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Thursday 27 June 2013

The PhD student info pack has arrived...

Well now its getting real.

A set of paperwork to read through, and a huge pile of huge books to read.

I've had a meeting with my supervisor, Dr Roberta Anderson (known as Bobby) and talked through how to really begin research in earnest. It was a good meeting, not least because chatting with members of the history department at BSU is always an inspiration. Its a great team, with great people, and I look forward to working with them even more.

My extra reading has also turned up a fascinating snippet of information, that the last family owner of Newton Park, Algernon Temple Gore Langton, was a member of the British Fascist Party in the 1930s. (according to David Cannadine) This adds a terrific extra layer to the background story of the property. One of my students on the BSU Archive is also interested in this as a potential dissertation topic, so I look forward to finding out more along with her.

My second supervisor is Dr Alison Hems, who was my tutor for the MA in Heritage Management last year. It was Alison who pointed me in the direction of the Cannadine book (Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy) as a good background text on this topic.

So, between all the experts in history and heritage at Bath Spa, I've been set in the right direction.

Time to read the PhD handbook...

Well, here we are...

Next week I officially begin as a PhD student at Bath Spa University.

However, the process has been going on a while, and has taken a lifetime of preparation, it seems.

Let me explain...

I started at Bath Spa University in 2008, and graduated with a BA Hons in History in 2011. Having discovered a whole new world, I didn't want to stop there, so I carried on with an MA in Heritage Management, and became interested (and frankly a little alarmed) at the prospect of working on a PhD.

This was at the suggestion of my supervisor, Dr Roberta Anderson, who throughout both degrees has encouraged and inspired my efforts, and understood what, as a mature student, I needed to push me onwards. I owe her a great deal.

During my final year as an undergraduate, I was given the opportunity to work on the Newton Park archive papers, and have continued this ever since. Newton Park is a country estate near the glorious city of Bath. With origins going back to the 11th century, the core of the estate is the 18th century mansion built in the 1760s, in the city's heyday as a fashionable Georgian spa town. This house nestles in a beautiful wide valley, landscaped by Capability Brown. The family who owned these rolling acres sold it after the death of Algernon Temple Gore Langton, 5th Earl Temple, in 1940. It then became a women's teacher training college, in the period of post Second World War reconstruction, and the expansion of the English education system. At the heart of this development was the first Principal of the college, Mary Dawson.

What was a training college adapted through the years to eventually become Bath Spa University.

Alongside the BSU Archive development, I have also been involved with gathering oral histories from former students and staff of the college, and it is this dynamic combination of archive history and personal testimony which has led me towards PhD studies. I want to tell the story of what was created here, back in the late 1940s and in the two decades which followed. I am inspired by the visionary determination of Mary Dawson, and the more I find out about her, the more I have come to believe that it was her personal drive and passion which built the solid foundations of community and place from which everything else has grown.

Having spent over two years on the archive project, I've been able to amass a considerable amount of information already. But this is only the beginning...

PS. To explain the title of the blog: Back in the day, rules were strict. Women students at Newton Park during Miss Dawson's tenure were warned not to wear fluffy slippers when entertaining young men at their hostels. 1961 -1964 student Carole Venner told me this with a giggle of reminiscence "Well fluffy slippers were supposed to inflame men's passions, weren't they?!"