Democracy, in close-up.

Andrew Shanahan gets Carried Away at Manchester’s newest old museum.

On 13 February 2010, the People’s History Museum will open its doors to the public for the first time since November 2007. The re-opening signals the end of a long (and sometimes complicated) refurbishment, which has ended up costing in excess of £12.5 million. The museum’s director, Dr Nick Mansfield, hopes that the expanded premises and new exhibitions will restore the venue to the minds of cultural visitors after a period in which the building threatened to become something of a forgotten member of Manchester’s museums scene. This despite the fact that it is the only national museum in the city and has a collection that contains some 1,500 historic objects. So why does Mansfield hope that you will make a date to visit a museum about the history of working people in Britain?

‘The key thing is that the new galleries are bigger and there are so many wonderful objects about to be shown! With the previous building we were only able to display a fraction of what we’ve got and so our first year is really focusing on displaying more, which is marvellous,’ Mansfield says. ‘We’ve got more room to display our collections of political posters, we’ve got banners from the 1832 Reform Act, banners from the miners’ strike, and items from our archive of the labour party – including the minutes of the first labour party meeting in Ramsay McDonald’s handwriting. Then of course we’ve got Carried Away.’

Given the importance of an inspiring re-opening, it seems only fair to assume that this opening exhibition must be a good demonstration of the museum’s principles and ethos. As its name would suggest, the show features photographs of demonstrators being literally carried away from protests by authorities. It’s a deceptively simple brief but one which Catherine O’Donnell, the lead researcher for the exhibition, says will sound the perfect opening fanfare for the museum.

‘I think the People’s History Museum tells the story of individuals, as well as those of the wider political movements,’ explains O’Donnell. ‘This exhibition is about normal people living extraordinary lives and the images in Carried Away are snapshots of these individual moments of defiance. One of the things that struck me when I was selecting images for the exhibition is that it takes a lot of guts to get arrested for something you believe in and these images capture that particular moment when people do just that and say, “screw the consequences, this is really important – it’s something more important than me.”‘

To emphasise O’Donnell’s point, the museum has tried to trace as many of the people shown in the photographs as possible, recording their stories of what happened before and after the pictures were taken. Incredibly, through local media campaigns, O’Donnell and her team have already found five protest protagonists and have included their accounts within the exhibition itself. And anyone visiting the museum is encouraged to share their version of the events on display, which will allow the show to evolve as more and more people see it.

The exhibition’s simple premise neatly demonstrates that shared struggle is central to any political change, regardless of era. The images, for example, cover a number of key moments in the progression towards democracy, ranging from the Suffragettes, represented by a 1909 photograph of a defiant Dora Marsden protesting outside Manchester University, to images of the miners’ strikes from the 1980s. In all of the images, whether they show people standing up for equality, anti-fascism or nuclear disarmament, it is the sense of unity between these moments of defiance that makes the most interesting point about the struggles that still go on today.

‘We have a tragic image in the exhibition of a man called Kevin Gately at an anti-fascist rally in the 70s,’ says O’Donnell. ‘We’ve got one picture of him being dragged away by the police and another of him on a stretcher. Sadly he later died – so although some of the images are quite quirky, there are also some terrible outcomes to these struggles. A lot of the themes raised by the photographs are very contemporary; they connect directly with protests and conversations that are going on now. You can see an image of someone being violently arrested by a policeman and it brings to mind recent stories like Ian Tomlinson.’

The question of relevance is one that concerns Mansfield and he says it’s an ongoing battle to keep a museum dedicated to the story of democracy in the UK relevant to a modern audience. ‘Younger people especially assume that democracy is 700 years old and that it’s something to do with Magna Carta, whereas it’s a really recent story. The pure “one person one vote” idea of democracy only really evolved into the late 1960s,’ Mansfield says. ‘It’s vital we remember that the story of democracy is ongoing and when we live in a time when there are more people voting for Big Brother than there are voting in the general election it’s essential that we keep people engaged, because otherwise who is going to keep politicians on their toes?’

Carried Away opens at the newly re-opened People’s History Museum on 13 February 2010. Andrew Shanahan is an award-winning freelance writer with work ranging from journalism with The Guardian and The Independent and national magazine titles to scriptwriting with the BBC. He has also developed a series of innovative writing projects for the internet with Moving Audio.

Images (top to bottom): Miners’ Strike 1984; Suffragettes 1909; Unemployment march 1929, all part of Carried Away and all courtesy of the People’s History Museum

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