Ss Great Britain and the Containment of British Collective Memory Deborah M

International Journal of Heritage Studies Vol. 17, No. 3, May 2011, 245–260

ss Great Britain and the containment of British collective memory Deborah M. Withers*

Independent Scholar, UK (TaylorRJHS_A_557835.sgmReceived and Francis 13 December 2010; final version received 22 January 2011) 10.1080/13527258.2011.557835International1352-7258Original2011Taylor173000000MayDrmail@debi-rah.net DeborahWithers & Article Francis (print)/1470-3610 2011 Journal of Heritage (online) Studies This article explores the Bristol-based ss Great Britain and the heritage industry dedicated to it. It critically examines how the museum, which is based within the ship itself, allows visitors to ‘feel good’ about the history of British colonialism by acting as a container for British collective memory. It examines how the key narrative in the exhibition is structured as an affective journey of hope for a better future based primarily around the journey of British people to Australia in the mid- nineteenth century. It is argued that it is no longer acceptable that public heritage institutions, such as the ss Great Britain, continue to represent British colonial history as a voyage of economic and personal discovery for white settlers. Keywords: collective memory; British colonialism; affect; museum frames; maritime history

Introduction

The British Empire was a historical reality, but it was also an ideal; indeed the ideal of empire participates in its justification as a moral project. The ideal of empire is retained by being rerouted through the moral understanding of empire as the gift of happiness. (Ahmed, 2010, p. 132–133)

In The Promise of Happiness Sara Ahmed (2010) explores the ways the history of the British Empire has been recounted as a ‘happy narrative’. Deploying the idea of happiness as a social technology, Ahmed argues, has enabled British identity to be fashioned in ways that allow British citizens to feel well adjusted to, and indeed happy about, the legacies of British colonialism. This article will take Ahmed’s idea as a starting point to examine one part of British colonial legacy – the Bristol-based ss Great Britain and the heritage industry dedicated to it. I want to critically examine how the museum, which is based within the ship itself, allows visitors to ‘feel good’ about the history of British colonialism by acting as a container for British collective memory. The paper begins by introducing the history of the ss Great Britain, then goes on to examine the ways that history is represented in the museum. Then follows content analysis of the museum itself. My aim in this is to demonstrate how the organisation of the museum – its story boards, written artefacts and material objects – attempt to take the visitor on an affective journey that plays upon the hope for a better life for the people who step on to the ss Great Britain – both in the past and the present. The ‘voyage of discovery into the past’ that the museum takes its visitors on is, however,

*Email: [email protected]

ISSN 1352-7258 print/ISSN 1470-3610 online © 2011 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13527258.2011.557835 http://www.informaworld.com 246 D.M. Withers made at the expense of mythologising the history of the ship and the wider context of British colonial history where it is situated. Consequently, the role the ss Great Britain played in the histories of British colonialism – histories that were far from happy for many people in the world – is removed from the frames of understanding presented in the museum. These are the frames of contained representation that ultimately want the museum to create feel-good experiences for the people who attend. This paper explores the role the ss Great Britain plays in perpetuating dominant trends within British collective memory that are common within museums, public rituals and wider popular culture. These trends refuse to confront the negative and violent truths of British colonial history. Ultimately I want to suggest that large heritage initiatives such as the ss Great Britain have a political responsibility to complicate rather than mythologise key moments in British history that demonstrate the ‘interre- lations between empire and British society’ (Wilson 2004, p. 13).

Background to the ss Great Britain and museum The ss Great Britain museum is a hugely popular visitor attraction. The website states that it is the ‘winner of more than 20 national and international awards including UK Museum of the Year and Enjoy England Large Visitor Attraction of the Year’, while The Mail on Sunday described it as ‘one of the UK’s finest visitor attractions’ (ss Great Britain 2010). The allure of the ss Great Britain may be because it evokes a particular kind of nostalgia common to maritime heritage. As Ann Day and Ken Lunn argue, ‘as the use of the sea declines, for naval and merchant shipping and for the fishing industry, so its representational forms become more poetic and thus more disassociated from the lives of people’ (Day and Lunn 2003, p. 296). Furthermore, Day and Lunn argue that this has an impact on the types of activities presented by maritime museums. Audiences at these heritage ‘attractions’ are often presented with ‘a set of leisure experiences … caught up in or peripherally linked to a series of nautical and maritime associations, and these associations lay with some vision of the past’ (Day and Lunn 2003, p. 302, emphasis added). That the ss Great Britain is first and foremost a leisure activity can help us understand the ways the museum sustains the communal memory of empire by focussing on the pleasure or happiness of its visitors. The ss Great Britain has been open to visitors since its return to Bristol in July 1970. The museum was re-launched after a £11.3 million restoration and conservation project (during which time it remained open to visitors) in July 2005. Since this time, visitors have enjoyed the Great Western Dockyard, the Dry Dock below the glass ‘sea’, the Dockyard Museum and the ss Great Britain itself. In June 2010, a new Visitor Centre was opened with an improved ticket office, shop and toilets and the David MacGregor Library. The Brunel Archive was also opened to the public on 24 November 2010. The museum attracts approximately 150,000 visitors (including 16,000 school children) and 15,000 venue hire guests per annum. The museum honours the ss Great Britain, a ship that ‘transformed ship building and international travel’ (ss Great Britain museum board). The ship was designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel and built between 1839 and 1843 in the dry dock where it now lives in Bristol harbour. Part of the historical significance of the ship lies in its technological innovation: the ss Great Britain’s screw propeller was at the time the newest invention in maritime history. With its 1000 horsepower (hp) steam engine, it was also the largest ship of its time. International Journal of Heritage Studies 247

In its lifetime, the ship sailed 32 times around the world, travelling more than 1,000,000 ocean miles (1,852,000km). From 1843 to 1852 the ship made several journeys to New York, carrying passengers and cargo. Between 1852 and 1882, the ship was transformed into a passenger sailing ship, taking British people to Australia. In 1882, the ss Great Britain was converted into a sailing ship, as it became used exclusively for stowing cargo, transporting coal and wheat on what had become a busy trade route from South and North America. After a fire in 1886, the ship then came to be docked at Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands where it was used to store coal. The ship played an important role in the First World War, acting as a coal bunker, and helped defeat Admiral von Spee’s German fleet in the battle of the Falklands. In 1937, the ship was abandoned and towed to Sparrow Cove. Later its steel plates were used to repair HMS Exeter in the Second World War after it had been damaged in the Battle of River Plate. The ship stayed in the Falklands until the late 1960s when interest developed in a salvage mission. At that time it was resting underneath the water, had a severe crack down one of its sides that had to be filled with mattresses before sailing, an old technique itself salvaged from the days of Nelson. On 24 April 1970, the ss Great Britain made the journey back to Bristol, a journey that has become a central part of the ship’s history. In the ss Great Britain museum the voyage home is presented as miraculous, like the building of the ship itself. It is seen to occupy a central place within Bristol’s social history. The recent animation film and exhibition shown in the Baker Gallery of the museum, ‘The Incredible Journey’ (2010), made to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the ship’s homecoming, demonstrates this. The film includes oral testimonies from people involved in the salvage mission and ‘ordinary’ Bristol citizens who comment on the importance of the homecoming in terms of their own personal autobiographies. The history of building and salvaging the ss Great Britain is, in many ways, a remarkable feat of human achievement. The museum itself, which is based on an immersive experience for the visitor that works on many different levels (including a re-creation of the smells that were onboard the ship, as well as the sights and sounds), communicates the grandeur of Brunel’s ambition through its collection of large material objects salvaged from the original ship. These include huge, rusted metal plates and beams that run along the walls of the Dockyard Museum (Figure 1). Their sheer size and presence in the museum orients visitors toward them in states of awe and wonder (Greenblatt 2006). This allows visitors to be proximate to the feats of engineering achievement and sea-worn materials.

Figure 1. Ship materials in the ss Great Britain. Photograph by Deborah Withers.

Navigating the museum My first trip to the ss Great Britain was as part of a family outing in August 2009, I had not deliberately set out to critique the museum.1 Nevertheless, being inside the museum I could not help but become what Margaret Lindauer (2006, p. 204) has called a ‘critical museum visitor’. This is where the:

visitor notes what objects are presented, in what ways, and for what purposes. She or he also explores what is left unspoken or kept off display. And she or he asks, who has the most to gain or the most to lose from having this information, collection, or interpretation publicly presented.

After this initial visit, I then returned in October 2010 with the intention of being a critical museum visitor in order to conduct research for this article. 248 D.M. Withers

Figure 1. Ship materials in the ss Great Britain. Photograph by Deborah Withers.

Figure 2. WelcomeAs sign for ss Great visitors Britain. Photograph by Deborah Withers. enter the Dockyard Museum, an information plate ‘Welcome[s]’ you onboard the ss Great Britain (Figure 2). This welcome sets the affective tone for the journey people undertake in the museum. Visitors are encouraged foremost to enjoy their trip on the ship, although the voyage is not presented as without challenge for the people who attempt it. For example, the histories of the people who travelled and worked on the ship offer tales of suicide and premature death from illnesses such as tuberculosis, warning sea-farers of the upcoming risks. The Dockyard Museum is where visitors learn about the different histories of the ss Great Britain, from its engineering histories to the social histories of the people who sailed on it. It is the second site people are encouraged to visit as they navigate the museum. Before entering the Dockyard, people are invited to visit the ‘Dry Dock’, which is where the base of the boat is being maintained by the use of technologies such as humidifiers. Visitors are able to touch the outside of the ship and simulate the experience of being under water, evoked by a ‘glass sea’ above visitors’ heads made of two sheets of glass containing water. As you approach the entrance to these sites, the passageway is lined by barrels, which serve to re-create the feeling of boarding a ship at a different point in history to the present (Figure 3). Visitors have to walk through the Dockyard Museum to reach the ship itself, as any other route cannot access it; the journey is thus directed in specific ways. Figure 3. EntranceThe to the Dockyard Museum. journey Photograph by Deborah Withers. in the Dockyard is presented as a journey back in time as people are guided through the various time zones of the ss Great Britain’s life.2 These time zones are: 1882 ‘The Windjammer’, which presents the story of the ship’s life as a coal trader. The journey then goes further into the past with 1852–1882 ‘The Emigrant Clipper’, then 1843–1853 as ‘The World’s First Great Ocean Liner’. It is during the International Journal of Heritage Studies 249

Figure 2. Welcome sign for ss Great Britain. Photograph by Deborah Withers. representations of the ss Great Britain’s life as an ‘Emigrant Clipper’ that what is presented ‘as history’ becomes more problematic – problematic because it is invested with cultural assumptions about British colonial ventures that too often get passed over as normal and, often, completely justifiable. The history of British colonial activity is rarely questioned – or pardoned – within official UK public narratives. While then Prime Minister Tony Blair did express his 250 D.M. Withers

Figure 3. Entrance to the Dockyard Museum. Photograph by Deborah Withers.

‘regret and sorrow’ (quoted in Churcher and Padley 2007) at Britain’s role in the ‘Atlantic holocaust’ (Golding 2009, p. 22) or transatlantic slave trade – no official apology was made at the 200th anniversary of Britain passing an abolition law. Simi- larly, there has been no official apology for British colonialism and, perhaps more worryingly, even basic acknowledgement that British colonial ventures had a negative impact on countries subject to British colonial rule. Recently popular historian Simon Schama, who was appointed in 2010 by the current Education Minister Michael Gove to help restructure history teaching in schools, advocated the importance of diversify- ing Britain’s collective memories of its past. In an article in The Guardian newspaper he stated that ‘the seeding of amnesia is the undoing of citizenship’ (Schama 2010) as he called for a reinvigoration of history teaching in schools. Schama outlined six episodes, which included the ‘Irish wars’ and the ‘Indian moment’ that children absolutely should study. These choices were however criticised in the newspaper’s letters’ pages as continuing to perpetuate Anglo-centric biases in the telling of history: ‘Irish history deserves to be taught as more than an English problem – that way, misunder- standing certainly lies. And Indian history deserves attention as more than a battle- ground and playground for 18th-century English elites’ (Ansari 2010). There is still an overriding sense within British popular culture, then, that Britain is a nation that ‘remain[s] … entranced by the image of themselves as defenders of world democracy’ (Calder 2004, p. 63), a notion which is ultimately supported by the enduring mythologies that surround the Second World War (Watson 2010). Such an image is supported by the ss Great Britain museum: the reconstruction of the ship International Journal of Heritage Studies 251

Figure 4. Front of the ss Great Britain ship. Photograph by Deborah Withers. allows visitors to experience the luxurious grandeur of the vessel with its painted black outside contrasting with gold plates, communicating wealth and prestige (Figure 4). Named after the country it was built in, the ship becomes a symbol for a national pride that has successfully navigated treacherous journeys across the world and returned home damaged, but, ultimately, a hero. Figure 4. Front ofThe the ss Great Britain ship.enduring Photograph by Deborah Withers. heroism and ‘greatness’ of ‘Great’ Britain co-exists, or is supported by, the idea that British colonialism was actually a good thing, and the benefits of being colonised far outweighed the negative aspects for nations that were subjected to British colonial rule. Ahmed (2010) points out that in the current tests that emigrants to the UK are required to take, Britain’s imperial past is scarcely mentioned and when it is, it is in these overwhelmingly positive terms. In these tests, British colonialism is still represented as bringing in ‘more regular, acceptable and impartial systems of law and order’ while the supposedly benevolent ‘spread of English language helped to unite disparate tribal areas that gradually came to see themselves as nations’ (Home Office 2005). Ahmed (2010, p. 131) asserts that ‘to become British is to accept empire as the gift of happiness, which might involve an implicit injunction to forget or not to remember the violence of colonial rule’. Such misrepresentations of British colonial history are mirrored in the ss Great Britain museum. The violence of British colonialism is completely removed from the frame of understanding presented in the museum, while the ‘happy journey’ of the ship’s voyagers is a key social story with which visitors engage. Judith Butler (2009) has identified the ‘frames of war’ that are used to mediate contentious political 252 D.M. Withers activities to the public and, indeed, render them palatable, within the context of the ‘War on Terror’. It may be beneficial to see how Butler’s ideas can be used to help understand other political contexts where violence and injustice are presented as a ‘good thing’, tolerable, and part of narratives which seek to reinforce notions of culture and ‘civilisation’. The point of knowing the frame, she argues, is not simply to ‘locate what is “in” or “outside” the frame, but what vacillates between those two locations, and what, foreclosed, becomes encrypted in the frame itself’ (Butler 2009, p. 75, emphasis added). This article will attempt to draw attention to the mechanisms of the frame that operate within the ss Great Britain museum, frames which encrypt social and political understandings of the British colonial past and, consequently, the neo-colonial present. My intention is to render such operations apparent in both a visual and a sensory-affective sense. Janet Marstine (2006, p. 4) affirms the importance of frames in museums: ‘frames not only set boundaries; they provide an ideologically based narrative context that colours our understanding of what’s included’. Arguably, there are such frames at work in how the museum represents British colonial history, of which the ss Great Britain can be seen as a significant microcosm. These are the frames that allow the British public to completely avoid an understanding of British colonialism that was, and continues to be, a massive part of the reality of British history and its present day culture. For a brief, but pertinent example of this, it is important to note that throughout the whole of the exhibition on the ss Great Britain, an exhibition ostensibly about nineteenth and twentieth century British history in a trans-national context, the word ‘colonialism’ is only mentioned once. This single appearance is in the context of the Eureka Stockade – a historical event that those without an immediate knowledge of nineteenth century Australian history would struggle to understand.. By removing colonialism from the history of the ss Great Britain it radically narrows how it can be understood. In its place, how are the colonial ventures of British people to Australia presented in the exhibition? ss Great Britain: A Golden Future and the journey of hope The journey that British people made to Australia on the ss Great Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century is arguably the key affective narrative in the exhibition. In order to ‘feel good’ about the journey the exhibition takes us on, we have to also feel good about the journey of the people who travelled on the ship. For ultimately the journey that migrants took to Australia is presented as a journey of hope. It is a narrative that seeks to organise the emotions of visitors in the space in a positive way, as visitors are invited to affectively participate in the lives of the people who boarded the ship. We meet these people through their diary entries, their personal possessions, replicas of their clothes and later, on the ship, as mannequin figures. Sometimes these ‘real-life’ characters appear in museum performance, which Kidd (2011) has argued furthers a sense of authenticity of histories presented in museums. It is within these encounters that the ‘human interest’ of the exhibition takes shape. As visitors we also participate in the journey, the entry ticket is designed as a ‘Passenger Ticket’ and is a reproduction of an original that emigrants would have carried. The ss Great Britain first sailed to Australia on 21 August 1852. The ship carried 630 people on a route from Liverpool to Melbourne. It would make 32 similar voyages International Journal of Heritage Studies 253 in its time as an ‘Emigrant Clipper’, hundreds of thousands of Australians are descended from the voyagers onboard the ss Great Britain. As a museum story board informs visitors: ‘When gold was found in Australia huge numbers wanted to travel to the British colony. The ss Great Britain’s new owners, Gibbs, Bright and Co., spot- ted an opportunity’ (Museum story board 2010). Here the decision to exploit the resources of another country is framed as shrewd business sense on behalf of the new owners of the ss Great Britain (it is worth noting that museum story boards inform us that until that point in the ship’s history it was losing more money than it was making). As visitors, we are invited to have sympathy with this perspective that values the economic opportunism of the new owners. The role of dominion states like Australia in the communal memory of empire is interesting to consider here. As John Darwin (2009, pp. 15–16) argues, ‘the place of the white dominions has been all but ignored by two generations of imperial histori- ography … revision is long over due’. Despite historians’ assertions that 70–80% of working class Victorians were unaffected by the ‘benefits’ of empire as these remained within elite circles (Porter 2006, p. 115), and that it cannot be assumed that there was ‘broad public sympathy for all types of empire and on every occasion’ (Darwin 2009, p. 15), there does seem to be a peculiar acceptance that Britain’s imperial behaviour in dominion states was more than justified. As David Cannadine (2001, p. 28) has argued: ‘In Australia it was an unquestioned assumption that the British enjoyed the sole right to own and occupy the island continent, embodied in the colo- nialists’ doctrine of “terra nullius”, and by the late nineteenth century the “white Australia” policy was fully in place.’ Furthermore, the very fashioning of British national identity in the nineteenth century was predicated on the notion of empire: ‘a much wider constituency saw Britain’s fate as tied up with overseas interests and assumed … the unchallengeable right of British migrants abroad to seize and fill up the lands of Indigenous people’ (Darwin 2009, p. 15). In highlighting this last point I do not want to disavow the work of post-colonial writers and new imperial historians who often write about the dynamic and ‘mutual constitution and entanglements of modern subjects though colonialism and its cultures’ (Wilson 2004, p. 24). However, I do want to draw attention to the specific role dominion states played in extending the so-called ‘greatness’ of Britain, and the role those countries played in maintaining British cultural, military and economic power in a globalised world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In fact there is nothing within the ss Great Britain museum that highlights the specific aspect of colonial history of the dominion states. Conse- quently, what is omitted from the frame is an understanding of how Britain sought to extend its cultural as well as economic influence within the nineteenth century, and how that had devastating consequences for Indigenous communities whose land they settled in and, it was popularly assumed, they could take away. There is no contextu- alisation of British colonialism in Australia, nor are basic questions about colonialism asked or answered (such as, for instance, ‘what is a colony?’; ‘by 1840 how long had British colonial activity been taking place in Australia?’ or ‘what were the social and political justifications for colonial enterprises in the nineteenth century?’). Asking such questions (and offering answers) could enable visitors to gain a critical appreci- ation of the ss Great Britain’s role in Britain’s colonial history and develop an understanding of colonialism outside of the museum’s encrypted frame. The presentation of these histories does nothing to encourage visitors to develop their own opinions or facilitate wider dialogue. It assumes the traditionally didactic role of the museum, ‘asserting factual information and exuding an aura of truth or 254 D.M. Withers respected knowledge’ (Lindauer 2006, p. 213). There is no reference to the impact of white settlement and the ‘influence of Christian missionaries, government resettle- ment programmes’ which has led to the severe disruption ‘of traditional languages and cultural practices’ (Simpson 2006, p. 160) of Aboriginal people. Furthermore, the fact that contemporary Aboriginal communities ‘have a life expectancy “20–1 years” lower than that of the total population of Australia’ (Simpson 2006, p. 160) is not something ss Great Britain museum attendees are told about. If they were, would they feel as hopeful about the journey to search for gold if they knew the happy journey was made at the expense of a community of people who continue to feel the effects of colonialism in the present? These are speculative questions, admittedly. However, they are important to ask if we are to critically engage with how the ss Great Britain museum creates an affective narrative that relies on the suppression of political facts which retain a pressing contemporary relevance. Such framings are perhaps common in museum representations of the historical past. As Watson notes, following Cubitt:

Cultural productions such as historical understanding in the museum appear, as Cubitt points out, to evoke rather than represent a sense of the past, because what is represented is a detail of an action or event or person that ‘alludes to something larger, but not neces- sarily precisely defined, of which the details is taken to be a part’. (Watson 2010, p. 205, emphasis added)

The allusion to larger and, crucially, undefined historical events is what characterises the story telling of ss Great Britain’s social histories. As Watson notes, this evocation creates a sense of the past that can organise visitors’ affective responses to exhibition materials. This organisation of response is cleverly contained in the ss Great Britain exhibition through its specificity of the site: the ship itself. The feeling of being inside the engine or ‘bowels’ of the ship that the Dockyard simulates enables the creation of a potent, immersive reality that manages the collective memories of people who pass through it. It is achieved through an evoked sense of the past that directs visitors towards the hope of passengers onboard the ship rather than any understanding of the wider social and political history of the time. This is not to suggest that every person who passes through the exhibition will have their experiences contained or directed in these monolithic ways. Much contemporary research about museums and visitors emphasise that the relationship between them ‘is a dynamic one. Rather than conceptualizing visitors as passively gleaning information from displays … museum audiences are active, productive and often expert in the knowledge that they bring to such exhibitions’ (Leonard 2010, p. 172). However, what I am suggesting is that it is important to be attentive to how highly significant histories – like the history of British colonialism – are ‘encrypted’ (Butler 2009, p. 75) in ways that actively manage the public’s relationship to the past in popular heritage ‘attractions’. That is, collective memories are contained within their encrypted museum frames. They do so in order to create what Eric Gable (2006, p. 111) calls a ‘managed community of memory’. If we understand this in line with Ahmed’s observation cited earlier that Britain has not come to terms with the violence of its colonial past (and sees empire as a gift to fortunate recipients), we can perhaps see the dangers of such an evocation, or at least the historical irresponsibility of their persistence. The title of the panel that informs visitors of the passengers’ journey to Australia is named ‘A Golden Future’. It states that emigrants ‘hoped to find wealth in Australia’s new gold fields. They looked forward to new life on the other side of the world’ (ss International Journal of Heritage Studies 255

Great Britain 2010). Again, the reasons for emigrants’ journeys are primarily framed as economic: journeys of social betterment and of hope. The museum then presents a number of sources that further invest visitors in their quest for a better future: journal entries and extracts from the ship’s newspaper, The Cabinet. For example, the newspaper tells the story of one passenger who ‘like thousands of my fellow country women possessing the same spirit of adventure [went] to seek fortune in a distant land’ (Anon 2010). There is an overwhelmingly shared sense of purpose on the ss Great Britain, where people are ‘so blinded by their golden dreams of sudden riches, and so eager to obtain them, they absolutely fail to reason in a fair and just spirit with those who oppose them going away’ (Park 2010). This last excerpt is telling again for how it weaves affect into the museum’s narratives by allowing the people ‘who oppose them going away’ to enter the museum frame. This cultivates understanding of the personal gravity and sacrifices made by voyagers to the visitor. Furthermore, the desire for riches, and the unquestionable right of British people to travel to a ‘far-away land’ to acquire them, is striking from reading these excerpts. The inclusion of such personal and community narratives is part of how the museum veri- tably celebrates the ‘gold fever’ of ss Great Britain voyagers as a happy and just thing. It does not create any space for critique as these actions are beyond critique, they are intrinsically good. The sense of collectivity and shared purpose is developed in the next section of the museum, which seeks to equalise the class differences of voyagers on the ship by appealing to the shared sense of identity: the emigrant. As one story board states: ‘there [are] all sorts of classes [that] emigrate … to the colony, but still anyone leaving their own country and going to another one emigrates the same as I am’ (Maclennen 2010). This sense of classlessness onboard the ship is another mechanism to generate hope for the visitors as all emigrants are presented as equally having the chance to make wealth in Australia. Visitors, who are encouraged to see themselves as passengers, can partake in this hope. This part of the museum’s narrative sits alongside the numerous evidence of massive class distinctions present on the ship. This ranged from the type of food people ate to the cabins people slept in, to the distinct areas to which people with higher classes of tickets had access. Class distinctions are also enacted within the part of the museum that re-creates the ship itself. Visitors are asked to not ‘cross the line’ – a space where richer people would have been allowed to go – as visitors’ understanding of class mobility is spatially stimulated (Figure 5). This allows visitors to adhere to authority, as it becomes a playful aspect of the museum experience, rather than a social reality that had a material impact on the lives of the ss Great Britain voyagers. This mythology of class presented in the museum contradicts Cannadine’s (2001, p. 28) assertion that ‘many white British settlers were increasingly concerned to replicate the layered, ordered, hierarchical society they believed they had left behind at home’. Despite this, the presence of different classes of people onboard the ship are united by the possibility of a shared outcome: getting rich in the bountiful gold fields of Australia.

Figure 5. Class distinctions in the ss Great Britain. Photograph by Deborah Withers. ss Great Britain, empire and war As well as carrying people and cargo around the world, the ss Great Britain played a significant role in transporting members of the British army to wars in the nineteenth century. Again, the way these narratives are presented in the museum direct the visitor 256 D.M. Withers

Figure 5. Class distinctions in the ss Great Britain. Photograph by Deborah Withers. responses away from critique of British colonial ventures and, indeed, allow us to feel good about the ship, what ‘she’ did, where ‘she’ went and what the people onboard did. The most striking example is the way the museum chooses to frame the time the ss Great Britain carried British troops from Ireland to India in 1857. The text panel describes it thus: ‘1857. The ship carries troops again. This time she took the 17th lancers and the 8th Royal Irish Hussars to Bombay; to serve during the Sepoy War. One of the soldiers she carried earned the Victoria Cross for his courageous action in India’ (ss Great Britain 2010). What is missing from this frame and what are its affective directives? Clearly, we are meant to feel pleasure (even pride?) in the fact that one of the soldiers the ss Great Britain carried earned the Victoria Cross (which is the highest military decoration a soldier can attain in the UK) for his brave fighting in India.3 What is missing from the frame is what the Sepoy War was actually fought for, or the complex issues surrounding it. The Sepoy War is also popularly known as the First War for Indian Independence, although ‘there is a growing consensus gradually emerging that the revolt of 1857 was not a nationalist movement in the modern sense of the term’ (Bandyopadhyay 2004, p. 174). However, the museum visitor is told nothing about the rebellion. Visitors are only encouraged to feel proud of the brave actions of the British soldier, actions which would have curtailed a complex rebellion which sought to end the military, economic and cultural occupation of India. What we are prevented from understanding – because they are removed from the frame in the ss Great Britain museum – is a nuanced understanding of Britain’s role in this part of its colonial history, a history where Britain is always the ‘good’ and heroic. International Journal of Heritage Studies 257

Concluding thoughts: remaking memory on the ss Great Britain Step back in time when you board Brunel’s ss Great Britain. Discover the true stories behind the ship that changed the world (ss Great Britain 2010, emphasis added). In the ss Great Britain museum the notion of ‘the past’ and ‘the truth’ are often conflated, suggesting a fixity that cannot possibly be questioned. Of course, what the museum documents did happen, on some level: Brunel built the ship, people sailed to Australia in search of gold and the ss Great Britain was returned to Bristol in 1970. However, the frame used by the museum to interpret the past radically constrains understandings of wider social, cultural, economic and political histories. Ultimately, it supports the prevalent tendency in British culture to render British colonial activity, and violence many experienced, as invisible and unidentifiable. This is not to suggest that the ss Great Britain museum should not tell the story of the ship, it just needs to tell it in a different way. It arguably needs to offer more openings for the non- specialised visitor to be independently critical about the histories of Britain and empire, rather than providing a leisure activity that escapes the particularities and difficulties of the past and present. There is a wealth of critical literature in cultural memory studies and museum studies that may offer tools to help re-make the histories of empire that are told on the ss Great Britain. Arguably there needs to be a larger cultural shift, encompassing social policy, school education, media and public learning institutions such as museums, which can responsibly re-assess Britain’s colonial history. Because of the way Britain inherited a unique position after the Second World War as ‘protectors of democracy’, the country has never been systematically confronted with ‘questions of how to assess and remember the macro-crimes associated with … imperial colonialism from the very beginning’ (Langenohl 2010, p. 163, emphasis added). Langenohl is here speaking from a German context, a country that has had to confront the political crimes of the past within public institutions and wider culture. The last part of Langenohl’s sentence is useful, however, to transpose to the British situation where the communal memory of empire is still affected by the types of mythologising I have demonstrated take place in the ss Great Britain museum. Such mythologising avoids a complex – and potentially painful – understanding of Britain’s role in shaping the contemporary and historical globalised world. How can British culture re-assess and remember its past and what role do heritage museums have to play in this? What transformations have to take place to prevent the story of empire being presented as a gift, as Ahmed asserts, or as a voyage of economic discovery, as the ss Great Britain promises its visitors? Following Gable, who writes about the Monticello museum in the USA, museums like the ss Great Britain could adopt a ‘more radical form of honesty’ in relation to the past. This means they have to convey the museum’s ‘past complicities in history’s inevitable erasures’ (Gable 2006, p. 124). Gable argues that the types of framed representation are prevalent in museums that already claim democracy as a starting point. At work in such sites is an ‘erasure which is far more subtle than the crude airbrushing of totalitarian regimes’ (Gable 2006, p. 124). Instead of smoothing over difficult historical truths, Ann Cvetkovich (2003, p. 119) notes the ‘interventionist potential of trauma histories to disrupt celebratory accounts of the nation that ignore or repress the violence and exclusions that are so often the foundation of the nation-state’. Both Gable and Cvetkovich argue for the necessity of new forms of collective story telling that account for the messy, disruptive and uncomfortable aspects of history to emerge as part of cultural memory. 258 D.M. Withers

It may be, therefore, that the affective memory of colonialism should never be allowed to circulate as un-problematised ‘good’ feelings in large, contained public spaces like museums. This is not to suggest that we simplistically replace good feelings with bad (such as shame, guilt, anger), but rather that we have an awareness of how affective responses are crucial mechanisms that have been used, and are used, to mediate social reality. What are the political implications of teaching young people about ‘the past’ in museum contexts in Britain that allow very young people to feel good about ‘voyages of discovery’ made at the expense of other cultures as they do in the ss Great Britain museum? What alternative histories can be told that are construc- tive and accountable to many different versions of the past that do not always end up with Britain being the upholders of the moral order, free from criticism? Within British culture, the problematic aspect of collective memory is arguably not what Thompson describes as ‘Liberal ahistoricism’ (Thompson 2009, p. 197). ‘Liberal ahistoricism’ is where the institutions, ideals and principles of citizens can be justified without reference to the past or where citizens of liberal societies ‘have no collective historical obligations or entitlements … they have no obligations that arise from the historical past’ (Thompson 2009, p. 197). There is, in fact, a strong sense of British identity that relies on a racist view of the colonial past – in particular the role of dominion states – which is often celebratory and uncritical. This poses its own specific challenges in terms of how British culture can begin to deconstruct and then recon- struct memorialising practices so they do not always privilege the ‘achievements’ of white colonial settlers. Such a different approach to the communal memory of empire may allow Britain to move into a space of transnational accountability for the impact of British colonialism on all the countries it affected. Practically this will mean that visitors to museums like the ss Great Britain may no longer be able to go and feel good about the histories represented there. This is because the museum will have fundamentally changed the way it represents social and cultural history to allow difficult questions and multiple perspectives to enter the frame. In so doing, this may even undo the notion of the museum frame itself. However, this will be more beneficial in the long run as it will demonstrate the vital role museums can play in facilitating social change and transforming the mythologies that have governed British identity within existing memory.

Notes on contributor Deborah Withers’ PhD explored subjectivity in the work of popular musician Kate Bush. In 2010 she published Adventures in Kate Bush and Theory, a popular re-interpretation of her thesis, to critical acclaim. Deborah’s current research explores the cultural activism of the Women’s Liberation Movement. She is the curator of Sistershow Revisited (May 2011), a Heritage Lottery funded exhibition about a feminist theatre troupe based in Bristol in 1973– 1975. The exhibition uses the activity of Sistershow to tell the story of feminism in Bristol at that time. Deborah is currently exploring research methodologies that consider the relationship between collective memory and social change through using public history, exhibitions and blogs (www.debi-rah.net).

Notes 1. I went on this trip with my father who had been part of the salvage mission of the ss Great Britain when he worked onboard HMS Endurance in 1970. 2. It is worth noting as well the extent to which the ship is anthropomorphised throughout the exhibition. As a ship, it is automatically gendered ‘she’. As a result, we are encouraged to International Journal of Heritage Studies 259

welcome ss Great Britain ‘home’ as much as we would a person who has been estranged. This gendering of the ss Great Britain is important because it creates dimensions of how people can care about the ship. Although ‘she’ is by no means vulnerable, ‘she’ can be tended to with the delicacy that you could, perhaps, lend to your mother or sister. 3. A similar problem is posed by the Extraordinary Heroes exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London, an exhibition which encourages visitors to explore notions of heroism such as aggression, boldness, endurance and sacrifice by engaging with the life-stories of soldiers who were awarded the Victoria Cross. For more information see here: http:// www.iwm.org.uk/upload/package/184/index.html

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