Local history in the service of society

LOCAL HISTORY IN THE SERVICE OF SOCIETY An edited version of an Open Lecture delivered at the University of Kent at Canterbury on 29 January, 1993 ARTHUR PERCIVAL, M.B.E., B.A., D.Litt, F.S.A. If I were to ask what the following people had in common, it might not be too difficult to guess the answer - given the theme of this lecture: Two clergy men, a G .P., a distinguished stained-glass artist, a silversmith, a Town Clerk, a solicitor, a journalist, and a public health inspector (what we now call an 'environmental health officer'). Indeed: they were all active local historians - ones who by their work over the past 250 years made a significant contribution to understanding of the town where I live - Faversham. None was a professional historian, none expected to make any money out of their work. It was done, one assumes, as a pleasure, and to give enjoyment to others. All indeed have achieved a kind of immortality, because their books are read as avidly today as when they first appeared - and by a wider circle of readers. The local historian, y ou could say, has a longer shelf-life than most chroniclers and interpreters of national history, whose work tends to be superseded and may go out of fashion. This is some compensation, perhaps, for the fact that his or her fame tends only to be local, and that local history, as a topic of serious study, has always seemed to rate a bit lower than national history, particularly in universities. Why bother with it, then, this 'Clochemerle' stuff? Does it really matter what happened in Faversham, or Canterbury, or Gillingham 50, or a 100, or 500 years ago? The Toytown story, surely, pales into abject insignificance beside the national one? Outside F aversham, or wherever, who cares why the parish church takes the form it does; what exactly happened after the Abbey was dissolved; and why some ageold industries have died, while others survive? Some people equipped with rose-tinted spectacles may like to wallow in nostalgia for the past, if only as a means of dodging the stresses of the present and the challenges of the future. However, we should not delude ourselves: this 211 A. PERCIVAL is not history, it is full-blown escapism, on a level with 'Morse' or "Allo, 'Allo'. Yes, it is very easy to dismiss local history, and local historians, who used to have the image - and may still do - of aged, fusty would-be academics, never happier than when burying themselves in airless libraries and dungeon record offices to follow some inconsequential trail, or when arguing amongst themselves about the precise date of some trivial event. But how fair is a caricature judgement? We British have a knack of making fun of one another, because it brings us all down to earth. So judges are all purveyors of ponderous, anachronistic wit; solicitors are dry old sticks whose special skill is more in prolixity than the law; accountants are faceless grey figures, without a shred of passion, who infiltrate every reach of our society, and quench any sparks of innovation before they can kindle the flame of enterprise. Perhaps now we should let one of the local historians speak for himself. What motivated Edward Jacob, the G.P. (as we would now describe him) whose History of Faversham was published in 1774 and is now back in print? He certainly had no intention of producing a book when he arrived in the town from his native Canterbury 40 years earlier. But (I quote from his Preface) ... '(having] happily fixed his abode in this pleasant town, [and] having an early propensity to the study of antiquities, it became his delight to collect whatever occurred relative thereto, and to insert in an interleaved history of the abbey and church of Faversham by the Rev Mr Lewis, everything conducive to his farther information.' Word then got round, he goes on, that he had accumulated a lot of new material, and the result was that he was repeatedly asked to publish it. When he finally decided to do so (and again I quote) ... 'the principal motive arose from an earnest desire of informing his good friends in this town and neighbourhood ... of many things wherewith they were quite unacquainted; whereby they may be enabled to give satisfactory replies to the inquisitive stranger; and also acquire some useful information in the course of his story, that hereafter may produce beneficial advantages to a community by him so much respected.' So Jacob was no nit-picking academic manque. Having been brought up in one community, which wore much of its eventful history on its sleeve, for all to see, he settled in another which turned out to be congenial and whose shape faithfully reflected its past. But less had been written about Faversham than Canterbury, so simply to satisfy his own curiosity and enable him to understand the town better he began collecting information. He accumulated a fund of knowledge, and 212 LOCAL HISTORY IN THE SERVICE OF SOCIETY people who shared his interest in the town suggested he should make it more widely available. He decided to do so, partly to open their eyes to things they did not know, partly to enable them to cope with visitors' questions. He hoped also that wider understanding of the town's past might bring benefits for the future, though he did not specify them. A hundred years later Frederick Francis Giraud, the Town Clerk, and Charles Donne, the Vicar, joined forces to carry on Jacob's good work. Their Guide Book and History of Faversham was specifically aimed at visitors, but you can be sure was read as avidly by residents. Though not as substantial as Jacob's, their work embodied much hitherto unpublished material. 'The collection of materials for this little volume', they said, 'has been to us an agreeable pastime, and we venture to hope that the result may be acceptable to others who are interested in the past history, the present state, and future welfare of this well-ordered and improving Country town '. Though Hasted had done Kent quite proud, they also endorse what Gilbert White had to say in his Natural History of Se/borne, published in 1789: 'If stationary men would pay some attention to the districts in which they reside, and would publish the thoughts respecting the objects which surround them, from such materials might be drawn the most complete county histories, which are still wanting in several parts of this kingdom.' In the wider national context, we might also recall what Edward Freeman had to say at about the same time, just over a hundred years ago. These days his books on the Norman Conquest, the Saracens and the Turks are the slowest of movers on the second-hand scene, because he relied too much on secondary sources; but he was one of the first to talk sense about urban history. 'Many of us', he says in the preface to English Towns and Districts, a collection of 'addresses and sketches' published in 1883, . .. 'many of us, in these days of foreign travel, have very little notion of the treasures of art and history which still live in the towns and villages of our own country. And many of us have not fully grasped the truth how largely in every land national history is made up of local history.' And he enlarges on this neatly in one of his addresses: 'The domestic history of an English town, which was always content to be a municipality, which never aspired to be an independent commonwealth, seems tame beside the long and stirring annals of the free cities of Italy and Germany. 'Yet, for that very reason, it has a special value of its own. Because the city has not striven after an independent being, it has done its work as a part of a greater 213 A. PERCIVAL whole. Because it has not aspired to be a sovereign commonwealth, it has played its part in building up a nation. 'And the comparison between the lowly English municipality and the proud Italian or German commonwealth has also an interest of another kind. The difference between the two is simply the difference implied in the absence of political independence in the one case and its presence in another. 'This difference is purely external. The internal constitution, the internal history, sometimes the internal revolutions, often present the most striking analogies. In both we may see the change from democracy to oligarchy, and f rom oligarchy to democracy. In both we may see men who in Old Greece would have taken their place as demagogues, perhaps as tyrants. Here, as in other lands, the city has often had to strive for its rights against the neighbouring nobles.' Now what Edward Freeman has to say rings very true, and nowhere more than Faversham, which through its membership of the Cinque Ports Confederation came closer to attaining what h e calls 'commonwealth' status than most English towns. The full story of its membership, and what it entailed, has still to be told, but what is clear is that it gave local politicians plenty of scope for manipulation. Freeman's 'neighbouring nobles' posed little threat to the town's freedom of manoeuvre, but a heavier incubus was much closer at hand - Faversham Abbey, founded by King Stephen in 1153. Its investment boosted the town's economy but, in return, it expected ultimate political control. Matters were made worse by the insensitive way in which St. Augustine's Abbey managed the Parish Church, of which it was patron. One way and another, and of course it was not the only town to suffer, Faversham was well and truly under the monastic thumb. Much of its story from 1153 to the Dissolution revolves around its efforts to loosen, if not throw off, the monastic bonds. Just one year - 1301 - saw two major thrusts in this direction. The town by then was an established borough and corporate member of the Cinque Ports Confederation, easing the burden of its 'head port', Dover. In the Court of Shepway it successfully indicted the Abbot of Faversham of some infringements of its liberties. He was imprisoned in Dover Castle, but appealed to the Archbishop, who promptly excommunicated the Lord Warden. The Lord Warden then appealed to the Crown and proceedings were instituted against the Archbishop. Eventually, the dispute was settled out of court, but the 'barons', or freemen, of Faversham had made their point. In the same year the Vicar of Faversham, who was a popular figure, fell foul of St. Augustine's and was dismissed by them. A riot, led by the Mayor, ensued. Monks who had been sent over from Canterbury were attacked, and an attempt made to set fire to the Church. The row simmered on, to be settled eventually by statesmanlike compromise; but again the town had made its point, and in the following year it won 214 LOCAL HISTORY IN THE SERVICE OF SOCIETY a new charter - its third - extending its rights and powers. For those who can 'read' buildings as well as they can decipher documents, eloquent witness of the dispute survives to this day in the shape of the Church's double-aisled transepts, rebuilt on a grand scale after the fire. Still the tensions continued, as the community sought to wrest more power from the Abbey, and they were not finally resolved till it was dissolved in 1538. Even then, however, the evidence suggests that one tyrant was only discarded for another - Thomas Arden, whose murder at his wife's instigation in 1551 went very unlamented in the town, and whose house dominates Abbey Street now as it did 450 years ago. Not much imagination is required to see why established local families hated him. All this is just a telescoped, possibly garbled, account. But it does vindicate Edward Freeman's views. There need be nothing tame about local history; and it was the power-struggles in Faversham, and many other towns and cities, which played a leading part in building up a nation. Freeman's loose analogy with the demagogues and tyrants of 'old Greece' prompts another thought, too. I was brought up on Herodotus and Thucydides, on ever more refined and searching analysis of long-familiar source-material. Every text, every inscription was squeezed for every last drop of possible significance. A good training for the mind, and I would be the last person to want to divert any of the energy. But is it not a bit odd that, even in 1993, we know more about fifth century Athens (fifth century B.C.), than fifteenth century Faversham, or perhaps even Canterbury? It is not for lack of raw material: there is a fair bit of it, but much of it still lies undisturbed and unexplored. How well, I wonder, do we really know and understand our own past? And why is it, for that matter, that Ancient History, in the form of the School of Lit. Hum. at Oxford, is rated one of the finest forms of academic discipline, while the history of Chatham, Tonbridge or Dover is not? We can begin to see, perhaps, that local history is no mere luxury. Already we have established four key points, on each of which I would like to enlarge a bit: 1. First, as Jacob, Giraud and Donne all acknowledge, it affords recreation, but there is no harm in that - there are worse ways of spending spare time. Bear in mind, too, that most of us are living longer; many of us are retiring earlier; and at 55, 60, 65 or whatever, we have plenty of time on our hands, and usually bags of mental vigour. One of the few areas in which there is a boom at the moment is ... pre-retirement training, or therapy - call it what you will. The Japanese, who live longer than 215 A.PERCIVAL we do, are into this in an even bigger way than we are, and recognise perhaps better than we do what important contributions retired people can make to voluntary organisations of all kinds. I wonder how much local history figures at the moment as a 'module' in pre-retirement training in Britain? Not much, I suspect, except informally through the evening class network. Yet in every city, town and village - without exception - there is huge scope. No-one need be dog in the manger: there is plenty for everyone. 2. The second point we have established is that most people are born explorers, and that local history satisfies their curiosity about the places they visit, or where they live and work. Canterbury, Faversham, Deal, Ramsgate would all be pale shadows of themselves if we knew nothing about their history. However fascinating the street pattern, however handsome the buildings, they would be utterly b affling. We would wander round them like amnesiacs, frustrated by total lack of recall. Indeed some of us may have had the experience, as I have, of visiting a non-European country about whose history, regrettably, I knew very little. There were fascinating cities, towns and villages, with thousands of interesting or attractive buildings in which the people took great pride. But what did they mean to me? Not a great deal, because I knew next to nothing of their context, or of the aspirations which had inspired them. 3. The third point is that without local history, the full stories of the nation, or of counties, would be impossible to trace. The actors would be moving across an empty stage, the events happening in a blinding fog. We need our reference points, whether they be Westminster, or Warrington, or Wolverhampton. Now, just as many of us under-rate our own influence on the course of events, we can under-estimate the impact made by individual communities, particularly the smaller ones. Of course no-one can be in any doubt about the contributions made by major ports, industrial areas or centres of culture, but what about Faversham and its like - just part of the supporting cast, perhaps? How far Faversham is representative is not for me to say, but to try to dispel this fallacy I have drawn a couple of 'Catherine wheels' (Fig. 1 ). The first, and more important, relates to social and economic history; the second, to what I have called 'sons and daughters'. In crude terms, in both cases, the bigger the diameter of the wheel, at its broadest point, the wider the influence of the community concerned on the world outside it - or it could be the other way round, the further- 216 I • International E • Europe R · Regional/National C - County L • Local + PlAY LOCAL HISTORY IN THE SERVICE OF SOCIETY Fig. I 217 FAVERSHAM CATHERINE WHEa 1 ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL HISTORY FAVERSHAM CATHERINE WHEEL 2 'SONS AND DAUGHTERS' A. PERCIVAL flung the influence on the town. The extent of influence is denoted by a series of concentric rings, graded from purely local (the innermost) through county, national and European to international (the outermost ring). The 'national' includes 'regional' because it is not always easy to separate them. You may like to look at the social and economic history wheel first. Without explaining it segment by segment, it may be sufficient to pick out an example or two. For at least 300 y ears, explosives were a Faversham speciality. They were made on a large scale, and the Government and the East India Company, among others, were heavily dependent on them. W hether you could sustain an argument that without Faversham explosives there would have been no British Empire, and no English-speaking world of nations, I do not know. But, not to put too fine a point on it, our experiences in the seventeenthcentury Dutch Wars, in British India and in World War I might have been very different without them. Two or three hundred years ago, I fancy, Faversham was closer to the Continent than it is today - of course not physically, but in terms of trade. Like several other east Kent towns it attracted its quota of Huguenot refugees - not as many perhaps as Canterbury but enough to regenerate its gunpowder industry, which was labouring under outmoded technology at the time. This of course is an example of a European impact on the town, not the other way round. Bricks we tend to take for granted, and particularly the massproduction techniques which enable us to build and rebuild rapidly and on a large scale when we can afford to. Till perhaps the end of the eighteenth century, most were baked on-site, from whatever clay or brickearth happened to be available. Come the Industrial Revolution, and demand soon outstripped such traditional sources of supply. It was the mass-production techniques evolved in the 'North Kent Brick Belt' which helped to make possible London's nineteenth-century mushroom growth. And to cite one documented case, worthy of special note if you have the misfortune to commute daily to Cannon Street, every brick in that long viaduct from New Cross to London Bridge was made in Faversham, and indeed moulded by hand - though some of the other processes were mechanised. The other wheel relates more to individual endeavour - not necessarily 'achievement' in the conventional sense, if only because one or two of the figures, including the first, were actually rogues. Somehow this seems right for Faversham, which has always been a bit more open-minded than most other places. To be honest, John Ward was a pirate - but no ordinary example of the kind. He started honourably enough, as a naval officer in the reign of James I, but found himself in a fix and decided to cut loose. He started with a single 218 LOCAL HISTORY IN THE SERVICE OF SOCIETY vessel, one which he had actually commandeered, and after a few years was the proud owner of a fleet of more than 30. Single-handedly, in the Mediterranean, he built himself up into ... a naval power, more than a match for Venice and Spain. His base was Tunis, and there he lived the life of a rich Arab, complete with harem. Mary Ballard had a very different kind of place on the international stage. Born in Faversham in 1789, and with perfectly ordinary parents, she married an Englishman who volunteered to fight with Bolivar. She went with him, and indeed at one stage - mounted on horseback - delivered a stirring address to the troops. Robert Heller (not his real name) was the son of the organist at Faversham Church. He followed in his father's footsteps, to the extent of studying music in London, then emigrated to the U.S.A., where he became the 'Liberace' of his day. But he had another great talent - for conjuring - and it is as the founder of American magic that he is remembered today. Unusually, perhaps, four of the 'sons and daughters' of Faversham on the wheel attained a kind of second-generation immortality - their lives provided inspiration for plays, one of which is still in the repertory. Sts. Crispin and Crispinian, French shoemakers who (it is said) were persecuted by the Roman emperor Diocletian and took refuge in Faversham, are the heroes of A Shoemaker A Gentleman, published in 1630. The anonymous Arden of Faversham, first published in 1592 and still performed today, tells how, and why, Thomas Arden was murdered at his wife's instigation in 1551. And in 1611, within a few years of John Ward's death, Robert Daborn had published A Christian turned Turk. As a measure, incidentally, of the amount of work which remains to be done, none of the topics or figures on the 'Catherine Wheels' have yet been properly studied - except one, Mary Ballard. 4. The fourth good reason I have identified for the study of local history is one of the most important. It is simply that people planning the future of towns stand a very fair chance of getting things wrong, if they do not understand their past. We have all seen it happen - how an overnight developer's whirlwind sweeps through an established, balanced community ... and destroys its character, its identity and its social and economic equilibrium. Then, there is a lot of ritual hand-wringing, but it is too late, and the damage has been done. It happens less often than it did, fortunately, and this is thanks largely to the efforts of ordinary members of the public, mostly in local amenity societies, like the Canterbury Society and the Faversham Society, who brought home to the 'experts' that towns and cities are delicate mechanisms, with a complex array of inter-dependent parts of different vintages, which need fine adjustment rather than the attentions of the sledgehammer. 219 A. PERCIVAL So councillors, developers, architects and town planners listened, and began to change tack. Sometimes indeed developers are now wise enough to look at the genius loci as well as the cash-flow projections before coming up with outline plans. Their architects will take the trouble to identify the local design vernacular and relate the new building to it. The planners, with any luck, will keep a benign eye on both parties, and the councillors will exercise well-informed final judgement. And at the end of the day the developers - shrewdly - will come up with a glossy brochure not just extolling the convenience and accessibility of their product, but summarising accurately the history of the community concerned, and stressing how its established character makes it especially appealing to prospective purchasers. However, this is the perfect scenario. Things do not always work out as well. Why should they? The developer's H.Q. may be 100 miles away, the architect's practice likewise. The planner could be new to the area, and so indeed could the councillor. Not necessarily a recipe for disaster, but it could be. The remarkable thing, when you think about it, is that not one of those involved need know anything about the history of the place, or have any grounding in local history. A community for them could just be a group of meaningless buildings and spaces, not a living organism whose present is the summation of its past. Now thankfully this is not the kind of country where you can ram a subject down the victim's throat, willy-nilly. You certainly cannot insist that developers, architects, planners and councillors know about local history before they exercise their skills or judgement. But it would help if you could make it easier for them to learn. Are the basic principles and techniques of local history taught in the colleges where the landed professions train? Not as far as I know. Are architects and planners who are new to an area advised by their employers to learn about its past? I have never heard of it happening. And what about newly-elected councillors? There is no training, none at all. Yet, these are the folk who between them, for better or for worse, will be dictating how the area changes. What an odd way to run a country, and no wonder crass mistakes still get made. I have been running local history evening classes now for nearly 15 years, and how many developers, planners and councillors have ever attended? None. The architects, to be fair, make a slightly better showing. There have been three, which in a small town is not too bad. And thankfully one or two of my 'graduates' have gone on to become councillors. But maybe the fault lies as much with the course-providers as with the prospective course-members. My courses get good publicity in the local press, but quite a few of the developers, architects and planners, who are active in the area, never see the local papers - because they do not live in it. Personally, I think they should, but these 220 LOCAL HISTORY IN THE SERVICE OF SOCIETY days this is a forlorn hope. Have I ever bothered to write to them personally about the course? I am afraid I have not. Have I been on the look-out for prospective councillors, and got in touch with them? No, but in fairness the parties have the knack of pulling some most unexpected names out of the hat at election time - people of whom noone has ever heard. What about the University itself? Does it run special courses targetted at this kind of market? Not as far as I know, and there is food for thought here. But I begin to get ill-natured. Are there any other reasons for taking local history more seriously, for treating it as a fully-fledged academic discipline, rather than as an also-ran? Indeed there are, though perhaps some are just embellishments of points I have already made. At one end of the scale, it can provide, and has provided, a bottomless well of inspiration and raw material for the writers of historical fiction. It is tempting to be patronising about this, but, before we sneer, we should remember that some of our greatest novelists have been dependent on this kind of source, and have conjured up some of the most evocative views of the past, without compromising accuracy or authenticity. There is the history of the landscape and the townscape, which can only be traced on the basis of local observation and research. Manmade features of any kind, however recent, are documents, waiting to be 'read' and interpreted, and I have already mentioned Arden's House and Faversham Church as illustrations. They are the mirrors of our political, social and economic development. The late L.T.C. Rolt put the point very well: 'Everything that man has made has a voice. Every earth bank, every wall of baked brick or cut stone, every iron beam speaks of the men who made them, telling us much, not only about the secrets of their technique, but about the thought and aspiration which led them to apply that technique in the way they did.' Oral history is specially important. Not only is it a precious source of evidence for events and trends which never found their way into written records, it can provide useful therapy for the subjects, particularly if they are elderly or not specially good at putting things in writing. Indeed, I can remember one elderly Favershamian who had a knack of attracting oral historians like moths to a light. It was only when they compared notes afterwards that they found he had just a single, well-rehearsed party-piece! But there are two final arguments I would like to put in support of my case. The first is that an understanding of local history helps to consolidate a sense of local identity, and so to foster and underpin community pride. The Faversham Society has the good fortune to be 221 A. PERCIVAL able to function both as a local amenity society and a local history society, and it has always been our belief that the more we can expand our knowledge of the area's past, and then share it as widely as possible, the more pride everyone will take in the area, the better they will look after it, and the nicer it will be to live or work in. So we have published (so far) 37 local history monographs, scores of picture postcards, facsimiles of old maps and prints, and so on. We have also kept prices down, to ensure that we do not just reach an elite. It is not for me to say how successful we have been, but the fact is that every year hundreds of visitors comment on how nice it is to come across one place, which is still an ordinary working town but has not succumbed to the routine tide of concrete and glass and is friendly, attractive and well cared-for. Underlying this argument is another, more important one. It is human nature to want a personal identity, to feel that we are a bit more than a soulless cog in a big machine. Now, if we are Earl Nelson, or, Professor of Economic History at a particular university, or the Bishop of Rochester, we have built-in identity. There is only one of us. But otherwise we may feel we are not much more than a number on a payroll, of interest to the rest of society mainly for our productive or spending capacity. We may want to influence the course of events, but find it difficult or impossible, because, in the interest of alleged 'savings', centralisation and rationalisation are all the vogue, and the pressure-points get more distant, and unyielding. 'They', it turns out, always know what is best for us, even if they have not taken the trouble to ask. The future of our town's economic welfare may be determined not by the enterprise, initiative and efforts of its own people, not even by the local authority or the Government, but by the whim of a single individual miles away who happens to interpret a balance-sheet in a particular way. Jobs can be created, or just as easily lost, at the stroke of a d i stant pen. Small wonder if we opt out, and pull up the drawbridge. At best, we may gorge ourselves night after night on escapist television; at worst, real alienation sets in, and with it vandalism and crime. 'They' do not care - why should we? In this context perhaps one can see why family history has become so popular. I may do them an injustice, but I think that once upon a time many people who started tracing their family trees did so because they were hoping to find specks of blue blood. Nowadays it seems to be different. People may be looking, I think, for the kind of identity their forebears can lend them. It hardly matters whether they were dukes or dustmen. The important thing is that they played an individual role in a local community. If it turns out they were rogues, it hardly matters, and we all know that in Australia it can be a matter of pride to have convict ancestors - they were among the first settlers, after all. But if a stylised, institutionalised society threatens our sense of 222 1. PORT 2. DFVIINAGE 3. WATER SUPPLY 4.GAS 5. POWER 6. CUSTOMS + EXCISE ?. INLAND REVENUE 8. REGISTilARS 9. POLICE 10. CRO\NN COURT 11. HOSPITALS 12. HOUSING 13, ALMS· HOUSES 14.CHARITIES 15. MARKET 16. CO-OP 17. ROADS 18. ENV. HEALTH 19. PLANNING 20. SCHOOLS 21, ADULT EDUCATION 22. LIBRARY 23. MUSEUM 24. PUBLIC HAUS LOCAL HISTORY IN THE SERVICE OF SOCIETY 1840 1840 1860 1880 1900 1860 1880 1900 1920 1940 REMOTE 24National 1960 1920 1940 1960 AUTONOMY IN FAVERSHAM 1830 • 1990 Fig. 2 223 1980 1980 A. PERCIVAL identity there is at least one other way of buttressing it. We can take pride in our town and its history - its personality, almost. Probably most Faversham people know that there was a Roman villa at the end of Abbey Street, that the town provided a ship to fight the Armada, that James II was given a rough ride by the local fishermen who captured him off Shellness when he was trying to escape to France. They know that to this day it is not a place where affected airs and graces cut much ice. If you live in Faversham, you can 'borrow' a bit of its stature. But the history, or rather the knowledge and understanding of the history, needs to be there. You would find in the case of Faversham that over the past century it has suffered sorely at the hands of the rationalisers and centralisers, and I have drawn a diagram to illustrate the point (Fig. 2). Ninety years ago, the town was thought fit enough to manage its own port, courts, schools and electricity supply, and it seems to have done so reasonably well. Today, when it is twice as big, it manages ... next to nothing. Full-circle - back to the same point. Our identity has been sapped because, though we are the people w h o know our own communities best, there are fewer opportunities for us to help manage them. Local government reform is on the agenda yet again, though sadly not because of the erosion of local autonomy. Nonetheless let us hope that those who review the structure have the sense to look at what history - local history - has to teach them. Citizen and Consumer Charters, I am afraid, are mere comforters: people need more opportunities to help shape their own communities. Whether I have made the case that local history should be taken more seriously, I must leave you to decide.B ut if you feel I have, you may like to cast your eye over the advertisement which follows. It is for the Kent County Council's Director of Heritage Management, who is also to occupy the Chair of Community History at the University of Kent at Canterbury. I should warn you it is a 'ham', because I have looked ahead and extracted it from a 1997 issue of a leading Kent newspaper. Public Appointments KENT COUNTY COUNCIL in association with the UNIVERSITY OF KENT AT CANTERBURY DIRE CTOR OF HERITAGE M ANAGEMENT PROFESSOR OF COMMUNITY H ISTORY With a Jong and proud history, and a wealth of heritage resources, Kent has been in the forefront of new initiatives to harness a fuller understanding of the past to the creation of 224 LOCAL HISTORY IN THE SERVICE OF SOCIETY a better future for its 1.25 million people. Its pace-setting Heritage Management team has won international acclaim for the quality and style of its innovative work in the fields of research, education, and presentation. With a staff of 60, it has a wide range of functions, and reports both to County Committees and to other public bodies with which it has standing consultancy agreements. Specific responsibilities include recording, reviewing and monitoring county heritage assets of all types and dates; input into county and district Development Plans; advice on individual development proposals; archaeological fieldwork; the provision and maintenance of a County-wide network of local resource and study centres; the development of museums and heritage centres; advice and assistance to tourism promotion agencies; an ongoing programme of exhibitions, video productions, and publications, including the Dictionary of Kent Biography; and facilitation of work by voluntary organisations with an active interest in the history of their areas. The present Director of Heritage Management is due to retire in a year's time and a successor is sought. By arrangement with the University of Kent at Canterbury the successful candidate will also be appointed to the Chair of Community History, to which he or she will be expected to devote half their time. The University was among the first to provide for a community history module at undergraduate level and its pioneering work has brought it nationwide recognition. Its courses are not confined to conventional studies and provide for project-based research and practical experience. The Chair of Community History is one of four in the University's Institute of Kent Studies, which as well as being responsible for modules in first-degree courses in a number of disciplines, maintains a county resource centre and undertakes research for public and private clients. The successful candidate will have well-developed leadership skills, and a sensitive awareness of the social importance of community history and heritage studies, and will have distilled some of his or her pioneering work in published papers, reports and books. He or she will see in this appointment an unrivalled opportunity to refine techniques and extend the horizons of understanding. Fuller details are available from the Chief Personnel Officers of the Kent County Council and University of Kent at Canterbury. Now, maybe, the two jobs should not be held in tandem, if the mental equilibrium of the successful candidate is not to be irrevocably impaired. And when money is tight, as it is today, the whole idea is a pipe-dream. But is it an idea worth considering for the future, is it one which might bring economic as well as cultural dividends, is it one we cannot afford to dismiss? Kent, after all, has a long and proud history, as it says in the advertisement, and, to be honest, there is still much that we do not know about it. We are fortunate that we have so many dedicated sparetime historians. But ... a nibble here, a nibble there ... is it enough? If Faversham is any guide, it is not. People, including me, have been nibbling at it for years, but still only a tiny fraction of the story has been told. God forbid that Kent County Council (or its successors) and the University should ever take us part-timers over, or ease us out. They could not, anyway; there is so much to do. No, the existence of accredited and properly staffed Departments at the Kent County Council and the University should enhance and facilitate the part- 225 A.PERCIVAL timers' work, giving them a greater s ense of overall purpose, making resources more accessible, and bringing home the importance of their work to a wider public. Thi n k of it this w a y, p erhaps. There are who l e n ations with populations not much larger than Kent's, and many sport Government and University institutions dedicat ed to study of their history and heritage. An Institute of Kent Studies - why not, indeed? 226