from the loan sharks with whom they had become embroiled to keep the rent paid on time. Anne says that many of the older residents died within six months of their evacuation, and younger residents simply left the area. It was clear how quickly a tight-knit community can become fragmented, the speed at which its emotional investment in the area can falter and family-based infrastructures can break apart. The condemned housing site remained derelict as the council debated its options. It was repossessed by local youth who used it as a drug-making factory.
In the early 1980s, the debris was finally cleared, by which time the Buchanan Street Housing Association had been set up to campaign for redevelopment under community control. It was not interested in a home-for-home reinstatement. It wanted to create housing that was designed to reflect the reality of Leith’s changing community, where more people needed a supportive environment. Their vision was to create a housing complex that maintained social diversity in dwellings customised for independent living inclusive of the elderly, disabled and the most vulnerable in their community; a balanced mixture of family provision, sheltered and supportive housing and a women’s refuge. The Pilmeny Development Project’s offices sat across the road from the gap site. It was the natural support agency in the local campaign for self-improvement.
It wasn’t Anne Munro who commissioned me to make a banner in 1985 but the Buchanan Street Housing Association, who thought a banner would be a useful campaigning tool. It was Anne, however, as the PDP’s community worker, who was tasked with setting up the banner-making workshops. She remembers being highly sceptical about the project, unconvinced of the usefulness of sewing a banner when there were more urgent tasks: a council to lobby, reports to be written, finance to raise. She was dubious about what level of participation it would attract. Nonetheless, despite her misgivings, she advertised the workshops, encouraged people to come, cleared workshop space in the centre and brought in tea and coffee. When people did come, a motley group of pensioners, unemployed young, local activists and curious residents, Anne got stuck in. While claiming no artistic skills and little interest in needlework, she nonetheless worked alongside us to make a banner that would represent the community-led housing association.
The banner illustrated the hoped-for modernised homes on a satin backdrop of appliquéd low-rise housing traced out by a seventeen-year-old lad using my overhead projector, the projected image of hoped-for homes etching his body in an architectural vision of light-filling windows and own-front-doors that would be his future. I arranged for a photograph to be taken of the core of campaigners as a template for a group portrait to be archived in fabric and stitched onto the banner. People arrived in an array of outfits – some even came in their best formal hats. One woman brought her cat, insisting on its inclusion. The group set to work replicating themselves in cloth, grumbling over the fiddle of it.
Gladys, a formidable presence, exempted herself from the sewing altogether, and instead thumped out Second World War ditties on an old piano to keep up morale. One by one, members of the association and its community were stitched together, standing proudly in front of their proposed homes. We appliquéd ‘Buchanan Street Housing Association’ in large red letters on an arching scroll and a strap-line, ‘Living for the Future’, in gold on black satin. We sewed the housing plans in black thread on the cotton pavement upon which the group stood, and we decided to leave a space blank on the banner, ready for the time when – if – the battle was won.
The project changed Anne’s view of how the arts could add value to a community endeavour. It had rekindled enthusiasm in what had become a hard-pressed and demoralised campaign, at a time when progress was achingly slow. It provided a different focus, revitalising diminished energies in something achievable and it allowed a moment to rest and review, to re-gather impetus in a project that was sociable and entertaining. Most significantly of all, it enabled the group to make themselves and their ambition more tangible, sewn together on the banner in front of the homes they longed for. It bolstered media interest. Residents unfurled their banner on the steps of the council chambers before important decisions were made, took it to community meetings, hung it up in the PDP window. They used it as an emphatic declaration of community solidarity and local need to further their cause.
Five years later, I went back to Buchanan Street to record the moment when Edinburgh’s Lady Provost presented the housing association with the title deeds to what was now community land, and to what was to be the largest new-build in Scotland at the time. The battle had been won. The banner, now complete with its final scene of triumph, was transformed into a testament of community resolve. It marked the long hard journey from l
ocal loss to neighbourhood gain.
In the process of working on the Leith banner, Anne and I discovered that we shared the same community values even though we had worked in different spheres, Anne in community work and myself in community arts. For both of us, our mindset and belief in the value of community involvement had been forged by the student unrest of the 1960s and community involvement in the 70s. Anne was the first of her family to access further education. She was training to be a teacher when a student placement in a community centre in Dundee opened her eyes to what poverty could inflict on a community and how community education could make a difference to its fate. A second placement that sought to give purpose to young people far from home or lost in addiction convinced her of the urgent need to keep young people connected to local life. She abandoned her teaching career and pushed at the door of community and youth provision. The Pilmeny Development Project was the first door to open.
I was shaped, like Anne, by campus politics. My route into community arts was via community theatre and local art centres. By the late 1970s, community arts was a growing international movement aimed at providing marginalised communities with creative resources such as artists, art centres, activities and projects, to foster local participation and self-expression through the arts. The social focus differed from country to country. In Australia, the Australia Arts Council created the Arts and Working Life programme to provide artists’ residencies in working-class workplaces and encourage the co-production, between artists and communities, of artefacts and exhibitions that reflected a wide diversity of local lives. Banners, large-scale textiles and printed fabric all featured strongly in the art that emerged. In France, the emphasis was on salvaging and rebuilding community identities dislocated by German occupation in the Second World War. Projects were devised to restore a more positive community memory that was celebratory, playful, respectful of past traditions and artisanal skills. In Italy, animators in the city called Red Bologna, because of its left-wing governance and the colour of its buildings and surrounding hills, prioritised young people and devised a programme of public artworks, youth-centre provision and workshops in craft skills to foster a recognition of young people as a resource rather than a problem, and to give their creativity greater visibility. In Britain, the agenda was more political. Artists set out to challenge the elitist stronghold of the arts establishment, which viewed arts institutions and galleries as the only valid and fundable promoters of art. They created alternative approaches to local arts development through which artists and community members could be equal collaborators in the creation of new neighbourhood-based artworks where the divisions between art forms and between amateur and professional works were purposefully blurred.