The Truth - Deal with It

Back when I was working for Reuters they came up with a great tag line for their news service - "The Truth - Deal with It" linking the idea of Reuters as an impartial news source and its ability to deliver that news quickly to trading desktops thus offering advantages to traders making decisions about whether to buy or sell. The difficult question, especially in our "post truth" world is how can we be objective and in the rather different field of my PhD research I have been promoted to think about the John Laing archive in terms of how objective is the story that it tells of the company and its accomplishments and whether the process of managing the archive itself alters the meaning. Rebecca Peabody's article What Is the Future of the Photo Archive? started this line of thinking and led onto looking at the Photo Archives series of symposia and in particular Photo Archives V: The Paradigm of Objectivity.

I probably need to start to think more about the process by which the archive has been created and the changes that have been made to it as it has developed and been passed from John Laing to Historic England (and are there any intermediate stops).

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The Mystery L

Clapham Wind Tunnel One area where being able to talk to the people who worked for John Laing is really helpful is unravelling the odd mystery. I have noticed that in a number of photographs from the 1950s there is one or two individuals who had a large L on their jacket. I speculated on what this might be and thought that most likely it was to designate the leader of a team of workers. I was able to put a short piece in John Laing's Retired Employees' News asking for any information on the mystery L and several people kindly wrote to explain the mystery - which was no real mystery at all. The L simply stood for Laing but only new employees would be given a jacket with the logotype and so this took a long time to permeate through the organisation. A case of applying Occam's razor and not overthinking things for me.

PHRC 2019

The PHRC conference at De Montfort was tremendous and provided a lot of insights for me to go away and think about. In particular there was a lot of discussion about what is missing from an archive and what that tells us - sometimes as much as the extant material. Things for me to think about include: How colour photography creates a new sensory experience - maybe tying this into the work that Lynda Nead has done Who are the keepers of corporate memory - the business or the people who work in it? How posed are the images - are they pictures of work in progress or staged Do the images sanction and "testify" to a particular (curated?) history I was also pointed at other work that I need to read - the pile keeps getting higher!

The Construction History Society - 6th Annual Conference

James W P Campbell opening the Conference On 5th April I got to present my early research at the Sixth Annual Conference of the Construction History Society at Queens' College, Cambridge. I was very pleased with the reaction and got a lot of questions and comments following the talk and have a number of angles to follow up. In particular my characterisation of senior staff in suits and labourers in more humble outfits was challenged with one member of the audience suggesting that suits were almost ubiquitous wear for all classes - something to look into. Other areas of interest included potential use of progress photos as means of protecting the company from claims by subcontractors or clients when a job took longer or cost more and there was a general sense that research into the social aspects of construction history as demonstrated by some of the Laing photographs would be important. The paper is published in the Proceedings so I am hopeful that the resear...

The Good Builder - Researching John Laing

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