CONSTRUCTION OF HERITAGE AND IDENTITY IN THE PLAGUE VILLAGE: EXAMINING THE INTERSECTIONS OF LOCAL IDENTITY, HERITAGE TOURISM, AND LOCAL HERITAGE MUSEUM IN

A thesis submitted to the University of Manchester for the degree of Master of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities

2012

BRANDI CHANTEL SKIPALIS

SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES LIST OF CONTENTS Chapter Page List of Figures ………………………………………………………………………………………………… 2 Abstract ………………………………………………………………………………………………………... 3 Declaration ……………………………………………………………………………………………………. 4 Copyright Statement …………………………………………………………………………………………. 5 Acknowledgements …………………………………………………………………………………………… 6 About the Author ……………………………………………………………………………………………… 7 Chapter 1: Introduction: Constructing Heritage and Identity in the Plague Village ……………………. 8 Chapter 2: The People of Eyam …………………………………………………………………………….. 35 Chapter 3: Local Heritage Outside of the Plague Context ..……………………………………………… 53 Chapter 4: Eyam Museum as Gatekeeper for Plague Heritage Information …………………………… 67 Chapter 5: The Public Gaze and Private Lives in Eyam: The Contestation of Space in the Plague Village …………………………………………………………………………………………….. 88 Chapter 6: “This is a Theme Museum”: Eyam Museum as a Memorial Site ……………………………123 Chapter 7: Museum Design, Display, and Presentation in Eyam ………………………………………..142 Chapter 8: Plague Heritage, Plague Inheritance: CCR5-∆32 – Public Understanding of ‘the Gene’ in Eyam ………………………………………………………………………………………………164 Chapter 9: Conclusion: Eyam as a Site of Memorial Tourism ……………………………………………181 Resources ……………………………………………………………………………………………………...196 LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page Figure 1: Map of Eyam ……………………………………………………………………………………….. 10 Figure 2: Diorama 1 at Plague Museum - George Viccars and the bolt of cloth from London believed to have caused the Plague outbreak at Eyam …………………………………………………...... 12 Figure 3: Eyam Museum on Hawkhill Rd. ………………………………………………………………….. 13 Figure 4: Eyam Map Project’s Map of Eyam ………………………………………………...... 64 Figure 5: “Cartoon of Difficult Visitors” from Discover Eyam Village Website ………………………….. 89 Figure 6: Boundary Stone + School Party Picnic Lunches ………………………...... 100 Figure 7: Visitors on Pavement in Front of Plague Cottages …………………………………………….100 Figure 8: Parishioners laying a wreath on the grave of Catherine Mompesson before the Plague Commemoration Service, August 2008 …………………………………………………………126 Figure 9: Text and Graphics Panels featuring Plague Rats and Plague Fleas ……………….……...... 147 Figure 10: Rat Weathervane at Eyam Museum ………………………………………………………….. 161 Figure 11: Black Rat, Brown Rat, and Fleas …………………………………………………………...... 161

Word Count: 74,147 Words

2

ABSTRACT The University of Manchester Brandi Chantel Skipalis Doctor of Philosophy February 7, 2012

Construction of Heritage and Identity in the Plague Village: Examining the Intersections of Local Identity, Heritage Tourism, and Local Heritage Museum in Eyam

In this thesis, I examine the ways in which the local identity as “the Plague Village” that has been built up in Eyam over the centuries intersects with heritage tourism and the local heritage museum in telling the story of Eyam’s history with bubonic plague. The key areas of investigation are: 1) tourism in Eyam and the interactions between visitors and village residents, 2) the role of the local museum and other heritage projects in defining and constructing Eyam’s public identity, 3) the secondary function of the museum as a memorial site, 4) the strategies employed by the museum in the design, display, and presentation of its exhibits, 5) the specific ways in which the museum describes and displays “the Plague”, and 6) the issues surrounding a specific aspect of the Plague discourse addressed in the museum, the CCR5-Δ32 genetic mutation, which was the subject of genetic testing in Eyam to study its possible connection to surviving bubonic plague. Drawing on tourism research and heritage tourism studies, museum anthropology, anthropology of science, and medical anthropology, I show the interconnectedness and the complexity of heritage tourism in Eyam and the ways in which Eyam Museum contributes to this.

Key Findings: 1) Heritage tourism is far more complex than can existing theories regarding “the gaze” suggest, and in Eyam, we see that the gaze is part of the picture, but the work of the imagination and the attempt by visitors to physically place themselves within the history they seek to learn about by walking particular routes and visiting particular spots are equally important in understanding the driving force behind the type of heritage tourism found in Eyam. 2) The museum is a very powerful driving force in Eyam’s tourism, and it is the museum which determines what story is told to visitors and in what ways. It tells a history, but it also serves as a memorial to the people who died in Eyam’s Plague outbreak, acting in some ways as a sacred site rather than as simply a museum. 3) Eyam Museum uses a variety of display formats, including dioramas, artefacts in glass cases, charts and graphs, drawings, and text panels. Its heavy use of text panels and its distinct lack of interactive displays differentiate Eyam Museum from other museums in Britain and in museum studies literature, but the museum’s memorial function combined with lack of space and low budget mean that interactive displays are not being considered as an option at this time. 4) The Plague and “the gene” are seen as biomedical concepts in some ways, illustrated through a variety of methods, but at the same time, they are seen in social terms, as the Plague is the story of great suffering and loss for the village that is associated with specific names and individuals’ life stories, while “the gene” is considered as an object of hope and amazement for its relationship not to bubonic plague, but to HIV, a “modern-day plague”, making this part of the story told in the museum relevant and exciting to visitors to Eyam today.

3

DECLARATION

I declare that no portion of the work referred to in the thesis has been submitted in support of an application for another degree or qualification of this or any other university or other institute of learning.

4

COPYRIGHT STATEMENT i. The author of this thesis (including any appendices and/or schedules to this thesis) owns certain copyright or related rights in it (the “Copyright”) and she has given The University of Manchester certain rights to use such Copyright, including for administrative purposes. ii. Copies of this thesis, either in full or in extracts and whether in hard or electronic copy, may be made only in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (as amended) and regulations issued under it or, where appropriate, in accordance with licensing agreements which the University has from time to time. This page must form part of any such copies made. iii. The ownership of certain Copyright, patents, designs, trade marks and other intellectual property (the “Intellectual Property”) and any reproductions of copyright works in the thesis, for example graphs and tables (“Reproductions”), which may be described in this thesis, may not be owned by the author and may be owned by third parties. Such Intellectual Property and Reproductions cannot and must not be made available for use without the prior written permission of the owner(s) of the relevant Intellectual Property and/or Reproductions. iv. Further information on the conditions under which disclosure, publication and commercialisation of this thesis, the Copyright and any Intellectual Property and/or Reproductions described in it may take place is available in the University IP Policy (see http://www.campus.manchester.ac.uk/medialibrary/policies/intellectual- property.pdf), in any relevant Thesis restriction declarations deposited in the University Library, The University Library’s regulations (see http://www.manchester.ac.uk/library/aboutus/regulations) and in The University’s policy on presentation of Theses.

5

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my supervisors, Professor Jeanette Edwards and Dr. Ian Fairweather for their guidance and support throughout my thesis process. I would also like to thank the other faculty, staff, and students in the Social Anthropology department who have made my time as a student at the University of Manchester memorable.

I would also especially like to thank the following people who helped me in my fieldwork: Mrs. Beryl Ramage, Mr. John Clifford, Dr. John Beck, Mrs. Gillian Wakelam, Mr. Paul Wakelam, Miss Jenny Wakelam, Mrs. Janet Smith, Mrs. Eugenia Ridgeway, Mrs. Judith Silk, and Angela and Paul of the Peak Pantry. Special thanks goes to the wonderful staff of Eyam Museum who gave freely of their time, knowledge, and friendship. Without you, none of this work would have been possible. I also thank Eyam Museum for giving me permission to print photographs of the museum exhibits, and for giving me access to their supplemental print materials and background information about the design of the exhibits.

And finally, I would like to thank my friends and family who have given me their love and support during my PhD studies, and I dedicate this to the memory of my mother, Elizabeth Roberts, and my grandfather, James Skipalis, both of whom I lost during my fieldwork and writing up period. And a very special thanks goes to my grandmother, Marianna Ward, who has continued to support me in this endeavour to the very end.

I also dedicate this thesis to the memory of two of my informants, Mr. John Clifford and Mrs. Judith Silk, both of whom died in 2011 during the time in which I was revising this thesis. Their assistance and friendship were invaluable to me during my fieldwork and I owe them a great deal of gratitude for everything they assisted me with during my stay in Eyam.

6

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Educational Background

Brandi Skipalis has a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology with Honors and in Russian Language and Literature with High Honors from the University of Florida (1998), as well as a Master of Social Work with dual degree work towards a Master of Public Administration and Policy from Florida State University (2001). She came to the University of Manchester in 2005 and was awarded a Master of Arts in Social Anthropology in 2006. She continued on to the MPhil/PhD programme in September 2006, completing her PhD fieldwork in Eyam, between August 2007 and October 2008.

Research and Writing Experience

Her masters dissertation for the MA in Social Anthropology was titled “The Role of Technology in Producing Local and National Heritage: Agency, Authority, and Authenticity.” It examined the various technologies that have been put to use in heritage projects, looking at why different technologies are being used and what their function is for the heritage projects that employ them. Prior to this, she submitted an Action Report (equivalent of an MA dissertation) titled “Public Funding of Private HIV/AIDS Services in Florida” in fulfillment of the requirements for her dual MSW/MPA programme at Florida State University, and an Honors Thesis for her BA in Russian Language and Literature at the University of Florida titled “The Use of Language in Russian Women’s Literature”. She has also written numerous news articles and contract evaluation reports as well as developing brochures, resource guides, and training manuals on behalf of the Florida Coalition Against Domestic Violence in Tallahassee, Florida.

7

Chapter 1: Introduction: Constructing Heritage and Identity in the Plague Village

Ring a Ring o’ Roses Ring a ring o’ roses A pocketful of posies Atishoo, atishoo We all fall down. --Traditional English Folk Song--

Background

The village of Eyam, located within the Hope Valley area in southeastern Derbyshire, and within the boundaries of the present-day National Park, traces its origins to Anglo-Saxon times (Clifford, 2003). Prior to the establishment of the modern-day village of Eyam in the eight century, there is also evidence of the area being used, but not settled in, during the Roman period. The area was also inhabited earlier during the Neolithic period, as there have been stone tools found in the area, as well as a Neolithic stone circle in nearby . Nineteenth century Eyam historian explains that “In the Norman survey, the name is written Aiune; in the fifteenth century and later it was written Eyham, and Eham; now, uniformly Eyam” (Wood, 1865:16). Wood originally identified Eyam as being of Celtic origin and an eighth century cross in the churchyard is identified on a small green plaque as being a Celtic cross, but it is generally accepted as and referred to today both in local and outside publications and in the museum as a Saxon cross, and the village is now believed to be of Saxon, not Celtic, origin. Eyam is near to the larger towns and cities of Matlock, , , Chesterfield, and Sheffield, and its primary industries for many centuries have been farming and mining, first for lead and then for fluorspar. Today, most residents commute outside of Eyam to work in places such as Chesterfield, Sheffield, and Buxton, and they also study outside of Eyam for all ages beyond primary school.

8

The 2001 census placed the population of Eyam at nine hundred and twenty six residents, including four hundred and forty four males and four hundred and eighty two females in a total of four hundred and nine households (Office for National Statistics, 2004). The primary school, according to the Head Teacher, had fifty one students at the time of my fieldwork, from nursery up to juniors. From my personal knowledge of the village, it is a popular place for people to move after they retire, and it is also popular for families looking for a “safe place” to raise their families, and most of the “incomers” I met who had lived in the village for some time fell into these two categories. However, many homes are also being purchased as “holiday homes” or “second homes” or to rent out to visitors as “holiday cottages”. Many local residents expressed concern over this when I spoke with them about living in Eyam, and it has emerged as a point of contention for local people. Eyam is a small village, and so housing is a major concern in the area. Many homes in the village were originally council houses which were sold to their residents during the Thatcher-era sell-offs, and others are much older cottages that can be several hundred years old. There is also a retirement home just off of the village square which is home to many elderly residents, and at the time of my fieldwork, a new housing development was being built near the centre of the village with the aim of providing more housing for “local” people rather than for purchase as holiday homes.

Figure 1 - Map of Eyam (Reference: http://www.eyammuseum.demon.co.uk/directions.htm)

9

Eyam is a popular holiday spot for two reasons: 1) it is situated within the Peak District National Park in a location convenient to many public footpaths and a Stone circle and offers a scenic countryside view, and 2) visitors come to learn about the Plague outbreak that struck Eyam during the seventeenth century, which has made Eyam famous throughout the UK as the “Plague Village”. The latter forms the basis of this thesis. The Plague In 1665-1666, the village of Eyam was ravaged by a year-long Plague epidemic that claimed two hundred and sixty lives, fully one-third of the population of the village at the time. The first person stricken was apprentice tailor George Viccars, who is believed to have contracted Plague by way of a cloth shipment that had recently arrived from London. The “bolt of cloth” must have, so the story goes, been infected with Plague, or the more updated version suggests that fleas and/or rats were in with the shipment. In the early eighteenth century, medical writings about the Plague such as Bagshaw (1702) and Mead (1722) included Eyam in discussions of specific Plague outbreaks, and by the end of that century, the story had entered into the non-medical literature through the writings of poet , “the Swan of ”, whose father, Thomas Seward, was Rector at Eyam’s St. Lawrence Parish Church for a time. It was Thomas Seward who began a tradition that persists in Eyam to this day of holding an annual Plague Commemoration Service at “Cucklet Delph”, which is also known as the “Cucklet Church”, an outdoor hillside where church services were held during the Plague to allow parishioners to sit far enough from one another to prevent infection. Anna Seward’s writings in particular were part of a burgeoning romantic tradition and focused on the story of Rev. William Mompesson, the Rector of the St. Lawrence Church at the time of Eyam’s Plague outbreak. Rev. Mompesson, in cooperation with local Nonconformist minister Rev. Thomas Stanley, led a self-imposed of the village, securing food shipments via the Duke of Devonshire, who provided food at two locations: a well at the north side of the village, which is today known as “Mompesson’s Well”, and the Boundary Stone at the south of the village which separates Eyam from nearby . In each location there was vinegar in which to dip coins to sterilize them

10 against infection, and coins were left as payment in exchange for food that would be left separately. All of this is part of what is now the traditional story of the Plague at Eyam, to which Anna Seward added the even more romantic element of including the letter that Rev. Mompesson wrote to his two children, whom he had sent to Yorkshire before the quarantine began, to inform them of the death of their mother, Catherine, of Plague. Seward’s writings are the first to speak of Eyam in terms of self-sacrifice and religious piety and faith, but this trend would continue into the present day. The first official history of Eyam was written by local author William Wood in the nineteenth century, and later another was written by local author Clarence Daniel, whose personal collection of artefacts led to the creation of Eyam Museum after his death. When the Peak District National Park was formed in the mid-twentieth century, the village was signposted on Plague-related locations, such as the “Plague Cottages,” where several families suffered heavy loss of life, the “Cucklet Church”, the Boundary Stone, Mompesson’s Well, and the “Riley Graves”, where Elizabeth Hancock buried her entire family during the Plague while she alone survived. The churchyard also has its own representative Plague monument in the grave of Catherine Mompesson and its stained glass windows, added much later, featuring some Plague scenes. Schools regularly visit Eyam to learn about the Plague and have done so long enough for parents who came to Eyam Figure 2 - Diorama 1 at Plague Museum - George Viccars as children to now be bringing their own and the bolt of cloth from London believed to have caused the Plague outbreak at Eyam children on visits to the village. Some of these visits pre-date the inception of Eyam Museum, which was opened in 1994, at a time when the church played the role of host now largely carried out by the museum, at one time getting “more visitors than cathedrals like York Minster” according to local historian, Mr. Stephens. A forty year-old woman from Devon told me in 2008 about her memories of visiting Eyam with her school as a child,

11 and many parents visiting with their children, who were studying the Plague in school at the time of their visits, also told me how they themselves had first visited with their schools when they were children. Some were even young enough to remember visiting the museum as children. Eyam Museum and the St. Lawrence Parish Church now have hundreds of school bookings each year, and a car park was specially constructed to handle the demand for parking as a result of visitors coming to learn about Eyam’s Plague history. In addition to coach tours and school groups, thousands of visitors come to Eyam every year, with the tourist season lasting roughly from Easter to Bonfire Night, which is also when Eyam Museum is open to visitors.

Figure 3 - Eyam Museum on Hawkhill Rd.

Local Businesses and Services There are several local businesses which cater to both local people and visitors, each of which acknowledges the visitors in some specific way. The Eyam Youth Hostel, Crown Cottage Bed and Breakfast, and Eyam Tea Rooms all offer

12 guest accommodations, in addition to various private cottages that are let out to visitors for their stays. The Crown Cottage also sells Plague-themed items, such as books and souvenir tea towels, as well as items suitable for hikers, like maps and guide books. The owners also provide very personalized services during one’s stay and breakfasts that include “authentic” Derbyshire oat cakes, an important inclusion toward authenticity in this Derbyshire-based B & B. The Eyam Tea Rooms also provide dining for breakfast and lunch, closing at about four p.m. each day. The Buttery and the Peak Pantry also provide meals and operate within similar opening hours to the Tea Rooms, with the Buttery selling sandwiches, light snacks, and ice cream, and the Peak Pantry providing cooked meals, as well as selling breads, desserts, ice cream, and “country” themed items such as jams and crafts. Both the Peak Pantry and the Eyam Tea Rooms changed owners during my field work, with local people having mixed feelings about these changes. The other main place in Eyam for visitors and locals to eat is the Miner’s Arms pub – the only pub in the village and the only year-round business that serves food after four p.m.. The Miner’s Arms, built in 1630 before the Plague, was once a meeting point and Barmote Court for the miners in the local area. Today, it has a regular quiz night and a darts team and tournaments, and it provides cooked meals as well as alcohol, and it is popular among locals and visitors alike. There are several shops primarily geared toward locals which sell food and other items, including the “Church Street Stores”, which primarily offers non- perishable foods, a small selection of fruits, vegetables, dairy, and processed meats for breakfast and sandwiches, maps, and household items and toiletries; George Siddall and Daughters Family Butchers, Pursglove Bros Butchers, and Eyam Country Store, which sells fresh produce and ice cream. Eyam also has a small post office, which sells newspapers, some stationery, and a small selection of Plague-themed and Eyam-themed items such as post cards and small crafts, and allows people to post notices for a small fee. The post office is also where residents can vote on local matters such as new signs for the village and find out about things such as the planning meeting for a new playground. The residents do their shopping primarily outside of Eyam, and others order their groceries and other items online through

13 shops such as Asda, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and Argos and have it delivered straight to their doors, but they still use the local shops as needed and for those items that can be purchased at them, most notably local meat and produce. The Church Street Stores also houses the only cash machine in the village, but customers at the post office can also request cash back at the post office till. Although many of these places cater primarily to residents, they do each, in some way, cater to visitors as well, and the visitors do make a difference to how well their businesses do during the tourist season versus the off season. Some businesses, such as Eyam Museum and the Crown Cottage, close down for a period during the off season, with the museum closing from November to April and the Crown Cottage closing each January for the full month so that its owners can go on holiday. Additionally, there had been a hairdresser in the village prior to my field work, but that business had closed down by the time I arrived. I learned from local women that they either paid someone local to come to their homes to cut their hair and that of their families, or they travelled outside of Eyam to Sheffield, Buxton, or Chesterfield to get their hair done and to obtain other goods and services not available in the village. Perhaps the most important place in Eyam that is primarily oriented toward local people is the Mechanic’s Institute, which functions as a local community centre, providing meeting rooms for groups and organizations, and it also is home to the “Village Club”, which has a small membership fee, and members have access to the bar on the top floor of the building. The Mechanic’s Institute (henceforth referred to using the local idiom, “the Mechanic’s”) also has movie nights once each month. Groups such as the Garden Club, the Women’s Institute, the Eyam Parish Council, after-school programs, and the football club meet here. In addition to the football club meetings at the Mechanic’s, the village also has a Sports Association, which is located behind the car park opposite Eyam Museum. The Head Teacher of the local school remarked to me once that she liked Eyam “because it isn’t a commuter village. People might work outside the village, but they participate in activities in the village. They’re a real community.” She compared Eyam to other villages with which she is familiar, saying that she has often found that people look outside of a village for entertainment and activities to get involved in, but in Eyam, she liked that the people

14 got involved in local activities and local organizations, and for local people, there are always flyers posted outside the primary school, outside the Mechanic’s, at the post office, and at the Church Street Stores to inform people of local events and organizations. Across the street from the Mechanic’s a short walk from the Village Square is the St. Lawrence Parish Church, which is open to visitors during the week and welcomes visitors to Sunday services, but serves a congregation that is primarily composed of local residents and people from nearby villages. The St. Lawrence Church also hosts tea and coffee mornings, mother and toddler mornings, and an after-school club. The St. Lawrence Church is affiliated with the primary school, which is a short distance to the east of the church, and it plays a role in local events such as the annual Wakes Week Carnival, the Plague Commemoration Service, and even the Bonfire Night celebrations – on Bonfire Night 2007, at the insistence of the Church, which works with the school to prepare the effigy to burn, decided to burn an effigy of a giant Plague rat rather than the traditional effigy of Guy Fawkes. This is the largest church in the village, but it is not the only one. There is also a Wesleyan Reform Chapel with a small local membership on the East end of town and a Methodist Chapel with a small membership of local people and people from neighbouring villages in a small building attached to the museum, although not all Eyam church-goers go to Eyam churches, with some going to other villages to attend services there, just as some people from outside Eyam go to church regularly in Eyam. The village also has a small primary school serving fifty one pupils at the time of my fieldwork, and it enrols students from Nursery to Year 5. After primary school, the students continue on to secondary school in places such as the nearby town of Hope, and nearby cities such as Sheffield, Buxton, and Chesterfield. Most secondary school students I met attended Hope Valley College in Hope, and one twelve year-old girl I met was attending a school in Sheffield, while a young woman who finished her GCSEs at Hope Valley College went on to do an A-Level beautician course in Buxton. Most Eyam residents also work outside the village, most notably in Sheffield, Chesterfield, and Buxton, and some people who worked in Eyam commuted in from

15 places like Chesterfield, which was home to the owner of local craft shop The Painted Place, the owners of the Peak Pantry, and the Head Teacher of the primary school. Some people move away from Eyam in early adulthood to study or to work, but several of the people I met had moved back to Eyam to raise their own families. However, it is becoming increasingly difficult for young families to establish themselves in their own homes in Eyam, which many people I interviewed feared would mean more local young people moving away and more holiday homers buying homes that they would use once or twice a year and lend to their friends at other times. People who did move away said that they were doing so because they wanted to move somewhere more rural and less busy, with one family buying a farm in the country and another man moving to the Scottish coast. Other people remain in the village and commute, and not all people who move to Eyam from elsewhere are holiday home buyers, however, as some people moved there from big cities such as Sheffield to raise their families and others moved there when they retired. There is considerable movement between Eyam and the nearby areas, and so it is appropriate to think of Eyam as part of a larger whole, encompassed within an area known as Hope Valley in the county of Derbyshire, in the Peak District National Park, and in the region known as the , though it is also largely identified with the North of because of its mining and industrial history and its close geographical ties to the region. Because there is so much travel between Eyam and neighbouring towns and cities, there are buses between Eyam and Sheffield, Chesterfield, and Buxton, with stops at or within walking distance of , Sheffield, Chesterfield, and Buxton train stations. Train stations in each of these cities afford further access to other destinations throughout Britain, particularly Sheffield station, which is the largest station in the area. Grindleford, three miles to the northeast of Eyam, is the closest station to the village and calls at Sheffield, Manchester, and a number of places in between that are very popular among hikers and campers. The other three are the primary places that people from Eyam travel to for shopping, going to a hairdresser, and leisure activities like bowling and going to the cinema. One older woman travels to Sheffield every Saturday to do her shopping and get her hair done – she travels by

16 bus and her husband drops her off at and picks her up from the bus stops in the Village Square in their little red car. However, buses run only once every hour or two depending on the day of the week and the time of day, from about seven in the morning to seven in the evening most days, but earlier on Sundays. The trains run until around eleven each evening, but there are no buses after seven, no lighted footpaths, and taxis are extremely rare, so most travel in and out of the village by public transport ends at seven p.m.. Many people in Eyam, therefore, have cars and drive to locations outside of the village, but there is a great deal of conflict between local people and visitors with regard to car parking, as many visitors prefer to park roadside for free rather than use the Pay and Display car park opposite the museum. I will explore this conflict more fully in Chapter 5 of this thesis. Local Traditions and Events Each year, Eyam has a number of notable events for locals and visitors alike, beginning at Good Friday, when there is an outdoor sermon and a procession from the Village Square to the St. Lawrence Parish Church for a tea and coffee morning. This is followed closely by an Easter Sunday service to a packed crowd at the church. Not long after, in early May, the village holds a widely-attended Half-Marathon that follows a rigorous course partly on-road and partly off-road through the hilly terrain of the Pennine foothills where Eyam is located. There is also a shorter run for children to participate in. The summer is largely a time of tourism, but towards the end of the summer, Eyam holds its annual Wakes Week in the last week of August / first week of September, one of many such observances throughout the region. In the weeks leading up to Wakes Week, three teams, one a children’s team, design and put together well dressings, made entirely of plant materials, to be placed at each well before it is blessed by the parish priest. The themes are tied to water, and in 2008, to the Beijing Olympics as well. It is common among locals and visitors to travel to other villages and towns throughout the region to see other well dressings, such as in neighbouring or nearby Buxton. There are a number of other activities and events throughout the week, with a large Carnival on the following Saturday. The Carnival includes a parade with floats from various organizations and businesses in Eyam and the surrounding area which are judged by a committee and awarded prizes

17 at the end, a fancy dress contest for all ages, collections of pennies by the children in the parade to go to charities, a sheep roast, Morris dancers, a group of children from the primary school dancing around the maypole, and a barbeque near the Miner’s Arms on Water Street. Then on the next morning, Sunday, the Annual Plague Commemoration Service is held. The next major community celebration comes at Bonfire Night, where a new tradition, introduced by the parish priest who was serving at the time of my fieldwork, involves burning an effigy of a giant Plague rat rather than one of Guy Fawkes. There is a torch-lit procession from the town end to the site of the bonfire, accompanied by a marching band, in which local schoolchildren carry the effigy through the village to the bonfire site. The Bonfire Night celebrations also involve selling foods like hot dogs and fudge and drinks like mulled wine, and it culminates in a fireworks display at the end. Held in the Pay and Display car park, it is widely attended by locals and visitors alike, with some young people who had moved away returning to spend Bonfire Night with their families. And finally, at Christmastime, in addition to church services, one man told me about an annual carolling event which includes songs written by local people over the years. Christmas is also the focus of Eyam’s “Old Folks Fund”, which provides a turkey for Christmas dinner to all OAPs (Old Age Pensioners) in the village. Each of these activities, with the exception of the Half-Marathon and the Carnival, are local traditions for local people. The Half-Marathon and the Carnival are local events but with a greater focus on the outside participation. The Half-Marathon includes competitors from around the country, while the Carnival attracts thousands of visitors, many of whom come from other villages in the surrounding area. People from Eyam, likewise, visit other Carnivals and Well Dressings in the area throughout the summer. The museum keeps a schedule of all of the Carnivals and Well Dressings posted on the wall behind the sales counter in the museum gift shop so that they can answer any questions about them that visitors might ask. These local traditions are, for the most part, unrelated to the Plague, and much of local life is separate from Plague-related activities. Many of the people whom I encountered during my fieldwork actively disliked the visitors and the Plague Village label, finding them to be disruptive to daily life and felt that there was so much more to Eyam than

18 just the Plague. However, a small number of dedicated individuals work on various Plague-related heritage projects in Eyam, as I will discuss in the following section. Heritage and Tourism in Eyam Relatively few people in Eyam are involved in heritage projects or tourist- oriented work, but those who are often participate in more than one heritage activity, such as the museum and the Eyam Map and CD-ROM project or the museum and the church, where volunteer “stewards” carry out the day to day staffing of the buildings during the hours in which they are open to visitors. Almost all of the people 1 working on heritage projects in Eyam are volunteers0F , which keeps costs down and allows entrance fees to remain low, but most volunteer stewards are pensioners and there has been some difficulty in recruiting new stewards, particularly younger ones (while I was volunteering there during my fieldwork, I was the youngest steward at the museum). However, despite low staffing and reliance on volunteers, these heritage projects are of great importance within the village and have become intricately linked with the perception of the village by visitors. When I interviewed a steward at the Parish church, he told me that in the past, the St. Lawrence Parish Church had been on par with larger cathedrals such as York Minster in annual visitor numbers, although numbers have dropped in recent years. Prior to the building of the museum, the church was the primary point of contact for visitors seeking to learn about Eyam’s Plague heritage, and it features several stained glass windows that were commissioned fairly recently with Plague scenes pictured in them. Because the church was at the heart of the self-quarantine of Eyam during the Plague, and because the church cemetery includes the grave of Catherine

1 I volunteered at the museum for one or two shifts per week from May until the last weekend in October, taking shifts with several different volunteer “stewards” and under the tutelage of Mrs. Stone, who provided me with training, information, and introductions. Among the museum board members and volunteers with whom I worked were the local historian, the Board Secretary, a descendant of a “Plague Survivor”, two members of the Eyam Map and CD-ROM committee, and other local residents, predominantly pensioners, who were interested in the Plague story. The stewards were not all originally from Eyam, with several members who moved to Eyam when they retired, one whose family was from Eyam though she was born and raised elsewhere and married a “local boy”, and several who were born and raised in the village. Many of the current stewards have been volunteering with the museum for a number of years, but as volunteers resign, often due to age-related difficulties, the museum has found it difficult to recruit new volunteers and posted a flyer around to every house in the village in May in order to get more volunteers. As far as I am aware, I am the only person who replied, and I was the youngest volunteer they had.

19

Mompesson, it was a logical starting point for visitors coming to the village, including school groups, which still visit the church today for a presentation about its role in local history. Furthermore, before the museum was built, the church was the only central indoor location in the village related to the Plague that was available to accommodate visiting school parties, and from my interviews with visitors, I know that school parties were coming to Eyam long before the museum was built. School parties comprise one of the largest groups of visitors to the village. In addition to visiting the church and the museum, schools and other visitors also visit one of more other Plague-related sites in the village, as well as the Village Stocks, which are a favourite with children, who like to play in them. Adult visitors enjoy not only visiting sites such as the Riley Graves, the Boundary Stone, and Mompesson’s Well, but also the Plague Cottages, where it is common for them to stop along the pavement and take photographs. However, no discussion of heritage and tourism in Eyam would be complete without discussing the Eyam Museum, ostensibly known as the “Plague Museum”, which was opened in 1994 and has thousands of visitors each year. Governed by a Board of Directors and employing one paid staff-member who works as the administrator of the museum, Eyam Museum is primarily staffed by volunteers from Eyam and the surrounding areas. Started with grants from the Heritage Lottery Fund and based on the private collection of Clarence Daniel following his death, it continues to grow and expand both its content and its physical space. This thesis will look at Eyam Museum in depth to analyze the various issues surrounding its role within the village, and how it works in relation to both the local community and the visitors. It is the primary source of historical information in Eyam today, and the visitors come as much for the information as for the emotional experience of learning about the Plague, as I will explore in depth in this thesis. The stewards take seriously their role in sharing their village history with these visitors, and many of them are good friends who are active in a range of other activities together within the village as well, and the visitors are usually quite interested in the exhibit and stop to talk with the stewards at the end of their walk through the museum. Together, the museum and

20 the visitors work to create a particular experience of visiting Eyam and of understanding and relating to the Plague period.

Methodology

As an ethnographic study, the primary methodology employed during my fieldwork was participant observation, for which I lived with a local family, ate at local restaurants, shopped at local shops, attended tea and coffee mornings at the Mechanic’s Institute and at the local parish church, volunteered at the local museum, and spent time at local tourist spots as well as at the local bus stops talking with local residents as well as visitors. I attended special events such as Wakes Week, Bonfire Night, Easter services, the Eyam Half-Marathon, speaking with both local residents and visitors to these events, and I conducted structured and semi-structured interviews with local residents and business owners, including people who were involved in Eyam’s heritage projects and people who were involved in the CCR5-Δ32 genetic testing as well as people who were not involved in any activities related to Eyam’s heritage. I began my fieldwork on August 25, 2007, at the start of Wakes Week, and completed my field work at the end of October, 2008, when I finished my volunteering at Eyam Museum. During the first four months of my field work, I familiarized myself with the people and businesses of the village, as well as learning about and participating in several local traditions. I began developing networks of informants and familiarizing local people with the research I was conducting and finding out from them the issues that they felt were most important with regard to tourism in Eyam. This period incorporated the end months of the tourist season, so I also spent a lot of time interacting with visitors and speaking with them about why they chose Eyam to visit, what they were doing while in the village, and how they felt about their visits. I spent time at a variety of local tourist destinations to visually observe visitor trends, as well. This period included my first formal introductions to Eyam Museum and to the St. Lawrence Parish Church, as well as to local non-tourist activities and organizations.

21

During the next four months, the tourist season drew to a close and I spent my fieldwork time meeting local residents and getting to know different local businesses and organizations, including following the progress as two local businesses changed hands and underwent restructuring and remodelling. During this period, I met with representatives from the local parish primary school and its Parent-Teacher Association and attended tea and coffee mornings at the Mechanic’s Institute and at the St. Lawrence Parish Church, as well as engaging various members of the Women’s Institute and the local Gardening Club. I participated in family life, shopped at local businesses, and ate at local cafés, and I became more fully integrated into local life during this period. By this point in my research, when I was introduced to new people, they recognized who I was and identified me as “the girl from Manchester”. From May until the end of my fieldwork at the end of October, 2008, I worked as a volunteer steward at Eyam Museum, and spent increased amounts of time at local businesses, such as the Peak Pantry café, the Painted Plate craft shop, the Eyam Post Office, and more. I also met new informants at local bus stops and through other more established informants. By this point in my research, I had developed social relationships with a variety of people ranging in age from 16 years old to over 90 years old, including owners and employees of local businesses, volunteer stewards at the museum and the church, the family with whom I was living and their friends and acquaintances, neighbours, and people I met while out walking in the village. Many visitors also spoke with me about their visits to Eyam and what they hoped to gain from the visit as well as what they felt afterward. I had a research information sheet and informed consent form available as well as oral statements prepared that I used to initially inform participants about my research and to let them know that they could opt out of participating at any time. All people with whom I spoke, however informally, were informed about my research. One individual did choose to opt out of my research. I have chosen to make my thesis closed-access so that I can accurately describe the individual residents of the village and use their real names, many of whom would be instantly identifiable by their descriptions in the

22 thesis even if I were to use aliases, and I have endeavoured to be respectful of the people who assisted me with my research while maintaining honesty at the same time. I also conducted archival research and a review of literature, including both academic literature and popular literature regarding heritage tourism, museum anthropology, anthropology of Britain, anthropology of science, and specifically about the village of Eyam and its Plague heritage. The decision to include popular literature in this review came after hearing repeated references to several novels and plays about Eyam by visitors and staff at the museum, showing the important role these works play in tourism to the village. I also reviewed a number of local publications that were produced during my fieldwork, such as newsletters produced by the parish church and the primary school, Wakes Week publicity materials, and more.

Examining the Intersections of Local Identity, Heritage Tourism, and Museum

In this thesis, I am to explore the ways in which heritage tourism, local identity, and Eyam Museum intersect, highlighting the ways in which they work together to create the experience of “the Plague Village”. It is my assertion that they work in tandem with one another to create particular experiences and imagery regarding Eyam, particularly as it relates to Eyam’s Plague history. The Plague in Eyam is not merely a historical occurrence, but a whole range of experiences, images, stories, and meanings that have evolved over the centuries to what is seen in Eyam today, and traditions continue to change even now as new elements are added and old ones may be removed because of some new piece of historical or scientific information or some new activity or tradition introduced by local leaders such as the vicar of the local parish church. The Plague at Eyam is a dynamic entity that grows and changes and is affected by locals and visitors alike, and Eyam Museum is the primary (but not the only) platform which tells the story and dictates what story is told to visitors and what is left out of the story. This museum has become an integral part of the Plague narrative in the sixteen years since its inception that what was meant to be only one element of this thesis has become its primary focus, as I explore here the many ways in which Eyam Museum, in its interactions with visitors and in its role as a

23 clearinghouse for all things related to the Plague in Eyam, is much more than “just” a museum. These themes have been explored in other anthropological research in Britain and abroad, with a particular focus on themes of heritage tourism and museum studies. Sociologist John Urry is a leader in the field of tourism research, and his concept of the “tourist gaze” has become a staple in tourist theory, describing tourism from the perspective of people gazing upon places, objects, and, indeed, on other people. Dean MacCannell expanded upon Urry’s concept to designate as the “second gaze” the tourist experience that endeavours to see beyond what is visible along the main tourist thoroughfares. Both of these concepts are central to how we understand the tourist experience today, as people who are acting as tourists in any given location are there to look at certain objects and to experience a place in a particular way, and often, today, with a camera in hand to capture the images and, in a way, to capture the experiences of the trip as well. As MacCannell observed, tourism is much more than just a visual experience for people; it is a way of understanding a people or a place or a time period or a combination of the three, as in Eyam. Tourism, too, has many different elements and actors. There are certainly the tourists, whose role in tourism is paramount; but tourism could not exist without people who operate the businesses like museums, gift shops, and restaurants and who play a very real role in creating and defining the place as a tourist destination; and finally, there are the people who live in the places where tourists visit who may or may not be involved in the tourist industry itself. This thesis explores the roles of these various actors and the ways in which they interact with one another to manifest a particular “tourist experience” for the village of Eyam. In Chapter 2, The People of Eyam, I discuss the people who were my key informants and my friends during my fieldwork in Eyam and the unique contributions they made to my research. These informants not only provided me with information in their own right, but they also introduced me to other people who could do so as well. Many of them spoke with me about their lives in the village, their spouses, their children, and their work, as well as their backgrounds and their history. Some spoke of their pasts to me in vivid detail, including some very colourful and intriguing stories.

24

Others spoke of their enthusiasm for and interest in local heritage. For some, their enthusiasm was for the church or for their children. For others, it was their interest in gardening or in their work. Each contributed in some way to painting a well-rounded picture for me of Eyam and its people. In this chapter, I explore the different roles my informants played within village life and in my fieldwork. I will explore their roles in home life, the museum, businesses, church, social groups, and school, looking at how they fit in relation to various social networks within the village. I will also explore here the different levels of locals and “incomers” within the village, which is a common theme in British ethnography, looking at how my ethnographic research in Eyam both resembles and differs from other British ethnographies. It is my hope with this chapter to show the different perspectives of my informants and how they contributed to my overall experience of Eyam and shaped the tone of this thesis. In Chapter 3, Local Heritage Outside of the Plague Context, I examine the extent to which local people are interested in local heritage or local history, and how they define “heritage” and “history” in the local context. More than that, I examine the variety of things that local people feel are important to the village identity and important to them personally as residents of Eyam. Much of the context of local identity in Eyam has been defined by its Plague history, but this chapter shows the other ways in which local people define their village identity and through that reshape its present. This chapter will also explore the local church and chapels and how they fit into local history, heritage, and tradition, as well as another local tourist draw, Eyam Hall, which was built in after the Plague in Eyam. There were two active chapels as well as the St. Lawrence Church in the village at the time of my fieldwork, including a Methodist Chapel and the Wesleyan Reform Chapel. In the years immediately prior to the Plague in Eyam, there was a strong Non-Conformist religious presence in the village that did not go away even when the Non-Conformist religious leaders were replaced by the Anglican church in the time immediately preceding Eyam’s Plague. However, as the leaders of all three churches/chapels in the village have noted, the numbers of members of the Non-Conformist churches has become very low in the

25 village, leading to some discord among the churches as they vie to retain their identities and their congregations and to continue the traditions they have developed over the years. The churches/chapels of Eyam play their own important role in local heritage that is particularly important to the members of their congregations. Eyam Hall also plays a role locally as an employer and as a tourist draw in its own right, as well as providing a place for wedding receptions and other special events. This chapter will also explore how Eyam Hall fits into this idea of local heritage that is not tied to Plague heritage. Finally, this chapter will also examine the Eyam Map Project, which led to the creation of a full-colour, 2-sided map and interactive CD-ROM, produced through a Heritage Lottery Fund grant in 2000 as a Local Heritage Initiative. The project was later updated with an “interactive interpretation of the map2” as Phase Two in 2004, producing a website that featured a variety of media, including photographs, text, audio, video, and other documents. I will examine how this project explores many facets of local heritage and identity and creates a more fully realized picture of local history than projects which focus predominantly on the Plague heritage of the village. This section of the chapter will also look at how this project functions both as complementary to and as opposite from the Plague-themed heritage projects in the village. Chapter 4, Eyam Museum as Gatekeeper for Plague Heritage Information, explores the role of the museum as an official gatekeeper for heritage information in a more in-depth manner and sets the stage for further discussion of Eyam Museum, which is the focal point of this thesis. Over the last century, the institution of the museum has become synonymous with expertise in a particular area of knowledge. In the case of local history museums such as that in Eyam, that expertise is in the Plague history of Eyam. The museum also displays information about other local history, but its specialty is the Plague outbreak of 1665-1666 and it is expected both by its directors and by its visitors to tell the story of the Plague as fully and as

2 http://www.lhi.org.uk/projects_directory/projects_by_region/east_midlands/derbyshire/eyam_map_cdrom/in dex.html

26 accurately as possible. To do this, the museum display writers and designers drew upon local oral histories, local historical documents, medical and scientific writings both from the time just after the Plague at Eyam and from today, and from other sources that were available to them in this undertaking. With the combined expertise of the Museum Board members and a privately contracted museum design company, these various types of information were integrated into a cohesive whole to tell the story of Eyam’s Plague outbreak in a way that could both meet visitor expectations and the Board’s own professional standards. More than any other organization within Eyam, the museum is responsible for telling Eyam’s story to visitors, and for doing so in a way that is in keeping with the traditions of the village. The museum does not just provide information, but also a particular way of emotionally experiencing the Plague at Eyam which sets the mood for the rest of their visit to the village and which may influence which places they go to within the village to follow in the footsteps of the Plague-era visitors. The museum also provides information about local dining and accommodations. It plays a role within the village as a whole as the official chronicler of the history of Eyam’s Plague, and it serves as a national contact point for schools and other organizations seeking to learn about the Plague at Eyam. This chapter documents the ways in which the museum and its staff carry out this role of gatekeeper and examines this within the larger context of tourism literature and museum literature and within the context of specifically British ethnography, highlighting the importance of local museums and heritage centres generally within the British context. In Chapter 5 of this thesis, The Public Gaze and Private Lives in Eyam: The Contestation of Space in the Plague Village, I explore these ideas of the “tourist gaze” and the “second gaze” and the ways in which they are operationalised by visitors, but at the same time, I look at the conflicts that occur when tourists “gaze” upon those parts of the village that have been associated in some way with the Plague. In Eyam, these associations are explicitly defined and signposted, marking a number of places within the village as being specifically about the Plague, and the places that have been labeled in this way have become public spaces. However, these public spaces often overlap with private spaces in many ways, and these overlaps are explored

27 here through the perspectives of both the tourists, or “visitors” as local people like to say, and the residents of the village. Anthropologists like Sharon Macdonald, Jane Nadel-Klein, and Hazel Tucker have explored the issues associated with tourist- resident interactions in a variety of ways, and their works are used here as a guide in understanding my own. My research of Eyam shares many commonalities with what they have observed, but also has its own unique elements that are explored herein related to the unique elements of place and subject matter that draws people to Eyam in order to explore its Plague history. The history of Eyam has been elaborated on and romanticized widely over the centuries since the Plague first occurred, and these different tellings of the Plague story from medical, historical, and literary perspectives have shaped the ways in which the village is viewed today, but more importantly to this thesis, it has shaped the ways in which people want to view the village today. Visitors come to Eyam with certain expectations, and the people in Eyam who have volunteered to help the village meet those expectations must do so through the museum, through the church, and through various publications and other tourist-oriented products and experiences that they provide for their visitors. This chapter begins to explore the role of those people who volunteer to work with visitors, providing them with information about Eyam’s history as well as about the village as it stands today and serving as official representatives of the village in this capacity. These people act as key gatekeepers of information within the village tourism industry, and their role is a critical one in providing the human element of interaction for visitors, a living link to the history of the village on one hand as residents of the village and potential descendants of Plague survivors, and as staff and stewards of places like the museum and the church who act as official, professional guides to the village’s past. They are seen as experts in the village history in more than one capacity, and this expertise is valued by visitors. But this does not supplant the desire of visitors to see and walk through the village itself, to see the sites associated with Eyam’s long-ago Plague past, and this physical experiencing of the village is also an important part of the visitor experience explored within this chapter, and it is also a primary source of conflict with the local residents who must share their local public spaces with these visitors. This chapter explores

28 these conflicts and the issues that influence them and those which attempt to mitigate them. Chapter 6, titled “This is a Theme Museum”: Eyam Museum as a Memorial Site, explores a phrase often used by the museum’s administrator, Mrs. Stone, who often uses the phrase “this is a theme museum” to express her dissatisfaction with people whom she feels are not being appropriately respectful to the museum environment. This chapter emerged out of my desire to understand her use of this phrase and how she applies it to the museum and its visitors in general. This chapter is about much more than Mrs. Stone, however, as it seeks to understand the museum as an institution that is not merely a vehicle for providing visitors with information. In this chapter, I examine the various types of visitors who come to the museum, and the ways in which they each understand and experience the museum, as well as the ways in which Mrs. Stone and other stewards understand them. In this chapter, Mrs. Stone is a central character, but it is here that the nature of the museum is explored more in-depth as well, looking at the ways in which it functions as a site of memorial for the Plague dead. Jane Nadel-Klein (2003) observed a similar dynamic in a Scottish fisher museum where relatives of fishermen who had died at sea saw the museum as a memorial site for their loved ones, but in Eyam, the memorial nature of the museum as well as of the village itself is more fully realized and elaborate. This is so much the case that Mrs. Stone’s assertion of Eyam Museum as a “theme museum” can also be extrapolated to the village itself, which can also be thought of as a “theme” village dedicated to the Plague. Many factors have contributed to this phenomenon in Eyam, not least of which was the signposting that occurred throughout the village after the Peak District National Park was created, specifically demarcating Plague-related locations in the village and displaying the names and dates of death for the Plague victims of Eyam. This chapter explores how the museum, the village council, the local residents who are interested in the Plague history of the village, and the visitors to the village interact with one another and work together, often unintentionally, to memorialize the Plague dead and to make the Plague a central feature that springs to mind when people think of Eyam. Eyam has other things to offer to visitors, after all, as it is located in an area that has footpaths

29 through farmland and forest for visitors to enjoy, as well as nearby hang gliding facilities to the west of the village and a stone circle to the north of the village, and like many other villages in the area, if it were not for Eyam’s Plague history, its visitors might come more for these experiences than to learn about the Plague. However, the Plague experience of Eyam has, over the centuries, taken root in the local and public imaginations and grown from a paragraph or two in some early eighteenth century medical texts and a romantic record written by a late eighteenth century poet into a fully realized tourism industry in the early twenty-first century. This is an important factor in any endeavour to understand the village and the museum as they are today, and I take it as a key starting point in my examination of the museum’s role in the village as I expand upon the idea from Chapter 4 of Eyam Museum as a local gatekeeper for Plague information into this look at the processes through which it carries out this role. Chapter 7, Museum Design, Display, and Presentation in Eyam, steps back from the functional and emotive tone of chapters 5 and 6 to take a more museology- oriented look at the planning and display aspects of the museum. In previous chapters, I began to explore the museum-visitor dynamic and the role(s) that the museum play within the village and within the greater context of museums and heritage centres in Britain, but a full understanding of the museum cannot be had without describing what is in the museum and what it is that visitors are seeing as well as what the museum Board have determined is appropriate and important to include in its exhibits and what it leaves out. This is not merely a descriptive chapter, however, as I also seek to understand Eyam Museum in the greater context of museum studies, taking a look at the strategies the museum employs in creating its displays and running the museum and the ways that it resembles and yet also differs from other museums and heritage centres. This chapter in particular contributes to current literature about interactive museum displays, which are favoured by children and parents and are also considered to be a good learning tool by many museums and researchers, but which Eyam Museum consciously does not incorporate into its exhibits for reasons which are explored here at length. In addition to examining the ways in which Eyam Museum’s Board and staff make decisions about the exhibits

30 and the choices that they have made and continue to make with regard to the museum, this chapter also examines the role of the museum in relation to the village as a whole. Some of this, as is discussed earlier in this thesis, relates to its role as the official voice of heritage and history in the village, but also important to understanding the museum’s relationship with the village is examining the ways in which the museum works with local people, both in staffing the museum and in incorporating information and artefacts into the displays and special exhibits that are relevant to the local community living in the village today. This chapter also takes a more in-depth look into how the museum defines and displays “the Plague” in a variety of ways that attempt to bring it to life in the imaginations of the visitors, showing it as more than just the bacterial organism that causes Plague. This chapter combines museum anthropology with the anthropology of science to examine how the museum endeavours to paint a picture for visitors not just of the disease of bubonic plague as seen through science and medicine, but of the effects it had on the people of Eyam physically as well as emotionally and religiously, of the historical details of the Plague epidemic in Eyam, and of the individual lives that it touched. The approach Eyam Museum takes to explaining the science and history of the Plague differs from both science and history museums in significant ways, and its approach to displaying the Plague is a very holistic one. This chapter tells the story of how the museum exhibits in Eyam have evolved over time and how they continue to grow and change today, and how they bridge the gap between the local and the national and international at the same time. Here I look at the thought processes that have gone into the making of Eyam Museum and how Eyam Museum functions within the wider sphere of museums and local heritage centres in Britain. In many ways, it has been modelled after other museums in Britain, but its Board have also decided to make an exhibit in Eyam that also defies traditional museum practices in several ways and which serves multiple purposes. This multiplicity of purposes within the museum lead to a variety of visitor experiences that reflect the historical, personal, and religious aspects of the display. And equally important is the participation of local volunteers who add their own stories and memories to the museum experience for visitors, some of whom can trace their own

31 ancestry back to the Plague survivors whose stories are told in the museum’s displays. These various aspects combine to ensure the successful running of Eyam Museum and its role as a place of interest to visitors from throughout Britain and beyond. Additionally, it is not only the museum that is doing the work of constructing the Plague at Eyam. It is true that the Museum is largely responsible for the information currently available to visitors about the Plague, but equally important to note are lessons that visitors have learned about Eyam in school, novels about the Plague at Eyam that they may have read, documentary videos that they may have seen on television, and more. The Plague at Eyam does not exist within a vacuum, and these outside sources, and the perspectives and imaginations of visitors themselves, have an impact as well on what makes the Plague in Eyam. This chapter looks at how visitors imagine the Plague for themselves, and what their imaginations would see added to the exhibit at the Museum, what they believe would make the Plague exhibit at the museum more real for them. It also looks at how the village itself is used by visitors to physically experience the Plague through retracing the steps of those who lived in Eyam during that time period, going to the various landmarks discussed within the museum in order to have the experience of “being there”. These elements are all critical to understanding the richly complex characterization of the Plague in Eyam in all of its many forms. In a very real way, the Plague is as much a character in the story of Eyam as are the individuals who died of Plague and those notable ones who survived whose stories continue to be told in the village and the museum today, and it becomes much more than just a disease in the way that it is portrayed. In Chapter 8, Plague Heritage, Plague Inheritance: CCR5-Δ32 – Public Understanding of ‘the Gene’ in Eyam, I continue to explore the museum’s treatment of science as I move on from looking at the Plague to looking at a genetic mutation that has been connected to Eyam by one scientist who thought that there might have been a connection between this genetic mutation and resistance to Plague. Though this genetic research ultimately proved otherwise, it was the subject of a video documentary for Channel Four in the and the Public Broadcasting System in the United States which has been cited by many visitors as one of the

32 reasons they decided to visit Eyam in the first place, and it has been a part of the museum since the year following the airing of the documentary, and so it bears examination. “The gene”, as it is referred to by locals and visitors alike, is treated by the museum in a manner quite different from that of the Plague, in which the people affected by it were given life through the descriptions and displays of the museum. The CCR5-Δ32 mutation is treated much more as an object of scientific enquiry than the Plague, as one would expect of a science museum rather than a local heritage centre or history museum, and it is described in a primarily scientific and medical manner rather than through the words and faces of the people who have the gene. Yet, at the same time, it was spoken of by many in emotive tones of hope and amazement in a way that seemed to give “the gene” its own particular place within Eyam’s Plague narrative. In this chapter, I look at the ways in which the museum and the visitors conceive of “the gene” as an object of science and medicine as well as one of hope, but also at how the museum works “the gene” into the existing Plague narrative, and I will look at the genetic testing, as well, which connects the story of “the gene” to Eyam in a way that is tied to ideas of blood and descent from the survivors of Eyam’s Plague. “The gene” is also tied in to ideas of “immunity”, of health, and of being important to the world because of its tie to “another plague”, HIV/AIDS. The various intersections of biomedical understandings of science, lay persons’ understanding of science, personal perspectives on and understandings of “the gene”, and the museum’s incorporation of “the gene” into its exhibits within the broader Plague narrative are examined here. It is these points of intersection and articulation between different perspectives on “the gene” that make it an interesting object of anthropological enquiry as they combine to appeal to visitors and researchers alike, capturing the public imagination with its potential for combating HIV/AIDS. In this thesis, I aim to understand the conjunction of tourism, museums, science, and medicine in producing the experience of “the Plague Village” for both visitors and locals. Each of these is important to understanding the dynamics at work in Eyam with regard to residents, visitors, and Eyam’s identity as the Plague Village. The museum plays an integral part of constructing Eyam’s Plague identity, and for

33 this reason, it is necessary to look at the role of Eyam Museum within the wider village and visitor contexts. From a look at how tourism impacts the village to an in- depth examination of the museum’s role as gatekeeper for local history and heritage information, continuing on to look at how the museum displays this history, how it specifically constructs the Plague and “the gene” for public consumption, and how these constructs are also anticipated, understood, and experienced by the visitors who come to learn about the Plague, this thesis will add to the anthropological knowledge base regarding heritage tourism, museum studies, and the public understanding of science. As we will see in this thesis, although there are similarities between Eyam and other British locales that have been discussed in the anthropological literature with regard to heritage tourism and museums and local heritage centres, there are also a number of key differences in how Eyam’s heritage is defined and how its local museum preserves and displays that heritage for visitors, as well as in how the biomedical concepts of the Plague and “the gene” are understood by the public. At the end of this thesis, we will understand more fully how heritage and identity are constructed in the Plague Village through a close examination of the intersections between local identity, heritage tourism, and the local heritage museum in Eyam, and why these are important to the anthropological knowledge base.

34

Chapter 2: The People of Eyam

Introduction

I had a number of local key informants from a variety of backgrounds, including young people, parents, and retirees, incomers, locals, and commuters who worked locally. Some of my informants were very involved in Eyam’s heritage projects, and some were not involved in them at all, and most were involved in more than one local activity. These key informants helped me to meet new informants through what is most accurately described as snowball sampling, with each person introducing me to other people within the village, creating a network of people who were involved, in some way, in assisting with my research. In this chapter, I will introduce these informants and attempt to paint a picture of them, and of the village as seen through their eyes and their social networks. I will also compare and contrast my experience with the residents of Eyam to that of other British ethnographies, specifically within the frameworks of “locals” and “incomers,” which is a pervasive theme of British ethnography, found in ethnographies of England (Edwards, 2000), Scotland (Macdonald, 1997b), and Wales (Frankenberg, 1957), spanning the latter half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. In these ethnographies, there are delineations such as “local”, “born and bred”, “incomer”, “strangers”, and “hippies”, showing clear separations between local people who were born and raised in a particular town or village and those who moved to the area from elsewhere. Based on my initial archival research of Eyam prior to beginning my fieldwork, I anticipated a similar separation in Eyam, particularly because of a quote from the Eyam Map and CD-ROM website by a man who referred to himself as a “comer3” even after living in the village for 52 years following his marriage to “a local girl,” and based on the pervasiveness of the theme in other British ethnographies. What I found were different levels of local and incomer, and the conditions under which an incomer can

3 http://www.eyamvillage.org.uk/memories.htm

35 be accepted as a local person and those under which he or she cannot. I also found other categories, including “visitors”, and a category similar to Macdonald’s “hippies”, the “holiday home buyers”, who buy property in the village but do not live there, and I identified trends related to the search for the rural idyll. My First Informants At the start of my fieldwork, I stayed in a local bed and breakfast called Crown Cottage, formerly known as the Rose and Crown Inn, owned by Mrs. Cheryl McCarthy, who was one of my earliest research informants. Mrs. McCarthy was introduced to me by the local historian, Mr. Mark Stephens, during my first formal interview in the village. Mrs. McCarthy then helped me to find more permanent accommodations by encouraging me to advertise on the bulletin board at the local post office when I could find no suitable housing through conventional means. Mrs. Sarah Grant and her husband, Dave, responded to my advertisement and rented a room to me in their home. For the duration of my stay in Eyam, I resided with the Grant family, including Sarah and Dave and three of their four children, Ashley, age 19, Chris, age 18, and Molly, age 16. Their oldest son, Darren (known to them as Daz), lived with his fiancée in Sheffield. Two of the four children and both parents agreed to participate in my research as informants. While Mrs. McCarthy and the Grants were instrumental in getting me settled into domestic life in Eyam, Mr. Stephens introduced me to the heritage tourism of Eyam, including several key informants, as well as to the details of the genetic testing that was conducted in 2002. Mr. Stephens also introduced me to Mrs. Margaret Stone, the museum administrator who would become my supervisor and a key informant in her own right during my time as a volunteer steward at the museum. The McCarthys I met Cheryl McCarthy on the same day I met Mark Stephens, during my first formal interview in Eyam. Mr. Stephens’ church steward shift was ending and Mrs. McCarthy’s was beginning, and he introduced me to Mrs. McCarthy when she arrived. Mrs. McCarthy was very friendly and helpful right from the start, even giving me tips on quicker, easier routes to and through the village. I mentioned to her that I was looking for accommodations in the village and she offered me a very good rate per

36 night for a room in her bed and breakfast, Crown Cottage, and even offered to pick me up from the train station if I arrived back in the village after dark. I spent quite a few nights at Crown Cottage and it was Mrs. McCarthy who suggested to me that I advertise for a room on the bulletin board in front of the post office when I was unable to find affordable accommodations to rent over the long term through conventional real estate and housing advertisements. Her suggestion was extremely helpful, and I received a reply from Mrs. Sarah Grant just a few weeks after beginning my fieldwork in Eyam. Mrs. and Mr. McCarthy invited me to share dinner with them in the kitchen of the bed and breakfast, and Mrs. McCarthy in particular provided me with a great deal of assistance in getting started in Eyam. She is also an excellent cook and it was a delight eating her home-made breakfasts each morning, including the “Derbyshire Oatcakes” made from a recipe that came with the house, and breakfast made from locally-sourced fresh foods, meant to lend a bit of local authenticity to the Eyam experience. Cheryl and Robert McCarthy bought Crown Cottage in 2006, moving to Eyam from Scotland. Crown Cottage was originally built in about 1780 and was originally called the Rose and Crown Inn, where for a time it served as one of four local pubs, but over the years, and primarily in the 20th century, according to Mrs. McCarthy, the pubs closed, one by one, leaving only one remaining pub in the village, the Miner’s Arms. Crown Cottage is a popular place for travellers, and it is a four star bed and breakfast, situated directly opposite the post office near the centre of the village within easy walking distance of a number of local attractions. When visitors come, Mrs. McCarthy gives them tips on attractions they can visit while they are in the area, helps them make reservations to eat at the Miner’s Arms, and provides a wealth of information about local history and events. She is also very involved in the local parish church, where she serves as a volunteer steward a couple of afternoons each week. Between her ownership of a very successful and popular local bed and breakfast and her volunteer work at the church, she is very involved in local tourism. She is also an “incomer”, but one who has made strong ties within the village both personally and professionally. She is also one of the few local residents who also

37 works locally because she owns her own business in Eyam. Her daughter was married at the St. Lawrence Parish Church and Mrs. McCarthy invited me to the wedding reception at Eyam Hall, and Mr. and Mrs. McCarthy are also involved in other local activities such as attending local tea and coffee mornings and other local functions. This strong level of local involvement and church membership has made the Smiths a more integrated part of the community with many local friends, and in contrast to non-local owners of local holiday cottages that are available for visitors to rent, Mr. and Mrs. McCarthy live in Eyam and they stay and socialise in the village during their free time (except for when they go on holiday, which is usually a trip abroad each January). Mark Stephens Mr. Mark Stephens, a 79 year-old retiree at the time my fieldwork began, is also from outside of Eyam, having been raised in Wakefield and Sheffield, coming to Eyam as a retiree when he was in his sixties, bringing his wife, Francine, and his elderly mother with him. Mr. Stephens is well-known as the local historian in Eyam, although his first career was as a history teacher rather than a researcher. Mr. Stephens was a founding member of Eyam Museum, Ltd., which was formed after the 1989 death of Clarence Daniel, and he was responsible for writing the bulk of its historical text content. He also quite literally wrote the book on the Plague at Eyam titled Eyam Plague: 1665-1666, which was first self-published in 1989, with revisions in 1993, 1995, and 2003 that included the most up-to-date research available, as well as a children’s workbook that is sold at the museum titled Bugs and Buboes. Mr. Stephens conducted new research into Eyam’s Plague History, building upon the previous work of William Wood (1865) and Clarence Daniel, and used this research both to produce his book and the content for the museum. During my fieldwork, Mr. Stephens volunteered as a steward at both the Eyam Museum and the St. Lawrence Parish Church, and he was my first formal contact within the village, having provided me with my first formal interview and a very in- depth picture of Eyam and the work he did to research Eyam’s history. At the time of our initial interview, Mr. Stephens told me that he and his wife had lived in Eyam for “about twenty-five years”, having moved to Eyam from Sheffield upon his retirement

38 from teaching in 1983. Mr. Stephens was very enthusiastic about Eyam, although he told me it has not been without its difficulties. When he brought his mother to live with him and his wife, he decided to build an extension onto their house so that his mother would have her own living area but still be close enough to help her when she needed it. He told me that they got the building permit, hired the builders, and had the extension built, only to learn that they had not built it to code. He explained to me that the Peak District has specific building codes that require building with local stone and slanted roofs. The extension they had built had a flat roof. He told me that they had to hire the builders again to change the roof and bring the extension to code. Apart from that, he said that he and his wife feel quite at home in Eyam, where they are both active in the church as well as the museum, and despite his not being from Eyam, he is well-known and accepted as the expert on local history. In Mr. Stephens, we see a man who was not born in Eyam, and who spent the majority of his life outside of Eyam, but who was considered a valued member of the local community within the village. He gained a certain level of notoriety when he was asked by Dr. Stephen J. O’Brien to research local genealogies of Plague survivors. He told me that he carefully researched the church records to determine first who survived the Plague, and then he looked at records of births, burials, and baptisms to follow their lineages to the present day. He said that many of the people he found to be descendants of Plague survivors had no idea that their ancestors had survived the Eyam Plague. It was his research that determined who would be tested for the CCR5-Δ32 gene mutation and participate in the documentary that was being made for Channel Four. Mr. Stephens was also featured in this documentary as the local expert who told the story of the Plague survivors. This documentary has since aired far outside of the United Kingdom and given national and international attention to Mr. Stephens and the fruits of his research. Mr. Stephens did not stop there, either. He continued to research the history of Eyam after that, making several revisions to his book and to the museum displays as he uncovered new information, including a striking revision to the number of people who had been in Eyam prior to and who had survived the Plague. Wood wrote that “[f]rom the latter end of 1664 to December 1665, about one-sixth of the population of London fell victims to this appalling

39 pestilence; but at Eyam, five-sixths were carried off in a few months of the summer of 1666, excepting a few who died at the close of 1665 (Wood, 1865: 41).” The number of Plague dead has been determined to be two hundred and sixty or two hundred and sixty-one, and at the time Wood wrote his history of Eyam, he estimated the village population at three hundred and fifty individuals from just seventy-six families, while Mr. Stephens told me that his research into tax records at nearby Lichfield revealed a population closer to seven hundred people from no fewer than four hundred and thirty-two families resident in Eyam at the time the Plague struck (Wood, 1665: 79; Clifford, personal communication). Yet he also insisted that while this meant that only about one-third of the village population died of Plague rather than Wood’s estimation of five-sixths, it did not make the devastation by the Plague any less severe, and he said that what is really important are the people who sacrificed their lives by staying in the village to prevent the spread of Plague rather than taking their families elsewhere, as he suggests many of Eyam’s wealthier residents must have done. Based on my observations and conversations with other village residents, Mr. Stephens’ dedication to uncovering and retelling the stories of those who lived and died during Eyam’s Plague has placed him in the category of “local” or “resident” (but not “villager”, he said) despite his being from outside of the village. Sarah and Dave Grant By contrast, Sarah and Dave Grant, a couple in their late 40s, are “incomers” who came to Eyam around the same time as Mr. Stephens in the early 1980s and who retained the feeling of otherness that comes with being an incomer long after they moved to the village to give their children a safer upbringing than they could have given them in Sheffield. Like the McCarthys and the Stephenses, they are active in the local church, Mr. Grant volunteers to help with church parking during the Eyam Half-Marathon and he also helps out with different holiday activities at the church and with the school. Mr. Grant also teaches at Cliff College, located about halfway between Eyam and Sheffield, and Mrs. Grant works as a supply teacher for schools in Sheffield. As previously discussed, they have four children, most of whom were born after they moved to Eyam and all of whom went to primary school in Eyam and three of whom still lived with them at the time of my fieldwork. Mrs. Grant was

40 the one who responded to the advertisement I posted outside the post office offering me a room to rent in their home. Through the Grants, I got a strong sense of local family life, and particularly working class family life, including the issues involved with raising their children, and the children’s own issues regarding work and school. I helped Mrs. Grant prepare her Christmas pudding at Christmastime, and we went to Easter services and had Easter dinner together at Eastertime, and she was happy to speak with me about life in the village. I had many conversations with both Mr. and Mrs. Grant regarding their life in Eyam and their feelings of belonging or not belonging within the village, and Mrs. Grant in particular felt very strongly that she and her family were not accepted in the village, particularly early on after they first moved to Eyam, both because they were working class and because of their strong Christian faith, which she suggested was frowned upon in Eyam. Their children, on the other hand, have strong networks of friends within the village and strong ties to the village. The other residents in the village knew immediately to whom I was referring when I told them where I lived, and they remembered the children more strongly than the parents. I find it curious, the different range of experiences for the three “incomer” couples I discuss here, where two of the families said that they felt accepted and included within the village while one felt just the opposite, citing class and religion as the reasons. All three were strongly involved in the church, but the Grants’ busy schedules working to support and raise four children kept them from being able to be involved in other things that the McCarthys and the Stephenses could participate in because they either worked locally or were retired, respectively. The Grants’ children did not have this same feeling of not belonging, but Mrs. Grant felt it very strongly, though Mr. Grant felt it less so. From my observations and conversations with each of these three families, it seems that strong involvement in local activities is the most likely factor defining what makes some “incomers” more “local” than others. At the same time, I also found a similar dynamic to what Macdonald observed on the Isle of Skye, with both the “locals” and the “incomers” united in their opposition to holiday home buyers, roughly analogous to Macdonald’s “hippies”, as people who did not even try to become a part of village life (Macdonald, 1997b). Mrs. Grant and others

41 spoke to me about the effect they felt the holiday home-buyers were having on the village, making it more difficult for local young people to stay in the village when they grow up because of the lack of affordable housing available, and also because they felt that the holiday home buyers were not there often enough to be part of the village and because they allowed their friends to borrow their homes, often resulting in loud parties in a usually quiet neighbourhood. Mr. Stephens described their “letting their friends and family use [the homes] casually” as “quite detrimental” to the village. This was also occurring at a time when local people were leaving to move elsewhere, including one of the local butchers, who “just sold his house and moved his whole family to Florida”. This did lend the “incomers” a stronger degree of local belonging as they were united in a common experience with the “locals” against the holiday home buyers, including having shared experiences, opinions, and fears regarding the holiday home buyers. Developing My Network of Informants These first informants then introduced me to others within the village who would also contribute significantly to my research. Through them, I developed a network that revolved largely around home, the museum, and being a customer of local businesses. A few individuals, in particular, were key in this and were invaluable in providing me with information and an opportunity to meet still more people and to learn from them on an ongoing basis throughout my fieldwork experience. These individuals, in addition to those discussed above, were at the base of an expanding network of informants, and they provided not only information but friendship and support throughout my fieldwork process. Some were “locals” and some were not, but all were instrumental in helping me to complete my research and write this thesis. Molly Grant Molly Grant is the youngest daughter of Sarah and Dave Grant. She celebrated her sixteenth birthday during my fieldwork period, and I saw her go from her final year at Hope Valley College, completing her GCSEs, to beginning her A- levels studying to become a beautician in Buxton. She introduced me to her friends, who would stop and say hello to me whenever they saw me in the village, and she

42 shared with me her hopes and dreams as well. Molly was born after her parents moved to Eyam and she was raised there. Molly was one of the few people in Eyam who both lived and worked in the village. One reason for this is the small number of local businesses where it is possible to work compared to a population of nearly one thousand people, and at least six of the people I met who did work in Eyam lived outside of the village, predominantly in nearby Chesterfield, including the owners of the business where Molly worked, the Peak Pantry, as well as the head teacher of the local primary school and the owner of one of the shops at Eyam Hall. Molly was a member of the local darts team at the Miner’s Arms and sometimes spent her social time at the Village Club upstairs in the Mechanic’s Institute, but she and her friends preferred to spend their social time in Chesterfield, bowling or going to the cinema. Where her mother reported experiencing a feeling of exclusion within the village, Molly was much more a part of village life and village social networks, popular and with many local friends. Molly was very much a “local” both in her mind and in the minds of others in the village. Margaret Stone Mrs. Margaret Stone, a retiree in her late 60s who works as the administrator at Eyam Museum, was perhaps the most important informant I had during my fieldwork. She was the person who trained me as a museum steward, and I shared most of my museum shifts with her. Mr. Mark Stephens first introduced me to Mrs. Stone on the day of our first interview, the same day he introduced me to Mrs. McCarthy, taking me with him to the museum to sit out the last part of the afternoon with him and Mrs. Stone during their museum steward shifts. Mrs. Stone lives with her husband in Sheffield but commutes to Eyam for her position as museum administrator, which she has held for several years. She is responsible for booking school groups and other group visits and for the day to day management of volunteers and the gift shop and for reconciling the books against the numbers of tickets sold each day. Before working at Eyam Museum, she was a volunteer steward at , also in Derbyshire, telling the story of Bess of Hardwick, the

43

Countess of Shrewsbury who lived during the sixteenth century. She has a passion for history and for teaching that history to others through museum settings. Mrs. Stone plays a specific role in the village, but she is neither a “local” nor an “incomer”. She is more of a “commuter”, to borrow a word used by the primary school’s Head Teacher, but like the Head Teacher, she plays an important role in Eyam, particularly within the tourism aspect of the village. She is the face and voice of local heritage for many visitors to the museum, and she trains others on how to interact with visitors in their official role as museum stewards, giving her great influence over the experience provided to visitors at the museum as well as the experience of visiting researchers, including myself and author Geraldine Brooks, who wrote the 2001 novel following a period spent living in Eyam while she conducted her research. Through her role in the museum, Mrs. Stone participates in village life and social relationships with the volunteer stewards, attends special events such as the well dressings, and tries to get new people involved in the museum in order to make sure it has enough stewards to keep going at its present level. Dr. Kevin Richardson Dr. Kevin Richardson is another leader of the museum who, like Mr. Stephens, was involved in more than one heritage project within the village. Where Mr. Stephens was involved with both the museum and the parish church, Dr. Richardson was involved with the museum and the Eyam Map and CD-ROM project, for both of which he was an active committee member during my fieldwork. Dr. Richardson is a geologist by trade and he has written his own self-published booklets on local geology, as well as having helped to design the museum displays and built a working model of a lead mine that is a very popular feature in the museum today. Dr. Richardson, who was in his 60s during my fieldwork, was born and raised in Eyam, and although he attended university outside of Eyam and worked outside of Eyam teaching in Sheffield, he has spent most of his life in Eyam. Dr. Richardson was extremely helpful in assisting me with my research, providing background on the creation and evolution of several of the museum displays and providing his own perspective as an academic and as someone who was from Eyam.

44

He also discussed local life and issues specifically related to conflict between him and the owner of a holiday cottage adjacent to his home, and to the wider conflict in general between people who purchase property in the village without intending to live there and those people who have lived there all of or for much of their lives. His was the perspective of a local person who had left the village and then returned, and someone who was deeply invested in local heritage from an academic perspective as well as because of his own local background. Susanne Carey Mrs. Susanne Carey was a fascinating older woman whom I met while volunteering at the museum. She was one of the people tested for the CCR5-Δ32 gene mutation and is a direct descendant of a particularly famous Plague survivor. Mrs. Carey’s mother was from Eyam and her father was Scottish, and although Mrs. Carey was born in Eyam, she was raised in Liverpool, returning to Eyam each summer to spend time with her grandmother, cousins, and other relatives, and it was during these summer visits that she first met and got to know her husband, who was from a prominent Eyam family. He was a friend of her cousins’ who, she told me, she thought he was a bit “goofy” and “funny-looking” when they first met, but she said that he got more handsome as he got older. Before she reconnected with the man who would be her husband, she spent her early adult years working for a chemist’s in Manchester during the war, including a brief engagement to an American soldier. She returned to Eyam and married her husband, moving to live in Eyam with him, leaving Liverpool and Manchester behind. Together they had a son and a daughter. Their son is also involved with local heritage as well as owning a local business, a chippy called the Toll Bar Fish and Chips Shop, in neighbouring Stoney Middleton. Mrs. Carey told me fascinating stories of her youth and young adulthood and her struggle to fit in when she moved to Eyam full-time, despite her strong local ties and being from a family that had lived in the village at least since the time of the Plague. She said that she felt disconnected from her faith when she first came to the village because she was raised Catholic, having a Catholic father, and there were no Catholic churches in Eyam. She and her husband were married in the Anglican church, and she attended the Anglican church some when she was unable to find a

45 nearby Catholic church that she liked, but she said it never really felt like the church she was raised in. However, she eventually became comfortable in Eyam, her mother’s home village and the place of her birth, and she has lived there ever since. At the time of my fieldwork, she was involved not only in the museum but also with the local Gardening Club, and at ninety-one years old, she was still a very active woman. Despite her earlier feelings of not belonging, she was well and truly a “local” by the time I completed my fieldwork, both in her own opinion and in the opinion of other local residents with whom I spoke. Emma and George Davis (The Peak Pantry) Emma and George Davis, a couple in their early 50s, purchased the Peak Pantry in early 2008 and commenced extensive renovations in the way this popular cafe, located in the Village Square, looked and operated. Molly Grant had worked for the Peak Pantry under its original ownership and was able to keep her job when it changed hands, reopening in May 2008, just in time for the Eyam Half-Marathon. Emma and George Davis ran the Peak Pantry with the help of their daughter, Tina, who came in at least once a week to help out. All three of them lived in Chesterfield rather than in Eyam, and while the bulk of their customers were visitors, for whom they made a special effort to be welcoming and to provide items for sale that they felt provided a bit of rural authenticity, they also sought to draw local customers by providing fresh breads and a good menu and providing friendly service. Emma, in particular, was excellent at remembering the names and faces of local customers and using that to make customers feel welcome every time they came into the café. While Emma served the customers, George did the cooking. George was a very good cook. Emma and George Davis were particularly keen to create a sense of local authenticity in their café by providing local foods and items for sale associated with the countryside, such as jams, candles, and crafts, and Cornish pasties delivered fresh from Cornwall. They hired local teenage girls, including Molly Grant, to work in the café, but it took a few months for local people to accept the new Peak Pantry and to become familiar with the new menu and the completely different atmosphere from the old Peak Pantry. However, once they did start eating at the Peak Pantry, some

46 people even decided that they liked it better than the food at the Eyam Tea Rooms, once the local favourite, which also changed ownership in early 2008. The last time I visited the Peak Pantry, in the summer of 2010, I saw quite a few local people coming in to buy lunch or to buy some of the fresh bread. Emma greeted them by name and knew their standing orders, and she remembered mine as well. Emma and George Davis were not from Eyam and did not live in Eyam, but they have become a part of the community in their own way. Other Informants I met so many wonderful people during my time in Eyam, all of whom made it memorable, and I cannot list them all, but in addition to the individuals discussed above, who provided me with a great deal of information and assisted me with building my network of informants, there were others who provided me with information and assistance during my fieldwork. These individuals came from different backgrounds and experiences with the local community and helped to provide a more well-rounded view of Eyam and what Mrs. Grant described as “village life.” Maude Tilley Mrs. Maude Tilley, who was in her mid 80s at the time of my fieldwork, retired to Eyam with her husband in the 1980s. She was a volunteer steward with me at the museum, and a valued friend during my time in Eyam. After her husband died, she moved into a small flat above the Church Street Stores, and she said that the people from the store had been lovely to her, for example one time when she was ill, they took her groceries to her and made sure she had everything she needed. She told me local gossip and gave me a ride to and from the museum when we were working the same shifts, and she was a member of local groups such as the Gardening Club. I was deeply saddened to hear that Mrs. Tilley died in January 2011. She was a valuable informant and a good friend during my time in the village. Chris Grant Chris Grant was seventeen years old when I began my fieldwork, turning eighteen during my time renting a room in his family’s home. Chris had left school after completing his GCSEs and worked sporadically in construction in and around

47

Eyam. Chris took his driver’s test during my time in the village, and he was struggling at one point with finding work when one job he had been working ended. Chris and his friends had a local reputation for having “anti-social behaviour”, and when local people remembered him, it was usually in association with his behaviour. He was born after his parents moved to Eyam and raised in the village, and he had a strong network of local friends. Chris could certainly be categorized as a “local”, but his reputation for anti-social behaviour does place him on the edges of local life alongside his friends. Mr. Carey Mr. Carey, one of the sons of Susanne Carey, is the owner of the Toll Bar Fish and Chips Shop in Stoney Middleton, a small village adjacent to Eyam and accessible to the village through the walkway leading to and from Eyam’s famous Boundary Stone. Mr. Carey was active in local activities such as the Wakes Week Carnival and the Eyam Map and CD-ROM project in addition to having a farm where he lived with his family, as well. We spoke about his interesting history as a member of the Merchant Marines, which allowed him to travel all over the world, and his decision to return to Eyam afterwards and to stay and build a life for himself there. As previously mentioned, the Careys are a prominent family who were already prominent at the time William Wood wrote his history of Eyam, and Mr. Carey’s ancestors had once owned shoe factories, or “Slipperworks”, that were thriving businesses in Eyam. Today’s population is smaller than in the past, with fewer children and fewer working age adults, and with fewer businesses now that the Glebe Mines and the Slipperworks are no longer in operation, but many residents like Mr. Carey, Dr. Richardson, and more with whom I spoke had left the village as young adults only to return and settle down to raise their families. Mr. Carey is a local person with a strong interest in local history and local activities, and anyone in the village is likely to know who he is and who his ancestors were. Anne Burton Anne Burton is the cousin of Mrs. Carey, and they can both trace their ancestry back to the Blackwell family and she was born and raised in Eyam. Mrs. Burton said that she did not even know her ancestors had been in Eyam at the time of the Plague

48 until Mr. Stephens produced his genealogies for the genetic testing, revealing that she is descended from the Blackwell siblings, Francis and Margaret, through her mother’s family. Mrs. Carey is also descended from Margaret Blackwell. Mrs. Burton works as the now part-time administrator for the St. Lawrence Parish Church, and she lives in the village with her husband, who is not originally from Eyam. Mrs. Burton is a very friendly and welcoming woman, and most people in the village know who she is. She was born and raised in Eyam and she is very active in the local church. Abigail Rigby Mrs. Abigail Rigby is the Head Teacher of the Eyam Church of England (C of E) Primary School and had been working in this capacity for several years when I met her. Mrs. Rigby lives in Chesterfield and commutes to Eyam, but she admires the people of Eyam for their strong ties to the local community and their participation in local activities. Mrs. Rigby is Head Teacher of a school with “50 or 51” pupils at the time of my research, and she spoke to me about the PTA, the children, the parents, the different activities the school does with the children, and about her impressions of the Eyam community and of the visitors. She is not a local, but she holds a very important position within the village as Head Teacher to the village primary school children. Conclusion: Similarities to and Differences from Other British Ethnographies My network of informants included people of many diverse backgrounds who helped to inform my thesis, including the ways in which Eyam is similar to and different from other British ethnographies. British ethnographies in the past have made strong distinctions between “locals” and “incomers”, “strangers”, and “hippies”, but in Eyam, I have found a wider range of distinctions in Eyam that depend on a variety of circumstances. These distinctions are nuanced and individualized depending on the level of local involvement someone has, as well as their developing of a local network of friends and organizational participation. Based on my conversations with Mrs. Grant, it appears that class affects the ability to be accepted as local as well, though whether this is because of simply class differences or because being a working class family raising four children leaves very little free time in which to participate locally, I do not know and it would require more in-depth study

49 of this particular issue to determine. However, it is clear that many “incomers” in Eyam are able to gain local acceptance and become a welcome part of the local community, a position which tends to strengthen the longer someone lives in the village. Additionally, the size and location of Eyam and the small number of businesses in the local area compared with its population lead to a high level of commuting for work between Eyam and surrounding towns and cities. In the nineteenth century, Eyam had both more residents and more businesses and it was a major centre for lead and fluorspar mining, as well as for shoemaking. Since the mine and Slipperworks, closed down, many other businesses have followed, including three local pubs and more. Similar to what Frankenberg (1957) observed in Pentrediwaith, where the loss of local jobs led to a community that spent more of its time outside of the village for work than inside of the village taking part in local life, Eyam has had to adjust to this change in local dynamics and identification. Frankenberg observed the villagers of Pentrediwaith at the time they were experiencing the change in work dynamics, but for the residents of Eyam, the change in this dynamic occurred in the 1979 when the last of the shoe factories closed, which has allowed for more than thirty years of social change and adjustment to these new circumstances. Many residents of Eyam today work or study outside of the village, and many of the people who work in Eyam or who own local businesses actually live elsewhere. Local businesses include shops selling fresh produce and other products, butchers, cafés, bed and breakfast facilities, holiday cottages, Eyam Hall, and the Miner’s Arms pub; however, employers able to employ large numbers of individuals no longer exist in Eyam. The present-day population of Eyam is also smaller than it was at the end of the nineteenth century, and according to Mrs. Rigby, there are perhaps only half the number of primary school students enrolled at the local primary school today as there were a century ago. Today, Eyam is part of a larger region with three main hubs for schools and businesses in Buxton, Chesterfield, and Sheffield, as well as many smaller towns and cities, such as Hope, where GCSE students attend Hope Valley College, and there is extensive traffic between Eyam and these other locations. However, simply commuting outside of the village for work does not

50 prevent someone from fully participating in village life, as there are a range of local groups and activities such as the church, the darts team and pub quiz at the Miner’s Arms, the Village Club and other activities at the Mechanic’s Institute, and more. These activities are popular with local people and they work to create a local community in the absence of shared workplaces in the mines or factories of the past. People who live elsewhere and commute to Eyam for work might be considered to be “commuters”, as one such person described, and several such “commuters” play important roles in village life despite being from outside the village. “Locals”, “incomers” who are nonetheless considered to be local by the other residents and by themselves, and “incomers” who still feel a disconnect between themselves and the village community, as well as the “commuters” who are active in important roles in local life, all fall into one category of people with a strong investment in local life and local community, while “visitors”, “holiday home buyers”, and people who own the holiday cottages but do not live in the village would fall into another category of people who are not invested in the local community. Those individuals with a strong investment in local life often have very strong feelings toward those who do not, feeling that people from outside the village are inconsiderate of those who live there (a point discussed in more detail in Chapter 5), and this creates a sort of unity between the “locals”, “incomers”, and “commuters” against these other people they see as intruding upon their space. I would suggest that it is the combination of special circumstances related to the length of time during which Eyam residents have worked largely outside of the village, the local activities and community networks that have developed in the absence of a shared work experience, and the tourism into the village for both the Plague heritage and the countryside rambling that contribute to this ability to absorb “incomers” and even “commuters” into the local community in a way that differs from the greater level of local exclusivity observed by Frankenberg (1957), Macdonald (1997b), Edwards (2000), and Nadel-Klein (2003). Nadel-Klein observed that “in Ferryden, the viewpoints of insider and outsider have reinforced each other over the years like a tennis match of labels and claims (Nadel-Klein, 2003: 94).” Yet in Eyam, we see a permeability to these labels and viewpoints. We see a man who spent more than

51 sixty years of his life outside of the village accepted as the expert on local history. We see a woman of Eyam heritage but raised outside of Eyam struggle to become a fully integrated part of the village in her marriage to a local person from an old Eyam family, and eventually gaining acceptance and a place of influence in her own right both because of her husband’s family ties and because of her own ties to her famous Plague-survivor ancestor. And we see “incomers” who are involved with village life but who do not feel accepted, but whose children have thriving groups of friends and strong ties to the local community. We also see people born and raised in the village who left for a time to go to university or to travel the world in the Merchant Marines, only to return to the village to raise their families. Eyam has close ties to the larger cities and towns of Buxton, Chesterfield, and Sheffield, as well as nearby villages, and so the village of 2007-2008 has a wide reach in terms of home, work, study, and commerce. All of these factors contribute to a dynamic in Eyam that is more than simply “incomer” and “local”, defying expectations based upon my review of other British ethnographies.

52

Chapter 3: Local Heritage Outside of the Plague Context

Introduction

This thesis focuses primarily on the Plague heritage of Eyam, but it is important to point out that local people do not necessarily think of the Plague first and foremost when they think of local heritage. Many have a different idea of what local heritage is or what it ought to be. Some are heavily invested in the Plague heritage of Eyam, but for others, they are either not invested at all in local heritage or they have different interests and different ideas about what is important to local history. The Plague devastated Eyam in the mid-seventeenth century, but in the years and centuries that followed, new industry and growth occurred within the village. Wealthier residents built homes like Aughton House and Eyam Hall and employed local people to work for them. Farmers raised cattle and sheep, producing milk and wool, as well as meat, and growing crops such as oats, wheat, and barley. A local primary school was built in the late nineteenth century, opening its doors in November 1871 and soon providing education to one hundred and eighteen pupils ranging in age from those in Infants’ school to children up to the age of thirteen. There were once quarries, mines, farms, silk and cotton manufacturers, and shoe factories – both agriculture and industry – that contributed to local growth in population and in employment; however, today, as Mr. Michael Johnson has noted, tourism has taken the place of industry in Eyam. In my conversations with local residents, I quickly learned that most people in Eyam had little interest in its history and heritage except in areas of its history that they felt were important in their own lives, like a young boy who was interested in a particular old house on the edge of the village because it was his grandparents’ house, or the local geologist’s interest in the mining and quarry industries in the village. Mr. Johnson has always participated in the village Wakes Week and had an interest in Eyam’s industrial history. Mr. Stephens was also interested in the history of the local parish church and shared some of that information with me when I

53 interviewed him during his church steward shift. And some people were not interested in local heritage at all. Mrs. Stone, Mr. Stephens, and Dr. Richardson all particularly lamented the lack of interest shown by younger people in the museum and the Eyam Map and CD-ROM Project, fearing that this lack of interest could lead to the end of these heritage projects. Many local people told me they felt like the heritage activities and tourism in Eyam created a serious imposition in their own lives because the people who come to Eyam to see the museum and the church and the graves park in their parking spaces, block their driveways, “block the pavement”, and “treat everything in the village as part of the attraction” rather than sticking to just those locations posted with the blue plaques, feeling like the visitors didn’t realise that this is “a modern village” where people still live and work today (discussed further in Chapter 5). The local church and chapels are a strong presence within the village, and for many of my informants, their church affiliation was an important part of their personal stories when talking to me. The Grants, the Cliffords, and the Smiths were all active members of the St. Lawrence Parish Church. Mrs. Carey spoke of her feeling of disconnect because there was no Catholic church in Eyam for her to attend. Mr. John Clark, a member of the Eyam Map Group, spoke to me of some of the different local traditions the Wesleyan Reform Chapel participates in, such as the carolling at Christmastime. Mrs. Stone kept me updated about the issues faced by the Methodist church, which was adjacent to the museum and which initially provided the museum with its current premises in the 1990s. Each of these churches plays its own role in local heritage and in the personal stories of Eyam’s residents. Eyam Hall is also tied in with Eyam’s history and with the economic life of the village and though it is not open to the public as often as the church or the museum, it faces many of the same issues and it has its own history that visitors come to enjoy, as well as owners who have been involved in many aspects of village life. This chapter will explore the Hall’s role in the village and in local heritage, as well as in hosting events and other businesses on its premises and how this affects local people. For those who are interested in local heritage but not in the Plague heritage, or not exclusively in the Plague heritage, a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund has

54 allowed for a local heritage project to be carried out covering many aspects of Eyam’s history and heritage and not only its Plague heritage. Through the Eyam Map and CD-ROM Project, local people were given a chance to have their voices heard, some in writing, some in audio recordings, and some on video, speaking about aspects of local heritage that interest them. This information was placed onto an interactive CD- ROM that was produced alongside a two-sided, full-colour map and information sheet portraying key local locations and things such as local birds and wildflowers. A second phase of the project also included the creation of a website with supplemental information that was not placed onto the initial CD-ROM. The maps and CD-ROMs are available via mail order as well as at most local gift shops, including the museum. This chapter will explore this project, including looking at what some of the people involved in the project had to say about it, as well as the ways in which the Eyam Map Group created a multi-media heritage project that covers a wider range of local history than does the museum, and does so with the perspective of many more voices. That is not to say that all local people are involved or invested in this project, but it is a project that offers a different experience and opportunity for people who want to become involved in local heritage but are not interested in the Plague history of the village. Churches in Eyam At the time of my fieldwork, Eyam was home to three different churches – the St. Lawrence Parish Church, which is the Anglican church in the village that dates to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; the Wesleyan Reform Chapel, which was built in 1787; and the Methodist Chapel, which was built in 1906. Non-Conformist worship in the village was replaced by Anglican worship at about the time of the Plague in the seventeenth century, but it experienced a resurgence in the latter half of the eighteenth century and at one point there were enough members of the Wesleyan Reform Chapel to justify a 250 seat chapel. Mrs. Sharon Craig said that the Wesleyan Reform Chapel, where she has gone to church since she was a girl, was in the past referred to as the Bottom Chapel, while the Methodist Chapel was called the Top Chapel because of their relative locations in the village, with the Wesleyan Reform Chapel located just at the bend where the Causeway becomes New Road

55 near the Townend and the Methodist Chapel located on Hawkhill Road near the Townhead. Both Rev. Andrew Montgomerie of the St. Lawrence Parish Church and Mr. John Clark from the Eyam Map Group pointed out, however, that there were barely ten people each counted among current members of the Wesleyan and Methodist churches in the village at the time of my fieldwork, while the St. Lawrence Parish Church drew parishioners not only from throughout Eyam but from surrounding villages as well. However, Mrs. Stone and Mrs. Tilley told me that they knew quite a few people from Eyam, including one of the museum volunteers, who regularly commuted to a nearby village to attend the Methodist church there rather than attending the Methodist church in Eyam, which held services in Eyam only once every other week. For example, Mrs. Hannah Marshall attended a Methodist Chapel outside of Eyam in Baslow rather than the one in Eyam. She told me that she liked the people there and felt more comfortable there. Toward the end of my fieldwork, the Methodist church’s minister, Rev. Rose Bartleson, resigned her post to “return to [her] homeland”, and at the time of this writing, Mrs. Stone told me that the Methodist Chapel has sold the remainder of its building to Eyam Museum. Most of the people I met in Eyam either belonged to the St. Lawrence Parish Church or the Wesleyan Reform Chapel rather than to the Methodist Chapel, and most church-based village activities were hosted by one of the two former churches rather than the latter. For example, the Wesleyan Reform Chapel, led by Mr. Philip Nutall, hosts a Christmas Carol Singing each December that Mr. Clark told me about with great enthusiasm, where they sing locally-written Christmas carols alongside more traditional carols, taking the carolling door to door throughout the village. And at Easter time each year, the St. Lawrence Parish Church hosts an outdoor Good Friday service in the Village Square followed by a procession that includes carrying a cross through the village from the square to the church, and then on Easter Sunday, the vicar of the parish gives an Easter sermon followed by a tea and coffee get-together. The St. Lawrence Parish Church also plays a regular role in the annual Plague Commemoration Service, the Bonfire Night effigy-building, and the blessing of the wells and judging of the carnival floats during Wakes Week. By the time of my fieldwork in late 2007, the church had implemented a new Bonfire Night practice

56 changing the effigy to be burnt from one of Guy Fawkes to one of a Plague rat that was carried by the children through the village in a torch-lit procession to the bonfire site in the car park on Hawkhill Road, and Mrs. Grant told me that Rev. Montgomerie also created quite a stir during the 2006 Wakes Week well blessings by refusing to bless a well that had been dressed with a Green Man theme because she said he found it to be too “Pagan” for a Christian blessing. In 2008, all three churches were represented in the Plague Commemoration Service, each speaking separately about the sacrifice of the men and women who maintained the Plague quarantine and died in Eyam to prevent the spread of disease elsewhere. These churches play a strong role in creating and maintaining local traditions like those described above, as well as meeting the demand for spiritual guidance by many both in and outside of the village. More than that, for many, the church is a very important part of their lives. Mr. and Mrs. Grant held a very strong “Christian” identity, with Mrs. Grant often saying “I’m a Christian” to explain her attitudes toward and experiences of life in the village, and they were quite active in the church, particularly Mr. Grant, who assisted with the Good Friday services for Easter and with the car parking for the church members during the Eyam Half-Marathon, as well as being involved in the Friday morning religious services for the local primary school and running a “house group” every second Thursday. Mr. and Mrs. Stephens and Mrs. McCarthy were even more involved, with their regular volunteer steward work at the church to meet and greet visitors and to provide information about the history of the church and the Plague. Mr. Stephens conducted a great deal of research on the history of the church and many visitors were interested in the history of the church, as well. Mr. Stephens told me that at one point the church had more visitors each year than much larger cathedrals like York Minster. The St. Lawrence Parish Church hosts tour groups and sells souvenirs much as the museum does, but emphasizing the church’s role in the Plague history, which was a very significant one, as well as showcasing its stained glass windows and the series of restored wall murals that have been dated to the seventeenth century. The church maintains the original death records from the Plague on display, and the grave of Catherine Mompesson, the wife of the Plague-era church rector William Mompesson, is in front of the church.

57

However, the churchyard is also home to many other local graves dating back several centuries, as well as the Saxon Cross that has been estimated to date back to the ninth or tenth century (Clifford, 2003). A war memorial in the churchyard is the site of Eyam’s Remembrance Day wreath-laying, and there is a footpath through the churchyard that leads to some walking trails through the area. And, of course, many Eyam families such as the Grants have attended the parish church for many years and their children have grown up in the church, and many were married there as well. There are many reasons why people in Eyam, including both locals and visitors, come to see the church, but for local people in particular, there are also personal connections that make the church important to them, whether it is memories from their childhood or their weddings, ancestors who are buried in the graveyard or memorialised on the war memorial, or current participation and the network of friends that people have developed through their membership in the church. Currently, the church hosts groups for mothers and toddlers, after school programs, tea and coffee mornings, and more that families in Eyam have grown up with. Mrs. McCarthy’s daughter was married at the St. Lawrence Parish Church. The Grants raised all of their children in the church. Mrs. Burton works as the church administrator. Mr. Clark is involved in the Wesleyan Reform Chapel and particularly enjoys the carolling at Christmastime with his church. These personal connections make the heritage and tradition associated with the churches in the village more salient to local people than with the Plague heritage of the village, and the churches do show up across all of Eyam’s other heritage projects, featuring strongly in the museum and the CD-ROM and website in large part because of its importance to the people of Eyam. Indeed, the church is an integral part of some local people’s identities as Christians, and it is a key player in making “incomers” more fully integrated into village life, as we have seen with the Smiths, the Cliffords, and the Grants. Eyam Hall Eyam Hall, a Jacobean Manor House, was built in 1671-1672 by the Wright family. According to Robert Wright, the current owner, the Hall was built by Thomas Wright for his son, John, as a wedding present for him and his new wife. Robert Wright inherited the Hall from his cousin’s family when the last direct heir died

58 childless in 1987, and Robert and his wife Nicola (Nicky) took over ownership of the Hall in 1990. Mrs. Wright explained that the Hall was in fairly bad shape when they moved in and it required a substantial number of repairs. However, once they had carried out the repair work, they decided to open the Hall to the public in 1992. In 1999, they also opened it up for weddings. Other improvement projects since then have focused on “updating the gardens”, as Mrs. Wright put it, which she said were still laid out the way they had been for centuries but they had not been well-tended or kept up in the years before Mr. Wright inherited the Hall. Eyam Hall tours are currently open to the public on Wednesdays, Thursdays, Sundays, and Bank Holiday Mondays for approximately nine weeks of the year in March/April and July/August and the price of an adult ticket is £7.50, £6.50 for concession tickets, £4.00 for children’s tickets, or a family ticket allowing for the inclusion of two adults and up to four children for £20.00, with the tickets sold at the Honey Buzzard gift shop. Reduced rates are available for pre-booked groups. Guided tours of the Hall take place from “midday” to 4:00 p.m. on the days the Hall is open. In the years after they inherited the Hall, Mrs. Wright said that they decided to transform the old “farm buildings” into the “Craft Centre” that today houses several businesses that are aimed at both visitors and local residents, including the Eyam Hall Buttery, the Painted Plate, the Honey Buzzard gift shop, ZS Silks, Crafty Red Fox, and Mother Nature. The Craft Centre is open year round, with opening hours from 10:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. from March to October and 10:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. from November to February. Honey Buzzard and the Eyam Hall Buttery are particularly popular with visitors, and the Buttery is also popular with local residents. Honey Buzzard sells cards, candles, jewellery, and more; and stewards at the museum, like Mrs. Stone, often recommend the Buttery when asked about places to eat in the village. It serves sandwiches, crisps, ice cream, and other light snack foods. In the courtyard of the Craft Centre are several benches and tables for people sit at while they eat or wait for their tour at the Hall to begin, and on a dry, sunny day, many people of all ages take advantage of these outdoor tables and seats. Eyam Hall offers a substantially different heritage experience than that of the museum or the church, while employing many of the same mechanisms in its day to

59 day running, such as having tour guides and other staff, both paid and voluntary, serving the public. I spoke with one woman, an Eyam resident for the past twenty five years, who worked at the Hall and who told me of her difficult days dealing with visitors, especially groups with school children who, she said, “aren’t really interested in being there at all.” Unlike the church and the museum, Eyam Hall played no role in Eyam’s Plague heritage, not having been built until after the Plague had ended, and so the history it tells is a very different one, filled with stories of eccentric members of the Wright family and the “resident ghost, Sarah Mills, who drowned in Wright's well and still answers the night bell!4” However, the Hall is not just a tourist attraction meant for outsiders. It hosts wedding receptions throughout the year, Christmas dinners in December, and outdoor theatre in the late summer months, and it has been a part of local history for over three hundred years. Its new owners, particularly Nicky Wright, have become quite active in local leadership and local life. For local people, Eyam Hall is a place to host special events or to just go for lunch at the Buttery, and it is a reminder, as Mrs. McCarthy would say, that “there is much more to Eyam than just the Plague”. The Eyam Map Group The Eyam Map Group first formed in 2000 in order to create a map of the village that would then also be used as a fundraiser for future projects. The initial Heritage Lottery Fund grant provided the group with £4,105 as a Local Heritage Initiative. The map they produced with these funds, designed by professional designers, is now accompanied by the companion CD-ROM, which was produced later in 2005 with another Heritage Lottery Fund grant, this time of £7,414 granted in late 2004. The Eyam Map CD-ROM led to the creation of two resources – an interactive CD-ROM and a website containing information that was not included on the CD-ROM. Under the leadership of Mr. George May, the Eyam Map Group aimed to provide “an additional tool for interpreting and understanding the village, its history

4 http://www.eyamhall.co.uk/

60 and heritage, for use by residents, visitors, and by schools and other educational establishments.5” The members of the Eyam Map Group whom I met through my fieldwork met monthly to discuss the progress of the project. At the time of my fieldwork, Dr. Richardson and Mr. Clark told me that their stock of maps and CD-ROMs that had been produced in 2005 as a result of the 2004 grant were running low and they were discussing the way forward, including whether to simply let the supply run out, to have another printer do the maps in order to reproduce them more cheaply, or to aim for another grant to reproduce them with, as well as whether to include updated information on the new products if they did decide to have the maps and discs reproduced. The maps, which include references to both modern attractions and historical ones, are sold as stand-alone items or as a packaged set with the CD- ROMs at venues like the Eyam Museum gift shop, selling for £2.50 on its own or £5 as a set, and they are quite popular with visitors, with several maps and CD-ROMs sold to visitors at the gift shop each day. Many visitors told me that they planned to use the maps as they walked around the village on that very day. There is also a copy of the map on display under glass in the Village Square to help visitors find their way. In addition to being something that is sold to tourists, it also serves as a local history project that includes oral histories and written memories of Eyam’s older people.

5 http://www.lhi.org.uk/projects_directory/projects_by_region/east_midlands/derbyshire/eyam_map_cdrom/in dex.html

61

Figure 4 - Eyam Map Project’s Map of Eyam

The CD-ROM and companion website cover a wide range of topics, including village sports, church and chapel, local clubs and groups, the local industrial and agricultural history, local architecture, and local traditions. The website also plays a role as a general website for Eyam Village, giving information about car parking, directions to the village, and a plea to tourists to please be respectful of people’s homes and of “No Parking” signs where they occur. It also contains links to the websites for the museum, Eyam Hall, the St. Lawrence Parish Church, and more. They CD-ROM contains audio interviews with older residents of Eyam to document their memories, videos of things like the local gardens of the Garden Club members, as well as photos dating back in some cases to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and text passages written by a variety of people who had a story to tell about Eyam’s history. Roger Ridgeway, George and Lesley May, Alan Ashton, Rev. Andrew Montgomerie, Dr. John Beck, John Fox, Chris Brackley, John Clifford, Paul Black, Marie Lowe, David Lewis, Andrew Travis, Doug Nash, Edgar Wagner, Madelaine Cocker, Mr. Gilbourn, and more participated in creating the CD-ROM and 62 accompanying website, and Mr. Stephen Plant produced the CD-ROM for the Eyam Map Group. John and Rosemary Judge have been responsible for administering the sales of the items locally as the project continues in its eighth year. Additionally, the Eyam Map Group uses the proceeds from the sales of its products, of which nearly ten thousand have been sold since 2000, to support local “environmental projects” within the village. This Derbyshire Greenwatch Award- winning project does more than just sell products and collect local histories. It also provides funding for projects in the present that help the village community in some way. These include £2000 for new public benches to be placed around the village, £2000 toward a disabled ramp for the Mechanic’s Institute, and £1000 towards a new children’s play area. Of this, the amount granted in 2008, the year my fieldwork ended, included £500 to the local primary school, £250 to the Carnival Committee to purchase 100 orange cones that will be available to any village group that needs to use them, and £1000 for the children’s play area as mentioned above. The Eyam Map Group has also given funds in the past to the local Garden Group to provide new plant boxes for the Village Square and to a group who are using the money to create “wall hangings”. Mr. George May said that the Eyam Map Group is now working in coordination with the Village Plan Group to create new signs at the entrances to the village which are “of a more attractive design” that they hope will “enhance the image of the village.” The signs in question were voted on by local residents via ballots at the local post office with three different potential designs from which to choose. Like the fisher museums that Nadel-Klein observed in Scotland, this CD-ROM project serves as a sort of clearinghouse for local heritage and memories (Nadel- Klein, 2003). With its turn-of-the-century photographs and audio recordings of older men and women from the village recounting their memories of involvement in local sports, working in the shoe factories, or excavating the shafts beneath Eyam Delph, the CD-ROM and the website tell the stories of the local people who live there and who lived there in the 1950s and earlier. At the same time as the CD-ROM project provides an oral and pictoral history, the museum houses many objects from Eyam’s past, the vast majority of which are not currently on display. This project allowed for the inclusion of many more voices than in the display in the museum, and in some

63 cases, more than one person wrote or spoke about the same subject from different perspectives. Where the museum provided a singular voice on the subject of local history, albeit one decided by a committee of several people, the CD-ROM and website allowed for different memories and interpretations of local history and heritage to sit side by side. Conclusion: Many Voices of Heritage in Eyam In the international focus on Eyam as the Plague Village, much of Eyam’s heritage and identity are eclipsed by the Plague story. Many local people with whom I spoke during my fieldwork had no interest in being a part of the “Plague Village”. Quite a few told me that they resented the tourists and felt that they were disrespectful to the people who lived there, citing very specific examples, to be detailed further in Chapter 5. This chapter has highlighted a number of ways in which local people connect with a local history that is not the Plague history, and the ways in which they participate in activities that are meaningful to them. Moreover, it has shown different ways in which a plurality of voices are heard in the heritage context in Eyam, some with different perspectives on the same issues, and covering a range of ages and experiences. Nadel-Klein wrote that “Identity – whether collective or individual – is never simply received. It is learned, lived, transmuted, and always contextualized (Nadel-Klein, 2003: 94).” The museum is a committee-determined heritage project that generally speaks with one authoritative voice, but the churches, the Hall, and the Eyam Map and CD-ROM Project allow for multiplicity and diversity in the voices presented, with different lived-experiences contributing to the different voices telling Eyam’s histories. In this, they create a local identity as residents of Eyam that is predicated on the experiences relevant to their own lives in the modern village. It is important to note that not all heritage projects in Eyam are completely aimed at visitors. The Eyam Map and CD-ROM project is much more oriented toward telling modern Eyam histories and its participants. In so doing, it invokes an altogether different type of social memory than that of the distant Plague past. Where the museum is of a distant past, the Eyam Map and CD-ROM project is one of recent, shared local memories borne of what Degnen calls “memory talk”, locating the

64 memories in particular places and times and within the social relationships of the people involved (Degnen, 2005). For local people, this is a heritage project to which they can relate, and the attitude of people to this project is altogether different from that to the museum and Plague heritage. Part of this is a local endeavour, to provide local people with a local experience, but it also, in part, shows a different side of Eyam to visitors as well because all three of these aspects of heritage – the churches, Eyam Hall, and the Eyam Map Group – present this heritage to visitors as well as to locals. It is an interesting dichotomy between knowledge and experiences that are intended for insiders versus those intended for outsiders, because the local insider information includes gossip and family memories as well as the aspects of these things which are part of the public record. But because there is local control over these activities, the local people determine what information the visitors are given and what information is private. This differs significantly from the museum because the museum tells the story of times long past and people long dead. However, the churches, the Eyam Map and CD-ROM Project, and even Eyam Hall at least in part tell the stories of people who are still living and still a part of village life. This makes this type of heritage more salient for the local residents, but it also even more important for local people to control what becomes part of the public heritage and what remains insider-knowledge, like information about the controversy over Rev. Montgomerie’s refusal to bless the Green Man well dressing versus information about Rev. Montgomerie’s time with the church in general. Of these, the Eyam Map and CD-ROM Project provides the widest range of experiences and voices and the strongest, most inclusive look at local history as a project specifically meant to be a heritage project. It also plays multiple roles within the village, first by creating an oral history project as well as collecting the written memories of a variety of people, then by marketing it to non-residents so that they can learn about modern Eyam and its more recent past, and third, by using the proceeds from the sales to fund village projects in the present that will be used for many years to come. Furthermore, it combines elements of the church, Eyam Hall, the local Plague heritage, and much more. As a truly locally-defined project that was not externally driven, as the museum is by its visitors from around the world, the

65

Eyam Map Group defined the project’s parameters and format without the need to conform to external expectations. This was not a Plague heritage project, but a local history project, and one which does the work of telling local stories in local voices, defined by local people. It is widely sold to visitors and by mail order to people outside of Eyam and sometimes even outside the United Kingdom, and so it provides an alternative heritage story about the village to the Plague heritage told by the museum and the St. Lawrence Parish Church and an alternative definition of who the people of Eyam are and what is important in their lives. At the same time, it is part of what is offered by the church and the museum as one of the things they sell to visitors regarding local heritage.

66

Chapter 4: Eyam Museum as Gatekeeper for Plague Heritage Information

Introduction

The museum, in particular, is quite important to tourism in the village. Eyam Museum sits directly opposite the village car park. When visitors come to the village, it is often one of the first things they see after they get out of their cars, and is arguably the most important point of articulation with the Plague story that visitors encounter during their time in Eyam. Families come with children, and sometimes a dog, which they tether to the banister of the stairway outside the entrance door beside the water dish that’s kept out there for dogs to drink from, and purchase their tickets for the museum. The children between the ages of about four and fourteen are offered worksheets to guide their learning, as well as to keep their attention. The adults are then told how to proceed through the museum and given a green overleaf as a guide to the museum. Their journey through the museum, then, becomes the beginning of their interactive experience with the village of Eyam. The visitors look to the museum to provide information via its displays, but also through the expertise of the people who staff the museum. As discussed later in this thesis, the display in the museum includes detailed panels describing what is currently understood to be the history of the Plague at Eyam, derived from both historical records and local folklore, as well as displays of objects related to the Plague and of mannequins dressed and arranged to represent individuals and scenarios described in the panels. The museum is further staffed by volunteers who are knowledgeable about the Plague at Eyam and who can respond to deeper inquiries made by visitors who are curious about particular aspects of the story. This is a part of the service they are selling to the public, and it is a much sought-after part of the Eyam experience by visitors interested in various aspects of the Plague story of Eyam. The “public”, in this case, is predominantly made up of visitors rather than local people, and though the museum tells the story of local history, I have only seen two types of local residents visiting – children (with or without their parents) and people who bring in friends

67 and/or relatives visiting from elsewhere. Because the Eyam Museum is virtually unrivalled as a provider of information to visitors, it plays an important role in perpetuating the Eyam Plague story to the public. The local parish church also has visitors who come to learn about the church’s role in the Plague story, but it is secondary to the museum in terms of telling Eyam’s Plague story to others. Museums and churches have different public functions, and when people want historical information, museums are more likely to be perceived as fulfilling that function. The institution of “the museum” confers official status onto a story, and so where a museum exists, it is thought to be the “authority”, something that tells the story of a place or a time or of things definitively. They have custodianship over a collection of artefacts, as well as the responsibility for telling the story of a place and/or time, and though different museums do so in different ways, they each strive to be the authority on a particular story (see for example Macdonald, 1997b, Nadel-Klein, 2003). As such, Eyam Museum is seen as the primary authority on Eyam’s Plague story. This authority is constructed and reinforced through many processes that serve to accumulate, interpret, and disseminate information about the history of Eyam to the general public. Constructing authority in this way provides a means through which local actors can assert control over the “official” Eyam Plague story. By this, I mean that the actors within the museum organization who decide upon what information is placed in the displays and into the supplemental information book that is on hand for stewards to use in answering visitors’ questions stay abreast of current research concerning Eyam and filter that research through the lens of the traditional Eyam Plague story to ensure that, in interpreting this research, the basic meaning of the Eyam Plague story remains the same. Researchers and writers make the museum a first stop when visiting the village, seeking its authority as an expert in conducting their own research. I was told that Geraldine Brooks, who wrote a popular novel about the Plague at Eyam titled Year of Wonders (2006), came to the museum and spent time with its stewards, living in the village as I did during my fieldwork in order to write her novel. As many visitors to the museum cite her novel as the reason for their interest in visiting Eyam, the role of the museum as a gatekeeper during her

68 research ensured that the story the museum provides was reinforced by her novel. Many people have also said that they decided to visit after seeing the Channel Four documentary about genetic testing in Eyam that will be discussed more fully in Chapter 8, which was an influencing factor for me, as well. And perhaps the biggest impact comes from schools regularly bringing their pupils to the museum, as well, and the museum readily accepts its role as educator despite not generally being considered a children’s museum. Related to this, many parents who bring their children to the museum, often because the child’s school is studying the Plague at the time, reminisce about their own trips to Eyam when they were in school, suggesting that the impact of visiting the village to learn about the Plague is a long-lasting one. The visiting of Eyam to learn about the Plague is now being repeated from one generation to the next, and the museum has become a part of that intergenerational experience. Because of the popularity of Eyam as a tourist destination, the authority of the museum as the arbiter of Eyam’s Plague heritage also means a responsibility to the village residents to tell the Plague story comprehensively and without doing damage to what has long been accepted within the village as truth, perpetuated through oral and written histories alike. This can be difficult at times as new studies are being conducted in the field of the biological sciences suggesting that the Plague at Eyam may not have been Bubonic plague as has long been believed. Because history and heritage museums are seen popularly as providing an authoritative voice in presenting the facts of history and location, the Eyam Museum is expected by the public to incorporate new research findings into its displays and supplemental information, while at the same time ensuring that the “essence” of the Plague story remains the same. Visitors to the museum who are interested in the science of the Plague, some of whom are also school teachers, frequently asked questions about the research that has been conducted and about any other research that is being done. In particular, I was asked questions about how the gene mutation research relates to HIV/AIDS research and the search for a cure or a vaccine for HIV, and also, one woman in particular had heard a rumour that “they” (scientists of some sort) were planning to dig up the Riley graves to test the bones of the Hancock family in order to

69 determine whether it was Bubonic plague or some other disease that killed that family in Eyam during the time of the Plague outbreak and asked us if it was true (it was not). The people who ask these types of questions are interested in finding the most up to date information they can about the science that they’ve read about or seen the documentary about on television, and they see the museum as the sort of place that will have knowledge about the latest scientific findings and research plans. Additionally, the home page of the Eyam Museum website reads, at the top, “THE HISTORY OF A VILLAGE. THE FULLY RESEARCHED AND AUTHENTIC STORY OF THE TRAGEDY THAT BEFELL ITS PEOPLE WHEN THE PLAGUE STRUCK IN 1665. THE RECOVERY” (Eyam Museum, 2009; emphasis in original source). As Nadel-Klein (2003) found in her study of Scottish fisher museums, the conflict between a heritage museum’s responsibility to the visiting public and its responsibility to the local residents whose heritage is on display can be problematic for the museum leadership during their decision-making processes. By and large, and perhaps due to the fact that the Trustees and Officers of the Museum are long-time residents of the village, attempts are made to ensure that the museum maintains the local narrative as much as possible, even when the historical evidence points to the contrary. How, then, are the people involved in the museum negotiating the “reality” that they wish the visiting public to understand? And how, in turn, are the visitors using their own agency in obtaining a specific, desired experience?

Museum as Gatekeeper

My examination of the dynamics at work in incorporating new information into an old story shows that this is a very complex issue which involves both the people involved with running the museum and the visitors to the museum. Eyam Museum’s main purpose is to provide information to the public about Eyam’s history, and specifically about the Plague at Eyam. This is evident in the museum website, which states, “The Museum tells the story of the development of a community from prehistoric to modern times. Eyam attracts attention due to the tragic epidemic of Bubonic Plague in the middle of the 17th century, its subsequent social and

70 industrial development, and its fascinating geology and prehistory. It is worth building on the story of human disaster during the Plague, to learn more about the relationship of men and women to each other and to their environment through the ages. That is what our museum aims to do” (Eyam Museum, 2009, emphasis in original source). Conversations with Board members and stewards also included many discussions of what the museum is for, because there is a sense that, even though it is there to educate people about the Plague, it’s “not a children’s museum”, as children were not the intended audience when the displays were designed, despite the very large number of schools visiting each year, so outside of a school group visit (and often within the school group visits as well), children are seen as disruptive rather than as appreciative of the museum as a place of learning. The Plague story that has been documented in Eyam since the early 1700s has been a combination of both “historical” (about the events that occurred) and “scientific” (about the medical details of the sickness) writings based on documentation kept in Eyam at the time of the Plague, as well as folklore passed down orally within local families. The authors of the exhibit, while being thorough in researching historical documentation from the time period that has uncovered new information about the number of residents living in Eyam at the time of the Plague, are also working hard to maintain the basic premises that have been long held and retold as part of the Plague story. These elements include, most notably and centrally to the telling of the story, a) that the illness that struck Eyam in 1665-1666 was Bubonic plague, and b) that two-thirds of the village population sacrificed their lives during their self-imposed quarantine in order to protect their neighbours. However, early in my fieldwork, it became apparent that, in recent years, research being conducted about Eyam’s Plague outbreak has shed new light and injected new information into the story that had traditionally been accepted since the seventeenth century. This has involved research into historical archives as well as genetic testing and biomedical research. The archival research has been conducted by a local historian, while the biomedical/genetic research has been conducted by outside researchers though with the consent and cooperation of the local people. New information from both of these types of sources has been incorporated into the museum’s displays and into its training for stewards. However,

71 the incorporation of new information has not been done unproblematically. For the museum, there is a need to balance the authority of having the most accurate and up to date information available with the “traditional” Plague story that has been long accepted and retold within the village; and for the visitor, there is the nostalgia of the Plague story they learned as children, the romanticism of the Plague story as one of self-sacrifice and survival, and at the same time the thirst for as much detail as possible about the events of that time. Literature that focuses on the experiences of visitors to museums and tourists in general shows that there are certain expectations people have of museums and of travelling. Of travelling, people often visit different places with pre-conceived notions of what that experience is meant to be, whether this is a museum, such as the Science Museum studied by Macdonald (2002) or a village, such as Göreme, studied by Tucker (2003). Macdonald has found that the preconceptions that visitors have colour and influence the experience that they have when they visit a museum (Macdonald, 1996). These preconceptions can be about the subject matter of the museum or in the style in which it is expected to present its information, and in Eyam, the pre-conceived notions are, as discussed above, romantic notions of self-sacrifice and historical certainty about the illness that struck Eyam as being Bubonic plague. As Macdonald points out, these pre-conceived notions can affect the visitor’s experience at a museum, with the perception of the exhibits being coloured by past learning and individual expertise. A teacher or a scientist is likely to have a different experience at a Science Museum than a civil servant or a journalist, for example. The intent of the museum exhibitors may or may not be understood by the visitors to the museum, and as MacCannell (2001) and Tucker (2003) have pointed out, many visitors often look for deeper knowledge about the place they are viewing than simply that which has been put there for them to gaze upon. Exhibits and tourist attractions are no longer taken at face value, as wary tourists look for ulterior motives or omissions of unpleasant information on behalf of those responsible for deciding what tourists or visitors see and what they do not see, which Macdonald discusses as “manipulative intent” (Richardson and Corner, 1986 as referenced in Macdonald, 2002). This “manipulative intent” is one of the driving forces behind what MacCannell

72 describes as the “second gaze”, in which people look for the story behind that which is deemed acceptable for them to see. One other factor to consider here is that of “truth” as “socially produced” and “relativistic” rather than as absolute fact, which has led to a number of reinterpretations of previously unquestioned museum exhibits, such as the displays – and official discourses of history transmitted to visitors – at Colonial Williamsburg in the United States (Handler and Gable, 1997:12). The example at Colonial Williamsburg shows that social factors affect the interpretations of exhibits as much as the archival and/or scientific information incorporated within them, and that, in essence, all exhibits, mediated as they are through the lens of human designers, are socially biased. Yet at the same time, the “expertise” of others is valued, as observed by Macdonald (2002) when interviewing visitors to the Science Museum about the sponsorship of the exhibit by Sainsbury’s. As one of the visitors she interviewed remarked, “’I know that it’s sponsored by Sainsbury’s, but I would imagine that they would use experts’” (Macdonald, 2002: 239). This notion of expertise is perhaps the cornerstone of museums in general, as organizations responsible for collecting, organizing, and retelling information about things, places, or times. As Edwards said of “The Nat” in Bacup, “identified as the town’s experts, members of the Nat were said to know all about Bacup” (Edwards, 2000: 35). There are, of course, different types of expertise that can go into the planning of a museum exhibition, as Nadel-Klein (2003) pointed out, and sometimes there can be conflict between local forms of expertise and academic, professional forms of expertise when it comes to designing a display for a museum or heritage centre, as she observed in Buckie and Anstruther. There, too, were conflicts over ownership and purpose of the display, which is central to my findings in Eyam, not because of outward conflict as observed in Buckie, but rather because of the conflict caused by the new information that has been injected into the Plague story as a result of research conducted locally by the village historian and externally by scientists studying the CCR5-Δ32 gene mutation and its consequences. These types of expertise are, then, in conflict with local expertise, local folklore, and local family lore, although this new information is, in some small

73 measure, also being incorporated into local discourses and not just museum discourses. Finally, another key concept of concern in research into visitors’ experiences with and expectations of museums and heritage sites is that of “authenticity”. Many researchers examining tourism have pointed out that tourists are often looking for this in their visits to places such as museums or villages that they deem to be of some kind of touristic interest. At Nakambale (Fairweather, 2001), for example, local people “performed” authenticity as they thought visitors expected it to be, and Nadel- Klein (2003) observed that people were eager to touch things they perceived as authentic, such as netting and tools used by fishers, often to the detriment of the objects, because they were seen as being something that was more related to real fisher life than other kinds of displays. Expectations of authenticity in a museum need not be about tangible objects or people, however, and may rest within words and personal anecdotes and “stories”, with the details of individual people’s lives being more desired than a non-personal history. For some, this was constructed using mannequins in period dress, in recordings meant to tell the story using local voices or words, or in objects from a particular place or period in time (c.f. Macdonald, 1997; Nadel-Klein, 2003), and for others, it is something gained through interaction with people perceived to be authentically representative of a particular group of people (Fairweather, 2001; Tucker, 2003). Giving voices and personalities to people and ways of life long gone is sought after by visitors to heritage museums such as Aros in Skye as well as visits to living villages such as Göreme, which are thought of as stepping into the past to see how people lived then (Macdonald, 1997a; Tucker, 2003). There are many ways in which “authenticity” is constructed for the gaze of visitors, with those responsible for doing so bearing in mind both the physical gaze as well as the romantic gaze when creating their exhibits. The creators of an exhibit attempt to imagine what the visitors are looking for in deciding what and how to display within the museum. In part, this is done through visitor feedback, both oral and written, and in part through consultations with a company that specializes in creating museum displays, with all three viewpoints – visitor, local museum staff and board, and specialist museum

74 display company – deciding on what and how to effect maximum impact for the visitors, in terms of maintaining the desired theme, utilizing all available expertise, and making the exhibits as authentic as possible in a way that is meaningful for the visitors and the museum alike. The viewpoints of the visitor and the specialist, based on their comments at the museum, both spoken and written, tended to be more in sync with one another than with the “local” people in terms of expectations of what a museum should be and what it should include (similar to arguments made by Nadel-Klein [2003] of the fisher museums she studied in Scotland). Different visitors wanted different things from their experiences – many wanted information that was detailed but also emotionally moving (based on questions they asked about the research done into village history and about the lives of the people whose stories are told in the museum, such as questions about the DNA research or questions about whatever happened with the relationship between two young lovers mentioned in the display panels), and those who had children specifically wanted interactive, hands-on activities – at least a quarter of all comment cards at the museum for the previous year included some type of comment asking for such activities, whether that be in the form of “more moving parts”, or “buttons to push” or “things for the children”. Many also wanted to have more audio-visual aspects to the display, most notably, they wanted sound being played, with some wanting recordings of the song “Ring-a-Ring o’ Roses” to be played as a background track while they make their way through the museum, and others wanting to hear recordings of the Plague survivors’ stories being told in a first- person perspective as though the speakers were the survivors. Specialists were very committed to their information being comprehensive and accurate and displayed professionally, taking inspiration from other museums’ display styles, visiting other museums, contracting with a professional design company, and making efforts not only to make the displays more varied including models and graphics in with the text panels, as well as increasing the amount of space available for moving around while reading the displays. One person, for instance, said that “the displays need to be broken up with variety of visual media to increase knowledge retention. The “local” perspective, however, aims to keep the main premises of the traditional Plague story

75 intact. I would place Mr. Stephens in both the specialist and local categories; the former because it is his specialized research and historical knowledge that makes up the bulk of the museum display, but the latter because he took great pains during our interviews to emphasize to me that, even though the proportion of dead is not as great as previously believed, that doesn’t change the strength of their sacrifice, and also that despite the high chance that the disease that struck Eyam might not have been Bubonic plague, it was still “a Plague” that killed hundreds, and the fact that they died and sacrificed themselves to save others in any kind of a Plague is what’s important, not the specific nature of the Plague. Others with a distinctly “local” perspective emphasize the romantic and human aspects of the story rather than the scientific aspects of it. Findings from the Field Conversations I have witnessed and in which I have taken part during my time as a volunteer at the museum suggest that multiple factors are at play in making and in visiting Eyam Museum. I identified three main points of articulation in my literature review above – perceptions of the story, both from the point of view of the visitors and from the staff; ideas of “expertise” that are employed by both visitors and staff; and issues of “authenticity” in the displays, but also in the interaction with stewards. These three issues are ones that recurred throughout my fieldwork. With the staff of the museum, a term I will use to refer to paid staff, volunteer Board members, and volunteer stewards, my interviews and informal conversations included several discussions with the individuals responsible for deciding what information would go into the exhibits and how it would be presented, as well as how volunteers were trained and what information was made available to them. I also had informal discussions with a number of volunteer stewards who were not in Board positions or other positions of authority within the museum. My conversations with visitors took place while I was seated at the tills for the ticket sales on one side and the gift shop on the other. This means that I was able to interact with them both at the beginning of their visit and at the end, though no interaction took place with them during their walk through the exhibits. These conversations were always prompted by visitors, first at the point of their ticket purchases and our (the stewards’) explanation of how to

76 go through the museum, and then again when they commented upon or asked questions about the display while at the gift shop afterwards. The visitors most likely to ask questions of the stewards were women, regardless of whether they were with their families, friends, or alone, though some men also asked questions, usually for the benefit of their children, whom they had brought to the museum for educational purposes. Therefore, my findings and observations primarily reflect the views and experiences of women rather than men. From these observations, I found that two main themes recur in the reasons that people are interested in the Plague story. The first is education, and the second is an interest in the romantic nature of the story, but these two things are bound up strongly with one another. Both Urry (1990) and MacCannell (2001) include the expectations of a place within their notions of the “gaze”, with Urry’s “romantic gaze” being a particularly useful concept in Eyam, where there is both a landscape and a history that are conceived of in terms of romanticism. The museum opened in 1994, thirteen years before I began my fieldwork there, and so it was not a part of the village when many of the visitors who came for nostalgic reasons first visited Eyam as children. Though they have been to the village before, this is their first time visiting the museum. For those within this group who have also brought their children to teach them about the Plague, the reasons, in addition to that of the child studying the Plague in school, often given include “I wanted them to know what happened here,” or “I learned about it when I were a girl and I wanted my daughter to learn about it. To learn about what happened here.” Others spoke of “how brave the people were”. Indeed, themes of bravery and “sacrifice” were prevalent. Part of this is due to the way that the museum has displayed and marketed its exhibit, and part of it is due to the long history of literary tradition and inclusion into lessons in schools in this manner. People spoke of learning how the people Eyam “sacrificed their own lives to keep their neighbours safe”, and some mentioned the long-accepted but recently found to be false statement about two-thirds of the villagers dying during the Plague. On this point, sometimes the stewards will point out that “we’ve recently found out that there were far more people living in Eyam at the time of the Plague than we originally believed”, but that one-third of the village had still died, and this was still a great

77 sacrifice on the part of the villagers. This notion of self-sacrifice has prominence within local narratives as well as nationally known narratives about the Eyam Plague story. The annual Plague Commemoration Service held by the St. Lawrence Parish Church can still “offer thanksgiving for the noble example of self-sacrifice shown by its inhabitants” (Eyam Plague Commemoration Service worship service handout, August 24, 2008). The entire purpose of this religious service is to commemorate the sacrifice of those who died when the village voluntarily quarantined itself. It has been held annually since 1906 after its initial debut in 1887, to commemorate the Plague victims. The vicar, Rev. Andrew Montgomerie, spoke of “death”, “sacrifice”, and of how that sacrifice has “sown seeds” that allows us today to be a part of the “fruits of [that] sacrifice” of three hundred and forty two and three hundred and forty three years ago . In 2008, for the first time in Eyam’s history according to the parish priest, all three churches were represented by and participating in the service, with the Wesleyan and Methodist ministers each delivering a portion of the service alongside the parish priest. The other two local ministers also spoke, each also echoing the sentiment of that sacrifice having sown seeds, connecting the past to the present in this way. The service began at the church with a blessing and placing a wreath on the grave of Catherine Mompesson and was then followed by a procession from the church, led by the parish priest and members of the church choir clothed in robes and accompanied by a marching band, down to the Cucklet Delph, where Rev. Mompesson held services during Eyam’s Plague. The choir led the singing alongside the priest, and the crowd of several hundred people sitting on the grass on the hillside followed along, using the programme that was handed out as each person reached the Delph. At the end of the service, there was a request for donations to help people with leprosy, a “modern-day plague” that was compared to Eyam’s Plague, and the marching band and religious leaders led the people out of the Delph and back to the church. I met up with a long-time Eyam resident on the way back who told me that “there used to be thousands of people who came to this every year, but now it’s only hundreds. Young people today have no respect for tradition.” There may not have been thousands, but the hundreds who did attend were still a remarkable number of

78 people in attendance on that small hillside to commemorate the Plague in Eyam in the only Plague-related portion of the Wakes Week celebrations. The theme of sacrifice and of the lives of the individuals who lived and died during the Plague in Eyam are what visitors seem to be most interested in. The most famous of these personages is the Reverend William Mompesson, who was the parish Rector at the time of the Plague and who led the efforts for self-imposed quarantine, and his wife, who died of the Plague during that period. Their story is well-documented because of letters he wrote to his children, who had been sent away to keep them safe, informing them of their mother’s death. However, though he is the most well-known, visitors more frequently ask about Margaret Blackwell, who was said to have contracted the Plague but been cured miraculously after mistakenly drinking warm bacon grease when looking for something to quench her thirst while in a fever-induced delirium. Her story of recovery from the brink of death, which visitors frequently link to the CCR5-Δ32 gene mutation, is a point that people find interesting and positive in contrast to Mompesson’s sad story. Visitors tend to have different but similar ideas of what the gene mutation means, with some generally speaking about how it would be great to be “immune”, some specifically speaking of it in terms of HIV, but others speaking about disease in general. Yet, even more mundane stories like a love affair between a local girl and a boy from a neighbouring village, which was cut short due to the quarantine, are found to be of interest. The woman who asked the question about this couple was curious as to whether they ended up together in the end. She was delighted that the steward who was on duty at the time she asked her question was able to tell her that they did not. It is this attention to personal details that visitors seem to be most interested in after going through the exhibit, and which the museum staff do their best to respond to. Visitors also have questions about the scientific part of the display, which discusses the research into the CCR5-Δ32 gene mutation and the theories that an illness other than Bubonic plague was responsible

79

6 for the deaths at Eyam2F . Here, many of them express their amazement about “the gene”, as most people, visitors as well as local, refer to it, and how incredible it must be to be “immune”. For some, this was a general notion of immunity, and for others it was a more detailed understanding based on what was written in the display. Some of visitors’ pre-conceived notions are reinforced by museum stewards, including especially those instances in which the visitor was first educated about the village before the new research into the population of the village and into the disease that struck the village had been carried out and published. It is not that the stewards are hiding or holding back the new information, which is part of the museum exhibit as well as part of the stewards’ repertoire of knowledge, but rather that they are reinforcing the underlying assumptions about these things. By and large, the pre- conceived notions seem to be confirmed by the displays, but those aspects of the display that diverge from the older version of the Plague story are not often remarked upon, such as in the above example about the nature of the illness at Eyam. In an early interview with Mr. Stephens, the village historian, he emphasized to me that “in the end, it doesn’t matter whether it really was the Plague that struck Eyam. It was a plague because so many people died (two hundred and sixty or two hundred and sixty one people in a one year period), and it doesn’t really matter what the name of that plague was.” He further touched on the other prominent conflict with the accepted Plague story, that of the numbers of people who died. He spoke of this with pride in his voice because he had been the person who uncovered the new population data when he found a copy of the 1664 Hearth Tax Assessment records for Eyam at a records office in a nearby town. It showed that about twice as many people were living in Eyam the year before the Plague outbreak than had previously been assumed based on church records. This revised the death toll from two-thirds to one-third of the population, a significant difference, but one which does not change the nature of the story being told, as he pointed out, because “many people still

6 The questioning of the nature of the illness at Eyam by scientists has been prompted, ironically, by the discovery of the CCR5-Δ32 gene mutation, which is linked to viral infections rather than bacterial infections. If there is a causal link between the survival of the Plague at Eyam and the gene, it would mean that the illness that struck Eyam could not have been Bubonic plague, which is a bacterial infection.

80 sacrificed their lives and a third of the village still died.” This is a point emphasized by stewards at the museum, usually when visitors begin to discuss their awe of the numbers who died, and it is not minimized because they see the new information as “giving us more information about that time”. Stewards at the museum elaborate on the story told in the museum display and they provide their own insight and personal knowledge, such as the steward who was tested for the CCR5-Δ32 gene mutation because she is a descendant of Margaret Blackwell, or a steward who moved to Eyam from nearby Baslow but who knows which families still living in the village are descended from Plague survivors. This generally augments rather than supplanting knowledge that the visitors had before coming to the museum. In turn, the museum strives to maintain the story as it has traditionally been told despite new information, such as the scientific questioning of whether the illness was Bubonic plague. The population difference is an easy transition that is considered unproblematic because it is a difference in scale but it does not differ in the basic idea of many people dying because of a self-imposed quarantine. However, the stewards and the display downplay the possibility of an illness other than bubonic plague even while highlighting it in the display, using such tactics as disputing the scientific points that suggest alternate theories concerning the illness and, as Mr. Stephens did above, incorporating all other possible illnesses into the general notion of “plague”, saying that if it was not bubonic plague, it was still A plague that killed a large proportion of village residents. Despite downplaying the alternative theories, the museum’s inclusion of alternative theories does highlight the fact that they exist and that there is scientific doubt as to whether the Plague Village actually fell victim to the Plague. This then brings up the issue of expertise. Early in my fieldwork at the museum, Mrs. Stone suggested that I would know more about Eyam than many locals because I had “researched it and all”, but she cautioned me to always defer to local residents when visitors ask questions about Eyam because “they’re quite proud” of their village and they’ve been there longer. She also suggested that it would hurt their feelings, in some cases, for an “outsider” like me to answer questions about local places and history instead of letting them do it themselves. The residents of the village were, de facto, considered to be more expert in Eyam’s history than any

81 outsider. The types of expertise in the Eyam Museum include both the expertise about the information in the exhibits that is documented through archival, scientific, or traditional lore, as well as local expertise about the people and the places in the village, including living people as well as the people who died and lived during the Plague period. Both of these types of expertise and experiences are sought and appreciated by visitors, and students and researchers also look to the museum to provide expertise in this area. Yet as Nadel-Klein points out, the different actors involved and different types of museums and heritage centres have different ideas of what constitutes expertise and authenticity in an exhibit (Nadel-Klein, 2003). Despite this, for someone looking for comprehensive information about a place or a time period, the authority that has been carved out by museums over time makes the museum the logical starting place for learning. Indeed, the museum was the first place I contacted to arrange interviews as it is the most noticeable heritage enterprise in the village, both because it is situated across from the car park used by visitors and because of the reputation of museums as repositories of knowledge. As Macdonald pointed out, museums are on the “lists” that people have when they travel somewhere that is outside of their normal routine (Macdonald, 2002: 222-223). Stewards who are volunteering their time with the museum tend to be people who are interested in local history and who want to interact with visitors and share their knowledge and their expertise about their village. Most are also retirees for whom volunteering is a social event. Noreen Orr (2006) suggests that people who volunteer at heritage museums are engaging in “leisure”, as well, which I have certainly found to be the case in Eyam, although not quite the “serious leisure” that Orr envisions in her article. Contrary to Orr’s observations of heritage museum volunteers as people who are eager visitors who want to prolong their visiting experience and who are interested in specialized training and sharing a social circle that is centred around that interest. Rather, the stewards at Eyam Museum did very little visiting of the exhibit, and many had not seen it in years, but their knowledge was acquired socially through contact with one another and their expertise was not questioned.

82

Some of the stewards of the museum are seen as more expert at the first type of information than others by virtue of their academic training and published works, while others are experts because of their age and the length of time they have lived in the village, or in other words, they are experts because they are “locals”. Museum visitors who stop to ask questions aren’t just asking about the content of the display panels as discussed above. Many ask about the local area, about the physical locations of the landmarks referenced in the displays, about where to go to eat, where to find a cash machine, and what else is interesting nearby. Some ask about the mining industry, and even more ask about the animated mining model on display in the museum, and stewards reply with pride that it was one of the museum’s own volunteers, Dr. Richardson, who built the model. Stewards, in turn, give detailed directions to the various locations of interest, along with a small map and brochure, and tips on where to go and where to avoid. For example, early in my volunteering, the two main eateries in the village square, the Peak Pantry and the Eyam Tea Rooms, had very different reputations – Peak Pantry was “known” to have very poor quality food and service, while the Tea Rooms were preferred for the service and for “the boys” who ran it. However, between late May and September, both of these eateries were sold and new owners took over. The new owners of the Peak Pantry were a family from Chesterfield, and the Tea Rooms were bought by one local woman and her non-local friend. Many changes took place, including the Tea Rooms adding on a bed and breakfast facility, and by the end of 2008, even those locals who had always preferred the Tea Rooms and recommended that eatery to visitors had changed their recommendations to either the Peak Pantry or the Eyam Hall Buttery because of the perceived change in quality and diversity of food at that eatery from when the previous owners were in charge. This local knowledge and recommendations by local people as to what’s good and what’s not is as valued a part of the visiting experience as the descriptions of how to find the Boundary Stone or the Riley Graves and how much time each would take so that they could plan their visits accordingly. This expertise is also, of course, about the Plague story, and about aspects of the story, small details, that are left out of the museum display. Some of this is a part

83 of local lore, and some of it, which is known to many of the stewards but not to the visitors, is supplemental material that has been put together as a resource for the stewards. Mrs. Stone told me that she doesn’t think that many of the stewards have read the supplemental materials, and some of the stewards “who have been around for a while” may not even be aware of them, but I read most of what was contained in them during quiet periods when I was volunteering, a little at a time over the five months of my work at the museum. The local lore, in particular, is an area of expertise for those stewards who are from well-known Eyam families such as those who trace their lineages back to the nineteenth century poet Richard Furness or the seventeenth century Plague survivor Margaret Blackwell. However, even my own expertise was appreciated when Mrs. Stone explained to the visitors that I was living in the village while I did my research, and also those stewards who moved to Eyam as retirees, mostly in the early 1980s, were seen by both visitors and other stewards as having lived in the village long enough to have become experts in Eyam history and Eyam life. This brings me to my final point, but a very important one, of the construction of and desire for authenticity not only in the exhibits on display, but also in exchanges between visitors and museum stewards. This is an important point of discussion with regards to not only the museum, but to the position of the stewards within the museum, and their daily interaction with visitors to the village. Unlike at Göreme, the people of Eyam are unlikely to invite a visitor into their homes, and in fact, many would like the visitors to stay away from their homes. Notions of host and hospitality are relegated to those facilities specifically designed for the purposes of visitors’ consumption and entertainment, most notably the museum, the church, and Eyam Hall. These locales are the primary points at which a visitor will have a chance to interact personally with “local people”. The museum displays give them academic knowledge, but with the stewards, the visitors have a chance to explore the lives and loves of the people who are the focus of the Plague exhibit in a way that builds a fuller picture, to them, of the realities of life in Eyam during that time period. Visitors to the museum can ask questions that they assume the stewards will know, whether about the people, the science, or the place, and many of their questions explore issues left

84 out of the museum displays. This extra bit of detail that they gain from the stewards, and the one on one attention that they receive as they ask their individualized (and often very diverse) questions, gives them more information with which to construct their “second gaze”, as well as a positive experience of interaction with local people who are experts in Eyam history and discourses. This interaction that seeks authenticity takes on an almost ritualized format, with patterns that seem to recur with many visitors from many different backgrounds. One of the first parts of most interactions between visitor and museum steward is the mispronunciation of the name of the village and the correction of that pronunciation by stewards. This exchange happened so frequently in almost exactly the same way that it could be seen to be a ritualized form of exchange. Not all visitors engaged in this behaviour, but I found it remarkable that visitors from so many different backgrounds, and even different countries, usually started their interactions at the museum by asking this one simple question, “How do you say the name of the village?” Some visitors ask how to pronounce it without attempting it first, and other times the visitor makes at least one attempt at pronouncing the word “Eyam”, usually done phonetically according to the spelling, as is logical, and asking if their pronunciation is correct before being told by museum stewards that “it’s pronounced ‘Eem’.” This bit of authenticity in being corrected by a local person on the pronunciation of the village name is both the assertion of the steward as expert and the beginning of the exchange relationship between the visitor and the steward, as they use this conversation as a starting point for dialogue, sometimes with brief conversation as they buy their tickets, and sometimes later at the end of their visit. This builds rapport and establishes a later basis for the visitor to speak again to the steward at the end of the visit, with the steward’s willingness to answer questions about the village already established and the visitor more at ease in speaking with the strangers behind the desk. I have already discussed the ways in which the stewards augment and reinforce the Plague story as it once was, as well as incorporating the new information that has been uncovered in recent years. I have also discussed the ways in which the various forms of local expertise are utilized by stewards and by visitors to the museum. Both of these are related to the issue of authenticity, which

85 must balance with the ideas of what the museum wants to portray and what the visitors want to learn. One could say that the more “authentic” version of the Plague story is the one that has long been believed by local people rather than the one that has been altered by new information. On the other hand, the authority of the museum can make the new version of the story just as authentic. An additional aspect of this is that simply speaking to a local person makes the experience more authentic.

Conclusion

Museum volunteers offer detailed information both factual and from oral tradition that expands upon the Plague Story of Eyam, as well as their local expertise about people and places, and their perspective as a “local” person. With one another, their volunteering is both a social experience as well as one in which they get to interact with visitors and impart the knowledge of which they are so “proud”. They are the experts on their village and they are the people who are interested enough in local “heritage” endeavours to volunteer their time and work with the museum (as well as other heritage activities in some cases). As such, they play the role of host to visiting guests and provide information and hospitality rather than simply engaging in monetary exchanges for gifts and tickets at the museum. They are appreciated by the visitors and it allows the museum to remain operational and staffed while providing the steward with social opportunities. At the same time, visitors to the museum are particularly interested in information that is only partially available through the exhibits. To delve deeper into the story of the Plague and the people involved, they ask questions and seek information about the details of people’s lives, loves, and deaths during the Plague years in Eyam. They educate themselves and their children, while also engaging in a romantic gaze at the history of Eyam village, and this romanticism is further augmented by the details stewards can provide. Their visit is enhanced by the information given to them by the stewards, even if that information only consists of where to eat, and they are generally very positive in their interactions with local people to gain hidden local knowledge. Many visitors ask questions of the stewards at the time that they purchase their tickets, and many more

86 ask questions during their visits to the gift shops afterwards. The stewards answer questions to clarify and expand upon themes explored within the exhibit, and it is very common for visitors to ask questions about the exhibit and about the village in general. Interacting with the stewards allows the visitors to get more information about Eyam, including recommendations for places to eat or where to get cash, that would not be so readily available to them otherwise. The stewards, in a sense, act as guides who serve to welcome people to the village and give them directions and information about the village as well as about the museum exhibits. In terms of the exhibits, specifically, the stewards know much more detail about the Plague story than is written of on the exhibit panels, and they can usually answer most questions people have, whether they are asking about the fate of two ill-fated lovers, about the details of the Margaret Blackwell bacon grease story, or about the working mine model on the ground floor in the mining portion of the exhibit. Visitors often thanked the stewards, some very enthusiastically so, for providing the extra information. Finally, in this way, the museum maintains control of the information given to the public and funnels the Plague story through a particular lens and, in so doing, maintains the spirit of the Plague story as it has been told and retold within the village over the centuries. It remains the arbiter of information, the gatekeeper of what is and is not considered the truth in Eyam.

87

Chapter 5: The Public Gaze and Private Lives in Eyam: The Contestation of Space in the Plague Village

Introduction

The tourism in Eyam is not unproblematic. There is also conflict involved with moving about the village. Next to the Visitors’ Centre and the Village Stocks in Eyam, there stands an old stone cottage. Its windows are filled with flower pots, and the white translucent curtains are generally kept closed. Mrs. White, the elderly woman who lives there, told me that she keeps the flower pots in the windows to keep people from being able to see into her house. Because of her home’s prominent location, people often do not realize that it is a separate structure from the Visitors’ Centre and they try to look in, thinking that it is part of the attraction. She told me that it really bothers her having people trying to see into her house all the time, so she does what she can to keep that from happening. So common is this occurrence that a recent cartoon created for the short-lived “Discover Eyam Village” website included her house as an illustration of the problems created by the desire of visitors to the village to look at everything that might be considered of interest, including people’s private homes (see below).

Figure 5 – “Cartoon of Difficult Visitors” from Discover Eyam Village Website (this description is the website’s roll-over caption), (Discover Eyam Village, 2009)

88

This chapter will examine the dynamics that occur when visitors’ public gaze interacts with village residents’ private lives in Eyam. Through an analysis of the ethnographic research I conducted in Eyam from August 2007 to November 2008, I aim to illustrate that both the residents and visitors of a tourist destination have specific ideas of what the place should be like, each also having opinions about the presence and impact of the other in these locations. They have different expectations of the place that is home to one and tourist destination to the other, and these expectations affect the experiences they have while they are there. It is my contention that there is a pattern to the tourist-local interaction that closely resembles MacCannell’s formulation based on ideas of the “gaze” and of “authenticity” that flows, more or less, as follows: The tourist/visitor arrives with a particular notion of what he or she expects to find in a location and seeks to gaze upon that imagined ideal. Local people, aware of this gaze, take steps to redirect the visitors’ gaze in the way that locals want it directed (MacCannell, 2001). However, tourists, aware that they are being intentionally guided in a particular direction, reject the notion of determinism, instead favouring an individualistic tourism experience in which they get to experience the “authentic” that is hidden behind the “inauthentic” redirection, in a sense rejecting a tourist identity at the same time, and redirecting their gaze beyond the set field of gaze intended for visitors. Local people, then, will react to these attempts by visitors in a variety of ways, including rejecting the visitors when they feel that a line has been crossed. This will be illustrated in the discussion that follows.

Eyam

The Tourist Gaze Real Olde England One of the most influential theorists in tourism studies is sociologist John Urry, whose book The Tourist Gaze provided a theory of tourist motivations, expectations, and experiences that was inspired by Foucault’s 1976 work on the medical gaze. Urry writes that “[w]hen we ‘go away’ we look at the environment with interest and curiosity. It speaks to us in ways we appreciate, or at least we anticipate that it will do

89 so. In other words, we gaze at what we encounter. And this gaze is as socially organized and systematized as is the gaze of the medic” (Urry, 1990: 1). He anticipates that the experience of tourism will be juxtaposed against the experience of the tourist’s everyday life, with a “system of social activities and signs which locate the particular tourist practices, not in terms of some intrinsic characteristics, but through the contrasts implied with non-tourist social practices…” (Urry, 1990:2). The leaving of one’s own environment in favour of seeing a different place and having a particular desired experience is meant to be exciting in comparison to one’s normal experiences of work and home. An element of fantasy is involved in choosing a tourism destination, and the expectations involved in these fantasies are emphasized and reinforced by mass media, which provide a notion of what can be expected of a particular place. This is further reinforced and constructed through what Urry describes as “signs”, saying that “tourism involves the collection of signs” (Urry, 1990:3). For example, of a “small village in England” Urry says that “what they gaze upon is the ‘real olde England’” (Urry, 1990:3), suggesting that the desired experience of a visit to an English village is one of romantically viewed history. Urry discusses the ways in which the heritage industry, in particular, constructs a specific view of history, which may in some instances seem to visitors to be created specifically for the tourist. Though some tourists may see these heritage industry’s presentations of history as somehow being inauthentic or contrived, Urry points out that these same tourists may have gotten their ideas of a particular history “through reading biographies and historical novels” (such as Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks, 2001, about the Plague at Eyam), which he suggests is certainly no more “misleading” than the heritage industry’s account of a particular history (Urry, 1990: 112). The particular view of the English village as representing the “real olde England” is further reinforced by guide books, advertisements, literature, television, film, and more, which collectively paint a picture of an ideal rural English village experience. It is this sort of view that results in what Urry terms the “romantic gaze,” called so because it is inspired by romantic notions of the place and/or time that is the object of the gaze.

90

He frames his argument in part through the lens of earlier arguments made by MacCannell in two works he published 1973 and 1976 respectively, in which he posits that “’tourist spaces’ are organised around … ‘staged authenticity’” (Urry, 1990: 9). Urry draws on this in writing, “[h]ence, the gaze of the tourist will involve an obvious intrusion into people’s lives, which would be generally unacceptable. So the people being observed and local tourist entrepreneurs gradually come to construct backstages in a contrived and artificial manner” (Urry, 1990: 9). He further explains that “[t]he development of the constructed tourist attraction results from how those who are subject to the tourist gaze respond, both to protect themselves from intrusions into their lives backstage and to take advantage of the opportunities it presents for profitable investment” (Urry, 1990: 9). Through these mechanisms, then, the people into whose lives the tourists are gazing take steps to minimize that gaze and to direct it for their own purposes which include both privacy and profit. I argue that, in Eyam, the people who find themselves as objects of the tourist gaze do not always necessarily have the resources available as individuals to arrange the tourist experience for their individual privacy or profit, but that there are other local-level actors who attempt to do this work on behalf of the collective whole of the village. The effort of redirecting the tourist gaze, as Urry rightly points out, “cannot be left to chance. People have to learn how, when, and where to ‘gaze’. Clear markers have to be provided and in some cases the object of the gaze is merely the marker that indicates some event or experience which previously happened at that spot” (Urry, 1990: 9). Typical “tourist” sites have signs posted to draw the attention of visitors to them as that which is meant to be gazed upon, but it is often the case that the attention and gaze of the tourists will extend beyond the signs into an unintentional gaze at people’s homes and gardens and private lives as a result. I will illustrate how this principle is being put into play within the village of Eyam, including the extent to which it serves the intended purpose. However, the “tourist gaze” is not quite a straight forward process, as both the visitors and the local people have agency of their own, which interact with one another, as well as with the strategies and rules put into place by local governing and tourist bodies.

91

This leads to another important topic – that of governing bodies that are cognizant of tourism issues and taking steps to regulate and direct the activities undertaken by tourists within their boundaries. Urry writes that the development of localities as tourist centres “has probably been most marked in the Midlands, the north of England, and Wales”, and indeed, the Peak District National Park in the East Midlands, where Eyam is located, has many localities that endeavour to attract visitors, some for their natural attractions such as mountains, reservoirs, or caverns, and some for their historical ties, stately homes, or literary referents. This national park is the oldest in the United Kingdom, having been established in 1951, and it has done much to standardize the type of image its villages present while at the same time also allowing each to advertise its own uniqueness to attract visitors (National Parks, 2009). One strategy mentioned by Urry in discussing the issue of locality is that of emphasizing particular types of architecture that are meant to be characteristic of an area, of ties to its past, and somehow integral to the character of the place as a whole. In the Peak District, homes are required to be built of local stone and to have sloped roofs in order to conform to the National Park’s building requirements, which are in place to ensure continuity and conformity of style between the older buildings in the park and the newer ones. For this reason, modern houses and cottages being built in the Peak District are designed so that they resemble the houses that have been standing there for centuries, though this creates its own set of problems for local people in leading to high housing costs and an influx of holiday home buyers (interview with local historian in Eyam, September 2009). Elsewhere, Urry addresses this trend, pointing out that “the phenomenon of the second home causes particularly severe environmental problems of a different sort, especially for those who are year- long residents, often on very modest incomes, who, for example, cannot ensure that their children are able to continue living in the area in question because the housing has been taking by second-homers” (Urry, 1995: 191), which I will discuss elsewhere in this thesis. However, one reason for the increase in “second homers” in a place such as Eyam is that they can afford the high cost of a home built of local stone when local people with lower incomes cannot. This leads to a change in the demographics of an area, though Urry has observed that people buying holiday homes in a place

92 are often more invested in preserving the heritage of the local area than those who are from the area (Urry, 1995). Architectural conformity is one very specific way in which history and heritage are tied to locality and a particular image is reinforced in so doing, for although the social makeup of the area may change, the appearance of the village stays the same. This “picture postcard village” type of imagery is one way in which the tourist gaze is catered to (Punter, 1986-7: 10, as quoted in Urry, 1990: 127). Romantic Gaze I would like to suggest that the romantic gaze, which Urry defines as a “gaze involving vision, awe, aura” (1995: 191), as it applies to Eyam is a thing that is not confined to tourist gazes, but rather, that which defines much of the residency patterns in the village as well. Interpreting the romantic gaze not just as a visual act but also as a “second gaze” act of interpretation and narration, my fieldwork suggests that that which is gazed upon with awe in Eyam includes the rural idyll of the countryside not only in the sense of natural landscapes and vistas of the foothills of the Pennines and local farms, but also as a close-knit, safe community with a romantic history bound up with self-sacrifice and the Black Death. These imaginings of Eyam are also shared by people who live there as well as by people who are merely visiting, making this particular gaze one that extends beyond the tourist/local dichotomy. The family with whom I lived while I was conducting my research considered both aspects of the rural idyll to be integral to their experience living in the village. They first moved to Eyam from Sheffield in the early 1980s because they wanted “a safe place to raise their children”, and they bought the council house that they moved into when council houses were privatized. Despite having difficulty in being accepted as incomers, they held onto the notion that this was a place in which they wanted their children to grow up, and “as long as their children were accepted”, that was all that mattered, because it was safer than Sheffield and it was a much nicer area than they would have been able to afford in Sheffield. That their children have now “been accepted” and become close friends with “local” children, including a member of one of oldest families in the village, the Lowes, makes their own struggle for acceptance worthwhile, and they themselves have carved out a niche for themselves through involvement in the local parish church. The other part of their

93 attraction to the area was, of course, the view. There was, until a neighbour built a shed in her back yard while I was living there, an unobstructed view of the Pennine foothills from the back windows of the house, and this was the other primary motivating factor for their having moved to the area where they now live. I would posit that their romantic notion of Eyam and their desire to gaze upon the natural landscapes visible in the distance played as much a part in their moving to and living in Eyam as they do for any tourist visiting Eyam because it is a nice example of a rural English village. When the neighbours built a new shed in a location that obstructed the view from the Grants’ house, Mr. and Mrs. Grant were very upset about it, as was I. The neighbours said that they submitted the required notice that they were planning to build on their property, but the Grants felt that the notice given did not give an accurate idea of how much the shed would obstruct their view and thought that they were not made fully aware of the building plans. When the Grants built their own addition to their home, they had to get permission first from the neighbours who lived behind them whose view would be obstructed by the addition. This was agreed upon much more amicably, largely because the family who lived in the house behind theirs a) had a better relationship with the Grants, and b) didn’t have any major windows or views to obstruct in the first place. The view of the countryside was a highly contentious issue because it was one of the primary reasons the Grants had bought their house there in the first place. In their way of thinking, to block their view was to insult them and keep them from enjoying one of the benefits of living in Eyam. The view of the countryside is one of the biggest benefits to their living in Eyam. In the case of the Grants, the “romantic gaze” was both literal, in terms of the view of the countryside from their back windows, and figurative, in their ideal image of why they wanted to move to Eyam in the first place and why they stayed to raise their children and live there still. Other village residents also employ the “romantic gaze” in the ways they talk about the village. Mrs. Hannah Marshall, for example, enjoyed living in Eyam because she thought it was “peaceful and pretty”. They own a three-bedroom house in the village with a small dog named Pipkin, their two sons now grown and moved out with families of their own. She explained that though she had had some trouble

94 with local teens drinking, making noise, swearing in public, and throwing rubbish on the ground instead of into a bin several feet away, and she was not afraid to threaten them, especially Neil Taylor, if he did not clean up after himself. She told him that she lives next door to his grandfather and she would tell his grandfather what he was doing. There was an ideal atmosphere of quiet, respect, and cleanliness that she wanted to maintain so that the village would stay, as she said, “peaceful and pretty.” Visitors, too, come to gaze upon that which they see as being romantically associated with Eyam, though for them the primary focus is the Plague heritage and all things associated with it, and after that the landscape and possibilities that exist for walking in the area. The major sites in the village where the gaze is centred include the museum, the Village Stocks, the churchyard, the Plague Cottages, Mompesson’s Well to the north, the Boundary Stone to the south, the Riley Graves, the Cucklet 7 Church1F , and Eyam Delph. Only the last of these is not associated with the Plague. It is a nature site that sits below the location of the Cucklet Church. The Stocks are featured in the cartoon I provided at the beginning of this chapter. One visitor remarked to me as she saw the Stocks that they were what she remembered most from her first and only previous trip to Eyam with her school when she was a child. Even without a Plague museum in Eyam at that time (the 1960s), her school still made the trip up from Devon to teach the children about the Plague. That nostalgic memory contributed to her own romantic gaze. However, the most often remarked-upon reason for coming to Eyam is because of the “self-sacrifice” of the people who lived there during the Plague, contributing to a very powerful behind-the-scenes romanticism about Eyam in many people’s minds. Visitors come to see the place where the people quarantined themselves, to see the Boundary Stone where they left their money in exchange for food, and to see the Plague Cottages and the Riley Graves. Perhaps most exemplary of this point is a comment made by a woman in her forties visiting from London said that she enjoyed the “uplifting accounts of human leadership and

7 The Cucklet Church is an outdoor area near a limestone cave where church services were held during the Plague outbreak in Eyam in 1665-1666 in order to minimize the chances of transmitting the Plague to or catching it from one’s neighbours.

95 sacrifice” at the museum, but she was far from the only one to comment in some way about the character of the people of Eyam during the Plague. One older woman who was there with her husband visiting from Lincoln spoke of how much Elizabeth Hancock lost, and how she had “the strength to carry on” after losing her children and her husband, while a group of older women from a coach tour group spoke with each other in front of the Plague cottages as they gathered around them in a large group, talking about “how sad it is to think about all the people who died here”, and the “families who lost so many but kept going”. The tourism and desire to gaze in Eyam is tied to, in many people’s minds, the notion of sacrifice and the somehow superior “moral character” they were seen to have. This notion of “moral character” (a museum visitor’s description) came up with me on more than one occasion, and in two instances, related to the modern-day inhabitants of the village, as if it was somehow a timeless, boundless characteristic that is tied to the place rather than the individual people. This American visitor in her late 50s who, with her sister, was also planning to visit the Methodist chapel while she was there, talked about “what a wonderful this village is. [Residents of Eyam] must be so proud of the moral character of its people.” She spoke of how “brave” the people of Eyam were and “how strong their faith must have been” to stay in Eyam to keep the Plague from spreading to their neighbours. This sort of understanding comprises part of the romantic second gaze that I have seen people use in interpreting the village as a whole. Additionally, Urry rightly asserted that the romantic gaze was often inspired by reading about a place in a work of literature, and this was very often the case for Eyam. Visitors to the museum, predominantly women, often told me that they had decided to visit Eyam after reading the novel Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks, and when they walked around the village, they looked for landmarks that had been mentioned in the book. This novel tells the story of one fictional woman who lived through Eyam’s Plague, weaving into her life story the stories of other real-life characters from the historical accounts told in the museum as well as other aspects of life that would have been encountered at the time, such as the mining industry that has been prevalent in and around Eyam for centuries and the hysteria that occurred

96 in other parts of Britain leading to charges of witchcraft (not a real part of Eyam history, but relevant in other parts of Britain around the same time). The novel details the people who would have lived in Eyam at the time, as well as the places where they would have lived and worked and the conditions of life that they would have faced both before and during the Plague, and it is both well-researched and well- rounded in its depiction of Plague-era Eyam, owing in part to the generous cooperation of the museum staff in sharing their expertise with the author. Because of the comprehensive picture painted in the novel of what Eyam might have been like during the Plague, visitors who have read the novel look for signs of the different places and people spoken of in the book. When they do so, they have already formed an idea of what Eyam might look like based on Ms. Brooks’ descriptions of the village, which colours their perception once they come to the village to see it for themselves. One visitor, a young woman from New Zealand, was surprised when the cottages in the village were all much closer to one another physically than she had expected based on her reading of the novel, which highlighted an interesting gap between the anticipated reality and the experienced reality. She said, “I didn’t expect everything to be so close together!” She also didn’t expect the village to be such a busy, lived in, modern place, having based her ideas about the village on a novel set far in the past. She was shocked at how busy and full of people it was, which somewhat removed the romantic illusion that the novel had provided for her. It is as if the romantic notions of the village based on its history in the 1660s are supposed to exist today in modern Eyam, timelessly, as visitors had also expected to be the case in the Turkish village of Göreme in Hazel Tucker’s study (2005), which will be further discussed later in this chapter. The Photographic Gaze and Visual Consumption Where the romantic gaze raises issues of perceptions of the village, the photographic gaze and notions of visual consumption, by contrast, are very much grounded on the streets and pavements of the village, as visitors are directed by signs telling them where to go and what to look at, with most faithfully adhering to the signposted heritage sites, though one or two attempt to go elsewhere, such as the couple who tried to go into the local primary school thinking it to be another tourist site

97 open to the public. Visitors carrying cameras congregate in two major areas in the village in large groups, sometimes family and tour groups that have come to the village together, and sometimes as separate sets of one and two people who are all moving from designated site to designated site at the same time. It is quite common for visitors to take photographs of each individual plaque and associated Plague Cottage in the area where they sit, several cottages in a row, each designated with a separate plaque stating the names, dates, and circumstances of deaths of the families who lived in the homes during the Plague. Two of these were being renovated at the time of my fieldwork, the others currently have residents who sometimes have to contend with visitors entering their gardens and trying to go inside, thinking the cottages to be open to the public. There is a warning against doing this on the local parish church’s website, and stewards at the museum will sometimes make sure that visitors are aware of this, as well, when giving directions to the cottages from the museum. However, the residents of the Plague Cottages do not encounter this much, with their main complaints being lack of privacy from people trying to see in through their doors and windows whenever they go in or out of the house. Their response was to keep curtains closed in the windows, and to minimize the amount of time they held their doors open. One visitor asked at the museum whether the families who live in the Plague Cottages now are descended from the original families who lived there during the Plague, and the bookkeeper and administrator, Mrs. Stone, disappointed him by telling him that none of the Plague Cottages were currently owned by the families listed on the plaques in front of them, although, she would offer, “there are a few Plague descendants still living in the village today”. From this exchange, it seems possible that there will be other visitors also wondering the same thing, whether the people coming in and out of the cottage are descendants of the Plague survivors, which would, in that case, make them into objects of the gaze on par with the buildings themselves, as their special status makes them a “part of the story”, especially since the DNA testing that was carried out in 2004.

98

The presence of people photographing the Plague Cottages was much more of a nuisance to the local residents trying to pass them on the pavements, however, than to the residents of the cottages. One young mother complained very strongly to me about the way the groups of visitors in front of the cottages, telling me that “they block the pavements so that I have to push the pram into the street just to get around them”. Rather than being an issue of invaded privacy, as with the crofters whom visitors often tried to photograph in Macdonald (1997b), the old women in Göreme who refused having their photos taken without compensation (Tucker, 2005), or the Plague Cottage owners who are the objects of the gaze, there is the additional issue of the physical space that people take up while they are stopping to take their photographs and consume the visual signs of heritage that have been placed there for their information. Another problem with this aspect of the photographic gaze as it

Figure 6 - Boundary Stone + school party picnic lunches Figure 7 – Visitors in Front of Plague Cottages takes place in Eyam is that which was illustrated in the introduction. Mrs. White’s house does not have an informational plaque attached to it and it is not listed as a site of historical significance, but it shares a wall with the Visitor Centre and borders the Stocks, and so it is unintentionally swept up into the gaze that is aimed at the other locations around it. She has found methods of coping with the gaze, of blocking it out with her potted plants, but she still finds it very bothersome whenever people try to see or get into her house. Yet, the photographic gaze as intended by the people taking the photographs is to capture a piece of “history” with the images of the places where tragedy took

99 place, assuming that Urry has described this phenomenon correctly, as well as taking down a record of their journeys. They are also, as MacCannell has suggested, looking for the unexpected, and are just as likely to take photographs of the gardens in front of the Plague Cottages as of the cottages themselves. Many women in Eyam pride themselves on their gardens, and there is a lively Garden Club to which many of my informants belonged. After all, what can be more English than a well-kept flower garden? Images of nature are also within the realm of possibility, particularly at the Boundary Stone, which is on a hill surrounded by wooded areas with more hills and mountains providing a very nice view for miles around, and during the lambing season, it is full of ewes and their lambs, as well. It is a place where families play and picnic and have a nice, scenic walk between Eyam and Stoney Middleton, and it is a place of particular photographic interest for those wishing to photograph images of “nature”. Visitors stand with their cameras at the highest point of the hillside and photograph the surrounding area, and when they come to photograph the Boundary Stone itself, they will wait until all other people have moved away from the area so that they can photograph the stone untarnished by human presence “so that it looks like it would have when they used it during the Plague.” The aim at photographing things that look authentic is also important to visitors, who complain about signs of construction and cars along the roadside and the large number of people in the village on any given day, which is why being able to photograph the actual, authentic Plague Cottages or the Riley Graves or Mompesson’s Well lends authority and authenticity to their photographic record and narrative of their visit. Consuming Places (Urry, 1995) is an influential work which examines the consumption aspects of tourism, and in particular, tourism that is aimed at the “countryside” and at the “natural” environment. In Consuming Places, he uses consumption in four different ways. The first is that of the comparing, evaluating, purchasing, and using of goods and services. The second is that of consuming the place through visual consumption and through the “provision of various kinds of consumer services for both visitors and locals” (Urry, 1995:1). The third is literal consumption of the things considered to be significant about a place, such as its buildings or its environment, thus depleting, devouring, or exhausting these things

100

(Urry, 1995: 1-2). And fourth, he speaks of consuming one’s “identity” through participation in “enthusiasms, social and political movements, preservation societies, repeat travel patterns, the pleasure of strolling around, and so on” (Urry, 1995: 2). For the purposes of this chapter discussion, I will specifically focus on the second and third types of consumption described by Urry. A particularly important and salient observation made by Urry is that ‘[s]paces of a neighbourhood, town, or region may become overwhelmed by visitors so that locals no longer feel it is their space/place any more. So many visitors pass through, visually appropriating the space and leading locals to feel that they have ‘lost’ their space. Visitors are viewed as the ‘other’” (Urry, 1995: 166). I have illustrated how this has become the case in Eyam, where local people are feeling an acute sense of displacement during the busy tourist season, with both their walkways and their parking places being taken up by visitors on busy days during the summer and on weekends. Furthermore, there is another issue as to “whose heritage is being conserved and how it relates to local people and their sense of what is important to remember” (Urry, 1995: 170), which also comes into play in Eyam. The local museum displays include not just the “Plague heritage” for which the village is known, but also has displays about the village’s ancient heritage and its modern industrial heritage and natural resources, though the emphasis is always on the Plague for both the museum staff and the visitors. Despite the fact that the working model of the lead mine is one of the most commented on items in the museum display, the museum devotes almost one and a half floors of its exhibit to the Plague and just the very last section to lead and fluorspar mining, quarrying, and shoemaking. Yet, while the Plague heritage is interesting, not all local residents want it to be the focus of their village. The children at the local primary school told their Head Teacher that “we don’t want to be the Plague children” when they were learning about local history in the 2007-2008 school year. The representation of Eyam as the “Plague Village” thrusts a particular collective identity onto its residents whether they want it or not. However, it does so while trying to draw the visitors’ attention to specific places and away from the majority of the village through informational plaques and the creation of a theme museum. The problem is that the visitors do not stick to the planned tourist sites. Eade points out of tourists

101 visiting London’s East End that “A safe local world of ‘Dickensian’ nostalgia might be provided inside local properties, but out on the streets the adventurous tourists are more vulnerable to local resentments” (Eade, 2002: 139). This is also the case in Eyam, where local people resent the presence of visitors outside of the sanctioned tourism-oriented areas, and often in more public of these areas, as well, particularly in front of the Plague Cottages, to be discussed further later. The Second Gaze In Urry’s The Tourist Gaze, he built upon earlier research and theory by researcher Dean MacCannell. In turn, MacCannell has built upon Urry’s argument in a very influential way. Where Urry discusses the gaze as something focused on visual experiences – photography, sight-seeing, and “visual consumption” of a place, MacCannell suggests that beyond the external objects upon which visitors are meant to gaze, there is a “second gaze that is capable of recognizing the misrecognition that defines the tourist gaze” (MacCannell, 2001: 31). He critiques Urry’s assertion that the gaze of the tourist is focused only upon that which is considered “extraordinary”, suggesting instead that many tourists consider that which is ordinary to be at least as interesting as things thought of by Urry as extraordinary, and it is these ordinary aspects of life that the second gaze seeks to interpret by seeing beyond that which is intended for the tourist gaze into a more individually determined and defined object of interest. He argues against the sort of deterministic mechanisms cited by Urry as drawing a tourist’s gaze to particular objects or information deemed worthy of the visitor’s attention without taking into account that person’s individuality and possible interests in gazing elsewhere. MacCannell draws attention back to Urry’s inspiration of Foucault, illustrating that The way out of this determinism for Urry is the one that was proffered by Foucault as he enunciated his theory of the gaze. Institutions and structured itineraries are laid down in advance, social hierarchies exist and are jealously guarded by those who benefit most from them. But, according to Foucault, within these fixed structural arrangements the human subject remains free. The human subject cannot be captured in

102

a causal framework because it is always the outcome of diverse articulations between different discourses” (MacCannell, 2001: 29). MacCannell’s notion of the “second gaze” is interested in the unseen behind that which is seen, and it is strongly interlinked with narratives about what is behind that which is being gazed upon. Referencing Stendhal (1962), he suggests that this idea of narrative is key to the travel experience. For the object of Stendhal’s writing, it was “having something new to say” that motivated his travelling (MacCannell, 2001: 32). MacCannell asserts that “[i]t takes the form of a drive to provide narrative accompaniment to what is seen, and this visual narrative, moreover, always goes beyond descriptions of the visible” (MacCannell, 2001: 32). This was also observed by Tucker (2003). Plaques that provide information about a place or an object are seen as more interesting than the physical object being described. MacCannell writes that “[m]any years ago, I wrote that a tourist attraction is a bond between a tourist, an attraction of sight, and its marker. I had discovered by observation that tourists who focused on the markers, that is on the unseen, expressed much greater satisfaction with their experiences than sight-involved tourists” (MacCannell, 1976: 112ff., referenced in MacCannell, 2001: 31). The second gaze can be seen to be particularly salient in the case of historical tourism where there exist only plaques and objects to gaze upon. The story of the people who lived and died in a particular house in the 1660s as written onto a plaque is more interesting, in this sense, than the house that the plaque writes about. A narrative can be constructed based on the information contained in the plaque that is far more vivid than could be the case if the narrative were based on the house only. The narrative formed by the visitor is more interesting than the actual objects designated for the tourist’s view. In my discussions both of the romantic gaze and of the photographic gaze, I have incorporated the notion of the second gaze, which is inextricably bound up, especially in Eyam, with the primary tourist gazes held by tourists visiting the area. People visit Eyam because of its background story. They have a preconceived notion not only about what it will look like as a rural English village, but also about what its character will be like and what connections its physical infrastructure has to its romantic Plague history (romantic because of the embellishments made to the story

103 by writers such as Anna Seward, who have emphasized the love story between William and Catherine Mompesson or the dalliance between two young lovers from Eyam and Stoney Middleton respectively that had to end as a result of the Plague). The story of self-sacrifice and hardship is also linked in people’s minds to the oral histories passed down and codified as part of the written Plague history, such as those telling about the young lovers, or about the woman who was miraculously cured of the Plague by drinking warm bacon fat (whose descendants still drink warm bacon fat to this day in order to stave off illness). When people visit Eyam Museum, they often ask about the small details such as these, because these little details are what they see as necessary to the completing of their narrative about the place upon which they are gazing. It is the details behind that which is visibly posted on the plaques and beyond even the comprehensively written museum displays that visitors seek out to complete their vision of Eyam’s Plague history, and which museum stewards and church stewards are expected to be able to answer in order to satisfy their customers. Plaques are placed throughout Eyam, not just on the Plague-related buildings, but also on other old buildings deemed to be historically important, such as the Wesleyan Reform Church and the Brick House (so-called because it is the only house in all of Eyam built of red brick rather than local stone). Visitors read the plaques to learn about the village, but they add into that what they already know to form a narrative about that place that incorporates the information on the plaque, the physical place the plaque is meant to illustrate, and the background information they have obtained through other means, such as the family histories learned by reading the displays at the museum. It is the second gaze, however, which also provokes curiosity about the people who live in the houses, whether they be the Plague Cottages or Mrs. White’s house next to the Visitors’ Centre or any other house in the village. This gaze is what inspires people to look more closely and to question more deeply the details of each of the sites. “Do the original families still live in the Plague Cottages?” “Is it true that they’re planning to dig up the Riley Graves to test the bones for evidence of the Plague?” “Do they still use the Stocks today?” These questions have all been asked of stewards at the museum while I was on duty, and they illustrate the further probing

104 and narrating that goes into the tourist endeavour when attempting to see beyond that which has been placed out front and centre for the tourist to examine. As one woman visiting the museum said, she wanted “to actually experience and see more about what happened” during the Plague. One of the stewards, Mrs. Marshall, mentioned a planned event for 2009 that would, in a way, accomplish just this. She said that the village was planning to host a version of Don Taylor’s 1973 play The Roses of Eyam that would be “in the round”, using the village itself as the stage, moving throughout the village to the different locations in order to recreate the Plague experience through this play, which is a very imaginative village response to the demand from visitors like this one who want to experience what happened during the Plague first- hand. Locality and Place-Myths Earlier in this chapter, I discussed the Peak District National Park and its building requirements regarding materials and design so that newly built homes will not differ noticeably from older homes in the same location, creating a homogenous appearance among the homes. This contributes toward the ideal of the rural English village by portraying a picturesque and consistent picture of what should be presented and what should be seen within the area. Many of the people whom I interviewed, including the local historian, the family with whom I lived, the owner of a local bed and breakfast, and the Secretary of the museum Board, all pointed out to me some specific dynamics that were taking place in Eyam at the time of my fieldwork that are at least partially related to the building requirements of the Peak District National Park, though other factors include the romantic gaze and the high trend of outmigration from the village also played a role in the increase in sales of homes in Eyam to be used as holiday cottage lets or as second holiday homes. This has created a shift in ownership demographics that is becoming more strongly weighted toward holiday home and holiday cottage let owners and an increase in prices that prevents younger people in the village from being able to buy or rent homes for their own families, leading these younger families to leave the village out of necessity because of the inability to afford a home in the village where they grew up. Certain measures are now being taken with a new housing complex that has been

105 built to ensure that only people classified as “local” by the Peak Park Authority, i.e. people who have lived in Derbyshire for three years or more, will be able to rent or buy the lower priced houses and apartments that have been built. There are not many of these homes, however, and demand was expected to be high. Other efforts in the past to limit holiday home buyers and holiday cottage let buyers by requiring that the person who purchased the building should live locally had all been unsuccessful, including one instance that was related to me in which a house was being sold off following the death of its owner, who had specified in his will that the person who bought the house must live in it locally. A lower bid was accepted from someone who promised to live in the house, as all other, higher bids were from people who would not agree to do that, and within six months after the purchase was made, the house was turned into a holiday let. Furthermore, there has been conflict between two local residents and the new owner of the house next door to theirs, which the owner turned into a holiday home. One of the men involved, who has lived in Eyam all his life, exclaimed angrily one day, “I don’t even want to live here anymore”, so exasperated he was by the conflicts over parking that were taking place with the owner of the holiday let. He and the other man had both used the parking spaces behind their building, which technically belonged to the property owned for the holiday let, for the past twenty years, and when the new owner came in, she threatened legal action against them if they continued to park there, or even if they so much as spoke to the people renting the cottage from her about the parking. A large number of houses were for sale in the village at the time that I left, and during my time there, I saw one family sell their home near where I lived in order to move out to a new farm they had bought for themselves in a place even more rural than Eyam, and I saw another man move into Eyam because he wanted to live in the countryside, and before I completed my fieldwork, he told me he was moving again, this time to the Scottish island of Orkney, because he had realized that Eyam just wasn’t what he was looking for. Mr. Campbell said he “missed the seaside”, which he grew up near, and gave that as his primary reason, though the fact that the business he had hoped to start in nearby Chesterfield had not worked out was his secondary reason for the move. Part of the impetus for the changing demographics, then, is a trend toward

106 moving to a place more rural or more picturesque than the place one was already to begin with. The family from Eyam moved to a place even more rural than Eyam. The holiday home buyers were coming in from the cities. Eyam is certainly not unique in the number of homes for sale in the area at that time – everywhere I went in Eyam and the neighbouring areas had high numbers of homes for sale. However, the draw to Eyam, apart from the view, is the romantic history of the village, which is highlighted prominently. The plaques in front of the Plague Cottages were first placed there within a decade after the formation of the Peak District National Park in 1951, with an emphasis even then on drawing visitors’ gazes toward those particular sites. Urry uses the term “place-myth” to refer to the expectations of a place based on some special characteristics it is meant to have (Urry, 1995). The “place-myth” of Eyam carries it fairly far in terms of being recognizable and attractive as a place to live. The aforementioned “moral character” supposed by some of the village, as well as the confirmed familiarity and closeness between neighbours, the safety of the area, and the interesting history make it a place that is attractive to people as residents. The problem is that it does not, as Mr. Campbell can attest, live up to the promise of a quiet English village that is a part of the myth of the rural idyll precisely because of its interesting history as the Plague Village. This failure to meet expectations, with the stereotypical ideal being strongly affected by the presence of visitors during the tourist season, leads to a disillusionment with the imagined ideal of Eyam that had prompted the move in the first place. In Consuming Places, Urry also includes a case study of the Lake District National Park, pointing out that “place-myths” are instrumental in drawing visitors and also in driving the efforts made to conserve a particular heritage within a place, using in Derbyshire as one of his examples in illustrating his point. In many cases, particularly in tourism of the English countryside by English people, these place-myths will draw people along a particular route of sites to see, though they may be unaware of this occurring. In the case of Eyam, visitors to the village frequently visit a wide range of places in the area, each with its own unique place- myth, during the course of a weekend, or even in a single day. Chatsworth House is

107 just a twenty minute drive away from Eyam and is often included within such an itinerary, as are other nearby attractions such as Castleton Caverns, Buxton, and . Place-myths are instrumental in drawing the gaze to a particular place and are, at the same time, beneficial to a local economy, which can capitalize upon the place-myth. However, these place-myths can also change when there are too many, or conversely too few, people visiting them. Urry writes that “[t]he place-myth of the Lake District suffers from … huge numbers of visitors flowing especially to the so- called honeypots and the sense that many of the small urban centres are periodically overwhelmed. It is widely thought that at particular times in specific spaces, too many people are drawn into the Lake District and that as a result the enjoyment and pleasure of many visitors is reduced” (Urry, 1995: 197). The romantic gaze is interrupted by too much of modernity and crowds who disrupt the view that is being sought and prevent the quiet, peaceful idyll expected of a “nature” site such as the Lake District. The Peak District, similarly, is considered to be a “nature” site where walking is one of the most common activities, and visitors to Eyam come not only for the Plague heritage it offers, but also to gaze upon the natural landscapes that surround the village. This is something that they share in common with residents, and particularly with incomers, who cite the quiet, peaceful rural idyll and landscape views of the area as reasons for moving to the area. The power of the place-myth is one felt by both local residents and visitors, as illustrated here. Host and Guest Relations In each of the previous sections, I have included some aspects related to host and guest relations in Eyam. There is a small number of businesses in Eyam that cater primarily to tourists, including the museum, Eyam Hall (which is only open three days a week for two months of the year), the various craft shops and the Eyam Hall buttery and gift shop affiliated with Eyam Hall, two bed and breakfast facilities, a youth hostel, several places to eat, and shops that cater to both local people and visitors. Although several of these facilities are designed specifically for the entertainment and comfort of visitors to the village, the visitors who use them must still travel through the rest of the village if they wish to see the “authentic” sites associated with the Plague in Eyam. Yet, these “authentic sites” are predominantly

108 located on private property, such as the Plague Cottages, described above, or the Riley Graves, which are inside a privately-owned horse enclosure, though they are open to members of the public. Furthermore, some of them are also along routes where space must be shared with local people. In front of the Plague Cottages, the space that must be shared is the pavement. The walkway to the Riley Graves is a private road that must be shared with the residents of that road. The businesses that cater almost exclusively to visitors do not see much competition for resources by local people, but those businesses and public spaces that are an everyday part of local residents’ lives, such as the Church Street Stores, the pavements that go from one end of the village to the other, or the Post Office, are seen as belonging first and foremost to the local people, with visitors in the role of guests as illustrated in Tucker’s ethnography of Göreme, a Turkish village that includes an Open Air Museum and homes that are built onto the existing landscape of cliffs. Tucker observed that visitors to Göreme visit for the Open Air Museum, for the unusual architecture, and to meet the local people of this village. She also observed that the people of the village turn the visitors’ curiosity into an advantage by selling them souvenirs and tours of their homes (Tucker, 2003). Only in the exclusively tourist spaces are the roles of host and guest formalized, however, such as in the museum where stewards are on hand to answer visitors’ questions, or in Eyam Hall, where guided tours take place. Outside of these formal business settings, it must be inferred. The host/guest dichotomy is sometimes tricky to negotiate due to the flexible nature of some aspects of life. Places where the public and the private collide, such as parking areas, which are as contentious among local people as are the pavements that are often too crowded and require someone leaving the pavement and moving onto the road. Although there is a paid car park, many people choose not to use it either because it is full or because they do not have the money to use to pay for it, and so visitors end up parking along the street. Parking areas are not necessarily clearly delineated in front of private homes (though sometimes they are marked very clearly), and as a result, local people are unable to park their cars. There have been specific instances relayed to me in which visitors parked within private driveways or

109 directly in front of a private garage door marked with a no parking sign. Mrs. Tilley told me about one time that this happened to her when she had to find a police officer to have him order the car that was blocking her garage door to be towed away. She asked him if she could “have some of those orange traffic cones” to use to block off the garage door while she was out doing her shopping to make sure the place stayed empty, but it was not permissible. The residents of the area want the visitors to use the car park rather than the roadsides, but they are powerless to enforce this apart from instances when they have a legal right to have a car towed as Mrs. Tilley did. The willingness to tolerate visitors to the village is compromised when guests do not take local residents into consideration when parking their cars in or in front of residents’ driveways or blocking the pavements on which local residents are trying to walk. Mrs. Burton told me that “people say, ‘oh, we don’t want them,’” and the tourists park on the streets rather than paying for the car park, which she says could lead to Eyam losing its bus service because the buses can’t get through the village, and it already causes people who leave the village on the weekends to have trouble parking at their own homes when they come back. Hazel Tucker’s examination of tourism in the Turkish village of Göreme includes discussions of the expectations and experiences of both tourists and locals involved in tourist encounters in the village. One statement she made of the Göreme experience with tourist groups was strongly reminiscent of the reality in Eyam. She writes that “at the weekends, particularly in springtime before the summer vacations begin in Turkey, the region fills with busloads of Turkish school parties coming to visit the historic sites. Although again these tourists do not stay within Göreme village, their presence is strongly felt on Saturdays and Sundays because of the huge increase in traffic moving through the village centre” (Tucker, 2003: 44). In fact, Göreme has a fairly well-developed tourism infrastructure largely run by local men through the renting of pansiyons that are rented to visitors for accommodation during their stay and which include organized activities meant to control visitors’ movements and keep them away from private aspects of local life, the selling of carpets, the running of tour agencies, and more. This is augmented by women’s entrepreneurship in charging tour groups for the chance to come into their homes and making craft

110 items such as head scarves for sale to the tourists invited into their homes. The theme of hosts and guests is the primary trope through which hospitality in Göreme is understood by local people, who see the visitors as guests in their private arena. As Tucker points out, This [promotional material that contrasts enclaves of hotels, tourist agencies, and brash restaurants with persistence of the old ways] suggests that there are two separate spaces in Cappadocia, each signifying something different for tourists: the tourist spaces with hotels and restaurants, and the non-tourist spaces where ‘the old ways persist’. For many villagers, too, the older back streets or upper mahalle (residential quarters) are where the traditional social relations and moral values of the village are still largely intact, while in the central area the moral fabric of the village is evidently corrupted. (Tucker, 2003: 120) They extend their hospitality and guests are expected to respect their culture (not wearing revealing clothing, not drinking in public, etc.) and are hoped to purchase the hand-made crafts that local women sell in their homes. The visitors, on the other hand, do not necessarily share the same values and attitudes toward host and guest relations and are often taken aback by the sales pitches being put forward by women who invite them into their homes for a cup of tea. Yet at the same time that the visitors are insulted by being invited into someone’s home for tea and then being shown the things that are for sale, so too are the local people insulted by things such as photography being attempted by tourists without permission, as was also the case in Macdonald’s ethnography as discussed above. Tucker writes that Göreme villagers are adamant that tourists should ‘ask first’ before taking a photograph of them, particularly the older villagers who are fearful because of the negative meaning attached to images in Islam. … One such incident blew up into quite a fury when a woman from New Zealand was trying to photograph old women on their donkeys as they returned from the fields through the centre of the village. … As per usual, this annoyed the villagers she was trying to photograph and they

111

conveyed their annoyance by turning away or waving a stick at the tourist” (Tucker, 2003: 124). This illustrates an aspect of the tourist-local conflict involving the photographic gaze that is a persistent theme in different times and different places examined here, showing a basic conflict of values and expectations between host and guest in the tourist encounter. Tourists, also, are cognizant of their sometimes negative impact on life in Göreme, being concerned less with the impact of actions such as photographing local people and more concerned with affecting the “traditional” way of life in Göreme. One visitor from Germany said that “’tourism can destroy the culture’“ because of the capitalistic competition that it introduces into people’s lives, asserting that it would interfere with communal living and group happiness (Tucker, 2003: 46). Several examples given by Tucker show that the primary impression on visitors is that time stands still in Göreme, as in a case when a tour guide who had surreptitiously paid a woman to allow a tour group into her house had explained that they exist without modern amenities such as electricity, despite the presence of modern appliances that clearly ran on electricity. The introduction of “modern” amenities to Göreme seems to Tucker to be as much related to the impact of television and film as to the impact of tourism from places like Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand, but visitors to the village long to see a timeless, “traditional” Göreme, much in the same way as the view of the English village given by Urry (1995), which is part of the appeal of the romantic gaze. However, to paraphrase Urry, the very act of having tourism in the village changes the village. In contrast to the example in Göreme, local people in Eyam neither invite visitors into their homes nor try to profit from their visits by selling them their handicrafts. All commerce, including sales of “traditional” English crafts, is conducted through the official tourist-oriented companies operating in Eyam. Eyam Hall gift shop sells locally made soaps, while the Eyam Museum gift shop sells locally produced publications. However, there are not many people locally employed in these industries, and those who do engage in tourist-oriented work in Eyam usually do so as volunteers at the museum, the church, and Eyam Hall. However, within

112 these officially sanctioned tourist activities, the “host” volunteers are well-trained to be able to answer most questions about the Plague that will be asked of them, which is something most local residents would not be able to do, and they have experience with customer service and maps ready at hand to refer to when giving directions. Mrs. Burton described it as “better to manage them than them manage us!” Some visitors may be seeking a more “authentic” local experience and forgoing formal heritage activities such as the museum as a result, but in so doing, they are also absenting themselves from the chance to ask any questions they might want of local residents. The museum, church, and Eyam Hall provide official settings in which it is acceptable for a local person to be an object of interaction and display, and in which to learn the behind-the-scenes experience of interacting with a local and gaining knowledge that cannot be gotten elsewhere. Furthermore, the visitor feels that he or she is getting extra attention and information that someone else might not get, which is quite likely to be the case as most visitors’ questions are unique to that visitor. One person might ask about the bacon grease Plague cure, while another will ask about personal relationships that existed at the time, while yet another will ask for more detail about the genetic research that was conducted in the village. Each person does get one on one treatment and individualized answers to their questions, and they thank the stewards for giving them the answers they have asked and for giving them their time and expertise. As I have illustrated in Chapter 4, “Museum as Gatekeeper for Plague Heritage Information,” the role of the volunteer stewards as guides and hosts is a vital one to the telling of a specific Plague story to visitors and in directing visitors to the Plague-specific sites in and around the village and away from private residences. This does not mean that local people are not concerned with local heritage, but recent local history is more relevant to them than is the distant past. The aspects of Eyam’s history that are more important to residents come from the memories and experiences of local people taken singly or shared with others. Cathrine Degnen (2005) writes about Western forms of social memory that are a product of conscious efforts to preserve information and memorialize it through such efforts as heritage museums and monuments to the dead, contending that these are not the only ways

113 that social memory can be constructed in Western settings. She proposes a broader understanding of the processes that make social memory beyond official memorials like heritage museums, and including memory that is “present and past, individual and collective” (Degnen, 2005: 730). She suggests that processes like gossip and other “memory talk”, reciting details, and collective recall and discussion of shared memories are among the ways that social memory is made. According to Degnen, these forms of “memory talk” also act three-dimensionally, situating the stories being told in space as well as across time, and showing relationships between different people in the memory at the same time. In Eyam, I would suggest that these processes are at work, but the particular nature of the heritage project in Eyam is also transforming this informal “memory talk” into formalized memorials, not just through the museum, which does have some oral histories and traditions at its core, but most notably through the Eyam Map and CD- ROM project, which collected recordings of memories by local people recounting a variety of memories, not only related to the Plague, but also to everyday life. One man remembers marrying “a local girl”, recounting his story from the past, when he met his wife, to the present, fifty years after the fact, from the place he had lived before to Eyam, where he moved after marrying and experienced life as a self- described “incomer”. Another recounts a story about farming in the area, while another still talks about the closure of the local mines. Local traditions like the Wakes Week Carnival are preserved in photographs and videos on this project, and in addition to audio recordings, there are also written testimonials and a website. Though it is now being formalized, these are stories that have arisen out of an informal “memory talk” setting and the idea for a heritage project that was wholly different from that of the museum and the physical sites throughout the village. This merges the notion of “memory talk” with a formal heritage project in quite a different way from the way that memory and memorial are codified for the museum, and it forms the core of a particular kind of local expertise that is now being valued in its own right as a result of this oral history project. The memories and stories of the people who participated in this project are an altogether different sort of heritage activity that works to make Eyam more than simply “the Plague Village”, bringing

114 different aspects of village life to the forefront in a way that relates to the lives of people who live in the village today, and while also valuable to visitors, this project is much more of a local endeavour by and for local people, bound up as it is with memories that they share with one another and common points of reference that foster a sense of place and belonging to Eyam. At the same time, because this is also marketed to visitors, it brings modern-day Eyam to the forefront and de- emphasizes the Plague aspects of the village experience.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have sought to show how the “gaze” is acted out by different actors in different ways, and how these different, often competing perspectives are portrayed in Eyam. Those who choose to live in Eyam have a very different way of looking at the village, at “village life”, and at the landscape and buildings of the area than do those visiting the village specifically for its Plague history and its geology as part of the Peak District National Park. I have also sought to show how both the “tourist gaze” as hypothesized by Urry and the “second gaze” of MacCannell work in tandem with one another as part of the experience-making of time spent in Eyam, both as a “visitor” and as a resident. Many visitors to the village seek to gain an empathetic and enacted form of understanding of the long-ago residents of Eyam through their reading, recounting, and photography of the story of Eyam and the subsequent travelling from place to place within the village to physically experience each part of Eyam’s Plague story. There is one further mechanism discussed here that speaks to the interaction between residents and visitors. Unlike in Göreme, the residents of Eyam do not extend hospitality to visitors outside of officially-designated tourist locations and the occasional giving of directions. Instead, these formal tourist locations have local volunteers who enjoy the interaction with visitors and the telling and elaborating on the Plague story. This allows visitors the chance to really get at and increase their experience of the “second gaze” when they venture out into the village for their visit to each of the key historical sites noted by plaques and signs as designated by the

115

Village Council and the Peak District National Park Authority. This also gives the visitors a story they can tell, a “narrative”, as MacCannell and Tucker both observed, that involves an “authentic” interaction with local people, particularly if that local person is also the descendant of a Plague survivor. Narrative, both in understanding and in being able to synthesize information to retell the Plague story, is an important factor for visitors to Eyam, as well as for those local residents who work on heritage- related projects in the village. However, from the perspective of the local residents, most with whom I spoke saw the visitors as intruders who spoil the rural idyll that drove many of them to move to, remain in, or return to Eyam in the first place. One life-long resident has become so stressed by it that he didn’t “even want to live here anymore.” Additionally, there is a marked generational gap in attitudes toward preserving and participating in activities related to the Plague heritage of the village, with the oldest residents of the village overwhelmingly making up those involved in Plague heritage-related activities, on the one hand, with some younger people being employed for pay in businesses that cater to visitors, but the sentiment of the youngest residents is different. Not only are they not showing interest. Older residents who are involved in Plague-related activities also frequently told me that there are no young people who want to get involved and carry on “keeping up the traditions” and participating in committees like that for the Eyam Map and CD-ROM project or volunteering for the museum, and fewer people, especially fewer young people, according to Mrs. Tilley, are attending events like the Plague Commemoration Service, as they did in decades past. Young people from the village have actively expressed a desire not to be associated with the Plague. Many of the adults with whom I spoke were also not interested in the Plague or not exclusively interested in it. Roger Ridgeway, for example, was particularly interested in industrial heritage via the shoe factories his family once owned in the village, while Dr. Richardson was interested more in the mining history of the village, even having led large-scale formal excavations of Eyam’s mining tunnels in the 1970s. Yet the local signs of history and heritage do not direct visitors to the former locations of the shoe factories or the silk or cotton manufacturers, nor are there signs showing where the mines once were. The signposting is specific to the Plague and locations

116 that would have been contemporary with the Plague, and to Eyam Hall, a tourist draw in its own right. Visitors follow the signs as they walk through the village, being drawn specifically to the Plague-related locations. In so doing, they congregate in specific places, some of which are in front of people’s homes or in busy footpaths. As the local people are rejecting the presence of the visitors, who they see as usurping their parking places and their right of way on the pavements, some are leaving for a place that is quieter than Eyam, and some are staying, but grudgingly. Additionally, people who have been purchasing second homes in Eyam, such as the young doctor and her fiancé who bought a house from an Eyam family near the Wesleyan Reform Chapel, are impacting upon housing prices, which means that younger people who do wish to remain in the village will be unable to do so because they cannot afford a home of their own. As the demographics of the village change, the nature of the village and what local residents see as “village life” changes. That which originally drew them to the village, or in the case of the families who have lived in the village for generations, that which keeps them there, or which brings them back after they’ve moved away for a while, is changing. Furthermore, the large number of visitors is affecting the visitors’ experiences of the village, as well, as the quiet English village they are seeking to visit is not quiet, and their “gaze”, particularly their “photographic gaze”, is obstructed by the presence of other visitors. The gaze which visitors and residents alike place upon Eyam is one fuelled largely by imagination and romanticism, but which is in conflict with the reality they encounter when in Eyam, in which the very presence of the visitors alters that which the visitors seek to view. Yet, the people in the village who are involved in heritage tourism seek to ensure that visitors have a memorable and educational visit, while at the same time directing their movements so as to keep visitors on a certain course through which they are meant to understand Eyam’s Plague story. Tucker pointed out that visitors often seek to venture off the standard tourist path in order to get at the “second gaze” which lies hidden, but in Eyam, in part, this is addressed by volunteers at places such as the museum and the church who answer the individual questions that visitors have, seeking to satisfy their curiosity and thirst for more in- depth knowledge about the aspects of the Plague story which interest them the most.

117

They are not always successful at this. People still gaze into Mrs. White’s kitchen window and wander into the primary school as though it is another site on their tour. However, there are blue plaques and signposts around the village, and by a new Eyam audio walking tour available for hire at the local shops, that seeks to correct this by directing people in a particular direction to see particular sites. People in the village associated with the heritage industry have developed this approach based on the experience of many years of doing this kind of work. However, they fear that their efforts will be abandoned if no younger people step up to participate in Eyam heritage projects, which would leave a gap in the provision of services for the many visitors who come each year. The lack of enthusiasm for the Plague heritage, and indeed the rejection of those activities which bring visitors to Eyam, is also accompanied by a shift in demographics as people who are from the village leave and the numbers of second-home owners and holiday cottages increase, adding to the tension between these types of “incomers” and local residents within the village. Thus the effects of the “gaze” in all its forms are far-reaching for both visitors and residents alike, leading to social changes that alter that which is being gazed upon as the local demographics change, and as the village also engages in more infrastructural changes to accommodate the growing numbers of visitors and holiday home buyers, including the making up of new signs and the repainting of benches, replacing signposts, and more, as well as building new, more affordable housing for the young families who cannot afford those homes that are being purchased as holiday homes. Both Urry’s and MacCannell’s notions of gaze are supported by my fieldwork, expanded upon by the roles played by the imagination and romanticism in constructing an idea of a historical place, but an element of phenomenological thought is also in play as visitors seek not just to see Eyam and read about its history, and not only to delve deeper to learn more about the story behind the story, but through the embodied practice of taking that knowledge and physically seeking to take part in that story through the journey through the village that takes the visitor to each of the historical sites of interest there. Many visitors, especially children, like to walk to the Boundary Stone and dip coins in the rainwater that has collected in the holes, mimicking the process of dipping

118 coins in vinegar that took place during the Plague, while the adults want to see the insides of the Plague cottages, sometimes even attempting to enter the homes, as Mr. George May of the Eyam Map Group has pointed out. Visitors to the museum also seem to want a more “authentic” experience, with some asking for audio recordings telling the Plague story from the perspectives of people like William Mompesson, as though in his own voice, and some of the children in particular asking for “moaning sounds” and more of the “plastic people” (mannequins) to provide a more realistic sense of having been there. Their parents suggest more period dress and “artefacts from the Plague”, including one who suggested having foods and drinks available like those that would have been available to the people of Eyam during the time of the Plague. Recall the young woman from New Zealand who told me that she intentionally tried to follow the same routes and see the village as it might have looked during the Plague, but the signs of modernity in the village disrupted her gaze and so her experience did not meet her expectations. Some of the imaginative work visitors do around their “gaze”, some of the things they have told me they wished to see, echo a wish to experience the historical village in a way similar to the Open Air Museum in Göreme or Colonial Williamsburg in the USA (Tucker, 2003; Handler and Gable, 1997). Many of them, especially young adults and children, have described a wish to not only see the sights, which they can do presently albeit with a view of the past hampered by modern buildings and construction, but also to hear the sounds, smell (some of) the smells, and taste the foods from the Plague era. Two different people, a man in his late twenties or early thirties who came to the museum with his partner, and a child who visited with a school group, even suggested having live rats available for sale as pets at the museum to reinforce the “rat” theme of the Plague. They imagine what they want to see, and that imaginative work functions alongside their actual walk around the village. When they take their photographs, I have seen them move into sometimes very awkward positions for photography in order to keep signs of modern life out of their pictures, blocking out the piles of wood planks and the scaffolding covering half of a cottage while it undergoes repairs, in order to photograph a Plague Cottage as something relatively untouched by these modern elements. I have seen this dynamic

119 with groups of pensioners who arrived in the village on a tour bus, as well as with “ramblers” in their thirties and forties who come into Eyam in their full rambling gear with a camera in hand, for whom Eyam is just one stop of many on their day’s outing. One enterprising person has even purchased one of the Plague Cottages and has plans to let it out as a holiday cottage, giving visitors the chance to experience being inside of a Plague Cottage in the place where the residents of that home died during the Plague. The actions of these photographers and the sentiments spoken to me by visitors at the museum, people I encountered in the Village Square, and customers at the Peak Pantry and the Buttery, show particular types of expectations for their experience and their own attempts to have Eyam meet those expectations. It is clear here that “the gaze” is not enough. The “romantic gaze” and the “photographic gaze” are the start of the visitor experience, but their use of imagination and seeking to experience the village in an embodied way, wanting to use multiple senses – seeing, touching, hearing, smelling, and tasting things as they would have been during the Plague, points to a desire for more of a re-creation of the Plague experience. Perhaps this accounts for the popularity of the Plague Commemoration Service, which seeks to recreate the circumstances of the church services delivered during the Plague at Eyam. For visitors to Eyam, the museum and the church are not enough to give them the Plague experience that they want. Young and old, male and female, they walk about the village seeing and visiting the places relevant to the Plague in Eyam. The women I spoke with were especially interested in the lives of the people and their stories, and in the sometimes very emotional idea of the “sacrifice” the people made, and the children had very strong imaginations and a desire to touch things and many of the older boys were very interested in the details of the physical effects of the Plague on the infected people. In Eyam, tourism is a very holistic experience that starts but does not end with “the gaze”. It is more than just the “romantic gaze” or the “photographic gaze” or even the deeper level of MacCannell’s “second gaze”, however, that visitors to Eyam engage in when they visit the homes and graves of the Plague dead, or speak of the “sacrifice” of people like Catherine Mompesson, who died of the Plague, or of the “amazing spirit” of people like Elizabeth Hancock, who buried her entire family after they died of Plague, or who

120 remember the Plague dead by placing flowers or stones on the graves of those who died. I would consider the tourism at Eyam to be an embodied memorial tourism that employs imagination and empathy to evoke an emotional connection to the victims and survivors of the Plague at Eyam. Tucker’s findings about hospitality are also echoed here, though in Eyam, hospitality is directed away from the home and toward the official tourist institutions. In deference to the rejection by visitors of a tourist label and a firm acceptance of the tourist attractions as directed by the signs and the facilities in the village, visitors can get an individual, unique-to-them, experience in speaking to the local people who work and volunteer at local attractions and questioning them more deeply on the issues that interest the visitor the most. Thus, it is, in a sense, tailored to the visitor’s needs while still directing visitors to go to only a fixed series of sites in the village in an effort to minimize the already strongly felt imposition that local residents feel as a result of the visitors’ presence. The negotiation of the tourist experience between hosts and guests is a careful dance. Both the host and the guest come with preconceived notions of what is special or importance about a particular location, and sometimes the presence of others disrupts the experience that is anticipated. The gaze of the guest/visitor/tourist upon the local landscape and history, as well as on the local/host people, is an integral but sometimes troublesome part of the tourist experience. The visitor is seeking out authenticity and anticipated realities, as well as the unexpected and the hidden part of what is being gazed at. In the case of Eyam, the focus is generally on issues of Eyam life and Eyam history that deal with the Plague outbreak that struck the village in 1665-1666, and so it is a primarily romantic gaze that is employed to understand the story of the Plague at Eyam, and then the second gaze is employed to further elicit a more comprehensive understanding of the village history, seeking to uncover the hidden and to narrate the experiences that have been uncovered. People seek to learn more about the Plague than they can get from reading panels at the museum or from looking at the plaques and the Plague Cottages in the village. It is at this point where the local residents come in. Though resentful of visitors for their imposing presence at times and for utilizing physical resources such as pavement

121 space and parking spaces, those residents who are keenly interested in the local history and heritage volunteer their time with one of three heritage sites within the village in order to interact with visitors and to provide their own local expertise in a formally sanctioned tourist location. This not only provides the host with the opportunity to help others, but it pleases the guest to get privileged, individualized information from a local “expert” on the subject. The interaction between host and guest in Eyam is, however, a strained one that is most acutely felt by those who live along Church Street, where most visitors park when avoiding the car park. As more and more people are buying homes in the village to use as holiday homes and as young people growing up in the village are forced to leave due to lack of affordable housing, which is already a growing trend, these dynamics may change, though whether this will increase or decrease tensions I cannot say. It is an ongoing, dynamic process of constant negotiation and accommodation that requires constant reassessment by the parties involved, as the Village Council and other official bodies are already engaged in doing.

122

Chapter 6: “This is a Theme Museum”: Eyam Museum as a Memorial Site

Introduction

Much that has been written about museums within both anthropological literature and museology literature classifies and categorizes these museums, from heritage centres to history museums, science museums, natural history museums, and art museums, each of which has its own purpose and its own particular ways of imparting information to the public. Of course, there are overlaps among the ways that different types of museums display their information, but each type has a few basic characteristics that distinguish them from one another. Heritage centres play a role in the making and transmitting of traditions and identities, whether local or national, as seen most prominently in literature about Scottish heritage, while history museums are based more on displaying artefacts and chronicling the local history of the place where it is located, such as at the Jorvik Viking Centre in York (Macdonald, 1997b; Nadel-Klein, 2003; http://www.jorvik-viking-centre.co.uk/about5.htm, 2009). In contrast, science museums display inventions and feature interactive displays, natural history museums feature collections of objects such as stuffed animals and artefacts from archaeological digs, and art museums display works of art that differ somehow from those items that would be categorized as historical or as cultural heritage (Macdonald, 2002; Harvey, 2005). At Eyam Museum, these different methods of display are not discrete, nor does the museum limit itself to just one or two of these types. From the archaeological artefacts on display at the museum entrance to the specimens of black and brown rats and “Plague fleas” on slides behind glass displays, from the recreated scenes of local historical events to the working model of a mine and the painting of the village on display in the gift shop, all of these types of exhibition are present in Eyam Museum. How, then, can this museum be classified, by others and by those who have designed it and are tasked with its day to day running?

123

In addition to how a museum’s displays are designed, a key determining factor in how it is used is its audience or audiences. Nadel-Klein observed competing audiences and intentions at the Buckie fisher museum in Scotland, where local people affiliated with the museum felt that it should have a very different purpose than that preferred by the professional museum curators hired to administer the museum, with the local people wanting it as a sort of memorial to their beloved dead family members who had perished at sea while the curators wanted it to be a museum about local fishing history in general. This conflict in purposes was very much about the different ways in which the people involved understood what kind of a place the museum was meant to be – heritage centre and memorial collection or local history museum (Nadel-Klein, 2003). With Eyam Museum, as I will illustrate here, there are also conflicts about what the museum’s purpose is and should be, with different audiences having very different needs and preferences with regards to the museum. In the case of Eyam Museum, however, those audiences are divided more along age lines than local versus outsider lines. The issue at Eyam Museum becomes one largely of whether it is a history museum that is intended to be a serious, somber, educational experience or a museum that caters to children, as school groups are its primary source of income each year. Striking a balance between the two has proven to be a difficult task for the staff and Board of the museum, who must balance the need to make money and the desire to educate children across the United Kingdom with the duty they feel they have to employ the more emotional and sacred ways of telling the story to people who will appreciate it as a memorial and as a testament to the sacrifice and survival that took place in Eyam during the Plague. These two are not mutually exclusive, but children and schools seeking to teach history to their children have very different learning goals than do adults and families visiting a museum during a holiday trip to the area. This chapter will explore these themes and seek to understand how the museum reconciles the needs of these two very different sorts of audiences and attempts to accommodate both to the greatest extent possible. Here we will also explore the ways in which the museum’s own staff view the museum and its purpose, which colours and affects the way in which they conduct the day to day business of

124 the museum and interact with its visitors and with one another. One person in particular, Mrs. Stone, the museum administrator, has a very strong view of this and trains new stewards and influences stewards, Board, and volunteers alike, with her particular view of the museum as a sort of sacred space dedicated to the memory of the Plague dead. Here we will examine her classification of Eyam Museum as a “theme museum” and the implications that this has for the running of the museum and the experiences that visitors take away with them. Eyam Museum, under her administration, is very much a place of memorial and reverence, and I examine the factors contributing to this in the section that follows. Finally, I will examine how Eyam Museum’s role as a theme museum dedicated to the Plague outbreak that struck Eyam in the seventeenth century translates to the rest of the village, which, as Eyam Museum is often called the “Plague Museum”, is often referred to as the “Plague Village”. This theming of the museum translates outward to the village itself, and it affects every aspect of the visitor experience in the museum and throughout their trips to and through Eyam. Those who visit the local St. Lawrence Parish Church will particularly note the same theme very strongly in play there, and the church graveyard is one of the most notable examples of the memorial sense of Eyam in the grave of Catherine Mompesson, which is an above- ground tomb in a place of prominence directly in front of the left side of the church. It is from this place that the procession travels through the village to Cucklet Delph each year for the Plague Commemoration Service, with Mrs. Mompesson serving, in a sense,

Figure 8 - Parishioners laying a wreath on the grave of as a representative for all the dead of Catherine Mompesson before the Plague Eyam and as a representative of its Commemoration Service, August 2008 religiosity and sacrifice, embodying in her own story these facets as she stayed in Eyam at her husband’s side when she could have fled to Yorkshire with her children before the self-imposed quarantine

125 began. Self-sacrifice, enormous losses, and near total devastation are key aspects of the “theme” to which Mrs. Stone refers, with the Plague survivors and Plague dead having a place of prominence as very real personas within the museum exhibit. When visitors read about these people in the museum and then go to visit their graves, it makes them more real and keeps their memories alive, in a way, and so serves as a living testament to the lives and deaths of these Eyam residents. The museum, whether purposely or inadvertently, serves as a ritual site, as “visitors [are] drawn into relationships with [the objects in museums]” through the ways in which “those who put the exhibitions together … articulate that relationship such that it both attracts and educates” (Harvey, 2005: 31). At Eyam Museum, these exhibitions are put together in a way that stirs the emotions and leads visitors through a very specific journey with a particular intended outcome that is both educational and emotional. Many of the young families who came to the museum during my time as a volunteer there told me that they had come to the museum themselves when they were at school and that was why they were bringing their children now to see it. Others brought friends and relatives visiting from abroad, from as far away as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States, and even China, such was the impact on them when they first visited Eyam and Eyam Museum in particular. Like the man who told me that he always brings his visiting friends and relatives to Eyam to visit the museum and tour through the village, these people are drawn to a particular element about the story and the way in which the museum tells it. It is emotional and visceral and it leaves a very strong impression on those people who are drawn into the emotional aspects of the story, or perhaps to the religious aspects of the story and the faith and sacrifice of those who followed the leadership of their religious leaders at the time, Anglican and Non-Conformist alike. How, then, does the museum accomplish this task, and what attitudes and thought processes go into creating this effect for its visitors?

Eyam Museum as “Theme Museum”

126

Hundreds of families visit Eyam Museum each week, with many children of school age accompanying their parents. The museum staff have designed three different worksheets that can be given out to children of different ages because, as Mrs. Stone, the museum administrator, frequently said to me in a hushed and complaining manner, “this is a theme museum, not a children’s museum,” and as such, its exhibits are not designed with children in mind. However, despite this, the museum serves a dual function as a “theme” museum, as Mrs. Stone calls it, and as a museum that earns most of its admissions revenue from visiting school parties, which are sometimes fully booked throughout the day. In this context, the museum serves as an educational facility, complete with a professionally-produced educational video, a teacher’s pack full of information and worksheets for teachers to use with their students during school visits, free visits permitted to teachers who are considering bringing their classes to the museum, and a special classroom set aside for school groups where they view the video and teachers have the opportunity to discuss the video and the plans for the museum with the students before walking through the exhibit. The museum has special admission rates for school groups, a booking system for school groups, and it advertises on its website specifically for school group bookings. Despite this educational component and the importance of school groups to the museum, the display, as has been commented upon by both staff and visitors, is not designed with children in mind, with activity sheets provided to occupy children in absence of hands-on, interactive components to the display, and with displays that rely heavily upon text to illustrate this point. What, then, does Mrs. Stone mean when she calls the museum a “theme museum”, and how does this concept, and specifically its “not for children” connotations, come into conflict with the museum’s role as educator? Additionally, how does Mrs. Stone’s own attitude come into play here? When Mrs. Stone said, hushed and complaining, almost angrily, that “this is a theme museum”, she only did so when no visitors were present, and frequently followed the statement with explanations of what she felt that the museum’s purpose really was. She saw the museum as being there to educate adults who were serious about learning the story that the museum told. To her, the museum is a “serious”

127 place, and the presence of children disrupts that seriousness. In her view, the activity sheets are not only a substitute for hands-on activities; they are also a “diversion” that keeps the children quiet while their parents and other visitors read the display panels. “It keeps them occupied so they won’t bother the other visitors,” she said. She sometimes referenced her previous work at another museum, which she felt conveyed the sort of seriousness she expected of the Eyam Museum. She sees the museum as being intended for adults, and more generally for people who want to learn, where learning means reading the panels carefully and paying attention to the displays. She is bothered by adults who rush through the exhibit in much the same way that she is by children who disrupt other visitors’ experiences at the museum. For example, I observed her saying on more than one occasion that “you can tell he’s not really interested in learning” when someone does not spend as much time as most people looking at the exhibits. These people often look rushed or bored or both, and she often asks, “why did he even come in here if he wasn’t interested in learning about the Plague?” She equates moving quickly through the exhibit with not being interested in the same way that she equates distracted children who are playing rather than filling out their worksheets with not being serious about learning, but for the most part, she concentrates her reaction, which I would characterize as perhaps being one of indignation at the exhibit not being taken seriously, on the children who run around, partly because, as she points out, they “bother” the other visitors. Visitors also frequently comment about how children in the museum, particularly school parties, have felt disruptive during their visits, but it is Mrs. Stone’s strong reaction that makes this point interesting. Furthermore, although she differentiates between a children’s museum and a “theme museum” in her reactions, her primary distinction appears to be the extent to which the educational information in the display is taken seriously by visitors, as simply being a museum specifically about the Plague at Eyam does not necessarily preclude using the sorts of audio-visual or interactive additions that visitors have asked for. Why is it, then, that Mrs. Stone asserts that a “theme museum” is not meant for children and that she differentiates so strongly between “theme museums” and museums for children? Furthermore, how does this impact the museum as a whole?

128

What Mrs. Stone appears to be most concerned with in her identification of the museum as a theme museum is the audience, both in terms of how the audience perceives the exhibits and how the audience behaves while in the museum. Her differentiation between a theme museum and a children’s museum shows that she groups her audience into different categories, by age, separating out children into a different category, and also, perhaps, by the degree to which they take the exhibit seriously, as adults who do not conform to her expectations are treated in much the same way as children are. Her concept of a “theme museum” seems to mean “educational museum (for adults)” in her emphasis on serious learning and engagement with the material in the exhibits. She takes a certain pride in being asked questions and conversing with visitors who show a genuine interest in the exhibit material, and who demonstrate that they have paid attention by asking questions that follow up on material covered in the exhibit, and she has a ready answer for most any question those visitors might ask. Having worked at the museum for many years, she is responsible for training new volunteers and showing them how to respond to these kinds of questions, and so her knowledge of the material is important to her and to the museum staff as a whole because they rely upon this information in order to perform well for the visitors in their roles as stewards. Other stewards, such as Mrs. Peters, who retired to Eyam with her late husband in the early 1980s, echo this sentiment when working apart from Mrs. Stone, showing the extent to which Mrs. Stone’s attitude has influenced the attitudes and practices overall at the museum. Not all stewards share this attitude, as Dr. Richardson, the Board Secretary, has a different take on it – he still maintains that the museum is not designed for children and intentionally so, but he approaches the concept as relating more to available space, budgeting, and the logistics of designing, building, and installing interactive exhibit pieces, as well as the crowds that might back up if children were gathered around such an exhibit piece during a busy time at the museum. Mrs. Stone’s assertion is more emotionally charged as she speaks of noise and disruption and interfering with other visitors’ enjoyment of the exhibits as she comments, only outside of the visitors’ hearing, that “there’s nothing for children here. It’s not that kind of museum.”

129

As Richard Wood writes, “museums are public places where particular codes of behaviour, probably unfamiliar to children, are expected (R. Wood, 1996: 79).” Because of this, children behave differently in museums than an adult would, and this, combined with different learning needs of children in comparison with adults, contributes in part to differentiating a children’s museum from a museum for adults. This brings up an important question – what is a children’s museum and how does a children’s museum differ from what Mrs. Stone calls a “theme museum”? In addition to “not having anything for children”, some of the defining factors to Mrs. Stone’s concept of a theme museum include seriousness, reading the panels, and not having hands-on components to the exhibit. School parties are rationalized as being different from children who are visiting with their families because a) they do most of their learning before going through the museum through a combination of classroom instruction, the educational video shown by the museum, and handouts from the Teacher’s Pack that the museum sells, b) because they usually move through the museum quickly, stopping only for a few key panels, and c) because the adults in the group are not visiting the museum in order to learn about the Plague themselves, but rather as chaperones for the children, whereas in family groups, visits are usually made because the parents have some interest in learning about the Plague at Eyam. Children visiting with their families, on the other hand, are visiting with parents who often want to see the exhibits for themselves, and as such, either the children are less closely supervised than Mrs. Stone would prefer or she feels that the adults get less of an educational experience than they would get if they did not have any children with them. As Matthew points out, “adult learning is intensely personal and private,” and so adults will interact with the exhibits differently than children and may resent the intrusion of children into their museum experience, as suggested by visitors’ comments at particularly busy times (Matthew, 1996: 70). Wood further illustrates this point. He writes of families visiting a museum, “the learning which takes place is qualitatively different from that of either the unaccompanied adult or the child in a school group. Unlike the former, it is social in context, and unlike the latter, it is informal and voluntary in character” (R. Wood, 1996: 79). This informality leads to further differences between family visitors and other types of visitors, with less of a

130 specific learning agenda in mind, except when the family is visiting because the child is learning about the Plague in school, and it is more “unstructured” and “casual” (R. Wood, 1996: 80). Because of the casual, recreational nature of this type of visit, children want and will expect a fun experience rather than a structured learning experience as they would in a school setting, and they are often disappointed by Eyam Museum because it lacks those components that many of them have been taught to expect through their socialization in other museum settings and which academics specializing in museum exhibits suggest are the best ways to engage children in museum learning (Durbin, 1996; Macdonald, 2002). Although she acknowledges that the museum is an educational place and feels a responsibility to teach others about it, Mrs. Stone’s very emotional attitude toward the museum cannot simply be explained in terms of adult versus children’s museum visiting experiences. In exploring the way she conceives of and speaks about the museum, one thing that becomes noticeable is her strong commitment to telling the story of Eyam’s Plague dead in a particular way, and her influence has been a strong one not only in how the museum is experienced by visitors, but also what information is transmitted and the specific language used to do this. In a way, though it is not enumerated in this way by the stewards, the museum is very much a memorial site that holds as sacred a position to the people involved in its running as do the church and the cemeteries in which Plague graves may still be found in Eyam today, and the memories of the people who died in Eyam’s Plague, as well as its survivors, are kept alive through the museum, evidenced by the attention to detail when recounting the stories of their lives and deaths, their romances, and their children. Whether reading about Elizabeth Hancock, who buried her entire family in the Riley Graves at the end of the village, or about the Reverend William Mompesson, who sent his children away and watched his wife die of Plague, writing an emotional letter to his children to let them know of their mother’s death, the museum appropriates these stories and the staff consider it a duty and, I think, an honour to be able to tell their stories to new generations, they take such pride in being able to expand upon the details of the people’s lives in conversations with visitors. The presence of children does not only hinder the ability of other adults to read the panels, to learn the information, and to

131 gain the appropriate amount of respect for the “sacrifice” of the villagers as understood by the staff of the museum, but these same children are also seen as unable to understand the museum in this context, as a memorial to the dead of Eyam. This is not something that can be easily understood by children, particularly as the museum does not officially consider itself a memorial site, but nonetheless, there is a perceived attitude of sacredness with regard to the Plague stories of the people mentioned and this makes the presence of children seem almost profane in this sacred setting. Mrs. Stone’s assertion that Eyam Museum is a “theme museum” may mean so much more than a local history museum about the Plague, given this reading of the attitudes toward and content of the exhibit. Many visitors to the village said that part of what influenced their coming was having read a novel about the Eyam Plague, Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks (2001), and a key part of the novel which seems to bear directly on visitors’ perceptions and expectations when they visit Eyam and on Mrs. Stone’s attitudes as well, as she worked closely with the author of the book as she was conducting her research for the novel, touches on the issue of sacredness and memorial. “[The rector] raised his hands high, calling for quiet. ‘Beloved, I know what you fear. Believe me, I know it. You fear that God will not find those who are laid down to rest outside of hallowed ground. You fear that your loved ones will be lost to you in eternity. But this day, I say to you, you have hallowed all the ground of this village. You have hallowed it by your sacrifice in this place! God will find you! He will gather you to Him. He is the Good Shepherd, and He will not abandon even the least of His flock!’” The village of Eyam, not just the museum, has become a sacred place of pilgrimage, and as such, Mrs. Stone and others believe that it is deserving of respect and solemnity that children and disinterested adults do not provide. Mrs. Stone’s strong feelings against disruptive visitors to the museum is closely tied to this idea of appropriate behaviour toward the story of the Plague and its victims and survivors. The “theme” in question when Mrs. Stone speaks of a “theme museum” is not necessarily the Plague itself, but rather, the lives and deaths of the villagers during the time of the Plague, preserving their memories and telling their stories to future generations. Mr. Stephens, a Board member, local historian, and author who wrote most of the content of the museum

132 display panels, certainly, feels very strongly that he not do harm to the memory of the Plague victims and survivors, arguing that their sacrifice is important and a significant part of Eyam’s story.

Theming Eyam Village

In the previous section, I asserted that Eyam village has become a sacred place of pilgrimage. In part, this is because of the strong convictions of those who have, over the centuries, told and retold the stories of these individuals in various ways and through different media. Some of these retellings have been published, some performed, and some preserved as embodied family traditions, and these stories have made their way to the present in a way that has contributed to Eyam’s present status as a tourist destination, with the most impacting of those retellings being done by local people or by people who have spent a significant amount of time researching the local history among local people, such as author Geraldine Brooks, whose Plague novel is the inspiration for many visits to Eyam, so much so that there is a very high demand for it at the Eyam Museum gift shop and usually not enough available stock to meet the demand. During 2009, a reproduction of the play “The Roses of Eyam” was performed in the village, using the village itself as a setting rather than using a stage, and it was a televised film version of that same play on BBC television in the early 1970s that prompted some of the heaviest traffic the village had ever seen, according to Dr. Richardson (Taylor, 1970). It was only after this performance that a dedicated car park was built for visitors to use, and many visitors came year after year long before the museum was built. A visitor might at first think that the car park was built initially with the museum in mind, when in fact it was sheer coincidence that the museum was able to obtain a building opposite the car park. Its original purpose was for those visitors who came to visit the church and all of the other sites that are still visited around the village today, and at that time it was the church which functioned as a base of information. Though the church still retains some of that function and is visited by dozens of tourists each day, the opening of the museum largely shifted the focus from the church to the museum. However, the

133 village as a whole still remains very much a memorial site in its own right, and sites that have no relation to the Plague at all, such as Eyam Hall, the Crown Cottage Bed and Breakfast, the Church Street Stores, and the local post office all sell items relating to the Plague, as do the church and the museum. When the Peak District National Park was created, Eyam saw the first official signposting of its heritage sites take place, with the placing of blue and green signs and wooden arrows labelling and pointing to the various sites within the village that are of any sort of historical interest. The Plague Cottages are a popular photo stop for many visitors who pause and read the lists of the dead who perished in those houses on the green display plaques near the front gate of each house. A metal plaque on a stone at the junction of two roads directs visitors to the Riley Graves in both regular print and in Braille lettering. Park benches are located at various spots in and around the village for visitors to sit and rest on, some of which are also particularly situated to maximize photo opportunities. Eyam even has its own Youth Hostel as well as Bed and Breakfast facilities for the many visitors who come not only to learn about Eyam’s Plague history but also for the significant numbers who come to enjoy the countryside hiking in the surrounding areas as well. In all of these, the Plague theme is ever-present, though the local residents often resent this and the visitors who come with it. Despite this resentment, which exists across all age groups, there is also a sense of pride in local history, and the museum and the church are joined by the Local Heritage Initiative and the Eyam Map and CD-ROM Committee in continuing to innovate and create new formats for sharing the Plague story with the community, including the audio walking tour that can be rented from Church Street Stores and the Map and CD-ROM that can be purchased at Eyam Museum. These activities and groups continue to perpetuate the theme of the village as the “Plague Village” and encourage visitors to keep visiting the village during the tourist season each year. The village went through a revitalization project at the end of my fieldwork, with signs being replaced, benches being re-painted, new Welcome to Eyam signs being erected, and clean-up efforts initiated to make the village more visually pleasing to visitors, and they were planning the building of a new playground to replace an older

134 one that was lost to flooding some years before, as well. These efforts to attract new visitors reflects the overall trends in Eyam as advertising online and improving available heritage-themed products join improvements to the museum to make a better and more pleasing experience for visitors. From the visitors’ perspectives, it is a mixture of childhood nostalgia of school trips to Eyam, deep appreciation for the “sacrifice” of the villagers during the Plague, and an interest in visiting the surrounding countryside that draws people to the village, and of all of these, it is the Plague story that is most memorable and has the strongest impact as they engage in a curious mix of photographic tourism and reverent memorial behaviour. Visitors speak strongly about the “sacrifice” and the noble character of those who died, and the more religious among the visitors speak about the villagers’ strong faith and deference to the two religious leaders during the Plague. Some visitors have spoken in modern day terms about Eyam residents as having a “strong faith” and being very much like their ancestors of the Plague era, equating the present day residents strongly with those who lived at the time of the Plague, and even in the 2008 Plague Commemoration Service, the religious leaders called upon the attendees to remember the faith and sacrifice of those who lived during the Plague when calling for donations to fund work with people suffering from leprosy abroad, appealing to people who are identified with one plague to alleviate the suffering of another plague that still affects people to this day. Particularly touching have been modern-day expressions of memorial to those long dead, including fictional works designed to provoke emotional responses, as well as simple gestures by visiting tourists such as the Jewish visitors who placed rocks on the Riley Graves to show that the Plague dead were still remembered. Not all sites are treated quite so reverently. At the Boundary Stone, for example, school groups play and picnic and walkers play fetch with their dogs at this place that is visited and known primarily for its role in exchanging food and money during the Plague. It is also a sheep pasture and the land between the village and the Boundary Stone is used for cattle grazing. But each day, visitors walk the long path from the village through the private farm properties along the public footpath, climbing over and squeezing between openings in the rock walls that separate the fields from the

135 home properties, in order to visit this place which has gained local importance due to its role in the Plague. For those who continue on and walk from the Boundary Stone to the neighbouring village of Stoney Middleton, there is a fish and chip shop at the end of the road where the path from Stoney Middleton meets the primary A road that leads back into Eyam. Some of those who go in and have a conversation with the owner may learn that he is a direct descendant of one of Eyam’s most famous Plague survivors through his mother’s side of the family. The theme of the Plague is almost ubiquitous in and around Eyam, and even when it is not the sole focus of visitors, it is usually present in some form. However, the village is generally seen as a sort of memorial location, and many visitors have expressed surprise at the modernity of the village when their expectations centre on the long ago history of the Plague. Many feel that their experience is marred by all of the cars and the other visitors, by the construction being carried out to renovate the insides of the Plague Cottages, and are surprised when some places such as private homes and the local primary school are closed to them. Likewise, many residents are disturbed by visitors taking their parking places or peering into their kitchen windows, but some of these same residents are active volunteers at the museum and deeply invested in sharing the Plague story in this way. They may be angry when visitors park illegally in front of their houses and garages, but are equally dismayed to note that the numbers of visitors attending the annual Plague Commemoration Service have dropped dramatically, as Mrs. Tilley explained to me that, years ago, there were thousands of people attending the service each year, and now it is merely hundreds of people who join the procession through the village, accompanied by a brass marching band, to Cucklet Delph for the service. And people like Mr. Stephens are quick to point to the great loss and suffering that occurred and to remind visitors and residents alike about the full extent and severity of losses to Plague in Eyam during the outbreak. One third of the village is a significant number of deaths, and it was very much a crisis period for all involved. Mr. Stephens, Mrs. Stone, Dr. Richardson, and others make a point of stressing this to visitors. There is very much a feeling that their goal is for people to be more reverent of these losses, and to have that emotional reaction to this information that makes the

136

Plague story at Eyam more than just a bit of history. And the visitors who come with this in mind do talk about how strongly the story affects them emotionally. Their frequent reference to the “sacrifice” of those who died shows that they are viewing the story in a very specific way, as they are intended to do, and their travels throughout the rest of the village are, in a way, a form of trying to understand that sacrifice as they move through the same space in which the Plague dead would have moved, seeing their homes and their graves, touching the gravestones and the Boundary Stone, and making the difficult trip up to Mompesson’s Well to embody the Plague era experience. Some of the sites visited are sacred, religiously identified sites such as the church and the various graveyards in which the Plague dead are buried, while others like the Well and the Boundary Stone are not inherently sacred places, but which are imbued with a sacred quality by virtue of their association with the Plague, as is also the case with the Plague Cottages and the museum itself, which did not come until centuries after the Plague but which houses the memories and tells the stories of the dead in a lasting tribute that is visited by thousands of people each year. It is not merely the fact of large-scale death that makes so much of Eyam into sacred sites, but also the circumstances under which these deaths took place, with no death being more representative of this than that of Catherine Mompesson herself, who could have fled to Yorkshire but did not because of her decision to stand with her husband as he led his congregation to do the same. She died of Plague, and the emotions that Rev. Mompesson felt and conveyed via letter to their children at the time have been immortalized first in Anna Seward’s Poetical Works (Seward, 1810) and now in the museum as well. Her grave is the starting point for the Plague Commemoration Service, where a member of the congregation lays a wreath upon her above-ground tomb while the vicar delivers his sermon to open the service officially before the procession begins. The Plague remains an important point of articulation by both local people and visitors, and the visitors in particular hold the village in reverence and treat it as a sacred place on the whole, remembering the dead, though they died centuries ago. The emotion that must be invoked in order to command such a response is delivered through the detailed and graphic displays at the museum and

137 this carries out into the real world of Eyam village by each visitor who understands the Plague story in this personal, emotional way.

Conclusion

What I have found at Eyam Museum is that this museum, influenced strongly by the people who work and volunteer for it, as well as by the visitors themselves, serves as far more than just an educational facility in which a history is told. It is a site of sacred memorial for the dead and tells a story that upholds a sacred quality in the story it tells, and this attitude is strongly reflected in Mrs. Stone’s often repeated statement, “this is a theme museum”. The relationship of the museum to its visitors is a careful one as they endeavour not to offend the families with children or the disinterested visitors because they are paying customers, but at the same time taking what steps they can to mitigate “disruptions” like the presence of children in order to preserve the sacred and serious atmosphere that they feel the museum should have. They carefully differentiate between children’s museum and theme museum in internal discussions, but it remains a site that depends on children at the same time, and so they try to carefully mold the educational experience for children, influencing both the school party experience and the experience of children visiting with their families. Yet, they do not make exhibits that are designed with children in mind. They do not have any plans to make exhibits for children, hands-on exhibits, despite the overwhelming preference of visitors for this kind of information. They do not plan this because it would cost too much. They do not plan this because it would cause even more congestion to their already crowded exhibit halls. But most of all, they do not plan this because it would belittle the sacred nature of the museum and the story it tells as a memorial to the Plague dead and as a testament to what they see as the strength and sacrifice of the survivors. This is a museum that is not just an educational experience, but also one that strives to evoke a specific set of emotions and experiences in its visitors, in much the same way as Holocaust museums or other museums that tell stories of the dead in powerful and deeply affecting, personal ways, and it does this not only through its exhibits, and not only through the conversations

138 its staff and volunteers have with visitors, but also through its influential role as an aid to researchers such as the author of Year of Wonders (and to university students like me) and as the official voice of Eyam’s history. It influences the education of children at schools throughout the whole of Britain who bring school groups to visit year after year, and even while including new research and information about the Plague at Eyam – the Plague that may not have been bubonic plague at all, it strives to retain a particular essence to the story that has been told by local people for over three hundred years, representing the village’s oral traditions as much as representing the data present in historical records and scientific research. And it provides a living memorial to the two hundred and sixty one people who died between 1665 and 1666 during the period of voluntary quarantine to prevent the spread of a Plague epidemic. It is all of these things that make it what Mrs. Stone calls “a theme museum”, and while the role of Eyam Museum as the creator of a sacred memorial space for Eyam village is not unique among museums that cover similar instances of large-scale loss of life, it nonetheless represents an important point of articulation for understanding the village of Eyam and the way in which the Plague story of Eyam is conceived of and transmitted to the visiting public, to schools, to researchers, and to the stewards themselves. Mrs. Stone and Mr. Stephens, and Dr. Richardson too, in his own way, strive to ensure that the themes of sacrifice and tragedy continue to be the dominant discourses in telling the story of Eyam, despite any changes in historical or scientific data that would otherwise risk changing the nature of the story of Eyam itself, thus retaining the sacredness through both the information provided and the tactics employed to keep the museum serious and educational and adult. The Board, staff, and volunteers of Eyam Museum take their role as experts very seriously, and because they feel a duty not only to the museum but also to the subjects of its exhibits to tell a story in a particularly strong and moving way, they deeply influence the national and international discourse about the history of this small English village. The role of the museum as deciders of these truths is explored further elsewhere in my thesis. These dedicated workers strive for “authenticity” of the sort discussed by Macdonald and Nadel-Klein in their Scottish ethnographies, and they strive for realism not in the physical experience of seeing things, but rather in the

139 visceral, emotional experience of someone mourning the dead (Macdonald, 1997a; Nadel-Klein, 2003). This intent by the museum as one not only of providing data but also of providing an emotional experience reinforces Mrs. Stone’s assertion that it is not a children’s museum, as children’s museums have been described as “settings that favour concrete over abstract learnings, physical over verbal interactions, experiential over conceptual understandings, and sensory over theoretical encounters” (Cohen, 1996: 73). This is not a children’s museum, but rather one designed as a memorial and a forum for the transmission of local traditional knowledge to the outside world. They consider themselves to have a duty to educate far beyond local reach, but only to people who are serious about learning, and by influencing the education of generations of children so that they come to their knowledge of Eyam with the museum’s particular take on the Plague story as the dominant factor in their learning. This small museum, run almost exclusively by volunteers in a small, otherwise unremarkable village, has had a far-reaching impact on making and keeping Eyam remarkable, in keeping visitors coming, in mediating the types of information passed along to researchers and students, in continuing to portray local oral traditions and the local sense of the facts and meaning of the Plague story, and most of all, in passing along to visitors this sense of sacred memorial to the dead whose lives and deaths are the subject of the museum displays. It is not only the museum that is considered a sacred, ritual site for these visitors or for the locals. This extends to the village beyond, and specifically to those sites associated with the Plague through their blue and green plaques or the wooden direction arrows that point visitors toward different Plague-related attractions in the village. Despite the photography and the picnicking, and despite the running children and dogs playing fetch, these sites are predominantly treated in a respectful and reverent way, as visitors read out the names of the dead and connect those names to the stories they have read about them in the museum. And they equally marvel at the tale of miraculous survival and cure experienced by Margaret Blackwell, and wonder at the strength of those who did survive, like Elizabeth Hancock, whose entire family was buried in the Riley Graves while she alone survived. The museum gives visitors a very specific set of information and tells them very specific stories about particular

140 individuals, and as they travel through the village, they see the places where those individuals lived and where they died. They physically place themselves in as close to the same locations as possible as the people who lived in Eyam long ago. This way of embodied understanding goes far beyond Urry’s notion of the “tourist gaze” or even MacCannell’s “second gaze”, reflecting a desire by visitors to place themselves in the footsteps of Eyam’s historical residents (Urry, 1990; MacCannell, 2001). These embodied understandings involve multiple senses, particularly sight and touch, but also smell and hearing as they place themselves in the same physical locations as the Plague dead, at least as much as is possible, and these visitors, in a way, become mourners at the graves of people who died centuries ago, and it is the museum which encourages this sense of mourning and “being there” that so many visitors then experience as they travel through the village.

141

Chapter 7: Museum Design, Display, and Presentation in Eyam

Introduction

Corsane, Davis, and Murtas suggest that local museums “emphasize that in a globalized world, there is a perceived, even urgent demand by small communities to appreciate and demonstrate their own history, distinctiveness, and identity,” linking museums closely “to the identity of a place and its people (Corsane, Davis, and Murtas, 2009: 49).” Eyam Museum is ostensibly known as the “Plague Museum”, although the museum’s exhibit displays include more about local history than just the Plague history, and its location just opposite the sole public pay and display car park in Eyam means that it is often the first place visited when people arrive in the village by car or coach (Eyam Museum, 2009). Established in 1994 and later expanded with a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the museum operates from around Easter to Bonfire Night each year and is open for business Tuesdays to Sundays and on Bank Holiday Mondays. While Eyam Museum does open its doors for free to local residents and, occasionally, puts on temporary displays of interest to and open only to local people, its primary goal is to tell the story of Eyam to outside visitors. Eyam Museum “represent[s] and assert[s] difference and distinctiveness” that sets Eyam’s local history apart from other heritage sites in the area, thus making it unique and marketable to the public on a national and even international level, and through this distinctiveness, it remains a heavily visited and popular draw among visitors (Anico, 2009: 63). The museum relies primarily on volunteer stewards for staffing and a voluntary Board of Directors for management, though it has one paid staff member, Mrs. Stone, the museum administrator, who also acts as bookkeeper, steward, and trainer. Additionally, there is a volunteer responsible for the stocking and decision-making on behalf of the gift shop portion of the museum. During the course of my fieldwork, I interviewed two museum Board members, as well as Mrs. Stone, and I had informal conversations with several of the volunteer stewards who work one or more two to

142 two and a half hour shifts each week. I served as a volunteer steward from May to November 2008 in answer to an appeal flyer put through the mail slots of all houses in the village. During my time with the museum, I explored the themes of the design and content of the museum, the perspectives of people who work on behalf of the museum, as well as the visitors’ experiences.

The Physical Display

Rather than being a ‘traditional museum’ in the sense of containing a series of artefacts on display, Eyam Museum includes only a few items from the local area, such as stone tools from the Bronze Age, geological specimens from the local mines, and old shoes made at the village’s long-closed Slipperworks, while the centrepiece of the museum, the upstairs exhibit about the Plague at Eyam, is primarily composed of text and graphics, along with mannequins set up wearing period clothing and posed in Plague-house scenarios to illustrate the suffering of the Plague victims (Corsane, Davis, and Murtas, 2009). Much of the museum literature I have reviewed discusses exhibitions as being artefact-centred Durbin, 1996; Anico and Peralta, 2009; Bouquet and Porto, 2005), with display types focusing on collections of objects, so in this sense, the exhibits of Eyam Museum differ from the standard, with the goal not of displaying objects, but rather of telling a story, described on the museum website as “the history of a village; the fully researched and authentic story of the tragedy that befell its people when a Plague struck in 1665; the recovery (Eyam Museum, 2009).” In the context of Eyam Museum, this means using words more than objects to convey the intended message, focusing on telling the story both in terms of the archival and scientific research that has been conducted on the village history and in terms of the “tragedy” as an emotionally-charged story intended to provoke sympathetic and reverent feelings toward the Plague victims and survivors in the visitors’ minds. Both the museum exhibit and the visitors use words such as “tragedy” and “sacrifice” to describe the events that occurred in Eyam in 1665-1666, and many visitors use these words to describe their reasons for visiting the museum before they have seen the exhibit, indicating that these words are part of a pre-existing discourse about the

143

Plague at Eyam that influences people to visit the museum in the first place, and this discourse is fully incorporated into and perpetuated by the museum. Indeed, the museum depends on the perception of Eyam’s Plague victims and survivors as self- sacrificing and noble as one of its primary messages to the visiting public. In addition to passing on the history and science of the Plague at Eyam, as documented in local parish birth and death records, tax records, and scientific journals, the museum’s intent is to pass on a particular attitude toward the Plague through its display items, publications for sale at the gift shop, and the opportunity for conversation with museum stewards at the end of the visit. Furthermore, as the most visible location in Eyam village for heritage tourism, Eyam Museum is perceived by locals and visitors alike as the place to go to learn about local history and the Plague in particular. As Macdonald points out, “Museums’ presence in public debate … is partly a consequence of the fact that they continue to be seen as possessing authority, expertise, and some kind of privileged access to ‘truths’ in the cultural domain” (Macdonald, 2005: 219). Because of this, the museum Board feel a responsibility to tell the best, most accurate story they can tell, and to do so in a way that incorporates all of the latest research into local history and the Plague while at the same time retaining the spirit of the story that has been a part of local oral and written traditions since the 1660s. It does this through a combination of exhibit displays, supplemental written materials, literature available in the gift shop, and live interaction with museum stewards who have been trained to answer a wide variety of questions about local history when asked by visitors. The physical aspects of the museum display include both its physical structure and the items which have been placed within it. My interviews with Board members and Mrs. Stone included discussions about the displays and the building in which the museum is located, about which a number of perspectives have been raised. I was told on three different occasions, twice by Board members in formal interviews and once by a fellow volunteer steward in response to an enquiry by two American visitors, that the building in which the museum is located was first leased and then purchased outright from the adjacent Methodist church. Before going in to Eyam to conduct my fieldwork, I already knew from the museum website that the museum collection was in

144 place long before there was a building in which to house it, and in my initial interview with the local historian and museum Board member, Mr. Stephens, he told me that there were several times at which they thought they had found a place to house the museum, including one space that was very nearby to the present-day location of the museum on Hawkhill Road, but that location, which was the site of a derelict building, ended up being taken off of the market and the museum had to wait until the local Methodist church decided to lease a part of their building to house the museum. At the end of the lease, the church sold the space to the museum outright. Since acquiring the building, the museum Board has made several changes. According to Dr. Richardson, the age of the building prohibits some alterations such as the installation of an enclosed lift, but still allows for many changes to be made within a certain parameters. The museum recently replaced the air conditioning and heating unit with a new unit, and the Board has also recently obtained building permission to construct an extension to the rear of the museum, although the extension “can’t be visible from the front of the building”, according to Dr. Richardson, so its external wall has to be recessed so that it is not apparent to visitors from the front or the side. There is also some discussion ongoing about making the museum more accessible for people with disabilities. Dr. Richardson said that this was scheduled to be discussed in the break between the 2008 and 2009 seasons. The current alternate arrangement for people who cannot go up the stairs is a book containing the full text and graphics found on the first floor display panels that can be read after the person goes through the ground floor part of the exhibit. One additional problem that arises much more frequently due to the lack of a lift is that parents who have brought small children in prams are unable to take the prams up the stairs and so must leave them in the front entrance area of the museum. Many of the parents who had to leave their prams downstairs were unhappy about having to do so. The museum exhibit itself is spread out over two floors, with the ground floor including local history and pre-history and general information about the science and history of the Bubonic plague and with the first floor dedicated entirely to telling the story of the Plague at Eyam. There is also a small gift shop, which sells many types of items, both Plague-themed and not. Board member, Dr. Richardson, told me that

145 at first, the museum was located only on the ground floor and that the first floor portion of the exhibit was added later when they obtained more funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund, which they used to expand the exhibit and to hire a professional design company to help them design professional displays. The text and charts included in the museum were largely created by Mr. Stephens, with additional input in the non-Plague local history sections from Dr. Richardson. Other items found throughout the museum were either a part of the original collection of local author Clarence Daniel, items donated by local people over the years, items made by volunteers and Board members, and mannequins with clothing made by a company to replicate Plague- era items (Eyam Museum, 2009). The mannequins, in particular, are very popular, especially with the Figure 9 - Text and Graphics Panels featuring Plague Rats and Plague Fleas children, who talk about liking the “plastic people”, and wanting “more dummies” in the display. One child wanted “more unreal people”. Not all liked the mannequins, of course. Some children found them to be frightening, with one saying, for instance, “I got scared at the dummies”, but the majority of comments people made about the mannequins were favourable and showed a desire for more mannequins in the display. Dr. Richardson told me that getting them was actually not planned. He said that a member of the museum Board had been out of the village shopping and saw them in the window of a “shop that was closing down” and stopped to ask if they could be purchased for the museum. They paid a much smaller fee than if they had been

146 buying brand new mannequins and had a company make the clothing for them. Museum staff and volunteers then built the display areas in which the mannequins were placed. Another popular display piece is the “working” fluorspar mine model, complete with motion and sound, built by Dr. Richardson, who is a professional geologist. These are popular because very little of the display is three-dimensional, and visitors commenting on the display often state that “there’s too much to read” and “there’s not enough hands-on things for the kids”. Macdonald has described the problems faced by the Science Museum with regard to hands-on exhibits for children (Macdonald, 2002), and some of the same issues were of concern in Eyam. Dr. Richardson told me that the museum Board had discussed whether or not to include hands-on activities for children, and they ultimately decided that the nature of the museum does not lend itself to hands-on displays, and children playing with these would “make too much noise,” as Mrs. Stone has said. This is a significant decision affecting both the intent of the museum and the perceptions of visitors, as we will see later in this chapter. The majority of the narrative content in the museum was written up for display by the local historian, Mr. Stephens . He was the first person I formally interviewed during my fieldwork in Eyam, and he told me about the research he conducted that expanded upon the history that had been traditionally accepted, which was most notably written about by Eyam historian William Wood (Wood, 1865). Mr. Stephens’ research of the 1864 tax records for Eyam in a records office in nearby Lichfield uncovered new information about the population of Eyam during the time of the Plague, showing that the number living in the village at the time was much larger than had previously been believed. He criticized the work of William Wood as poorly researched and considered Wood’s work to be very flawed in both form and content because Wood overlooked “some very important facts” and failed to do his research as thoroughly as Mr. Stephens did. Mr. Stephens told me that he was also asked to contribute his researching skills as local historian to the genetic testing that was conducted in 2002 by a joint team from the United States National Institute of Health and London School of Economics researching the CCR5-Δ32 gene mutation in descendants of Plague survivors. He was given the task of doing thorough

147 genealogical research to discover all descendants of the Eyam Plague survivors living in Eyam today. He was very proud when he told me that he’d been asked to do this research and that he had “even uncovered some new family members” who never knew that they were descended from Eyam’s Plague survivors, and he uncovered ninety-seven individuals in all. This information was used to conduct genetic testing and produce a Channel Four documentary about the gene mutation, in which several local people were featured (www.pbs.org, 2004). When I first visited the museum in September 2005, there was a temporary display about the gene mutation. By the time I began my fieldwork in 2007, it had been made a formal part of the display, expanding on research into the gene mutation and also including related research based on the CCR5-Δ32 research that calls into question whether the disease that struck Eyam in 1665-1666 was even Bubonic plague at all. Mr. Stephens and Dr. Richardson both explained to me that they initially “tried out” the new addition to the exhibit as temporary because of the cost involved in having it added in as a permanent part of the exhibit, but found that it was very popular among the visitors, many of whom had also seen the Channel Four documentary. I, myself, had seen the documentary on television in the United States before I came to the United Kingdom to study, and it was the most influential factor to my choosing Eyam as my research location. Following a trial period with this information remaining a temporary part of the exhibit, it was finally made permanent during the break between opening periods 2007 and 2008. I first visited the museum as a tourist in September 2005, and then I began my research and interviews during the 2007 season and I did my volunteering there during the 2008 season. Because of these different visits over time, I was able to see for myself some of the changes that have taken place with the museum exhibit over the past few years, and I also asked questions about changes to the museum in my interviews. The museum also highlights the pre-history and early pre-Plague history of the village, including the famous Saxon cross that today stands in the graveyard at the parish church, stone tools that have been found in Eyam, and local residents who have been involved in the finding and identifying of pre-historic and early historic artefacts like these. The latter part of the display, which includes a working mine model, emphasizes the more recent history of the village, including the

148 various industries that were once the largest employers in the area, including the Slipperworks and the Glebe Mines. The last part of the display that visitors see before exiting into the gift shop includes samples of fluorspar to show the results of local mining, old leather shoes that were produced by the Slipperworks, and a display about Mr. Clarence Daniel himself along with the story about how he began the collection that became the museum that stands in Eyam today. In addition to having a book format version of the display for people who cannot go up the stairs, which is available in both regular print and large print sizes, the museum also keeps on hand a supplemental binder of reference materials that are mainly meant for the stewards’ use, as well as a small informational pack specifically about the science of the CCR5-Δ32 gene mutation which can be sold to students and researchers like me for a small fee, although Mrs. Stone gave me a copy for free because of my volunteering at the museum. She told me that most stewards had not read the stewards’ supplemental information, and she wasn’t even certain that some of them remembered that it was even there, but I made an effort to read it and it showed me just how much of the information that Mr. Stephens uncovered was left out of the formal exhibit, which again shows the process of weeding out the most pertinent information. Mr. Stephens and Dr. Richardson both told me about the process of deciding what to include in and exclude from the display, with Mr. Stephens discussing the research he conducted, as discussed above, and Dr. Richardson discussing the actual design and building of the exhibits. He told me that, in addition to contracting with a company to design and build the actual displays, as was the case with the Aros centre that Macdonald studied on the Isle of Skye, they “went around to visit other museums” such as the Jorvik Viking Centre in York to get ideas of how to set up the displays and what types of information and what styles would be best for them to use (Macdonald, 1997). This combination of looking at other museums’ styles and content and hiring a professional design company led to the basic format and content of the museum that is now built upon with additions rather than outright changes when new displays and new information is added. Also, because of the style of the displays, they can be moved around if necessary, which is why Dr. Richardson insists that there is enough room upstairs now for people in

149 wheelchairs to have plenty of room. It is ironic that many stewards would not necessarily know this. Many of the stewards with whom I spoke had not been upstairs to see the exhibit for at least a year or more, and even Mrs. Stone told me that she had not been up there since it was renovated the previous winter apart from checking on the air conditioning and heating unit at top of the stairs, which does not require actually going in to the exhibit. Because of this, some of the stewards may not necessarily be aware of the content of the new pieces of the exhibit apart from hearing of it by word of mouth, being told by Mrs. Stone, Dr. Richardson, or Mr. Stephens. In fact, much of the training is oral and I only went through the exhibit three times after beginning my fieldwork, and only once after beginning my volunteering period. Thus far, this discussion has been about what the museum has done to set up the exhibits and to decide which information to include and what to omit. However, the museum also keeps track of what visitors say, both in the form of written comment cards and via oral feedback, usually in the gift shop at the end of the exhibit. To a certain extent, visitor preferences and expectations are considered by the museum administration when they design their exhibits. Visitor recommendations and requests for the exhibit are sometimes very specific, including suggestions that audio- visual and tactile elements be included within the exhibit, in part to make the exhibits more interesting to children, and in part to make the exhibits more appealing to the adults. These suggestions came from both adults and children, but among both there are common themes, especially with regard to things meant to make the experience of visiting the museum seem more “realistic.” Much of the museum literature that I have examined, such as Macdonald’s examination of the Aros Centre on Skye, or her ethnography of the science museum in London and Nadel-Klein’s ethnography of heritage centres in Scottish fisher villages, and more point to a desire for “authenticity” both by the people responsible for museum displays and by visitors to the museums where they conducted their research (Macdonald, 1997; Macdonald, 2002; Nadel-Klein, 2003). To be authentic, the literature suggests that museums try to tell a story that not only provides information that is considered by the museum board, the visitors, or both to be complete and accurate, but also to do so in a way

150 that gives the story being told a physical and emotional context and a feeling of realism to add to the visitor experience. However, different people have different ideas of what would best create that realism for them.

The Museum and its Visitors

The limitations of the museum design are often dictated by budgetary matters, with funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund making up only a portion of the museum’s budget, ticket sales similarly accounting for a relatively small portion of the museum’s revenue, and the gift shop being the highest earner for the museum. For this reason, although the museum contracts with a professional design firm to make its displays, it uses volunteer stewards for staffing, second-hand mannequins as models for the Plague victims, and artefacts that have been donated by local residents for inclusion in the displays. It makes a small number of changes each year during its off season between, roughly, Guy Fawkes Day and Easter, but the budget only permits a small number of changes each year. Upcoming priorities at the time I was concluding my fieldwork were building an extension to the back of the building to use for additional storage, and a possible installation of a chair lift for the stairs in place of the stair lift that had been in use for several years by that time. The museum does try to incorporate visitor suggestions into its exhibits, but it can only do so within certain constraints that are a) affordable, b) possible in the space available, and c) in line with the basic vision that the museum board has for its displays. Budget is certainly a strong deciding factor in why there are no audio or video recordings or any “interactive” displays, and space is another factor that prevents some of the changes that visitors want, and quite a lot of visitors commented on crowding during busy times of the day, but it is the last point which I will discuss further in this chapter, as it has emerged as a recurring topic with the museum administrator, Mrs. Stone. During the height of the tourist season, the museum can get very busy, and during the school year, it is busier still. Although the maximum capacity for school parties is thirty, the museum usually limits the groups to fifteen children plus adult chaperones and encourages larger school groups to visit the museum in staggered

151 visits so that there are not too many children in the museum at one time. The museum also becomes very crowded when families come with their children and on rainy days when a large number of people come into the museum to get out of the rain. A storage area has been set aside near the entrance for visitors to leave their umbrellas, raincoats to keep the floors dry. Dr. Richardson told me that, over the past few years, the display has been reworked and moved around to create more space upstairs. Each winter, while the museum is closed for business, renovations are made to accommodate both the wishes of the museum to add new things to the exhibits and the needs of the visitors, such as providing more space and installing a new heating and air conditioning unit. Despite working to meet these needs, they cannot meet all of the needs of visitors, such as installing a chair lift that would allow disabled visitors to go upstairs with their wheelchairs rather than relying on the stair lift, which can only be used for visitors who are able to walk and stand while viewing the upstairs exhibit. Otherwise, wheelchair-using visitors must instead stay downstairs and read the alternative museum book, which contains all text and graphics shown on the displays upstairs. Additionally, despite requests for upstairs benches to sit on for those visitors who have trouble standing for long periods of time, at the time of my fieldwork, the only available seating was downstairs and on request only. Stewards offer a seat in the gift shop to anyone who needs to sit down for a while, extending courtesy and having polite and interested conversation with anyone who is curious about the exhibit, and older visitors in particular seem to prefer sitting to standing for the long periods of time required to view the exhibit. Issues of space and display placement within the exhibit are tied in to the ways visitors use the space as well as how the museum intends the space to be used. Visitors have certain expectations of what a museum should include, which increasingly includes interactive exhibits and multimedia aspects to the exhibits. Their expectations are for entertainment as well as education, which is why exhibits such as that seen at the Science Museum in Macdonald’s 2002 ethnography of the Food for Thought exhibit, at the Jorvik Viking Centre in York, at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, the Open-Air Museum at Göreme, Colonial

152

Williamsburg living village with its costumed tour guides, or even at the Nakambale Museum in Namibia, with its live-action presentations by local villagers, are part of a growing trend that sees museums as entertaining as well as educational (Macdonald, 2002; http://www.jorvik-viking-centre.co.uk/about5.htm, 2009; Harvey, 2005; Tucker, 2005; Handler and Gable, 1997; Fairweather, 2001). Eyam Museum lacks these aspects, except for the case of school groups, whose visits include a fifteen minute video with every visit and a lecture from a guide if they pay extra. Otherwise, only very special occasions have live actors or other “entertaining” aspects to the exhibit, such as the summer 2008 re-opening special event for locals only, which chronicled local education from the beginning of Eyam’s first school until the present, with display pieces set up specially in the room usually reserved for school groups using donated items from the local community. In this, Eyam Museum acts as a heritage centre with a live actor dressed as Eyam’s first Head Teacher and it makes the display very personal to the visitors, who spoke with one another about all of the children they recognized from the photographs, and about the memories invoked by the names of children on tea towels they had made at school years ago, making it a moment of community memory and sharing. This is reminiscent of the desired format that local people wanted for the Buckie fisher museum profiled by Nadel-Klein, as a local heritage centre intended for local use to chronicle and collect local memories (Nadel-Klein, 2003). However, this was a rare special event rather than a regular feature of the museum, and it was produced with the cooperation of the local residents and open only to them, and it was very different from the other exhibits and display styles within the museum. The main museum exhibit does include items donated by local residents and a small recent history section with artefacts from the village, but Eyam Museum also functions as a professional museum with a display designed in concert with a professional design company, but guided by and using content written by local people. This is a very different sort of endeavour from that seen at Buckie, as Eyam Museum melds the personal meanings of the history the museum aims to tell with the public presentation and professional guidance that caused such conflict at Buckie. Although visitors are not entirely satisfied, the local residents and the people who run and design the museum have a much more

153 amicable relationship with one another than Nadel-Klein observed in Buckie. However, the museum sees very little traffic from local residents apart from special events like the re-opening special event about the local school. Local people who are not stewards at the museum seldom visit, but they are permitted to come for free if they do. The stewards are recruited locally, however, and most of the Board members and volunteers are local residents rather than museum professionals. This gives it a very locally-driven dynamic, although the number of local people involved is relatively small compared to the overall village population. It behaves very differently from the Buckie fisher museum because of this different dynamic, and it may not be entertaining or have audio and visual elements that visitors desire, but it satisfies the local people in general, and it is professionally produced. It does not include a full sensory experience like Jorvik Viking Centre in York or have rooms full of inventions or artefacts like the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, but rather tells a story in text and in emotion, and through this, provides an experience that speaks to visitors nonetheless (http://www.jorvik-viking-centre.co.uk/about5.htm, 2009; Harvey, 2005; Nadel-Klein, 2003). Furthermore, it is part of a holistic visitor experience that may begin at the museum but continues on after the museum visit to include the rest of Eyam village, as well.

Eyam Museum and Eyam Village

Eyam Museum has a dual responsibility as the expert on local history – it is responsible both to its visitors and to the village whose history it represents. This local effort to preserve Eyam’s history in a format to be presented to other people has evolved and taken shape over the centuries, from Anna Seward’s writings that first publicized and romanticized the life and death of Catherine Mompesson, wife of the Reverend William Mompesson, and her father, Thomas, who began the tradition of the annual Plague Commemoration Service during his tenure as Rector of St. Lawrence Parish Church, to local nineteenth century historian, William Wood, and early twentieth century Eyam historian, Clarence Daniel, whose collection inspired the museum as it stands today (Seward, 1810; Wood, 1865; Eyam Museum, 2010). The

154 museum strives to remain true to the spirit with which these historians and community leaders began the heritage project in Eyam and to the descendants of Eyam’s Plague survivors whose oral family traditions have also played a role in the ways in which the Plague is discussed and displayed today. Eyam Museum is the primary official voice of the village in matters related to local history, and in addition to displaying items it acquires intentionally, it is also the place where local residents bring items that they feel to be of historical value, where Dr. Richardson will assess them to determine their age and whether they are something that could be of use to the museum. The museum considers local people’s memories and input to be of value to the display and values them both as information that they can include in the official museum exhibit and among the stewards who volunteer their time to the museum. Concessions to local residents, such as free admission to the museum, and special events like the local education exhibit for the 2008 museum re-opening, continue to engage the local community. At the same time, without the local community, the museum cannot continue to exist in its current state. When I first began my volunteering, it was in response to an open invitation placed in the mail slots of all local homes seeking new volunteer stewards to work at the museum in at least one regular two to two and a half hour slots per week. Museum stewards get a discount on purchases at the museum gift shop and get free training, as well as a thank you luncheon at the end of the year. However, the majority of museum stewards are retired pensioners and the number of volunteers who are regularly available is declining. However, those stewards who do regularly volunteer their time at the museum are quite dedicated to the work that they do, and they are experts in their own right about not just the Plague but other aspects of local history and local geography as well. As we saw in Chapter 4, their expertise is an important part of the service Eyam Museum provides to the public, and they play an integral role in the transmission of information about Eyam’s history to visitors who come to the museum. They augment the message of the museum and they each bring their own kind of expertise to the table as active members of the museum and of the local community in general, and their dedication to doing so is evident in their participation even in the heaviest rainstorms, which is difficult especially for those who

155 walk to the museum from their homes. Mrs. Marshall, for example, enjoyed speaking specifically about the “Non-Conformist influence during the Plague”. She said that “Stanley was deposed because he was a Non-Conformist, but nevertheless, his aid was enlisted in the Plague effort because he was respected by the people.” Mrs. Marshall’s own Methodist upbringing led to her particular interest in Non-Conformist contributions toward the Plague heritage. Mrs. Carey is a direct descendant from one of the women profiled in the museum display, and so her family history and her participation in the genetic testing give her pride of place as a steward with a very personal connection to and actual participation in some of the aspects of the museum display. Dr. Richardson’s expertise was in the lead and fluorspar mines and the industry of the city, and Mr. Stephens was the expert in the statistics of the Plague. Mrs. Tilley and Mrs. Stone were particularly knowledgeable about other businesses in the village that they would refer visitors to, like the Eyam Hall Buttery and the Eyam Tea Rooms, and Mrs. Stone was an expert on the history of the museum itself. These men and women trained me as I shared shifts with them, showing me which businesses were in local favour and which were not, and giving me what I would consider to be insider knowledge about local history that is reserved for when visitors stop and ask for extra details about a particular aspect of the museum display. During my on-the-job training with Mrs. Stone and others, I learned about group bookings, ticket sales, and gift shop sales, as well as about aspects of the displays about which visitors had the most questions, disabled access issues, and the history of the museum. I was instructed to give the older stewards the opportunity to answer questions first because Mrs. Stone said that “they are proud” of their local knowledge and they enjoy sharing it with people. And I was shown how to handle interacting with the children with regard to the various quizzes they are given to take around the museum with them and marking the quizzes afterward. There is much more in the museum that is not on display, but rather held in storage in the back of the museum; a storage space that was due to be expanded in the winter of 2008 following the end of my fieldwork. What began as Clarence Daniel’s collection was catalogued and stored by the individuals who first made up Eyam Museum Ltd., and following the receipt of a grant from East Midlands Museum

156

Service, the collection was electronically catalogued and stored in acid-free boxes and plastic wallets in an area with controlled temperature and humidity (Eyam Museum, 2010). Among the items not on display are clay pipes that were unearthed on local properties, a “fretwork clock” made by a local craftsman, and artefacts from the local mines. This collection is not static, however, as the expansion of the building reflects the growing size of the museum’s collection of artefacts. There is much more in storage than there is on display, most notably the mining implements and artefacts, and the mining history of the village is second only to the Plague in terms of its importance to the museum, and to the village itself, which to this day shows the prominence of local mining in the name of its local pub, the Miner’s Arms. Though the museum’s collection is growing, they only accept items that are of local interest in an effort to conserve storage space (Eyam Museum, 2010). The storage space available also includes storage for gift shop stock, which is regularly re-ordered by a volunteer, a business-woman in her early thirties with expertise in retail, and which includes a variety of books related to the Plague or to local Derbyshire history and traditions, as well as various toys and craft items of a sort common among museum gift shops throughout Britain, such as pencil sharpeners in the form of knights and Vikings, tea towels, postcards, and collections of small gemstones of various types. When I asked why there were so many things for sale in the gift shop that had nothing at all to do with the Plague or local history, Mrs. Stone told me that this volunteer, Allison, chose the items she did because they were “what sells”. She said that the books about the Plague sell fairly well, but children coming as part of a school group with spending money at hand tend to buy the toys, replica coins, and gemstones rather than Plague-related items, and older visitors were more likely to buy tea towels, ceramic tea sets, and postcards. As a volunteer steward, I was also entitled to a ten percent gift shop discount, which I mainly used to purchase copies of the various novels that have been written about the Plague. The museum’s hallmark items, however, are its branded items, including school supplies, balls, and other items imprinted with Eyam Museum’s name and black rat logo, as well as rubber black rats themselves. As what can be considered to be a particular “invented tradition” concerning bubonic plague, the black rat becomes a form of branding that

157 identifies both Eyam and the Plague at the same time and conflates the two as interrelated and interdependent (Hobsbawm, 1983). Branding of this sort can identify a particular locale with a particular image. It is not quite the national branding that can be seen in Scotland with regard to figures like William Wallace (Edensor, 2005) or traditional items such as bagpipes and kilts (Nadel-Klein, 2003), but nonetheless, it equates Plague with Eyam and gives visitors a memorable image that is as synonymous with Eyam as kilts are with Scotland. This is not a national imagining transmissible to England as a whole, nor is it unique to Eyam, as bubonic plague has killed millions throughout China and Europe over the centuries, but Eyam has made the rat image its own and associated it specifically with the Plague and with Eyam’s particular local history, and this symbol is prominently displayed in the rat-shaped weathervane that tops the museum building.

Eyam Museum, as a representative of Eyam itself, is tasked with making the local global, in a way, appealing to visitors from around the world while telling very personal, local stories and displaying local artefacts It does this in concert with the local community and could not, in fact, continue to exist and prosper without the input of local people who donate their time and various artefacts to the museum. In exchange for this, the museum provides free admission to local people and discounted purchases to its volunteers, and it shows its appreciation for its volunteers

Figure 10 - Rat Weathervane at Eyam Museum, Figure 11 - Black Rat, Brown Rat, and Fleas, On Donated to Eyam Museum in 1994. display to represent bubonic plague at Eyam Museum

each year with a formal luncheon. This investment in the local community and by local people makes the museum very much a local endeavour despite its national and global aims. This sense of being local can be seen in interactions with the stewards

158 as well as in the displays that encompass more local history than just the Plague era which is the big draw for the majority of visitors to the museum. This commitment by local people for local people is important to Eyam Museum and to the ways in which it makes its displays and its representations of local history and local traditions.

Conclusion

Eyam Museum has a difficult task to do in being simultaneously a heritage centre, a history museum, and a science museum as it displays Eyam’s local history and the science of bubonic plague and “the gene” that has given Eyam international notoriety. In order to do this, the museum requires several elements. The first is deciding what information to include in the museum, which became an amalgamation of Clarence Daniel’s original collection of artefacts, text about the Plague history written by the local historian, Mr. Stephens, and the pre-history, early Eyam history, and recent industrial history sections being primarily the remit of local geologist, Dr. Richardson, who also built the mining model. Over the years, the exhibit has changed and grown, incorporating new information where appropriate, and changing the layout on occasion in response to visitor needs and preferences. Responsible to both the village residents and the visitors, the museum has used a variety of tactics in designing the overall layout and content of the exhibits. From a one floor exhibit while renting the space from the Methodist Church to two floors in the now purchased church property and a rear extension for additional storage, Eyam Museum has grown and expanded its content over the years. In an effort to be as professional as possible and through the assistance of grant funding, the museum was able to hire professional designers to create the display panels and build the display cases for artefacts such as the rats in the Plague exhibit and the mining implements in the section about the Glebe Mines, and they contracted with a clothing design company to make period clothing for the mannequins that were purchased at discount from a shop that was going out of business. Through these things, they were striving for professionalism, to present themselves as experts on local history and heritage, and also to portray “authenticity” in their display. Different

159 things can be seen as making something authentic, like recordings of local voices (Nadel-Klein, 2003), mannequins or statues made to look as realistic and appropriately dressed as possible (Macdonald, 1997b; Edensor, 2005), or live action portrayals of history (Fairweather, 2001; Handler and Gable, 1997), all of which strive, in different ways, to portray people and events as closely as possible to what is believed to be historically accurate. In Eyam Museum, mannequins and drawings of historical scenes along with personalized story panels are employed to tell an “authentic” story. When deciding how to set up the museum when it was first getting started, Eyam Museum’s Board members visited a variety of museums to get ideas for how to do their displays and to appear as a serious, professional museum, and yet their display format differs significantly from the current theme in museum display that leans toward interactive exhibits as well as from the long-accepted museum format of displaying artefacts as tangible representations of history or of nature. It does display some artefacts, but it has no interactive activities, and the only concession it makes to visitor demands for sound and visuals is the model of the mine and the fourteen minute video that is available only to school groups. Using activity worksheets to give children something to do within the museum is their alternative to hands-on activities for the reasons explored in Chapter 4. The heavy reliance of the museum on text panels runs counter to current museum trends, and it also stands in stark contrast to what research into the learning styles of adults and children suggests are the most effective educational display styles. However, in its own way, Eyam Museum accomplishes something that differs from what most museums do, evoking a very emotional response from its visitors and interesting the visitors in the personal lives and deaths of the people whose stories are told through these text panels and the accompanying dioramas. As I explored in Chapter 6, this lack of “fun” interactive activities are not merely practical, but rather this contributes to the solemnity desired of the museum by the staff, who do see the museum as a memorial site in many ways. The stories of individual people who lived and died in the Plague are its claim to authority and authenticity, and it strives to make real the events of the Plague in the visitors’ minds in telling these very personal stories.

160

Though visitors may bemoan the preponderance of text in the exhibit, the panels tell the story of the Plague to them in ways that an exhibit based on artefacts and interactive displays could not accomplish. It shows suffering and perseverance, “sacrifice” and miraculous recovery and couches the Plague in those terms. When visitors’ experiences at the museum are added to previous knowledge they might have gained through school, watching the documentary about the genetic testing, seeing the play “The Roses of Eyam”, or reading one or more of the many novels that have been written about the Plague at Eyam, the story of the Plague is very much humanized and personalized. In this way, the museum is able to connect with its visitors on a visceral level, which could arguably be a stronger impact than it would have on a purely educational level, showing that research into learning styles ignores the important factor of emotional reactions. Similar to what MacCannell calls the “second gaze”, visitors here see more than just what is physically in front of them, looking for the “truth” behind what they see in the museum display. They then use this information when they go out into the village to visit its other Plague-related sites and keep this information in mind as they travel from place to place, visiting the Plague Cottages, the Riley Graves, the Boundary Stone, Mompesson’s Well, the Cucklet Delph, and the grave of Catherine Mompesson. Through this, the museum gives the visitors a sense of what is “authentic” that they then use as their guide for the rest of their visit. The museum provides them with a framework with which to view the rest of the village and the Plague history that makes Eyam famous. In this way, they are given an imaginary historical landscape superimposed onto the real, modern day landscape of the village. This framework is partly historical, partly personal, and partly religious due to the strong role of the parish church and its leaders in the actions taken during Eyam’s Plague outbreak. The museum works to bring all of these elements to its display and to the experience that visitors take away with them when they leave. And finally, the degree to which the local community is prioritized by the museum is also important. The stories that are told are not all stories of a distant past and long dead people. The descendants of these people are also a small part of the exhibit, whether in the discussion of their famous ancestors’ lives, the part of the

161 display that tells about the genetic testing that was conducted, the recent history of the village that includes artefacts from some local residents’ lifetimes, or in the residents themselves who play a role as both Board members and volunteer stewards. Special events specifically for residents and free admission for people who live in the village, flyers that go out to every home in Eyam, and volunteer participation from within the village itself show a strong desire of the museum to engage with the local community. In this, the museum behaves much like a heritage centre or memorial site rather than as strictly a museum or science or of history. Through volunteer stewards telling visitors their own local memories or giving them directions with added information based on local knowledge, visitors are connected to the local community and made to feel welcome, as well, and the knowledge and experience of the volunteers is valued and given importance. The local is made important in the present and not just in the past, and the different time periods included in the museum are connected together, distant past, Plague past, recent past, and present, so that the visitors see a progression through time and through genealogical descent in some cases. The methods of display and the purpose of each part of the exhibit in Eyam Museum are both like and unlike what can be seen in other museum literature. Thought is put into the smallest details of the museum’s design, and aspects of the display are tested before being made permanent, as was done with the genetic mutation portion of the display. The museum attempts to please its visitors, but is also greatly constrained by budgetary issues and lack of space, and so makes compromises where possible in order to try to meet the visitors’ wishes halfway. Though the museum aims to educate, it does so in a very emotion-provoking way that provides a connection between visitors and the residents of Eyam of its Plague-era past while also connecting them to present-day Eyam and the local community. The knowledge is transmitted via professionally-produced exhibits containing information prepared by local expert Board members, making it a museum that can compete with other museums on the national and international level while remaining distinctly local, transmitting traditional knowledge about local history in a way that fleshes out the traditional story with statistics and modern research while holding true to the basic

162 details of the traditional stories that have been told and transmitted across time in Eyam.

163

Chapter 8: Plague Heritage, Plague Inheritance: CCR5-Δ32 – Public Understanding of ‘the Gene’ in Eyam

Introduction

Eyam’s identity as the “Plague Village” has largely been produced out of a combination of oral tradition, history books, medical texts, prose, poetry, plays, church records, tax records, and copies of letters sent by the Reverend William Mompesson to his children, as this thesis has shown. These publications and documents told the story of the voluntary quarantine of Eyam during a year-long outbreak of what was believed to have been bubonic plague in 1665-1666, and of the loss of one third of the village population to Plague during this outbreak. Yet, they also told the stories of the survivors, whose tales have intrigued scientists and historians alike over the years. As discussed earlier in this thesis, in 2002, drawn to Eyam by stories of Plague survivors while he was researching HIV transmission and resistance, Dr. Stephen J. O’Brien of the US National Institute of Health came to Eyam to test Eyam’s Plague survivor descendants for a particular genetic mutation, CCR5-Δ32, about which a documentary was made for Channel Four. The first person I made deliberate contact with upon starting my research was the local historian, Mr. Stephens, who researched the local genealogies to define a research sample for Dr. O’Brien specifically of those people living in Eyam who were descendants of the people who survived Eyam’s Plague outbreak. He identified ninety seven living descendants who would be tested for the CCR5-Δ32 gene mutation. This intrigued me, the idea of the descendants of Plague survivors still living in Eyam today, and I wondered to what extent the local identity of Eyam as Plague Village and people’s personal identities as descendants of Eyam’s Plague survivors might intersect, and how the notion of heritage in this instance would take on a personal as well as a geographical/historical significance, much like the fishers celebrating their heritage in Nadel-Klein’s 2003 ethnography of Scottish fisher heritage or Gaelic—speaking crofters celebrating their heritage in Macdonald’s 1997

164 ethnography of Carnan on the Isle of Skye. My meeting Mrs. Carey, a direct descendant of Margaret Blackwell, whose story as a Plague survivor has been written about and retold often in the centuries since Eyam’s Plague outbreak, was not planned. I was first introduced to her when we were given the same volunteering slot together at Eyam Museum, and it was through our volunteer shifts at the museum that I got to know her and she told me her story. What follows here is a discussion of divergences and intersections between different narratives about the Plague, and about the CCR5-Δ32 gene mutation, henceforth called “the gene”, as it was most commonly called by my informants.

The Plague and CCR5-Δ32 in Eyam

“The Plague” in Eyam is a constant point of reference, with the Eyam being known as “The Plague Village”, displaying signs related to Plague-era locations in the village, its museum dedicated to telling the story of Eyam’s Plague outbreak, complete with rat-shaped weathervane atop the building, and numerous plays, novels, and historical and scientific publications attesting to its popularity in the public imagination. Elsewhere in this thesis, I talk about the Plague from a heritage tourism standpoint and in terms of the romantic ideas of sacrifice and survival that are attached to Eyam’s Plague narrative in a majority of the works mentioned above as well as in the museum, the local parish church, and the tourist imagination. It is spoken of as a dynamic organism that is part disease, part history, and part antagonist in a story against which Eyam’s residents are the protagonists. As a dynamic entity with which the people engage, it is almost a living thing in the narratives that people tell about it. In a way, this is the case if one thinks about Yersinia pestis, the bacteria which causes bubonic plague, as a living thing, and as with “the Plague”, “Yersinia pestis” too is often discussed in writings about the Plague and in the museum itself. Thus, the Plague becomes an object that is at once a biomedical concept and a physical opponent to be defeated, often spoken of with religious undertones because of the role of Eyam’s religious leaders at the time of Eyam’s Plague outbreak.

165

The biomedical understandings of the Plague centre on infection, transmission, and immunity. Medical literature about the Plague in general and about Eyam’s Plague outbreak in particular dates back to the early eighteenth century (Mead, 1722), at a time when discussions of Plague were informed more by religion than by science, and these discussions about the Plague and about the CCR5-Δ32 gene mutation continue today through numerous studies being conducted based on historical reports, statistical modelling, and genetic testing (for example, Coleman, 1986; Dean, Carrington, and O’Brien, 2002; Mecsas et al, 2004; Stephens et al, 1998; Massad et al, 2004). In 2002, the British television network Channel Four aired a documentary about genetic testing that was done in Eyam by a US researcher, Stephen J. O’Brien of the National Institute of Health, in conjunction with University College London (UCL). I saw the Channel Four documentary, Mystery of the Black Death, in the United States on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in 2004, and it was from this documentary that I first learned of Eyam, as well as of the CCR5-Δ32 genetic mutation that has become known simply as “the gene” in Eyam by both residents and visitors alike. My first visit to Eyam Museum was in September 2005, and at that time, the museum had put up a temporary display of simple black text on white background propped up on an easel which described the genetic testing and the information they had at the time about the CCR5-Δ32 genetic mutation. When I returned to begin my fieldwork in August 2007, it was still a temporary exhibit, but by Spring of 2008, it had been made a permanent part of the Plague exhibit. In the years since the testing was done, as a result of both the documentary and the inclusion of information about the testing and “the gene” in the museum exhibit, discussion about “the gene” has become fully integrated into Eyam’s Plague narrative. This places it in a very dynamic position with regard to Eyam, the Plague, tourism, museum display, kinship, genetics, and immunology. In this chapter, I will examine the CCR5-Δ32 genetic mutation in terms of its place within scientific discourse, interpretation by Eyam Museum, how it is discussed by visitors to the village, and its place within the family tradition of one family who were tested for the gene. Anthropologically, this discussion is situated within three primary themes – medical anthropology, public

166 understanding of science, and understandings of “genetic kinship”. Though still situated within the themes of the Plague and of the Eyam Museum, and of tourism in Eyam, “the gene” holds a place all its own within Eyam’s Plague narrative. In the many studies that have been conducted concerning the CCR5-Δ32 gene mutation, CCR5-Δ32 and Yersinia pestis become objects of engagement for scientists doing medical research, with CCR5-Δ32 taking on an almost mythical status whether discussed by scientists writing in medical journals, by Eyam Museum, or by visitors to Eyam. Eyam Museum, for example, sells supplemental materials that discuss the science of the gene mutation in a hopeful way, stating that “[r]esearch into the precise mechanism by which Delta 32 confers immunity gives a glimmer of hope that it may one day be possible to develop an effective vaccine against HIV. Mompesson and Stanley could not have imagined that their decision to quarantine the villagers of Eyam might, centuries later, make an important contribution to the possible eradication of another dreadful disease” (Eyam Museum, year unknown, p. 3). Visitors to the village have a similar take on it, some speaking of it in terms of all disease in general, and others specifically marvelling about its relationship to HIV (another actor in this dynamic), and sometimes thinking about it in a very personal way. On my second day of fieldwork, for example, I met a man from a smaller nearby village who claimed descent from a Plague survivor family of Eyam, “the Lowe family”, who told me, “I hope I have the gene. I think it would be fabulous to be immune to those diseases.” He had only a vague notion of what the CCR5-Δ32 mutation means with regard to immunity, equating it with all diseases, while the biomedical profession speaks of it in very specific terms regarding how the genetic mutation has evolved, how it is expressed on the gene “alleles”, how it works in relation to viruses and microphages, and what its potential applications are within the medical profession. These scientists specifically write about the role of this gene mutation in preventing 8 HIV infection in its “homozygous3F ” form and reducing the effects of disease on HIV 9 infected people in its “heterozygous4F ” form (Michael et al, 1998; Dean, Carrington,

8 Homozygous = inherited from both parents.

9 Heterozygous = inherited from one parent.

167 and O’Brien, 2002; Stephens et al, 1998; Thio et al, 2007; Carrington et al, 1999; Carrington et al, 1997; Dean et al, 1999; O’Brien et al, 2000). These concepts of homozygous and heterozygous, however, are absent from the gene narrative told by Mrs. Carey, one of the descendants of a Plague survivor who was tested for the gene. She told me how she came to be tested for the gene: “My cousin, Anne, phoned me up and told me about the research they were doing. She wanted to know if she could give them my information. I gave permission for them to contact me, and I did the swab.” She explained how she received the DNA testing kit in the post and swabbed the inside of her cheek, demonstrating with her fingers as though she was holding the swab in her hand. She put “the swab” back into the return envelope and sent it off. I asked her whether she had “the gene” or not, and she said, “I waited, but I never heard back from them, so I guess I probably don’t have the gene. I wish I did know!” Despite not knowing her own test results, she and her cousin, both descended from the same Plague survivor, have their own understanding of what “the gene” means and how it is passed down from parent to child. She told me that “it’s only the women who can get it,” which relates strongly to her personal connection to Eyam and to her Plague survivor ancestor. She told me, “my mother’s family was from Eyam, and we’re descended from Margaret Blackwell. She’s the one who cured herself of the Plague by drinking warm bacon fat.” Mrs. Carey’s and her family’s understanding of “the gene” is strongly tied to their understanding of their own descent from a female Plague survivor through their mothers’ mothers’ lines. This is a much more personal view of the gene, and one that is centred on understandings related to genealogically and genetically-defined kinship to famous Eyam Plague survivor Margaret Blackwell (Nash, 2002; Nash, 2004). Her cousin, Anne, is Mrs. Burton. Mrs. Burton does know her test results. Mrs. Burton was found to be one of the fourteen percent of those tested who was positive for “the gene”. Unlike Mrs. Carey, Mrs. Burton said that she did not know she was a descendant of Margaret Blackwell until Mr. Stephens showed her the genealogical research he had conducted, which traced her mother’s side of her family “to the Blackwell siblings, Francis and Margaret”. She also does not have the same family history of drinking bacon fat to stave off illness that her cousin has, so for her, both

168 the genealogical information tracing her back to the Blackwells and the genetic testing came at the same time. For her, this was all new information to explore and learn about. She was featured on the Channel Four documentary talking about Mr. Stephens’ discovery about her ancestry and her participation in the DNA testing. She told me, “Oh, I was really amazed to find all this out! I had no idea.” She said it was really interesting for her and her family to take part in the testing. Nash wrote that “[g]enealogy can locate the individual in complex and overlapping, rather than simple, linear histories (Nash, 2002: 39).” With the revelation of her genealogy, Mrs. Burton found not just a new family connection to an ancestor she did not know she had, but she also became bound up in a television documentary, genetic testing, and research searching for a “cure to a modern-day Plague”. Nash also wrote that “[t]he effects of genetics on genealogy and on the versions of relatedness bound up with ideas of ancestry and origins are thus likely to prove politically and culturally significant (Nash, 2004: 6).” This has been especially true with Mrs. Burton with the testing for “the gene”. To the visitors to Eyam, HIV exists more as a modern-day correlate of the Plague than as a strictly biomedical entity. HIV infection involves a set of behaviours and fears that lead to contracting it, but it is not the disease which is spoken of in Eyam as much as it is the potential for curing the disease, which is spoken of with hopefulness and awe as people talk about how “wonderful” the “gene” is in its potential for curing AIDS. This is quite a different view of HIV and AIDS than the shamefulness and pity that can be associated with the disease and often is elsewhere, as in Zambia, where anthropologist Anthony Simpson examined the ways in which people speak of HIV in terms of sinfulness and bad behaviour, and in shame and in blame (Simpson, 2009). He observes that “Sampa described the difficulty relatives had in accepting that someone was suffering from AIDS-related conditions because of stigma and the sense of hopelessness that accompanied the pandemic” (Simpson, 2009:147). In Eyam, by stark contrast, HIV is secondary in the narrative to “the gene”, and the dialogue about HIV is one of hopefulness for a cure. The vast majority of visitors spoke of immunity and of a cure in regards to “the gene”, and the museum

169 staff and visitors spoke of ending HIV/AIDS as the ultimate goal or purpose of this relatively rare genetic mutation. The scientific articles written about the gene mutation, however, do not speak in the more romantic and hopeful terms of the museum or in the idealistic terms of the man who hopes he has the gene because it would make him immune to disease, or in the personally connected way the people who were tested for it speak about it, but each seems to view the gene mutation as a sort of medical Holy Grail while doing so in different ways all related to its bearing on “immunity”. This concept of immunity is a running theme in discussions of the gene, and is an interesting contrast with the concepts of Plague and disease that otherwise dominate such discussions, with immunity being spoken of in a hopeful way and disease spoken of in a more serious manner about what is quite literally a matter of life and death. This concept of “immunity” is used to understand both the ways in which some people survived the Plague at Eyam while the rest of their families perished (Eyam Museum, date unknown), as well as how some people avoid HIV infection despite being at very high risk of infection through repeated exposure to the disease, and why some people who are infected with HIV progress to AIDS far more quickly than others (http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/case_plague/p_clues.html, 2004; O’Brien et al, 2000). Immunity, like the concepts of the Plague, “the gene”, and HIV/AIDS, becomes a powerful player in the way people talk about the Plague in Eyam. Yet, immunity is not understood simply as a result of a genetic mutation. Long before anyone in Eyam had heard of the CCR5-Δ32 mutation, the descendants of Margaret Blackwell were drinking warm bacon fat to stave off infection because that was thought to be the reason that Blackwell recovered from the Plague when she fell ill during the outbreak. The story of Blackwell’s recovery has been written about by two different Eyam historians in two different centuries, but the accounts are quite similar, as follows: William Wood, 1865 The History and Antiquities of Eyam; with a John Clifford, 2003 minute account of The Great Plague, which Eyam Plague: 1665-1666 desolated that village in the year 1666 p. 30 pp. 116-117 Some few who had the Plague in Eyam, Few medicines were available, and none was recovered: one was a Margaret Blackwell. reliable, but some suffers did recover. The

170

Tradition says that she was about eighteen years chances were very slim, but it is perhaps not of age when she took the distemper, and that her surprising that with a total of nearly 300 deaths we father and whole family, excepting one brother, have a few stories of survivors. were dead, at the time of her sickness. Her brother was one morning obliged to go some The first and perhaps the strangest of these distance for coals; - he arose very early, cooked concerned Margaret Blackwell, who discovered himself some bacon, and started, being certain, in her own cure. Margaret’s house still stands, his mind, that he should find his sister dead when though it is not distinguishable by any sign over he returned. Margaret, almost dying with the door. All her family had died quite early in excessive thirst, got out of bed for something to 1666, except that is, for herself and one brother, drink, and finding a small wooden piggin with though she had caught the disease and appeared something in it, which she thought was water, but to be in the last stages of suffering. So much so which was the fat from the bacon which her that on the day in question, her brother who had brother had just cooked, she drank it all off, duties to attend to outside the home, was sure as returned to bed again, and found herself soon he left the house that he would not see her alive after rather better. She, however, had not the on his return. Before leaving the house the man least hope of surviving. … had his breakfast. He cooked himself some bacon, which no doubt would be home cured, and On her brother’s return, he found her, to his great probably far more fatty than would be appreciated surprise, much better: she eventually recovered, today. Certainly there was a lot of excess fat and lived to a good old age. Drinking which he poured into a jug which he left in the adventitiously the contents of the wooden piggin, kitchen. Shortly after his departure, Margaret, has generally been considered the cause of her who was delirious and had blurred vision was unexpected resuscitation. overcome with a great thirst; all conditions encountered at this stage in the progress of the disease. In spite of all her difficulties she left her bed and went in search of a drink, and finding the warm fat, which she took to be milk, drank it greedily. This probably caused her to vomit, but whatever the immediate result, in the long term it was doubtless beneficial. When her brother returned, not only was Margaret still alive, but she was clearly much stronger. She did in fact recover, and lived a full life, convinced that the bacon fat had cured her.

Wood uses words like “distemper”, “dying”, but also “recovered” and “resuscitation”, while Clifford, writing just a few years ago, goes into far more detail and uses words like “cure”, “suffering”, “disease”, “delirious”, “beneficial”, and “stronger”. The former accepts that it was the bacon fat itself which cured her, while the latter suggests that the bacon fat caused her to vomit, thus ridding her body of that which was making her sick. Ms. Blackwell’s descendants tend to take the former view, and Mrs. Carey told me that a long standing family tradition is to drink warm bacon fat not only to cure illness, but as a preventative as well. It is something her mother and grandmother passed on to her, and which she has passed on to her own children and grandchildren. Mrs. Carey worked as a pharmacy dispenser in Manchester as a young woman during the war, and so she is not unfamiliar with scientific and medical

171 thinking on curing or preventing illness. However, to her, this is a tried and true method of maintaining her health, and so it is one that she sticks with and passes down to future generations. This family takes the family tradition of the bacon fat, which obviously made a strong impression on Ms. Blackwell if the accounts of Wood and Clifford are any indication, as a guide for keeping themselves healthy, and Mrs. Carey seems to think it works, and she drinks warm bacon fat whenever she starts “to feel a sore throat coming on” and has her children and grandchildren do the same. The bacon fat takes on an active role here as something which cures, whether by simply fighting off the invaders or by forcing the invaders out through vomiting, as Clifford suggests may be the case (Clifford, 2003). In a very real way, the immune system, the Plague, “the gene”, and HIV are all somewhat personified in these narratives of health and illness that surround the Plague at Eyam, as they become antagonists and protagonists in an epic battle rather than parts of the body and invaders to the body, yet they are also a theological concept to the religious leaders of Eyam that must be overcome or suffered through in order to protect neighbouring villages from infection. Seeing illness as an invader and the self as its opponent is part of what is going on at Eyam, as things such as bacon fat and the modern-day cure of antibiotics are seen as fighting off the Plague, and the Plague is seen as something that must be contained in order to protect others. So, too, is “the gene” seen as a player in this game, as a defender against the invaders which come bringing death in their wake. Purpose and sentience are conferred upon this random genetic mutation, giving it a personality and a will. Words used to describe them, such as “cure” and “immunity” also rest side by side with these notions of fighting and invasion, metaphors which are a running theme in reference to the Plague at Eyam, and which are “resistant … to alteration” (Napier, 2003: 62) as they have been part of an ongoing narrative in Eyam since the 1660s. I would also like to posit that another factor at play in understanding how people in Eyam understand disease, immunity, Plague, and “the gene” is the degree to which they have previously learned about these different topics, and the source of their learning. Someone who has a local family background in Eyam’s Plague will

172 have a very different take on things than will a medical scientist who is conducting immunological research. A visiting family will have a different perspective than a visiting researcher will. And to those people who do follow scientific research, the “truth” will change with each new article, or if one fails to read a new study on the subject of research, one person’s truth will remain the same while another’s truth will change because of the new information that they have read. Someone who knows only of the earlier studies on the CCR5-Δ32 mutation may not be aware that its connection to the Plague has been called into question (Scripps, 2004), and someone who has only learned of the gene through the Channel Four documentary about it or through the museum itself will have very different views, both from one another and from people who either have not seen the documentary or the museum, or from people who have read formal scientific journal articles about it. The access to different levels of information results in the construction of different realities in understanding the Plague and “the gene”. Mrs. Carey’s reality is a very different one than that of Stephen J. O’Brien, and Mr. Stephens’ reality is very different from that of the suburban mother of two who comes into the museum on a day out with her children. Latour and Woolgar (1986) write about the “construction of scientific facts” in terms of testing hypotheses and questioning results, and in terms of peer reviewed publications and reproducing results in the laboratory. The medical scientists studying “the gene” and the Plague use these tropes in order to decide what is real, and as Dean, Carrington, and O’Brien (2002) and Mescas (2004) have shown, this has happened in Eyam. But medical scientific facts are not the only ones at play here, as people like Mrs. Carey sidestep the science through their own embodied understandings of the Plague and immunity, with side by side narratives of a cure by bacon fat (which to my knowledge no scientist has yet published a study about) and her understanding of a matrilineally transmitted CCR5-Δ32 gene mutation, just as the bacon fat tradition was also transmitted from mother to daughter to daughter. She and her family simply incorporated the new information about “the gene” into what they already “knew” about the Plague and immunity in their family tradition. Mr. Stephens at the museum has addressed the “scientific facts” by incorporating the new information into an old narrative, but in quite a different way

173 from that of Mrs. Carey’s family. Research such as that by Mescas et al (2004) refutes a connection of CCR5-Δ32 to Yersinia pestis, and another study has questioned this hypothesis and has suggested that the genetic mutation is so prevalent in Eyam not because it conferred immunity to Plague, but rather that it was another disease prevalent in Europe at the same time, such as smallpox, that led to this mutation (The Scripps Research Institute, 2004). This has led Eyam Museum to rework its display on CCR5-Δ32’s connection to the Plague by showing other hypotheses that have been presented as alternatives to the Plague as the disease that struck Eyam, such as that by the Scripps Research Institute (ibid.) suggesting smallpox as the cause of Eyam’s plague. At the same time, however, the museum display also refutes these alternative explanations one by one and attempts to retain the bubonic plague as the truth told by the museum. The exact nature of that Plague is less important than the effects it had on the local population in Mr. Stephens’ viewpoint. The case remains, though, that Eyam is known throughout the UK and beyond as “the Plague Village”. Redefining the nature of that Plague is problematic to the identity of Eyam as the Plague Village, to Eyam Museum as a Plague-themed museum, to the descendants of Eyam’s “Plague survivors”, and to the myriad of fictional and historical works about the Plague at Eyam. Yet, the various actors involved have, as discussed above, found creative ways of working with the “scientific facts”, which were themselves tested and determined based on knowledge of the local history and traditions, constructing models to determine rates of change and probable causes, and, of course, swabbing the cheeks of the descendants of Eyam’s Plague survivors to test their DNA for evidence, finding a statistically significant 14% incidence of CCR5-Δ32 in a country where 11% is the norm. The reality of the Plague at Eyam is that it is dynamic, changeable, and differently constructed by different actors in the story.

The Gene at the Museum

The museum as gatekeeper is a key player in mediating how the visiting public understands the science of “the gene”, and its primary display writer, Mr.

174

Stephens, is a historian, and its other display writer, Dr. Richardson, while a scientist, is a geologist, not a biologist, so when faced with a high level of technical detail, theirs becomes the task not only to understand it themselves, but then to translate it into something even more understandable for the visiting public. The museum, involved as it was in the genetic testing, and as committed as it is to telling Eyam’s Plague story as faithfully as possible to the traditional local narrative(s) about the Plague, is, then, straddling a line between telling about the science and telling about the social history of “the gene”, as they are related but separate concepts. This brings to mind Nadel-Klein’s discussion of a Scottish fisher heritage centre in which the purpose of the centre was in dispute – the local fisher families wanted the heritage centre to be like a memorial to those who had died in fishing accidents at sea, while the professional museum administrators who were hired to run the centre wished to make it more into a museum for tourists to visit, with the intent to tell a story rather than to serve as a memorial (Nadel-Klein, 2003). Eyam Museum does both of these, but in attempting to tell a story of a science that potentially refutes their traditional history that is being memorialized in the exhibit, they were under pressure to find a balance between science and tradition. Ultimately, their decision was to accentuate the traditional history, and, as described above, to sidestep the discrepancies between the science of “the gene” and its implications for Eyam’s Plague and for those people in Eyam who tested positive for it. However, even though they have written around the issue of CCR5-Δ32 being unrelated to the Plague, they have kept it prominent in the exhibit for two reasons. First, there was a major local genealogical research project conducted to identify descendants of Eyam’s Plague survivors, genetic testing of around a hundred people to test for “the gene”, and an internationally televised documentary produced as a result, thus making it an important part of Eyam’s history in its own right. And second, the findings were significant that fourteen percent of Eyam’s Plague survivor descendants have the gene because it is greater than the national average for Britain. It may not be related to the Plague itself, but it is a part of Eyam’s Plague history nonetheless, as well as a part of a different sort of recent local history in its own right, a part of family-tree-making, a part of creating new stories and new meanings for

175 importance in Eyam, and a part of popular culture as a result of the television documentary that many visitors reported as a primary inspiration for their visit to Eyam in the first place. The museum has created a popular display about “the gene”, sells student information packs about “the gene” which cost 50p in 2008, and has a much more expanded entry about it in the supplemental information book that is available for stewards’ reference in the event that they are asked questions for which they do not know the answers. There has also been demand for the video of the documentary, but as of the end of my field work, Mrs. Stone told me that they had, as yet, been unable to obtain copies of the documentary to sell in the gift shop, but that they would continue to try to do so, both because so many people were requesting it and because of the museum’s own role in the production of the documentary. This shows the level to which the museum is invested in the story of “the gene”, and while it has taken great pains to show that, despite the research about “the gene” that divorces it from bubonic plague, Eyam’s Plague is still “the Plague”, it has also invested significant time and money into making it a permanent part of the museum. This self-described “theme museum” has worked to preserve its theme, being creative with the available data and interpreting it within a Plague context for the visiting public, even though this is not the approach that the scientists involved would likely have taken. The science and the museum display depart from one another here as the former seeks medical explanations and applications, while the latter seeks to present the information in a very specific historical context. They have different purposes and different needs, and most of all, different audiences interested in the presentation of their research. Different still are the experiences and stories of those people who were actually tested for “the gene”, for although they played a part in creating the data for both the scientists and the museum to examine and report, they also had a very different, very personal relationship to “the gene”, whether they were found to carry the gene or not, because of its linkages to their family histories and their family relationships in the present day, as we will examine in the next section of this chapter.

Conclusion

176

We have seen in the discussion above how different actors construct different understandings of what the Plague, “the gene”, illness, and immunity mean to them. These concepts become active entities, protagonists or antagonists in a story, and they are points of multiple articulation in Eyam’s Plague narrative. “Truth” and “scientific fact” are understood differently and constructed differently depending on the actor’s point of view, experiences, and goals. Mol’s concept of the “body multiple” (2002), which looks at the many ways in which a whole is made up of many different parts, is another way that we can view the Plague and “the gene” in Eyam, with them both being considered as heritage issues, historical issues, biomedical issues, and family issues all at the same time. They are objects in a museum, but also a swab of a cheek and a glass of warm bacon fat, disease and immunity, a genealogical project, and perhaps even the key to the cure for HIV/AIDS. The Plague is an object of much religious discussion, but also a source of grief, and a site of remembering. “The gene” is homozygous or heterozygous, but it is also “passed down” from mother to daughter to granddaughter. The Plague is an enemy, and “the gene” is the tool with which to defeat it. And the Plague is an allegory for the modern day plague of HIV/AIDS, with the connection made stronger by history of scientific enquiry into the relationship between CCR5-Δ32 and the Plague. Immunity is constructed from the intersection of these things, where devastation meets hope, and where genealogy meets genetics. In a village that is strongly connected to its past through the work of actors both from within and without, as a site of memory and memorial, and of sacrifice and of survival, Eyam is also seen as holding hope that the results of the genetic testing that was conducted there will sometimes cure another plague, as was written in the handout provided by the museum (Eyam Museum, date unknown). Earlier I described “the gene” as a Holy Grail, and that metaphor reflects the possibilities that it contains to improve the lives of people infected with and affected by HIV. Yet the research that scientists at the Scripps Institute conducted into “the gene” is perhaps a two headed coin, or more likely a double edged sword for Eyam, as it calls into question Eyam’s very identity as the Plague Village. The thing that makes Eyam unique also has the potential to alter

177 the nature of that uniqueness, from The Plague to a plague of, as yet, unknown origins. Someone asked the stewards at the museum once whether “they10 were planning to dig up the Riley graves to test the bones for evidence of the Plague”, to which the answer was no, but by her asking this question, she revealed that this is something that has entered the public consciousness – she had heard the rumour “somewhere” that this was, indeed, going to take place. As more answers are found, more and more questions are raised, and this will lead to further inquiry. Fujimura explains how the “[e]xpansion of genetic screening programs for inherited diseases extended the impact of molecular biology to the public,” including to the students who would go on to become scientists such as those discussed in the first section of this chapter (1996: 145). However, she points out that “scientific representations have far-ranging symbolic, historical, and geographical (time and space) consequences, when packaged in durable inscriptions and black boxes. Once black boxes and their inscriptions are put out into the world, they can be destabilized, either through different uses in other situations, or through changes in situations” (1996: 215). This is what we have seen in translating the scientific data into museum data and then the museum data into personal data. We have seen in the discussion above how different actors construct different understandings of what the Plague, “the gene”, illness, and immunity mean to them. Questions of Plague versus plague, “the gene”, and immunity continue to spark the public imagination in Eyam, but just as important is how they relate privately to people who consider themselves to be intimately connected through a shared genealogical kinship to one of the survivors. This family has its own narrative of health and immunity that follows a centuries old tradition of drinking warm bacon fat for immunity and recovery, but they have also readily incorporate their own understanding of “the gene” into their narrative, connecting their ancestor, Margaret Blackwell, to themselves through their mothers’ mothers’ line, representing “the gene” as something specifically connected to this bond of kinship and genetic descent that has also governed their bacon grease traditions. Mrs. Carey and her cousin, Mrs.

10 “They” in this context is not defined by the speaker, but rather was understood by this researcher and the other steward on duty at the time as a general ‘they’ who might do this sort of a thing.

178

Burton, also shared the experience of being tested for the gene, having their cheeks swabbed, and the feeling of being connected to the research that was being conducted as well as to their famous ancestor in a way that is quite different from the old way. Their original connection to her was through their mothers’ families and oral traditions, through family health practices, and through their kinship to one another, but this new way of knowing and understanding themselves and their connection to her is now mediated through DNA and genetic testing, as they think about her not just as an ancestor, but also as a progenitor who has perhaps passed on her genetic mutation to them. They speak of this in terms of specialness, hope, and intrigue at the possibilities, as they tell their stories to others – Mrs. Burton in the Channel Four documentary and Mrs. Carey to her fellow museum stewards and the occasional visitor such as myself. And even the man I met who “hope[s] he has the gene” has redefined his relationship to his own Eyam Plague survivor ancestors. Just as the Plague has become a dominant trope within Eyam itself, “the gene” is becoming one of the primary points through which Eyam articulates with the world, including individual visitors, as well as with researchers, historians, folklorists, anthropologists, and more. It is a very popular part of the museum exhibit, having first started as merely a temporary display (as was the case when I first visited the museum in September 2005 and again in September 2007), and then being upgraded to a permanent part of the exhibit during the winter of 2007/2008 because of its popularity with the visitors. The Plague, “the gene”, and all that is associated with these concepts, are a part of the popular imagination in Eyam, but so, too, are they a part of scientific enquiry, historical discovery, and family tradition. These elements do not stand alone, however, as they are at least somewhat dependent upon one another for their existence as part of this narrative. They interact, however, with a shared set of terminologies to hold them all together, to ensure that the “multiple” still refers to a whole body rather than many fractured and irreparable bodies. Regardless of the point of view held by the people involved, they are all speaking about the same concepts, albeit in very different ways. As the Museum document states, “Very little happens when conditions are stable, but there have been huge upheavals in the

179 history of the Earth, and its creatures have had to adapt. Little by little, through five hundred thousand millennia, life has changed” (Eyam Museum, year unknown:4). So, too, have the Plague and “the gene” changed, and they will continue to do so as a part of the whole that makes up the Plague Village in modern day Eyam.

180

Chapter 9: Conclusion: The Role of Eyam Museum in Making Eyam a Memorial Site

The story of Eyam’s experiences during its Plague outbreak in 1665-1666 has captured the public imagination throughout Britain and beyond, attracting hundreds of visitors of all ages to Eyam every day during the busy tourist season. These visitors come from all over the United Kingdom and from countries like Ireland, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and China to name a few, and for many of these visitors, they have made a special trip to Eyam because they’ve learned about its history in school, from a television documentary, or from reading about it in a novel or a research article. Most, though not all, of Eyam’s visitors are particularly drawn by its Plague history, and many also come to enjoy walking in the hills surrounding the village, situated as it is within the Peak District National Park and near other popular hiking and camping locations in the surrounding Hope Valley area of southeastern Derbyshire. Although most accounts by local people suggest that tourism numbers have actually dropped in recent years, the sheer numbers of people coming to the village every day continues to have a noticeable and significant effect on village planning and village life. Eyam’s local parish church, at one time, had enough visitors each year to rival much larger cathedrals such as York Minster, and the number of visitors was so great that a car park was built in the northwest end of the village to accommodate the need. Later, Eyam Museum was built, growing out of one man’s private collection after his death. Since its inception in 1994, the museum has grown and expanded, and the exhibits continue to accommodate new information and new ideas as small changes are made each year during the off season. This thesis is the result of fieldwork conducted from August 2007 to October 2008 and I have sought here to take a thorough look at the issues associated with tourism in Eyam and, in particular, the museum’s role in this, with particular attention to the ways in which the museum and the visitors’ experiences combine to shape the way that the Plague is seen in Eyam. As a project of social anthropology, this research has drawn upon studies of heritage tourism and museum anthropology most heavily, with additional attention to

181 medical anthropology and the anthropology of science. Eyam is an intriguing heritage site because of its subject matter as well as because of the different media through which the village and its museum tell the story of Eyam to the thousands of people who visit each year. Heritage literature can be very diverse, including such sites as Colonial Williamsburg in the United States, Nakambale in Namibia, Göreme in Turkey, Buckie and Anstruther fisher museums in Scotland, or Carnan on the Isle of Skye with its Celtic heritage that includes the speaking of Gaelic and the practice of crofting. The subject matter that can be described as “heritage” varies widely and incorporates many different and diverse notions of what is important in the history of a particular place or people. In Eyam, it is the Plague which has come to define the heritage of the village. The stories that have been passed down and the places that were important to the village at the time of the Plague have become the objects of public consumption, being told and retold and experienced in many different ways. In this thesis, I have sought to explore these stories and places as they are constructed and experienced within Eyam, especially through the work of Eyam Museum and its Board, staff, and volunteer stewards and through interactions with the many visitors who come each year. In so doing, there are several important questions to be answered. To begin with, we are concerned with what tourism means in Eyam, how it is experienced by both tourists and local residents, and how the different experiences and interpretations of tourism interact with one another. This central research question has two primary perspectives that are often at odds with one another, and it is the combination and interaction of the two different perspectives which contextualizes and more broadly defines what tourism means for Eyam. Once this is defined, we must then answer the question of how Eyam tourism fits into the broader context of heritage tourism research. I do this here through the theoretical lens of the “tourist gaze” as set forth by sociologist John Urry and expanded upon through the concept of the “second gaze” by Dean MacCannell. This concept of the gaze is integral to understanding many of the complexities of Plague tourism in Eyam. Following on from this, I examined the role which Eyam Museum plays in defining precisely what information about the Plague people should know and in

182 determining how they should learn about it. Here I addressed the questions of how Eyam Museum projects authority and authenticity to its visitors in the telling of the Plague story. I was concerned not only with what the museum does in actual practice, but what its visitors expect it to do for them based on a wider range of personal experience with other museums. How does Eyam Museum carry out the responsibility of representing the village of Eyam as the definitive source of Plague information within the village? I follow on from the earlier discussion of “the gaze” with an examination and comparison of other ethnographic sources that have focused on museums within the wider context of heritage tourism. Additionally, Eyam Museum is not simply a place to provide information, but one which does so in a particular way and with particular goals to achieve. Herein I have explored what the staff of the museum see as the purpose of the museum, and how they act to reinforce that purpose. I have also sought to answer the question of to what extent this purpose coincides or clashes with the expectations of visitors discussed previously. I have addressed more in-depth the elements that make up Eyam Museum and define its character and its place within the wider category of local heritage museums. Following on this, I have looked at how the museum then relates to and represents the village as a whole. The two major issues that I have explored in this regard are that of “theming” the museum and the village with regard to the Plague and the memorial nature of the museum. The idea of the museum and the village as memorial sites is explored through comparisons with other ethnographic sources such as the fisher museums researched by Nadel-Klein, and we return again to the concept of “the gaze” as it relates to this theme. As important as exploring why the museum does what it does is the question of how it does it, looking at the display, design, and presentation strategies employed by the museum in creating its exhibits, as well as at the day to day running of the museum. Drawing heavily on research from museum studies about display and the decision-making processes that inform it, I have examined the ways in which Eyam Museum’s Board members have worked to design various kinds of displays, including also a discussion of public opinions and input regarding the museum exhibits. I have looked at their goals and methods in comparison with other museum ethnographies

183 and research from the field of museum studies to examine the ways in which Eyam Museum’s Board has both drawn upon the examples of other museums and made the museum unique in its own right. I have also explored how the museum Board and the staff and volunteer stewards who work there contribute to the overall museum experience presented to visitors, as well as how the visitors’ own input is taken into consideration when the Board makes decisions regarding changes to the exhibit or to the working practices of the stewards. Moving on from the design and display strategies of the museum as a whole, I set out to examine the subject matter of the museum and specifically how the museum deals with the Plague, which is the primary focus of the exhibit. Here I was concerned with how the museum Board have worked to bring the Plague of seventeenth century Eyam to life for visitors in the twenty-first century. I examined the various types of display styles the museum uses to recreate the Plague and to tell the stories that have been passed down from generation to generation while augmenting the traditional stories with archival data and different visual display techniques. It is here that I drew in a discussion of the anthropology of science and medical anthropology to look at how the biomedical aspects of the Plague were addressed in the display and at the multiple meanings that the Plague can have for the different people who are concerned with understanding and defining it. And finally, I looked at one specific biomedical aspect of the Plague story told in the museum because of the way that it is idealized by visitors, seeking to understand how and why “the gene” has become a part of the public imagination in Eyam, and the wider role that it plays within Eyam’s Plague narrative. How do people talk about it and think about it? Why has it become so important to Eyam’s Plague story and, by extension, to the museum? When I made my very first visit to Eyam Museum, the display about “the gene” was a temporary one on one small panel in black and white and today it is a permanent part of the exhibit spanning more than one full sized panel and also has supplemental materials for sale and additional research data available to stewards to aid in their answering questions from visitors. How is it that something that started off as just a small, temporary item became so integral to Eyam Museum in just a few short years, and why is this important in the

184 wider context of Eyam Museum and Plague tourism? And why is this important more generally to studies that encompass medical anthropology, museum anthropology, and heritage tourism studies in anthropology? This study began with the goal of understanding the intersections of heritage tourism, local identity, and the local heritage museum in Eyam, and using evidence collected during a fourteen month period from 2007 to 2008, I have sought to answer these questions and better understand the role that each of these plays within the village of Eyam. Tourism in Eyam has become an integral part of village life between Easter and Bonfire Night, however much the local residents may bemoan this fact. It is because of this tourism that a car park was built on Hawkhill Road, and that there is a growing number of bed and breakfast facilities and private rental cottages for holidaymakers, as well as a growing number of houses for sale being purchased by people seeking a holiday home rather than to relocate to Eyam completely. The tourism also contributes to the success of local cafes and shops, as well as to the traffic, both vehicular and pedestrian, which can be especially heavy during the warm summer months. To the people of Eyam, there are many downsides to the tourism in the village, but at the same time, it has led to improvements in Eyam such as new signs around the village and the repainting of the benches in the Village Square, as well as to efforts to clean up areas where littering is a problem. In Chapter 2, I explored the issues surrounding tourism in Eyam, including visitors’ motivations and experiences and the reactions of village residents to the impact this is having on their own lives. Heritage tourism is far more complex than can existing theories regarding “the gaze” suggest, and in Eyam, we see that the gaze is part of the picture, but the work of the imagination and the attempt by visitors to physically place themselves within the history they seek to learn about by walking particular routes and visiting particular spots are equally important in understanding the driving force behind the type of heritage tourism found in Eyam. While Urry’s concept of “the gaze” is a strong influencing factor in why people visit a tourist site and what they do while they are there, such as documenting their visit with photographs, it only explains a portion of what is happening in Eyam. Visitors are looking for authenticity, and one of the ways

185 they try to find it is by moving about in the setting of the history they are learning about, experiencing the environment both physically and imaginatively. This imaginative element combines Urry’s “romantic gaze” with MacCannell’s “second gaze”, but it is much more than that. Unlike at Göreme or Carnan, which people visit to see residents living in the present, or even Colonial Williamsburg, which features a recreated past, people who come to Eyam do so primarily to learn about a distant past in a present that has moved on. The green and blue signs posted throughout the village tell visitors what is important and where they should go to visit the places in Eyam that relate to its Plague history, but for many visitors, the boundaries are blurred between the places that are signposted and those that are not, like the people who attempt to gaze inside private homes or to walk into the school building while school is in session. They want to see more than just the plaques and heritage sites. They want to see inside the houses. They want to dip coins into the holes in the Boundary Stone. They want to pay their respects at the Riley Graves. Their actions recreate the Plague in an embodied, experiential way. However, what they are doing often conflicts with the lives of local people, taking up public walkways and intruding into private homes. This is more than just an attempt to gaze at what is before them, and, in many ways, it is also more than MacCannell’s second gaze, more than just wanting to see beyond the surface of the heritage sites in Eyam. Visitors to Eyam do the imaginative work of placing themselves in the footsteps of the people who lived at the time of Eyam’s Plague. At the same time, the residents of the village, who are not a part of this imagined Eyam, are somewhat displaced by the visitors, and they feel that their privacy is invaded, like the crofter who turned away from the camera lenses of visitors to Carnan when Macdonald first visited the area (Macdonald, 1997b). As their homes are gazed upon, they place flowers in the windowsills to prevent people from peering through their windows. As they walk along the pavements, they find their way blocked by visitors. As they return home from their grocery shopping, they find their driveways blocked by visitors’ cars. And as the younger residents try to move out into homes of their own, they find that they cannot afford to live in Eyam, and so more and more of the homes in Eyam are becoming second homes or holiday cottages. This

186 feeling of displacement leads to resentment among the residents, most poignantly remarked upon by the school children who told their head teacher, “we don’t want to be the Plague children.” Unlike at Göreme, the local residents of Eyam do not profit from the visitors, nor do they attempt to do so. Their life is as separate as possible from the tourism except among the select few who volunteer their time in tourist locales. Because of this, those few who do get involved in tourism activities act as representatives of the village at places like the church and the museum, where they meet and greet the visitors but also try to direct them to particular places in the village and give recommendations for everything from the best heritage site to go next to a good place to buy lunch for the family. But tourist-oriented activities such as the museum are not the only heritage projects in Eyam, and the Eyam Map and CD-ROM project is more oriented toward local people and was produced with the cooperation and input of many people who shared their personal memories of their lives in Eyam. This collective memory work is a heritage project that the local people are invested in, with a more personal meaning for them than the museum, which follows a more rigid format and has a different audience to answer to. Though the Eyam Map and CD-ROM project and its accompanying website are marketed toward outsiders, they are pertinent to the lives of the residents of Eyam in a way that the Plague heritage is not. For some, the project allows people to tell their own stories. For others, the project tells collective memories that remind local residents of certain people, times, or places that were important to them as well. This is an altogether different kind of heritage work than that done by the museum, the church, and the signs posted around the village to different historical sites of interest, and it is one that appeals to local people in a way that the other heritage activities do not because it is more personal for them and more meaningful to their lives. Furthermore, it is concerned more with memory than with “the gaze”, and it highlights the very different priorities of local residents for engagement with memory and heritage projects, as well as the different ways in which heritage is constructed in Eyam. However, the role the museum plays in constructing local heritage has far more of an impact in the making of “the Plague Village”.

187

The museum is a very powerful driving force in Eyam’s tourism, and it is the museum which determines what story is told to visitors and in what ways. It tells a history, but it also serves as a memorial to the people who died in Eyam’s Plague outbreak, acting in some ways as a sacred site rather than as simply a museum. Today, Eyam Museum has the primary responsibility for the Plague story, though the church held this role before the museum was created. The museum and its Board have been responsible for the research and the writing of the displays and for training stewards to work at the museum, ensuring that they are able to answer questions about various aspects of the story told within the museum. As Nadel-Klein observed in her ethnography of Scottish fisher museums (2003), local heritage museums often have two competing viewpoints – that which strives to tell an authentic local story in which local people are invested and that which strives for authority through professionalism, which is shown through specific museum practices with regard to the preservation and display of artefacts and using other display strategies that are considered standard for modern museums. In Eyam, the museum Board feel a strong duty to remain true to the spirit of the Plague story that has been told in the village since the seventeenth century, but also an obligation to do so professionally and as accurately as possible, using the most up to date archival and scientific research. They are the gatekeepers responsible for telling the official story of the Plague in Eyam, and as such, their expertise is sought by schools, by researchers, and by the thousands of visitors who come each year. The stewards also take on the role of guide and teacher for those visitors who ask questions about the exhibit and about the village itself, playing the role of host to their visiting guests. They also, however, feel a duty to the memory of those whose stories are told in the museum. Part of the work the museum does is to bring to life the memory of the people who lived and died during the Plague outbreak at Eyam. Harvey has pointed out how museums can “create a sense of hallowed terrain,” and this process is certainly observed at Eyam Museum (Harvey, 2005: 31). Though Eyam Museum does not call itself a memorial site, this is very much its function, echoed in the sentiments of the museum administrator, Mrs. Stone, as she is frustrated by people who do not give the exhibit the respect and attention she feels it is due. The museum

188 is, in many ways, a solemn place telling somber stories of suffering and survival. Through dioramas featuring mannequins in period clothing and panels featuring both text and artists’ drawings, the museum attempts to bring those stories to life, to instill a certain level of empathy with and connection to the people discussed therein. The museum uses educational worksheets to distract children so that they, in turn, do not distract adults from properly appreciating the exhibit, and it rules out the possibility of incorporating interactive exhibits in part because this would spoil the solemn nature of the museum and distract from learning about the lives and deaths of the people of Plague-era Eyam. The museum, with its rat-shaped weathervane and its particular attention to the Plague, can be seen as a “theme” museum but, in a way, it also provides a theme that encompasses the village as a whole. This “theming” defines the heritage context of the village and provides a particular focus for the tourism and heritage projects, but also extends outward to local events such as Bonfire Night, with its 2007 celebration burning a rat effigy rather than the traditional effigy of Guy Fawkes and the Plague Commemoration Service that is held each year during Wakes Week. The bed and breakfast facilities in the village perpetuate this theme, selling Plague-related books and other items. The local shops participate by carrying the audio walking tour equipment for rental by visitors. The local post office sells souvenirs and postcards featuring the Plague theme. And the history books and guide books for the village concentrate almost exclusively on the Plague, with only the Eyam Map and CD-ROM project focusing on local heritage other than the Plague. This practice of theming has overarching consequences for the village as a whole, as it capitalizes on this theme and benefits financially from it, though many local people have a desire to be represented by something other than the Plague theme. The vote in 2008 on new “Welcome to Eyam” signs included a Plague option which was rejected by local people in favour of the image of the much older Saxon cross that stands in the churchyard just a few feet away from Catherine Mompesson’s grave, and the Eyam Map and CD-ROM project, as well as parts of the museum, focus on the village’s industrial, mining, and agricultural heritage rather than on the Plague. However, for the majority of Britain, Eyam is “the Plague Village” that children learn about (and

189 often visit) in school and that people read about in novels such as Year of Wonders or see documentaries about, such as the Channel Four production, Riddle of the Plague Survivors. This has a significant impact on the people who live in Eyam and on the heritage enterprises that make money from the tourism, most notably the museum and the church, and it impacts the strategies and direction of the museum as it bears the primary responsibility as the public representative of Eyam’s heritage. Eyam Museum uses a variety of display formats, including dioramas, artefacts in glass cases, charts and graphs, drawings, and text panels. Its heavy use of text panels and its distinct lack of interactive displays differentiate Eyam Museum from other museums in Britain and in museum studies literature, but the museum’s memorial function combined with lack of space and low budget mean that interactive displays are not being considered as an option at this time. Despite many visitors commenting negatively about the length and number of the text panels, they serve a very important function for the museum by doing work that artefacts or hands-on activities would not be able to do, telling the story of people and events long past. The text of the displays is also based on the small history book written by the local historian and so it follows the same basic format and wording found in the book. This is a museum that aims to tell a story rather than to display objects to look upon or hands-on exhibits meant to facilitate learning through an increasingly popular museum format. Yet it also aims to do so in authentic and thorough, detailed ways. The authenticity that the museum seeks to achieve is created through a variety of strategies. The dioramas are meant to provide to visitors a picture as realistic as possible of the suffering that occurred during the Plague. The artefacts are meant to show different aspects of the Plague and of life in Eyam in different time periods, spanning from the pre-historic to the recent industrial past. The charts and graphs are meant to provide a visual representation of the numbers of people and families affected by the Plague. And the drawings and text panels seek to paint a picture of the stories being told in a way that the designers hope will resonate with visitors. Each of these display strategies has been developed in coordination with an outside design firm that specializes in these kinds of displays, and the combined effect is intended to be one of comprehensiveness, accuracy, and authority.

190

It is a common feature of heritage projects to aim for authority and authenticity, using a variety of strategies in order to do so. Museums in general are expected to be places of expertise able to share that expertise with the public in an accessible but thorough format. Eyam Museum in particular is expected to be an expert specifically in the Plague outbreak that devastated Eyam in 1665-1666, and it has assumed an authoritative stance and continues to update and improve upon the exhibits year after year as new information becomes available or as visitor needs and preferences require. When the museum first started to tell the story of “the gene”, it was a small, temporary effort. As visitor demand began to favour this particular aspect of the story, it was expanded and incorporated as a permanent exhibit and expanded upon in several ways. Likewise, when Mr. Stephens uncovered new archival information about the number of people who died in the Plague relative to the number of tax- paying households immediately prior to the outbreak, this new information was incorporated into the overall Plague narrative that had, previously, been told with a very different number for at least one hundred and forty years. These sorts of inclusions and changes show not only the museum’s efforts to be accurate and authentic, but also their drive for professionalism and authority over the stories being told. Most notable among these are the stories of the Plague and the very popular addition about “the gene”. The Plague and “the gene” are seen as biomedical concepts in some ways, illustrated through a variety of methods, but at the same time, they are seen in social terms, as the Plague is the story of great suffering and loss for the village that is associated with specific names and individuals’ life stories, while “the gene” is considered as an object of hope and amazement for its relationship not to bubonic plague, but to HIV, a “modern-day plague”, making this part of the story told in the museum relevant and exciting to visitors to Eyam today. The treatment of both of these as simultaneously medical subjects and as moral and social concepts is important within the context of Eyam Museum, and the strategies employed to display and discuss such concepts are complex. In particular, the strategies used to display the Plague are notable for their complexity and for their multiple ways of illustrating the Plague. Bubonic plague in

191 and of itself is strictly speaking a bacterial infection, but the museum cannot show a small bacterium as evidence of this, so it shows the delivery mechanisms – the black rat and the fleas that carry the Plague – using preserved, dead specimens of each on display behind a glass case, augmented by text panels that explain the biology of the Plague with illustrations and lay descriptions of scientific terminology. Yet this, too, is insufficient to show the complexity and meaning of the Plague at Eyam, and so the museum employs other strategies as well, showing images of people suffering from the Plague, writing the stories of those who died and of the select few who survived. The different treatments for Plague are also depicted, as is a list of the dead. This does not simply show a biomedical concept, but rather provides a view of the multiplicity of experiences and types of knowledge associated with this disease. Through the use of these “multiple ontologies”, the disease is made more three dimensional, more relevant, and more meaningful to visitors by connecting it to individuals and to specific details and events. Likewise, treatment of “the gene” is complex and is able to show even less physical evidence than that shown for the Plague. Where the Plague has long been associated with the black rat and, to a lesser extent, the fleas that carry it, the CCR5- Δ32 genetic mutation is a much more intangible concept. The display on “the gene” features a graphic of a DNA double-helix and descriptions of the genetic testing that was conducted. “The gene” is somewhat personalized through the story of the genetic testing of specific people from Eyam who were chosen based on their genealogical association with the Plague survivors, but they are not named and there are no faces to go along with this. Yet, visitors are very drawn to this subject not because of the scientific details that the museum can show about it, but because of what it can do. “The gene” has taken on an almost mythical status for one simple reason – it confers immunity to HIV infection on people who have inherited it from both parents. In the early twenty-first century when HIV and AIDS are still highly relevant to people’s lives, this is an almost miraculous discovery. For many, the connection of “the gene” to the Plague that the researchers once thought existed is incidental to this aspect of amazement and awe. As an object at once associated with the blood connections of modern-day Eyam residents to their Plague-survivor

192 ancestors and with the potential life-saving effects of this discovery, “the gene” is just as complex and interesting to visitors as the Plague is, if not more so. As such, the museum’s inclusion of “the gene”, despite the fact that it has been found to be unrelated to the bubonic plague epidemic, and the multiple ways in which “the gene” has meaning for the village and for the museum, shows that the emotional connections that people have with this subject are at least as important to its place within the Plague narrative of Eyam. Taken together, the picture painted of the heritage projects of Eyam and the various ways in which local identity is crafted and constructed shows complexity and holds many different forms of meaning and importance to the various actors involved. Tourism in Eyam is not simply an exercise in “the gaze”. There is much imaginative work being done that involves embodied experiences of moving through the heritage landscape and superimposing historical knowledge and events onto a present-day location. The work of the imagination here is largely due to the role played by the museum, which tells the story of the Plague in a particular way and points people to seek out specific places and sites of memory throughout the village. The role the museum plays as gatekeeper for this story is an important one, and its expertise provides it with authority over the history of this village. It strives not only to tell an authentic story, but also to serve as a memorial site commemorating the dead. This memorial function plays a strong role in the ways in which the museum strives for authenticity and authority over the story, telling the stories of individual lives in detail and without the use of many artefacts or hands-on activities, which would detract in many ways from the somber tone of the story. As an educational site, it seeks to provide as much detail as possible as accurately as possible, but as a memorial site, it seeks to stay true to the spirit of the stories that have been passed down through the years by the Plague survivors and their descendants, including both tragic ones such as that of Elizabeth Hancock, who buried her entire family and inspirational ones, such as that of Margaret Blackwell, who made a “miraculous recovery” from the brink of death. Its treatment of the Plague and “the gene” are complex and not merely told in biomedical terms and their importance is far more than just biomedical in nature. They are a source of inspiration and wonder to visitors despite their scientific,

193 biomedical roots, and they are made relevant to the visitors in very personal ways. This strategy of the museum in personalizing the stories told is a very effective one that augments the memorial function that the museum serves, and it plays a powerful role in the ongoing heritage work being done in “the Plague Village”. Future research into identity, heritage tourism, and museum studies can particularly look to the ways in which local people’s preferences compete with those of visitors in determining the course of heritage projects in the area being studied. Tourism research needs to look beyond “the gaze” and even “the second gaze” to recognize and better understand the imaginative work being done by visitors and the embodied forms of knowledge that they seek to gain when they visit a historical site. These are very important aspects of tourism in Eyam, and it is necessary to understand how much of the tourist experience is based on imagination rather than simply seeing what is physically present in front of the viewer. And finally, museum studies and museum anthropology need to incorporate an understanding of the complex meanings and purposes of exhibits, not just as decided upon by the creators of those exhibits, but by the viewers as well. Museums do not function unilaterally in presenting information, but rather, visitors’ own perspectives and previous forms of knowledge can inform and affect the museum experience. Furthermore, it is necessary to acknowledge that the information presented in a museum, particularly in a local heritage museum such as that in Eyam, does not exist in discrete categories or as stand-alone items within a larger narrative. These exhibits are complex and multiple, interrelated and holistic representations of the stories they seek to tell. The Plague as a biomedical concept does not work without the human element that personalizes it. “The gene”, which is arguably even more abstract than the Plague, cannot exist independently of the social meanings that it has in terms of hopefulness and wonder which visitors attribute to it. And the stories of the Plague dead are more than just historical tales. Told by local people and imbued with local meaning, they are personal and memorial in nature, speaking of sacrifice and of faith in ways that go beyond just recounting a series of historical events. In seeking to understand the intersections of local identity, heritage tourism, and the local heritage museum in Eyam, I found that they are intricately bound together in a way that prevents any one

194 aspect from operating independently of the others, as the museum is the gatekeeper for this story and sets the stage for the theming of the village as “the Plague Village” and provides a focal point that directs and influences the tourism within Eyam, playing host to thousands of guests every year.

195

Resources

Anico, Marta and Elsa Peralta, Eds (2009). Heritage and Identity: Engagement and Demission in the Contemporary World. London: Routledge.

Bagshaw, W. (1702). De Spiritualibus Pecci. London: Neville Simmons, Bookfeller in Sheffield.

Bouquet, Mary and Nuno Porto, Eds (2005). Science, Magic, and Religion: The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic. Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Brooks, Geraldine (2001) Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague. London: Fourth Estate.

Carrington, Mary et al (1997) “Novel Alleles of the Chemokine-Receptor Gene CCR5.” American Journal of Human Genetics. (61) pp. 1261-1267.

Carrington, Mary et al (1999) “Genetics of HIV-1 Infection: Chemokine receptor CCR5 polymorphism and its consequences.” Human Molecular Genetics (8:10) pp. 1939-1945.

Clifford, John (2003) Eyam Plague, 1665-1666. Fourth edition, revised and enlarged. Mark Stephens: Eyam, Derbyshire.

Cohen, Stewart (1996). “Children and Adults: Extracted from ‘Fostering shared learning among children and adults: the children’s museum’ in Young Children 44(4), 1989, pp. 20-24.” in Durbin, Gail, Ed. on behalf of the Group for Education in Museums (1996). Developing Museum Exhibitions for Lifelong Learning. pp. 73-76. London: The Stationery Office.

196

Coleman, M. P. (1986). "A Plague Epidemic in Voluntary Quarantine.” International Journal of Epidemiology 15(3) pp. 379-385.

Corsane, Gerard, Peter Davis, and Donatella Murtas (2009). “Place, local distinctiveness, and local identity: Ecomuseum approaches in Europe and Asia.” in Anico, Marta and Elsa Peralta, Eds (2009). Heritage and Identity: Engagement and Demission in the Contemporary World. pp. 47-62. London: Routledge.

Davies, Stuart (1996) “The Museum Visitor: Statistical Information and Trends, extracted from ‘By popular demand: a strategic analysis of the market potential for museums and art galleries in the UK’, Museums and Galleries Commission, 1994, p. 33, 48-49, 61, 89.” in Durbin, Gail, Ed. on behalf of the Group for Education in Museums (1996). Developing Museum Exhibitions for Lifelong Learning. pp.52-55. London: The Stationery Office.

Dean, Michael, Mary Carrington, and Stephen J. O’Brien (2002) “Balanced polymorphism selected by genetic versus infectious human disease.” Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics. 3: 263-292.

Degnen, Cathrine (2005) “Relationality, place, and absence: a three-dimensional perspective on social memory.” The Sociological Review. 53(4): 729-744.

Discover Eyam Village (2009) “Group Visits.” Found Online at http://www.eyam.info/groupvisits.html. Last accessed on 23 May 2009; no longer available online at the time of thesis publication.

Durbin, Gail, Ed. on behalf of the Group for Education in Museums (1996). Developing Museum Exhibitions for Lifelong Learning. London: The Stationery Office.

197

Eade, John (2002) “Adventure Tourists and Locals in a Global City: Resisting Tourist Performances in London’s ‘East End’.” in Coleman, Simon and Mike Crang, Eds (2002) Tourism: Between Place and Performance. pp. 128-139. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Edensor, Tim (2005) “Mediating William Wallace: Audio-visual technologies in tourism.” in Crouch, David, Rhona Jackson, and Felix Thompson, Eds (2005) The Media and the Tourist Imagination: Converging Cultures. pp. 105-118. London and New York: Routledge.

Edwards, Jeanette (2000) Born and Bred: Idioms of kinship and new reproductive technologies in England. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Eyam Museum (2009). “The History of Eyam Museum,” found online at: http://www.eyammuseum.demon.co.uk/history.htm. Last accessed on 28 August, 2010.

Eyam Museum (year unknown). “Eyam and the CCR5-Delta 32 Mutation.” Eyam: Eyam Museum.

Fairweather, Ian S. (2001) Identity Politics and the Heritage Industry in Post- Apartheid Northern Namibia: A thesis submitted to the University of Manchester for the degree of Ph.D. in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Law, Department of Social Anthropology. Manchester: University of Manchester Press.

Fairweather, Ian S. (2005) “The Performance of Heritage in a Reconstructed Post- Apartheid Museum in Namibia.” in Bouquet, Mary and Nuno Porto, Eds (2005). Science, Magic, and Religion: The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic. pp. 161-181. Oxford: Berghahn Books.

198

Finkler, Kaja (2001). “The kin in the gene: The medicalization of family and kinship in American society.” Current Anthropology 42(2): 235-263.

Fujimura, Joan H. (1996) Crafting Science: A sociohistory of the quest for the genetics of cancer. Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press.

Glass, William G. et al (2006). “CCR5 deficiency increases risk of symptomatic West Nile Virus infection.” Journal of Experimental Medicine 203(1): 35-40.

Handler, Richard and Eric Gable (1997) The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Harvey, Penelope (2005) “Memorialising the Future – The Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester.” in Bouquet, Mary and Nuno Porto, Eds (2005). Science, Magic, and Religion: The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic. pp. 29-50. Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Hobsbawm, Eric (1983) “Introduction: Inventing traditions” in Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence Ranger, Eds (1983) The Invention of Tradition. pp. 1-14. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Knight, David (2006) Public Understanding of Science: A history of communicating scientific ideas. London and New York: Routledge.

Latour, Bruno and Woolgar, Steve (1986) Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

MacCannell, Dean (2001) “Tourist Agency.” Tourist Studies. 1(1): 23-37.

199

Macdonald, Sharon (1996) “’The influence of visitors’ preconceptions on their experience of exhibitions’ in Museum Management and Curatorship 11(4), 1992, pp. 401-409.” in Durbin, Gail, Ed. on behalf of the Group for Education in Museums (1996). Developing Museum Exhibitions for Lifelong Learning. pp.61-69. London: The Stationery Office.

Macdonald, Sharon (1997a) “A people's story: Heritage, identity, and authenticity.” in Rojek, Chris and John Urry, Eds (1997) Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel Theory. pp. 155-175. London and New York: Routledge.

Macdonald, Sharon (1997b) Reimagining Culture: Histories, Identities, and the Gaelic Renaissance. Oxford and New York: Berg.

Macdonald, Sharon (2002) Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum. London and Oxford: Berg.

Macdonald, Sharon (2005). “Enchantment and its dilemmas: the museum as a ritual site.” in Bouquet, Mary and Nuno Porto, Eds (2005). Science, Magic, and Religion: The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic. pp. 209-227. Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Massad, E. et al (2004) “The Eyam Plague Revisited: Did the village isolation change transmission from fleas to pulmonary?” Medical Hypotheses (63) pp. 911-915.

Matthew, Maureen (1996) “Adult Learners: this article ‘Adult learners in the invitational environment of the museum’ appeared in Dawson & Hind 14(1), 1987/88, pp. 4-6.” in Durbin, Gail, Ed. on behalf of the Group for Education in Museums (1996). Developing Museum Exhibitions for Lifelong Learning. pp. 70-76. London: The Stationery Office.

200

Mead, R. (1722). A Short Discourse concerning Pestilential Contagion, and Methods To be used to Prevent it. London, Sam Buckley in Amen-Corner.

Mecsas, Joan et al (2004) “CCR5 Mutation and Plague Protection.” Nature. (427) pp. 606.

Michael, Nelson L. et al (1998) “Exclusive and Persistent Use of the Entry Coreceptor CXCR4 by Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 from a Subject Homozygous for CCR5 Δ32.” Journal of Virology (72:7) pp. 6040-6047.

Mol, Annemarie (2002) The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Nadel-Klein, Jane (2003) Fishing for Heritage: Modernity and Loss Along the Scottish Coast. Oxford and New York: Berg.

Napier, A. David (2003) The Age of Immunology: Conceiving of Future in an Alienating World. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Nash, Catherine (2002) “Genealogical identities.” Environment and Planning: Society and Space 20 (27-52).

Nash, Catherine (2004) “Genetic kinship.” Cultural Studies 18:1 (1-33).

National Parks (2009) “History of the National Parks.” Found Online at http://www.nationalparks.gov.uk/about/ourhistory.htm#1950. Last accessed on 18 June 2009.

O’Brien, Stephen J. et al (2000) “Polygenic and Multifactorial Disease Gene Association in Man: Lessons from AIDS.” Annual Review of Genetics.(34) pp. 563-591.

201

Orr, Noreen (2006) “Museum Volunteering: Heritage as ‘Serious Leisure.’” International Journal of Heritage Studies. 12(2):194 – 210.

Richards, Martin (1996). “Lay and professional knowledge of genetics and inheritance.” Public Understanding of Science 5: 217-230.

Richards, Martin (1998). “Annotation: Genetic research, family life, and clinical practice.” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 39(3): 291-305.

Seward, Anna (1810). The Poetical Works of Anna Seward; with Extracts from her Literary Correspondence. Edited by Walter Scott, in Three Volumes. London: James Ballantyne and Co. for John Ballantyne and Co.; Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme.

Simpson, Anthony (2009). Boys to Men in the Shadow of AIDS: Masculinities and HIV Risk in Zambia. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Stephens, J. Claiborne et al (1998) “Dating the Origin of the CCR5-Δ32 AIDS- Resistance Allele by the Coalescence of Haplotypes.” American Journal of Human Genetics (62) pp. 1507-1515.

Taylor, Don (1973) The Roses of Eyam. Film. Based on the play “The Roses of Eyam” by Don Taylor, 1970. Aired on 12 June, 1973 on BBC television.

The Scripps Research Institute. (2004). "Press Release: Genetic Mutation Protects Against both HIV and Plague? Not So, Say Scientists at Scripps Research." Retrieved 25 October, 2006, from http://www.scripps.edu/news/press/021104b.html.

202

Thio, Chloe L. et al (2007) “Genetic Protection Against Hepatitis B Virus Conferred by CCR5Δ32: Evidence that CCR5 contributes t viral persistence.” Journal of Virology (81:2) pp. 441-445.

Tucker, Hazel (2003) Living with Tourism: Negotiating Identities in a Turkish Village. London and New York: Routledge.

Urry, John (1990) The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies. London: Sage Publications.

Urry, John (1995) Consuming Places. London and New York: Routledge.

Wood, Richard (1996) “Families: this article ‘Museum learning: a family focus’ appeared in Journal of Education in Museums 11, 1990, pp. 20-23.” in Durbin, Gail, Ed. on behalf of the Group for Education in Museums (1996). Developing Museum Exhibitions for Lifelong Learning. pp. 77-82. London: The Stationery Office.

Wood, William (1865) The History and Antiquities of Eyam; with a minute account of The Great Plague, which desolated that village in the year 1666. Fourth Edition. London: Bell and Daldy, Fleet Street; and Derby: Richard Keene. www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/case_plague/ (2004) Secrets of the Dead: Case File: Mystery of the Black Death. Scene: Eyam, England. Lead Detective: Dr. Stephen O’Brien. Last accessed online on 13 April, 2007 at http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/case_plague/ (including the following sublinks: p_clues.html; p_interview.html)

203