Women’s history accolade for I Dig Canals project
THEATRE company Alarum Productions has been awarded Highly Commended for its project I Dig Canals – How Women Helped Save the Waterways, by the Women’s History Network.
An annual prize is awarded by the network to the team behind a community history project by, about, or for women in a particular locale or community.
I Dig Canals celebrates women’s roles in campaigning to save the canals postwar to the 1970s. The news came through in the middle of July but co-directors Kate Saffin and Heather Wastie had to keep it to themselves.
Community history prize chair, Elspeth King, wrote: “The panel were particularly taken with training you offered to your volunteers and the knowledge gap your project has filled with this important piece of industrial heritage from a female perspective. You came very close to winning.”
Thanks to generous funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund and with the help of project manager Nadia Stone, Heather and Kate were able to work with a team of 14 volunteers to record 16 individual and three mother/daughter oral history interviews with women, mostly in the Black Country, aged mid-60s to early 90s.
They also researched women’s wider contribution from 1945 to the 1970s via existing (and rather sparse) written accounts and archives, both nationally and locally. Interviewees also contributed archive material and photographs.
Alarum Productions organised stalls at local waterway festivals and reminiscence events across the Black Country, capturing local memories and short interviews with 10 other women. They engaged with around 800 members of the public and put on a creative writing workshop on the Vic Smallshire, a trip boat owned by Dudley Canal & Tunnel Trust who generously provided a base for the project.
Writing from the workshop is included with archive material, photographs, poems by Heather and an article by Kate, in a celebratory book. There is also a series of 15 podcasts, created using a range of extracts from the interviews – fascinating, touching, funny and occasionally heart stopping – shedding light on some of the volunteer roles women took on to further the cause of canal restoration in the Black Country and beyond.
Finally, there is a short film about the project, and further audio and video material is still being uploaded. Further information and links can be found on the Alarum website www.alarumtheatre.co.uk
The top prize went to Doing It Ourselves: The First Neighbourhood Co-operative Nursery, Walthamstow.