FRED - The First Weekend

The weekend of Saturday 27th and Sunday 28th September saw the official opening of the Broughton Sound Tour and an enthusiastic response from it's first listeners. Thanks to the efforts of the FRED festival marketing team, the local tourist information centre and a two-day respite from the wet weather, the tour was visited by around 30 people who spent a combined total of approximately 50 hours exploring the historic market town whilst wearing large pairs of headphones.

FRED visitors, walkers, families and local residents alike set off up the steep climb to High Cross to hear children from St James' school, Millom recreate the sounds of the Hodbarrow Iron Ore mines, before arriving back at the square to the sound of a flapping salmon tail.

The tour will also run on the weekends of: 4th/5th October and 11th/12th October.

Preview Event 26/09/08

The Broughton Sound Tour opened for business last Friday evening at a special preview event for participants in the project and local residents. Setting up stall in the large) and inexplicably far from the actual bus stop) stone bus shelter, Samantha and Glenn handed out headphones and media players over wine and nibbles.

Amongst the first people to sample the tour were life-long Broughton residents Ray Babb (above) and Vera Fugler as well as ardent project promoter, parish council member and chief direction-giver, Graham George. The evening was a great chance to say thank you to everyone who has helped us with the project, particularly those who helped to create content for the tour.

Workshops at St James' School, Millom (Part 2)

On Wednesday 17th September, children from St James' School in Millom took part in the second of two workshops looking at the role played by the mining industry in their town's history. Following on from a visit to the Millom Folk Museum last term, the children, from year 4, were asked to recreate sounds and dialogue from the nearby Hodbarrow mine and Millom Iron Works, formerly the town's main employer until its closure in 1968. A series of worksheets with photos of the mine and works provided a starting point, asking the children to list the sounds that they might hear as well as imagining a dialogue between workers.

Working in groups of 3, the children began to recreate and record the sounds using a variety of amplified household objects and instruments connected to contact microphones.
By attaching it to a flat surface, the microphone transforms vibrations in materials into audio signals, thus making it possible to record the sound of any material or surface. Among the objects we worked with were: plastic egg timers, a jar of cous-cous, pebbles from a local beach, a small wooden frog, a bucket of water and a drum machine. After choosing an object each, the children experimented with making and altering sounds by using effects boxes to add echo, distortion and to alter the pitch. These were then recorded into a looping device which automatically repeats and layers the sounds. Controlling individual loops manually, each group mixed a finished track directly to a digital recorder, providing material for the Hodbarrow section of the audio tour.

Samantha and Glenn would like to thank Copeland Borough Council and all at St. James' school for their help in organising the workshops.

North West Evening Mail, Thurs. 18th September

An article looking at the Sound Tour and other FRED 08 projects, published in last Thursday's edition of the North West Evening Mail.

FRED 2008

The website for this year's FRED festival is now up and running, so go to to: www.fredsblog.co.uk

to see a full list of all the events happening across Cumbria from the 26th of September.

Broughton Cattle Market

Earlier today, land rovers and trailers poured into Broughton as farmers flocked to the cattle market on Princes Street for the livestock auction.

Samantha and Glenn donned their wellies and went along to collect recordings for the sound tour, paying particular attention to the voice of today's auctioneer.

Our thanks to chairman Bill Johnson for his kind permission to record.

Click here to view a report on a recent auction at Broughton Market.

Workshops at Broughton Youth Club

On Friday 5th September, Glenn and Samantha went along to the Victory Hall in Broughton to work with members of the local youth club. The club is run by volunteers and provides activities for children between the ages of 10 and 16.

Working in small groups, the children were asked to recreate sounds for different sites around the town to be used in the sound tour. These ranged from the sound of an early X-Ray machine (pioneered by a local GP), to cows grazing and fish being scaled and sold in the market square. The sounds were recreated by using contact microphones (small devices that amplify surface vibrations) and a variety of objects. These were then run through effects units to alter the pitch, add echo and to create repeating loops.

Examples included using the flapping rubber of a damaged table tennis bat to mimic the sound of fish being unloaded, the sloshing of a kettle to act as the sea and pressing the microphones to the vocal chords to create an eerie drone. The sounds were then layered and mixed by the children using a mixer and digital recorder.

The Fred Barlow Archive

It was a great pleasure to meet Fred Barlow last week. A retired park ranger and local historian, Fred has written several books about the town and the surrounding landscape.



Although not comfortable with being recorded himself for the Tour, Fred has allowed us to use as much of his vast archive information as we need (which includes over 3000 slides). This includes transcripts of interviews Fred made with craftsmen such as, the long gone, swill basket makers. Fred has expressed a desire to donate his archive to an appropriate organisation for public access and display - if you know of anyone who may be interested please contact us and we will pass the details on.

Fred has offered to give us a tour of the town which we will soon take him up on!

The First Recordings

On Thursday, after two months of research and workshops, we finally began recording for the finished Tour. First up was Sue Halsey, at the Parsonage Room, who described how her grandfather, a local train driver, had saved the life of a boy who was asleep on the tracks, and went on to reminisce on her playful cousins who used to leave her down in her grandmother's shop cellar with the dissected pigs maturing from the beams above - recalling the smell above anything else.

Then, after too much traffic noise outside, we moved to take advantage of the acoustics at the Methodist Hall to record Margaret. She produced a fantastic piece of creative writing about the system she used to name her cattle. Below is a short extract (we will be publishing all stories on the blog after the festival):

"Each cow had a name with the prefix STICKLE- like a surname but it came first, as in STICKLE Kim, STICKLE Hawthorn, STICKLE Daisybell - who failed to recover from a twisted stomach operation"

Through this short text Margaret has given us a glimpse into a world that seems completely alien to us, non farmers.

Then came Vera to read her text which she had re-written three times. It was a condensed history of her working life, were she went from shop assistant to manager. Vera painted an amusing picture of a co-op manager she remembered:

"We got a different manager, not for the better. He came from lakeside and would roll up in a taxi about 11.30 and go in the back and fry himself some bacon and egg...It was funny when he came, he had his gloves and was all dressed up and had a long umbrella. Nobody would've thought he was coming to Broughton co-op."

And so it was the turn of Graham George (a retired policeman, now a member of the parish council, Amateur Dramatics Society, part-time post office worker and unofficial 'Caretaker of the Square'). Graham, put his dramatic skills to good use to read a text we had created about the invention of the X-ray which will be played outside the old Cottage Hospital were the son of Dr Fawcett, an early pioneer of radiology, lived.

Many thanks to these four participants for their enthusiasm in the project and who all turned up on time and did more than we had anticipated - it's a great start to the Tour!

Workshop at Broughton Parsonage Room

A poster distributed to local residents advertising the first in a series of workshops sessions for the project. The workshop will be held this Thursday (14/08/08) at the Parsonage Room, Market St., Broughton between 5pm and 7pm and is open to all.

Sue Halsey's Museum of Broughton's Industries

Sue Halsey of New Street is a mine of information. After spending two minutes in her cottage she had ran up the stairs several times bringing down with her gems from Broughtons past. The most moving was her grandfather's pocket watch that he was awarded for forty seven years of service as the "engine driver" on the Broughton to Coniston railway. This, together with his lapel pin, proved a inspiring starting point for Sue to describe to me how useful the service was in terms of jobs in the village.

Sue explained that she actually lived in Coniston and once a week she would board the train that her grandfather drove and alight in Broughton to assist her grandmother, who had a grocers shop on Princess St (still called Grocer's Cottage), in bringing heavy bags of flour and sugar up from the cellar for the shop.

It's interesting to think that the now disused railway was central in Broughton's industries - getting people to and from work, carrying the slate from the various quarries, the swill baskets to the mines at Millom and the Lancashire factories. I wonder if there were protests when is was closed like the protests at last weeks Charter Day when a group expressed palpable anger at the cutting of several important bus routes from Broughton to Ulverston. In this rurally isolated town these routes have a direct impact on the jobs people of Broughton can do, as the bus, for many young residents in particular, is their only form of transport. It also was pointed out that the students at Victoria High School in Ulverston, are not able to stay for the extra curricula activities on offer because there is now no public transport available later than 3.30pm. This is an interesting time because it is these factors that continue to shape the town's identity and professions accessible to the residents.

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Sue also showed me a group of objects she has saved from the old shops and workrooms of Broughton, including a wonderful potato weight, a clog last and a beautiful and fully functional whisk from the old bakery. Recording the sounds these objects make including the ticking of Sue's grandfather's watch have produced some really evocative sound sketches which are helping to build ideas of an historical Broughton Soundscape.

Historical sound is an interesting and difficult concept to explore. Sound is specific to time and place and until the late 19th century impossible to record. Images through photography and film were available and accepted long before sound. In fact the Victorians were frightened to hear recorded conversations between people who were no longer alive, imagining they were listening to ghosts.

With this project we are hoping to re-create a tour full of rich layered sounds that explore the industrious nooks and crannies of the ancient town over the centuries.

Vera's tour of the forgotton shops

Today I had the pleasure of a tour of Broughton's old shops by the lovely Vera Fugler, who is often referred to as "the longest living resident". Born in Broughton in 1926 Vera painted an evocative picture of Broughton in the early to mid twentieth century.

(Vera outside of the old Cooperative, now a house, 1st August 2008. Vera told me the windowsill used to be much lower and children used to sit on it)

As we dodged the speeding cars, watching our steps on the tiny pavements, we walked past an inconceivable amount of houses that were once thriving businesses. We passed three cobblers, a saddlers, three tailors, a chemist, a "posh confectioners", a toy shop, two wool shops, two slaughter houses, two tanneries, a games room, a clock makers, a butchers, a fish mongers, five grocers (her family owned one), a garage (where she bought her first bike for £5), the old Midland bank (where she saved up for her first bike), the 'new' electrical shop (where her family bought their first television) and finally the cooperative where she worked for over twenty years. In the co-op Vera told me that they would make orders up for customers right up to Seathwaite and Woodland and deliver their produce in small vans in summer and through the harsh winters. Around the back of the building Vera said there were always horses because of the blacksmiths that was attached to the co-op. I left Vera having tea with her friends in the Methodist church with a sense of the wonderful chaos and purpose so many industries bring to a place. All the characters and life that would have contributed to the overall soundscape. How different it must seem to Vera from when she was growing up "You could get everything in one place, absolutely everything you needed was here".

I would like to thank Vera for her time on such a rainy day - she has given us lots of ideas of sounds to pursue. We hope to record Vera for the tour at one of the scheduled workshops.

Samantha Allan

Workshops at St James' School, Millom

Earlier this month we held the first in a series of three workshops with year 3 pupils from St. James' Primary School in Millom. During a visit to the nearby Millom Folk Museum, the children were asked to choose one area of the museum and to use their imaginations to document sounds produced by objects from the collection, ranging from farming machinery, and iron ore mining tools to the sound of a grocer's till. This was followed by a classroom session introducing the concept of soundscapes and sharing our findings in a recorded discussion. Further workshops will take place in September and will involve the children recreating the sounds of local industry using contact microphones and spoken word, with the results to be included as part of the completed tour.

The Tour's HQ

During the festival the head sets and maps for the Tour will be hired out from the bus shelter in the middle of the beautiful Georgian Square. It's an attractive building, made from the local slate and painted a calming blue inside, however it is somewhat defunct as a shelter as the bus stops at the other side of the square and if you were to shelter from the wild Cumbria weather in it, you would need to run across and hope to stop the bus in time. For this reason, we have decided to make use of this sad but inviting building and turn in into the centre of activity during the festival. It already has a great map on the side of it with information about the nature reserves and local walks. From here you can hire out the head sets and maps, talk to the artists and the various members of the community who participated in the project.