See short promotional video:-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_A3jMwIHrdA
Monday 6 November 2023
Sunday 29 October 2023
Exclusive: Arsenal academy guru Roy Massey on Arteta, Wilshere & facing George Best - Tribal Football
https://www.tribalfootball.com/articles/exclusive-arsenal-academy-guru-roy-massey-on-arteta-wilshere-facing-george-best-4474376
Exclusive: Arsenal academy guru Roy Massey on Arteta, Wilshere & facing George Best - Tribal Football
Roy Massey has a great anecdote on the (in)famous George Best..."I was with Rotherham, playing Manchester United at Millmoor in a FA Cup replay. With 15 min
www.tribalfootball.com
Paving the way to highlight gypsy and traveller heritage
More museums are reaching out to the Gypsy Roma and
Traveller community to record their distinctive lives to help their visitors
and the general public at large to understand how these minority ethnic groups have contributed to British society –
and rural communities particularly - for centuries.
In 2022, Landworker revealed how Worcestershire County
Museum (WCM) at Hartlebury Castle was transforming the experiences of visitors
to its beautiful Gypsy Roma and Traveller (GRT) Vardo (the Romany word for a
horse drawn gypsy caravan) collection. This followed the appointment of Vardo Project Officer of Georgie
Stevens, part Romany herself.
Members of
the Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller community are featured in many of the
photographs in the Gordon Shennan collection at Inverness Museum and Art
Gallery. Many museums held special events during June which is Gypsy, Roma, and
Traveller History Month. The historical, economic and cultural contribution of
Britain's 300,000 Gypsies and Travellers is slowly becoming recognised.
When Robin
Diaper, whose work as the Curator of Maritime & Social History at Hull
Museums and Gallery involves overseeing, amongst other sites, the Streetlife
Museum of Transport became aware there were stories about the history of the
gypsy and traveller community in the city and its surrounding areas he sought
help.
“During
COVID we tried doing things remotely. There was man called John Cunningham in
the Hull Pals Battalion who had earned a Victoria Cross for his bravery during
WWI. He was a Romany gypsy. I had seen that Violet Cannon at York Travellers
Trust (YTT) had written a blog on him but as she was having a baby at the time,
she was unable to write a panel on him for the Wilberforce Museum, which is
next door”, explains Diaper, who then was able to get in touch with
Cunningham’s great nephew Charles Newland who was good enough to provide all
the necessary information for a permanent display of a powerful story that was
just waiting to be told.
“That was
great and as we had pockets of unused space at Streetlife and understood that
perhaps we were not covering the heritage of the gypsy and traveller (G&T)
community we asked Violet if she would be willing to help us develop this and
to facilitate contact with communities too,” said Diaper. “What we wanted to do
was make a permanent addition and a meaningful change”.
YTT chief
executive Cannon, who is a Romany Gypsy who spent her childhood roadside at a
time when land was not as scarce as today and legislation, which eventually
forced her family to move into a house, was less restrictive, was inspired by
what she heard to get involved. “I felt it would recognise the permanency of
Gypsy and Travellers families in Hull where many families have strong links to York.
I have worked in the voluntary sector from an early age and I am keen to remove
the obstacles that I faced for future generations of my community,” many of
whom are no longer travelling round the country.
Asked to
describe the situation facing today’s G&T community, Cannon said recent
research by Birmingham University exploring Islamophobia and prejudice against
Muslims found that it was exceeded by negative perceptions towards G&T.
Cannon
facilitated workshops with members of the G&T community who decided what
items would go on display to represent them. This includes a life-sized model
of a piebald horse, information boards on diverse subjects and lots of
photographs, many taken by George Norris who is strongly linked with G&T.
There is
also a unique painting by Charles Cooper Henderson (1803-1845) who is
considered one of the greatest coaching painters of the 19th century
and whose works are on display at, amongst others, the Tate Gallery. Amidst the
grandeur of Henderson’s painting of the Hull and London Royal Mail coach around
1835 there can be glimpsed in the corner a gypsy tent with a small ass resting
alongside.
In a similar
fashion to the total absence of agricultural workers in paintings from the past
this is a silent testament to a race of people that have lived here for
centuries but who have been largely drowned by deafening silence.
Cannon hopes
the exhibition will be attended by “gypsy and travellers who will feel valued
to see their culture represented. I hope that other communities attend and
learn something new, or at least open their minds a little”.
Diaper has
been heartened that Gypsies and Travellers have visited Streetlife to view the
displays on their culture and social history and “when we did a small opening
there was a couple of families who were passing through locally who came along
and expressed their pleasure afterwards.”
He is
hopeful of developing more exhibition projects with G&T. “Now that we have
gained a bit of trust, we have already had some initial interest and we have
some spaces that could accommodate temporary works.”
Diaper has
also had visitors to Streetlife, which is ostensibly a transport museum, express
their pleasure at seeing the G&T community represented.
Visitor Ian
Atherton felt it was “only right that G&T are represented in a Hull Museum.
If you want to know the true history of a place then every part has to be
represented and my dad worked as a scrap man with many gypsies.”
Atherton,
who has regularly visited Appleby Horse Fair, believes much of the negative
perceptions towards G&T are “generated by the media because once people mix
with one another they soon get along well enough.”
The
Streetlife Museum of Transport is home to over 200 years of transport history
spread across six galleries.
Situated
within Hull’s Museums Quarter, the Streetlife Museum of Transport neighbours
both Wilberforce House and the Hull & East Riding Museum which are also
free to enter.
In recent
times the Wilberforce Museum has been working with the local Black Community to
develop new galleries looking at the legacies of transatlantic slavery. A
temporary exhibition Uncovering Modern Slavery has just opened.
Milking it - where have all the cows gone?
Milking
It
Just as
environmental subsidies are allowing money to grow on trees for big companies
who are buying up large amounts of land for carbon trading projects then so too
are our public funds being misused in a case of missing cows helping to boost
supermarket profits.
From the
towns where you buy your packaged milk from the supermarket, you will not have
noticed the radical changes in the fields that are taking place to provide that
carton.
Yet if you
are lucky enough to have the time to roam round the countryside, you will not
see many cows grazing anymore. There are being replaced by black plastic bags
stuffed with grass cuttings ready for storage nearer the farm for use as feed
for cattle, whose pats are washed out and collected in slurry tanks, all ready
to be transported by road to the fields.
Locked
away
The cattle
still exist and many farms now house several thousand cows - or beef cattle.
They are out of sight in big barns. They stay indoors throughout the year as
the drag of taking them out to fields and bringing them back, twice a day in
all sorts of weathers, is several steps too far for most producers these
days. Quite simply that is ‘inefficient’ in terms of energy and time consumed. The
cattle are there 24 hours a day in sparse conditions. While we rightly hear
about chickens indoors, we hear much less about these cattle, yet they are
sentient creatures.
So, the
animals stay indoors, in the dry, and eat mainly grass from the fields. But
they also eat a lot of ‘concentrate’. This is usually soy beans, £800million annually
imported from Brazil, and maize (about the same amount in money) mainly
imported from USA. The tax/tariff on this maize has been removed by this
government in June this year, only the second tariff change since Brexit, in
order to keep feed prices low.
The change
from field to factory production has gone on in the last 5-10 years out of
sight and with few controls on conditions.
Banks and
supermarket pressures
Banks have shoved
dairy farmers, caught by supermarkets pushing them to produce milk ever
cheaper, into major investment. They need massive tractors and mowers to cut
the grass as quickly as possible, often 4 times a year, and then shift the cuttings
into silage bags. Farmers also need slurry tanks to hold the waste washed from
the barns plus slurry tankers to cart the stuff to deposit on the fields, often
along busy roads at high speed. They also need to improve their own
infrastructure to carry this frequently used heavyweight. No wonder 1 in
20 dairy farmers went to the (albeit dry stone) wall last year.
Diary
workers quit over working conditions
Many dairy
workers have been replaced by ever more accurate machines to feed, precisely
measured amounts, and to milk and measure the production of the beasts. There
are not now enough dairy workers. A survey for ‘The Cattle Site’ found
that four fifths of all respondents were worried by staff recruitment with almost
a third considering leaving the industry due to a lack of dairy labour. 28%
reported staff were leaving due to unsociable working hours. It may also have
something to do with working inside all day. Clearly, they need a union.
River
damage to be paid for by the public purse
The environmental
impacts of these changes are poorly understood, as they are poorly studied. One
big issue are excessive phosphates going into rivers, causing ‘nutrient growth’
of algae taking oxygen and thus killing other river life. Half comes from yards
and half from fields. The slurry is rich in phosphates which are not held in
the ground well, and so washes off. It may also be that the slurry soil
works more anaerobically, so not as efficient as old-fashioned aerobic cow manure
in holding the phosphate. But I cannot find any UK Land based research looking
into this issue.
The
government announced in August this year - as part of unlocking the old EU’s
‘nutrient neutrality’ law- that £280m is going to be invested directly to
rivers to improve slurry damage with 4000 farm inspections being carried out by
50 new inspectors. There is also a £25m innovative research programme to
improve nutrient (phosphate) holding in soil. Are the supermarkets going
to fund these government costs, rather than coming out of taxpayer’s money, to
make up for their cheap milk policy?
The really big environmental issue concerns global warming.
Cows are often blamed for their methane burps, yet the cow contribution to this
major problem is much more complex. Cows in fields burp across the grass, where
chemicals called ‘hydroxyl radicals’ (charged OH molecules), produced in
sunlight by water on grass, break the methane up into less harmful water and
carbon dioxide.
In the barns there are no radicals keeping things the
methane down. Also, there are all those imported feed concentrates - £1.5
billion in imports from land that would be better left for trees or ranching.
The two dairy footprints - one from grazing and the other from barns are wildly
different. Our food carbon footprint makes its impression all over the world,
when we could be using our grass better.
New approach needed
Imagine if we used the £1.5b worth of cattle feed going to
people abroad to regenerate our soils, move the cows more easily, pay dairy
workers living wages, and utilise our land to grow grass without polluting the
rivers. And we’d have cows back in the fields to show off our countryside.
Ex-PM Johnson promised in June 2016 at Gisburn market that
the existing farming subsidies would stay. He lied. They are going. Dairy farms
will be hit by the losses. Yet new
‘environmentally friendly’ farm subsidies are doing little to address the
environmental issues of barn-bred cattle. Much money is going to consultants on
unworkable schemes to attract inward investors, rather than the farmers
themselves. 2,000 farmers signed up to the sustainable
farming incentive (SFI) scheme. By
August this year, it had paid out £10,692,415– less than 0.5% of the overall
£2.4bn farming budget.
Can the breaking of their chains by enslaved persons inspire today's trade union movement?
Following the unveiling of a statue by Belfast City Council
to former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, Unite in Ireland wants his
legacy and those of other enslaved persons such as Oloudah Equiano, born in
Nigeria, to inspire today’s trade union movement.
Douglass was born into slavery in Maryland around 1818. He
worked on a plantation. When he was sent to live in Baltimore as a house slave
his mistress, not knowing it was illegal to educate slaves began teaching him
to read. When though the slave master ended this the experience, Douglass continued
his education by swapping food scraps to poor white children in exchange of
knowledge.
At 18, Douglas was reading about the abolitionist movement.
In 1838 he escaped, using faked papers, to New Bedford, Mass. In 1841 he gave
his first anti-slavery oration speaking boldly and honestly about life as a
slave and the traumas it leaves behind. He thereafter became a national leader
of the abolitionist movement.
Chattel slavery was to be outlawed on 6 December 1865.
Douglass, who wrote three autobiographies, died in 1895. Six years earlier he
became the United States ambassador to Haiti where slaves, on what was then
known as Saint-Domingue, waged between 1791-1804 the first successful
revolution under the leadership of former slave and first black general
Toussaint Louverture and by defeating Napoleon Bonaparte’s forces achieved
freedom.
August 23rd is the International Day for
Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition which Unite marked by its
regional equalities officer Taryn Trainor stating “Today commemorates the
insurrection in Saint-Domingue by self-liberated slaves – an event which played
a crucial role in the eventual abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and
reminds us that abolition was driven and eventually won by enslaved and formerly
enslaved persons.
“Earlier this year, we welcomed the unveiling of a statue to
former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, funded by Belfast City
Council. Douglass, like Oloudah Equiano in the previous century, travelled
throughout Ireland, and was supported by a network of determined anti-slavery
activists, women and men, from Cork to Belfast. They knew that, as
Frederick Douglass pointed out, there can be no progress without
struggle.
“As trade unionists, the fight for abolition reminds us
that struggle must always be informed and directed by those most directly
affected.”
When Douglass travelled to Britain and Ireland in the 1840s
his lectures excited great interest and now that Belfast has become the first
in Europe to honour Frederick Douglass there are plans in places such as
Halifax to erect plaques at some of the locations he spoke at.
The life-sized bronze statue in Belfast is located at
Rosemary Street, close to where Douglass addressed crowds in 1845.
Ms Trainor concluded:
“The impact of chattel slavery continues to resonate today –
not just in monuments and the names of public buildings and spaces, but also in
the ongoing discrimination faced by people of African descent.
“As attempts are made by far-right actors to stir up
hatred, fear and anger against migrants and refugees, many fleeing war and
oppression, trade unions must draw inspiration from the movement to end slavery
and work side-by-side with those being targeted by these messages of hate to
build an inclusive society.”
Belfast historian and tour guide Dr Tom Thorpe said the
statue was appropriate as the statue "takes us into a history which united
us rather than divides us.
"The anti-slavery cause was followed by people from
across the political divide, unionists and nationalists, but also from the
Catholic and Presbyterian communities.”
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