Project volunteer Fiona reflects on some of the women she is learning about from MPA’s archive on this special day…
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It’s International Women’s Day today and I thought I’d write about some of the women from the early days of MPA.
Without Doris Nield Chew, there would not be a Mid Pennine Arts. She ran the fledgling organisation from her dining room in 1965. She wanted something better for this area, because she could see the beginnings of the closure of music halls, cinemas, theatres and reflected ‘there is little to enhance the quality of life for those of us who live here’.
Her vision was for an arts centre containing a theatre. From her dining room she invited artists and consultants from different disciplines – poetry, theatre, visual arts and music to advise her.
Doris never gave up. She said she, ‘became hardened to remarks about being airy fairy and having her head in the clouds’. She worked on the process for years before anything practical happened. She leafleted, went out with questionnaires and went to meeting after meeting after meeting to persuade people.
I would have loved to have met her. I look at pictures of her and she reminds me of my Grandma, a very strong woman who wasn’t at all a cuddly Grandma and I get that impression when I read about Doris Chew.
My second inspiring woman of MPA (or MPAA as it was then) is Jenny Wilson, Director from 1970-1977, a woman who was almost unique for the time. From talking to her and reading about her she was clearly one woman in a man’s world who had to constantly fight her corner for her decisions to be taken seriously.
She presided over a period of time where the Association expanded its remit quite dramatically, and she and the team were balancing so many elements of MPAA, from the gallery and workshops, through radical theatre, to brass bands and classical performances. An article from the Financial Times of 3 March 1971 entitled Cultural Desert Image Disappearing about the arts in NE Lancashire quotes Jenny as saying ‘There is no point in expecting the people of NE Lancashire to leap up and say ‘what we want is Schönberg because they won’t. We have got to cater for as wide an audience as possible and build up the habit of culture’.
I’ve also been quite shocked by the way women were represented in the local press in the 1970s. Almost every article about a woman, her art or her work, mentions her husband, even if the article has nothing to do with him. An article in Woman’s Angle from one of the local papers in 1971 written by Winifred Rose about Mrs Caryl Simms is particularly telling. Caryl was one of the first craftspeople to be exhibited by MPAA at Back St James’ Street, Burnley. Before we find out what she has achieved, we are told that she is ‘lovely, green-eyed Caryl’ that she is ‘young and pretty’ and we find out what her husband Gordon does for a living!
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