Anna Farthing here. As Bea is going to be very busy over the next few weeks on other things, including a new draft of her play for January’s BOV Ferment, I will pick up the progress report.
There has been much squealing with delight in archives recently. We visited Alan Freke at the Frenchay Village Museum, who showed us a fine collection of objects, archives and ephemera relating to the Fry family and their connection to the area. There was even a box of Fry’s chocolate, well past its sell by date. It’s a great little place and highly recommended. As it is housed in the entrance lodge to Frenchay Hospital, you can even get a coffee from the lovely ladies of the WRVS.
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| Best before.... |
Alan’s book about the Fry’s has also been a great aide to our research. You can buy one following this link.
While in Frenchay we had our second session with Hugh Evans, former Hygiene Manager at Somerdale, who has been explaining modern manufacturing processes to us, and what Somerdale was really like to work in at the point at which it closed. His pride in the company and in his work shines through his stories, and we look forward to talking to more of his former colleagues soon.
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| Hugh Evans and Alan Freke with Bea in the wonderful Frenchay Village Museum |
On Monday we took some students on the Bristol University MA Performance Research to the Bristol Record Office, where Graham and Sarah showed them how it all works using the Fry archive as an example. We found recipes and packaging labels from 1878 destined for Germany, France, Spain and South America, along with carbon copies of letters to and from customers all over the world, as well as competitors such as Rowntrees and Cadburys.
The correspondence showed that this really was the first global trade, and the company was dealing with a wide range of dilemmas including corporate responsibility, fair trade and worker’s welfare from the outset. These dilemmas, and how they were approached, will provide us with plenty of drama. The students were stunned to discover that the manufacturing of eating chocolate was actually begun in Bristol, and that this was not well known. As they are an international bunch, we were heartened with their interest in the story. It backs up our feeling that this really is a story that can resonate around the world.
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| Graham lets us poke about in the archive; a Bristol charter from the 14th Century! |
The students then explored Bristol city centre with old maps, and we got lost among the alleys and passageways, trying to work out where everything was before it was either bulldozed or blitzed. We tried to imagine the rumble of machinery, the smell of chocolate, and the sound of hymns being sung by Fry’s Angels. At St Nicholas’s Market, we looked at the small suppliers and independent producers who may be founding their own food dynasties. And we finished off, of course, with hot chocolate all round.
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| On the wall of what is now Subway in Broadmead |
Recently we have also been reading the transcripts of the Select Committee and The Takeover Panel regarding the Kraft takeover of Cadburys. The verbatim dialogue gets unbelievably heated at times, verging on the surreal. Almost as surreal as the ‘life of a cocoa bean’ published in 1928 in the bicentennial works magazine....
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| From the Fry's Bi-Centennial Magazine, 1928 |
Characters, situations, songs and images are emerging...and will be developed through a number of workshops and scratch nights over the next few months.
We are delighted to have won the support not only of Bristol Museums Galleries and Archives, but also The Tobacco Factory Theatre. We now know this project can reach a broad and diverse audience. The next step for us, is to raise the funds to make it happen.
In the meantime....Support your local archives! The call up system may be a bit like Argos, but it's free, the staff are much nicer and the stuff lasts much, much longer.
