Peter Kent-Baguley

FAIR PLAY DRAMA plans for FAIRTRADE Fortnight '08 (25th February - 9th March)

One of the most truly FANTASTIC productions I have seen this year so far was FAIRGAME'S, One For Me, which I brought to 6 Stoke-on-Trent High schools during FAIRTRADE Fortnight earlier this year. It was a first rate professional touring drama focussed on the bicentenary of the abolition of the Slave Trade in the British Empire. My only regret was that the Cheltenham-based company were not able to tour the production throughout the year!

However, looking forward to FAIRTRADE FORTNIGHT 2008, Cally Wright's brainchild, Fair Play Drama, was launched today on the web at: www.fairplaydrama.co.uk

Cally has provided scripts, free of charge, for various product centred dramas, for example, on cotton, coffee, chocolate and bananas. (Tea is due later.) The scripts include song and dance and of course they can be varied according to the needs and abilities of the group involved in the production. Cally has conceived this as an innovative ethical pyramid. She is hoping to recruit champions who will promote the project in their area (needless to say I've volunteered!) to as many groups as possible (lots of potential with schools, youth groups and church groups) so that lots of participants are enjoyably spreading the Faitrade message to hundreds, thousands even, of audience members. 

Each drama can run from 10 to 40 minutes. I hope schools will present one or more of the dramas at the Annual FAIRTRADE schools one-day conference at Port Vale on Wednesday 27th February and at the Lord Mayor's Annual Fairtrade Civic Reception at Stoke Town Hall during FAIRTRADE Fortnight, on Wednesday 5th March. Be inspired, look at Cally Wright's website: www.fairplaydrama.co.uk

Crafty, Creative, Entrepreneurial City Graduate Boosts Stoke-on-Trent Regeneration   

27 year-old Gareth Thomas left school at sixteen, started work immediately at Burslem printers, Sherwin Rivers, and thoroughly enjoyed being in the thick of print and made excellent progress on his NVQ Origination training. Unfortunately, before he could complete the training, unforseen circumstances took him away from Stoke-on-Trent for a couple of years. On his return to the City, having tried various computer-related jobs for a year or two as well as twelve months as a youth worker in the then tension-ridden student body of a City High School, he decided to embark on the three-year journalism B.A. course at Staffordshire University. Having graduated in June this year, Gareth decided to launch commercially what had been part of his final degree course work. In fact, his course work magazine project was so well received that he was awarded a £750 university bursary to help launch his business career. And so, in September Crafty was released in the tight, glossy, professional form of a 16pp A5 magazine. "It combines both of my passions: print and music." Gareth told me. "It may make me a nerd but I just love printing! I always have."

Gareth pictured in soft focus outside O'Leary's, one of Stoke's London Road venues featured in this month's Crafty music scene magazine.

Crafty has been so well received, not only by the live music fraternity, but also by his former university tutors that they have asked Gareth to mentor a journalism student on a three-week placement. Also, students on the journalism course are keen to contribute news and reviews.

Only last week a fellow guest at a Burslem reception told me that he and one other were the only two boys out of his school year group that had stayed to run businesses in the City. The rest were all high-flyers in London and elsewhere.

Gareth really is a good-news story for Stoke-on-Trent: city born, city educated and city entrepreneur. To make contact: craftymag@hotmail.co.uk  Telephone: 01782 612452. 

DISHINIT     specially long posting for a VERY special exhibition

Californian artist, Pamela Wells (see my entry for 14th October) has achieved a remarkable artistic unity out of diversity and destined for dispersal. Elevent year-old Tobias Skipiol and his mother, Susan, pictured below, were the first of the 101 participants to be involved. "We saw the project mentioned in The Sentinel", Susand told me: "And we thought that would be interesting to be involved with." To be one of the 101 you simply had to live or work in Stoke-on-Trent, and of course, contact Pamela Wells! All 101 people spent at least an hour with Pamela discussing their ideas for the decoration of thier 4 bowls. Each of the 404 identical bowls were made by Pamela on the potters wheel and she also hand decorated them. Individuals o looked through the portfolio of Pamela's photographs of the entire collection of Staffordshire tableware at the Potteries Museum & Art Gallery as well as more than a hundred drawings of various aspects of the decorated tableware that Pamela had produced. Each of the 101, like Tobias, would tease out aspects of designs and how they would like their design or different parts of designs to be arranged on their bowls as well as choosing the colour. 

The exhibition of one each of the 101 participants' bowls was opened this evening at the New Vic Theatre, Basford. Well that is not quite accurate in fact! Tobias told me of the previous day's trauma when he read the email from Pamela informing him that his bowls along with the 52 bowls from 13 other people had been smashed. Tobias' reaction? "Oh no." In fact, he told me: "I could hardly believe it. I was very upset and disappointed."

On Saturday, Pamela and a dozen or so of the participants spent the day arranging the hanging of all 404 bowls, arranged in 4 horozontal rows affixed to white painted boards, suspended by wires from the theatre's permanent display rail fixed just below the ceiling along the curved wall of the upper concourse. However, when Pamela walked upstairs at the theatre on Monday morning she was greeted by a huddle of staff who had just finished cleaning up the debris. At some point over the weekend, the rail holding the boards with 14 of the participants' 56 bowls broke away from its fixings in the wall and so 54 unique bowls were smasked to smithereens. "Shock, just shock." that was Pamela's initial reaction, understandably, but, she told me: "I had no time to dwell on the catastrophe; the exhibition was due to open the next day; a solution was required. So I decided that just one bowl of each of the 101 people would be displayed, thus vastly reducing the weight on the hanging bars. Fortunately, all of the bowls had been photographed so I was able to display 14 photographs to fill the void."

I should add that none of this drama was evident this evening. Participants, even those like Tobias who now have to wait for several weeks while Pamela is tending to another art project in Sweden before she is able to replace the smashed 56, were so delighted about both the project as a whole as well as their part in it that catastrophe had become little more than a challenging hiccup!  

Gay Hoban, 49 (project number, not age!) from Burslem, the Mother town of the Potteries, told me: "I thought it would be a fun thing to do. The idea of inviting three friends to a meal when we have the bowls after the exhibition seemed a really good idea." It is an integral part of the project, that each of the 101 participants invites three people they do not live with to a meal, make a record of some kind of the occasion and give each of the guests their bowl to take away.   

Journalist founder of the recently established free community newspaper, Local Edition, which curculates in the Burslem and Tunstall areas, and Burslem resident, Clare-Marie White, 95 (project number, remember, not age!) told me: "I thought it sounded really interesting particularly the way the pottery is going to scatter, not knowing where it will end up." Inside Clare's bright and lively bowl is the quote, from an C18th design: love and live happy. "I thought that was such a lovely thought." Clare said: "I knew I wanted that on my bowl the moment I saw it."

Former Stoke-on-Trent Elected Mayor, Mike Wolfe, 46, told me: "I was immediately fascinated by the project, based as it is on Staffordshire designs which I really like, and drawing from them to produce something new and highly individual. I also like the idea that the finished bowls are not the finish of the project but the beginning of the next stage, the communal element of the project."

Judith Brook, 84, (right) said: "It sounded like an interesting thing to do and I wanted to connect with the past. Also, I liked the organic aspect of the project and was fascinated about how it will evolve. I think it's a challenge to find the right approach for the evening when sharing the meal with three other people. I really like the way the project expands and reaches out to more people through the meal." The decoration on Judith's bowl, as she told me, is minimalist: totally white glaze on the inside with the merest hint of several lines of subtle colour on the outside. Judith's bowl is hanging above the stairwell, hence it is quite a way above her head. Incidentally, the bowls that fell and smashed were not those above the stairs! Judith added: The project encourages play and I like play."

The exhibition remains until 17th November: I thoroughly recommend a visit. Congratulations to Pamella Wells and to the 101 participants.    

Strategy to Street

I continue to have serious reservations about the way our City Council is working. the 2000 Local Government Act stressed that the new Executive form of local government was designed to increase efficiency, effectiveness and transparency. In our City Council we have 60 councillors, three from each of 20 Wards. We also have the UNIQUE (and UNQUESTIONABLY disastrously UNDEMOCRATIC, inefficient, ineffective and opaque) Elected Mayor with Council Manager Executive system. Even this Labour government, not noted for implementing its rhetoric about local democracy, has recognised just how appalling the system is and has included its abolition in the current Local Government Bill wending its way through parliament. However, we are stuck with the system until May 2009. Having been reduced to being the minority Labour Group following May's elections, it cobbled together a United Front coalition with the Conservative Group and the Liberal Democrat Group to push through a pretend cabinet set-up which pays the 10 so-called cabinet members an extra £9,000 a year! What possibly united Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat IMMEDIATELY after the May elections during which party politics held sway? Could it be shared political principles? I wouldn't know! What I do know is that I haven't been able to work out what the shared principles are! Maybe it is as so may residents assert, a shared interest in the £ sign that unites. That's their concern - they will have to face the voters next May. What is my concern is the way councillors in the Groups outside the United Front, namely the Independent Group, the Potteries Alliance Group and the BNP, struggle to find out what decisions these so-called cabinet member protfolio holders actually make. The truth is, of course, as I have maintained all along, that they do not make any decisions. It is the Council Manager who makes the decisions - no one else can LEGALLY make the decisions in our system! But why worry about an extra £90,000 for make-belief?

Spitfire Dream

This musical documentary, devised and produced by Ray Johnson, was originally performed at the Mitchell Theatre in 1995 as part of Stoke-on-Trent's week-long celebration of the Spitfire designer, Reginald Mitchell's birth. The 1995 programme was the brainchild of local businessman, Alex Humphreys, who organised a series of fund-raising events, including a variety show at the Victoria Hall that included the Beverley Sisters and the Syd Lawrence Orchestra and a golf tournament. The motivation was to raise sufficient money to fund the statue of Reginald Mitchell which stands by the side of the Potteries Museum & Art Gallery in Broad Street, Hanley. 

Our limited budget precluded a full-scale stage production this time so Ray most skillfully captured the action on film. During the screening, professional actor Tim Churchill added narration and song from his small set to the right of the screen, sometimes accompanying his own singing on screen!

The first half covered Mitchell's growing up in the Potteries where intially his father, Herbert, was a school teacher but he later trained to be a printer and went on to establish Wood Mitchell Printers which is still a flourishing printing company in the City, run by Reginald Mitchell's great nephew, Ross Mitchell. Some very interesting archive film show Mitchell's entries for a number of Sneider Trophy competitions which, of course, Britain goes on to win on three consecutive occasions, thereby securing the Trophy in perpetuity and thus bringing to an end the competition. Mitchell was awarded the CBE for his outstanding contribution.

The second half of the programme is devoted to Mitchell's relentless endeavours to produce the supreme fighter 'plane despite the fact that for most of that concentrated period he knows he has little time because of incurable cancer. He lived to see the test flight but unfortunately died in 1937 and thus never knew the pivoital role his 'plane played in the Battle of Britain.

I saw the show this evening with Alex Humphreys who was absolutely delighted with it. That, for me, was a major accolade for Ray Johnson's work, considering he had seen the original stage version in 1995. The photograph, courtesy of Geoff Price of the Newcastle Players, shows from left, Ray Johnson, Tim Churchill and Alex Humphreys. Alex is holding a copy of the 1995 souvenir brochure and Ray is holding the booklet marking the 50th anniversary of the Mitchell Memorial Youth Theatre.   

Reginald Mitchell's Spitfire celebrated IN FLIGHT

Students from St Margaret Ward R.C. School & Arts College and from Holden Lane High School and Sports College dance performance this evening at the Victoria Hall, Hanley, was a wonderfully choreographed narrative of the manufacture and flight of R.J.Mitchell's iconic Spitfire which played such a pivotal role in the 1940 Battle of Britain. The point of the differently coloured costumes of just a few of the three dozen dancers became clear as the plane took shape and the concentric colours of the RAF mark emerged. The agility, grace and charm of the Spitfire were well exemplified in the performance. There was an added poignancy when the only boy in the group wore the flying jacket of a Spitfire pilot. The pilot was the father of Jo Blagg, Education & Outreach Manager at the Victoria Theatre. The performance prior to In Flight, was redolent with confidence and poise and a reflection that those pupils like all pupils at Ash Green Primary School at Trentham participate in dance as a normal part of their curriculum.

Ceramica...Burslem's Millennium dream fading fast 

The Trustees of the Ceramica charity and limited company by guarantee agreed in principle several months ago to wind up and transfer the project to the City Council. Since Ceramica is dependent upon the £130,000 annual funding from the City Council it seemed sensible to recognise the reality of  independent sustainability and dissolve in favour of the Council. The glass building, the controversial millennium project appendage at the eastern end of the classical-style Town Hall, is set to become the base for a brand new local commercial radio station, likely to be on air by the end of the year.

Burslem library will move from the Wedgwood Institute into the ground floor of the Town Hall and the Ceramica exhibits will be concentrated on the first floor. Although Ceramica has exhibits, it most certainly does not work as a free-standing exhibition. The essence of Ceramica has always been its guided tours around various interactive facilities and workshops that explore design and the qualities of clay.

A static exhibition without staff-led workshops spells the demise of Ceramica. Not unlike many Millennium projects up and down the country, London's Millennium Dome being the example par excellence, Ceramica was conceived in the hyped hysteria as the millennium approached and normal commonsense financial prudence went out of the window. Again, like so many similar projects, particularly the London Dome (but that was alright because the government continued to bail it out of one financial crisis after another), Ceramica went over budget, over time and over the top as far as its unrealistic visitor numbers were concerned. The miracle is that the project has staggered on as long as it has, particularly since it was conceived by those Bursley millennia worthies to be only a three year project anyway!

Were it not for the fact that the Millennium Commission, now wound up and its responsibilities passed to the Lottery Fund, attached a few strings to its £3m grant to refurbish the Town Hall, the City Council Executive would surely cut Ceramica completely.  

Dishinit...

...is a two year art project by Californian artist Pamela Wells, domiciled at Wolverhampton. Working from one of Potclay's studios at Etruria, Pamela started work nearly two years ago by photographing the entire Staffordshire tableware collection at the Potteries Museum & Art Gallery. The next stage was to recruit 101 people who lived and/or worked in Stoke-on-Trent. During an early gestation period of the project, Pamela had thought in terms of 1001 people. With the aid of the photographs and numerous drawings by Pamela relating to the designs, she systematically carried out one-to-one conversations with each of the 101, selected simply on a first come basis. The result is a surprisingly broad cross of people, ranging in age from 10 years to 70+ ("I thought it indelicate to ask people how old they were."), ethnically varied, including several Afghanistani refugees now working in the City and people from a wide range of backgrounds, some of whom have worked in the Potteries.

The individual conversations lasted between one and three hours and from each emerged the interviewee's ideas for the design of their four bowls. Pamela has made and decorated all 404 bowls which will be exhibited at the New Vic Theatre until 17th November following the launch of the exhibition on Tuesday 23rd October. Each bowl is back-stamped with numbers identifying each of the 101 participants.

Time for Pamela (pictured) in this project is a recurring theme. Times past, present times, times in the future, things that bind and things that divide as well as unite people at different times are deeply embedded and permeate the project as Pamela conceives it.

Emma Biggs' monumental back-stamp mosaic at the Potteries Museum & Art Gallery is a permanent memorialisation of disparate, individual items brought together, to be kept together.

Pamela with the help of 101 people will bring together 404 individal pieces at the New Vic, but after the 17th November the physical unity will disappear. More of that after the launch!  

Seeing Slavery

Josiah Wedgwood, founder of the world-famous Stoke-on-Trent pottery firm was a leading anti-slave trade campaigner. The minutes book of the inaugural meeting in Burslem is displayed in the SEEING SLAVERY exhibition, opened today at the Stoke-on-Trent Museum & Art Gallery by the Staffordshire University Pro-Vice Chancellor, Dr Teeraniall Ramgopal. It opens with the list of those present and then records: "Josiah Wedgwood having been called to the chair it was unanimously resolved that this meeting beholds with sorrow the condition of 80,000 of our fellow creatures in the colonies of Great Britain suffering the privations and hardships inseparable from a state of slavery having no prospect of their condition being improved or their or their posterity's being liberated from bondage but through the interference of the British Nation."  

The captain of a slave ship (right in picture) invited the two dozen of us there for the opening to follow him into the exhibition where he explained the "benefits" of the slave trade, providing much wealth for England and allaying any fears we might have about injustices, for after all, he explained, if English traders didn't transport the Africans into slavery, others would! To back him up, he introduced us to a slave whose words suggested he was content with the situation but whose tone and demeanour suggested otherwise. The two actors from the agency, Andrew Ashmore & Associates of London, provided a novel and stimulating introduction to the exhibition.

"Am I not a man and a brother?" The Wedgwood ceramic slave medallion is perhaps the first mass-produced single-issue campaign badge, produced 220 years ago.   

Thistley Hough High School's slave galley quilt is a significant exhibit, vividly illustrating the appalling treatment and unimgainable suffering of an estimated 12 million African slaves shipped across the Atlantic, though many thousands died en route.

Pogus Caesar's face of an African man is a striking and haunting exhibit, evocative of a thousand  thoughts of the degradation, humiliation and inhumanity of capture, transportation and enslavement. The very title of the work, 80lbs of chains, along with adjacent headphones chained to the wall to remind you just what weight held down those enslaved, in unspeakably unsanitary conditions, indescribable stench, unbearable heat and almost total darkness, not knowing when or how the nightmare journey would end.

A large blue and white ware bowl, inscribed with the chilling words "Success to the Africa Trade" was made for a trader who never returned to collect his order. The label indicates it was made circa 1767 but fails to say where it was made.

Hopefully, not in the Potteries.    

What price local democracy? 

RENEW North Staffordshire, the government's housing market renewal QUANGO, expects to get in the region of £110million from the government for its third funding period, 2008-2011. Most of the £110m will be devoted to City Centre developments. Nothing will come to Chell Heath & Fegg Hayes, one of the five so-called five peripheral estate areas. Both housing in Chell Heath and Fegg Hayes is predominantly Council housing, some of which of course has been sold over the years under the Right-to-Buy scheme. The point is, several years ago, a so-called Masterplanning Steering Group was established, composed of the three Ward Councillors, residents and plenty of officers from RENEW, the Council and Staffordshire Housing Association, the "agent" through which transformation would be delivered.

At this afternoon's meeting, had I not raised the matter, there would have been no mention of the fact that RENEW's funding application contains nothing for the area. It's not particularly the fault of the RENEW officers; they are only writing the submission according to the guidelines, the steer the government has dictated. Aspirations were raised several years ago; major improvements were promised; the areas would be transformed. While the boss of the Government's Audit Commission cavorts around the globe on government-paid first class airfares, government-paid hotel bills and expensive lunches and dinners amounting to tens of thousands of pounds, ordinary people are told, cash is tight! No wonder Gordon Brown backed away from a General Election he may well have lost.

Democracy in action?

The government has published the names of the members of the Governance Commission. Professor Michael Clarke, Vice Principal of the University of Birmingham is the Chair and his four colleagues are: professor Christine King, Vice-Chancellor of Staffordshire University; Ian Dudson, Chief Executive of the Dudson Pottery Group; the Rt Rev Gordon Mursell, Bishop of Stafford; Muhhamed Tufail, former Chief Executive of the North Staffs Racial Equality Council.

That none of the members lives in Stoke-on-Trent nor comes from a grassroots group such as a trades union or residents' association need not necessarily mean that views and aspirations from a cross section of the economic, political and social spectrum in the City will not be included in the deliberations of the Commission.

The Commission is due to complete its Report, having taken ideas, experiences, views and aspirations from anyone and any group that may care to make a submission by May 2008. Full Council will then debate the Report and decide which options should be put to the electorate in the referendum scheduled for October 2008. Whatever system emerges from the referendum result will be the basis for the City election in May 2009.

One thing is certain: the despised, deeply undemocratic Elected Mayor-unelected Council Manager system that we have suffered since 2002 will be abolished. Whatever follows MUST be democratic, accountable and open.

Stoke-on-Trent's CERAMICS FESTIVAL

The City Council's new Festivals Strategy envisages a major development of the current Ceramics Festival. It will be developed to become not only a major national festival celebrating ceramics, past, present and crucially, the future, but will be striving towards international status. "Top studio potters will display their work for sale" , reads just one line in the 24pp Festival programme under the event: Ceramics Art Fair. Brief casual claims such as that seldom point to the cornucopia of ceramic excellence across a wide range of artefacts and styles that greeted the visitor in the excellently arranged upper gallery over the weekend. Top marks to Eleni and Paul Brammer, directors of advertising agency EXESIOS (http://www.exesios.co.uk/) for their unstinting efforts and for producing a superbly professional exhibition. Annabel Faraday's MAPS ON POTS are not only pleasingly shaped vessels but seductively echo time and place by the use of Ordnance Survey maps (permission duly obtained!) and Minton patterns. I was glad Annabel (http://www.annablefaraday.co.uk/), much exhibited in London and the south, ventured this far north from her Bethnal Green studio. I was equally pleased that John Kershaw (www.kershawpottery.com) ventured from his studio "situated down a ginnel off the Main Road in Windermere" to share the shapes of his bowls and vases with their very tactile "rough" surfaces and decoration which sparked in my mind Kandinsky's use of line and colour. I was delighted to be bowled over by the scale and exuberance of the show by the City's very own Philip Hardaker (www.philhardaker.co.uk). Philip's passion for peace and communication through his mosaics of all shapes and sizes, for indoor and outdoor display and often the product of communal working with different communities. Philip's passion for peace and communication shines through his mosaics of all shapes and sizes, for indoor and outdoor display and often the product of co-operative working with different communities. Another City potter, young, aspiring Denise O'Sullivan, (denisecaptaineo@hotmail.com) is making her ceramic mark with highly individualistic work appealing to the fun, jokey, child-like natures of people.  

Question of the week!

Paul, st4 1hh, ended his email response to The Sentinel's gagging of Council staff report by raising the question: !In fact, why should we pay for 60 Councillors, if they can no longer influence what happens in the City nor speak, with authority, for local people?

I hope Paul and many other similarly concerned City citizens will be making submissions to the Governance Commission once it starts its work. One thing is clear, there is nothing in the Ministry of Justice's GREEN PAPER, The Governance of Britain, published by the government earlier this year in July, that remotely hints of an answer Paul! Such is Labour's real interest in real democracy!