the-christina-gib-project-blog
The Christina Gib Project
Welcome to Elisabeth Flett's blog about researching and writing her Dundee Wighton Centre folk theatre performance, Christina
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Christina has arrived!
Christina has officially arrived! Thanks so much to everyone who came along to the Wighton Centre this morning and saw the first ever debut performance of the show. I’m hoping to tour the performance around libraries/education centres in the local area but, for now, it’s a goodbye to the #christinagibproject.
Thanks to Friends of Wighton, Heritage Lottery Fund, Cockpit Theatre, Brockley Jack Theatre, Bridewell Theatre, British Library, Pusey Library, Brechin Town House Museum and Enfield Archives for all their help during the past 10 months, this project couldn’t have happened without all your advice and support. Onwards and upwards!
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“Fresh from the sell-out Edinburgh Fringe run of her acclaimed production “Roots”, Elisabeth Flett returns to the Wighton with the world premiere of “Christina”. The show is inspired by the 19th century manuscript book of Christina Gib of Maulesden House, Brechin. Elisabeth has researched the elusive Christina’s story to create a fascinating musical and historical journey.”
The 26th is nearing, and so is the debut full performance of Christina!!
Here I am looking suitably 1840s-ish at the Cockpit Theatre scratch night last month! It was an amazing experience to see Christina come to life with lighting, sound, props and an audience :D The onstage Q&A afterwards was also great (if a little scary!) The script is finished and the music is neaaarly all recorded so we’re definitely nearing the first full debut performance...exciting stuff!! Come along to the Dundee Wighton Centre on the 26th to watch the full performance. It’s been a long time in the making and I’m so thrilled to finally share Christina with all of you.
http://friendsofwighton.com/category/concert/
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It’s nearly time for the last ever (and I mean that this time!!) scratch of Christina.
Come along to the Cockpit Theatre on Monday to see the 15 minute version and a whole host of other new theatre works too - tickets just £1!
https://www.thecockpit.org.uk/show/theatre_in_the_pound
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8th August 2019 - 2nd Enfield Trip
On the 8th I finally got round to doing what I’d been meaning to do for months - go back to Enfield and have a look at where Eagle House used to stand. Doing my best to have a positive, explorer’s attitude despite the stifling heat, I caught the overground and headed to Silver Street, seemingly just ten minutes from Fore Street.
As I stepped off the train, thankful for the slightly fresher air outside the carriage, and headed out into the street I was struck once more by the difference between the old photographs at Enfield Archives and the street in front of me. This area had always been poor, so why was I continually surprised by the grimy reality of 2019 Enfield? Perhaps it was the lack of hedges, or horse-drawn carts? The fact that the skyline was now crammed with tall buildings, or maybe the endless roar of traffic?
I wandered along the side of the motorway, hacking at the car fumes, squinting at my phone’s Google Maps in the blazing sunshine. A left, another left, along Fore Street for five minutes, and then - there, in this decidedly dodgy part of town, next to a corner shop selling mangos, papayas and cheap phone calls to Ghana, sat the Red Cross shop I’d been searching for. White paint smeared with dirt. Dresses in the window. Rusting TV aerial on the roof. This was it, then. This was where the ghostly remains of Eagle House stood.
The underwhelming Red Cross shop
I felt suddenly as thought the last 9 months had been leading to this moment, only for it to turn out to be a rather damp squib. I half-heartedly raised my phone to record myself outside the shop, clocked just how many guys were sitting on nearby doorsteps and wandering the street, all watching this new addition to the neighbourhood with no little interest, and lowered it again. I felt as though eyes followed me down the street as I marched away with faux-purpose, the other way from the station - after coming all this way, surely there was something else I could do with my time here? Fuller-Russel’s old church, St James’, turned out to be over 40 minutes away (quite the journey for the 19th century vicar!) so instead I just wandered along in the brutal heat, looking at the shop fronts for any remnants of an Enfield that Christina might have known. And yes, here and there, the old buildings could be spotted - some gutted to become draperies and clothes shops specialising in Hijabs or African dresses, some now food stores, some now Turkish cafes. London doing what London does best: recycling what’s already there, the newest wave of immigrants in this city of perpetual newcomers adapting the buildings in the ways that best suited their needs. There was something heartening about this thought, despite the dirt, pollution and growling traffic.
One of the few untouched buildings
I began to count the many different ethnic communities that lived in this area. Polish nut shop, SIM cards for phoning Uganda and Nigeria, signs advertising Mauritian products, Islamic products, Turkish products and services for sending money to the Philippines. A working class borough in London in 2019 looks a little different to the ones in the 1840s...
I noticed a street called Park Lane, turned the corner and suddenly the houses were clearly in an entirely price bracket. In that fascinating way that London often does, one moment you had abandoned shopping trolleys, grubby car wash stations manned by surly looking men and people yelling at each other in their cars, and the next moment there was quiet. I could even hear birdsong.
Houses with gates and high walls, voice-operated keypads and lots of immaculately cleaned glass doors. I’d just been puzzling over the juxtaposition of a building like Eagle House in an area like factory-town Enfield, and now I had my 21st century answer. Rich and poor have always lived side by side in cities, and the imposing gates and grounds of Eagle House would have served much the same purpose as these electric keypads and metal bars.
Both say: this is not for you, common people. Keep out.
Musing on all of this, I kept on walking and found the “park” advertised by the street name - a somewhat understated name, it turned out.
Pymmes Park, originally the grounds surrounding Pymes House, was first built in 1327 by William Pyme. Passing hands frequently throughout the following centuries, by Christina’s time the House and the grounds belonged to the Ray family. I could easily imagine well-to-do ladies promenading through the trees or across the grass as I sat there licking an ice cream and trying not to seem too eccentric as I recorded myself on my phone, and that thought cheered me up on what felt a little bit like a failed mission. Christina may have paused to adjust her hat or make a remark to Russell right where I’m sitting, I thought. That’s definitely worth the effort of coming here.
Ice cream finished, I pushed myself up from off the grass and headed back slowly to Silver Street, noting a seemingly better-preserved side street as I went. A grimy bridge led me over a stream which, although now funnelled using modern engineering and filled with litter, probably started out life as a countryside bubbling brook. A row of houses stood as they might have done two hundred years ago, with one hollowed out in the middle for a passageway that may well have once led to a yard, complete with horses and carriages.
It was a strange trip, full of contradictions and surprises.
Modernisation of the area has bulldozed breathtakingly beautiful buildings such as Eagle House, but at the same time green spaces such as Pymmes Park, once only for the gentry to enjoy, are now open to all. On the journey back my mind kept returning to those glassy houses with their locked gates. Class differences can still be seen clearly in London, two centuries on from the elite living of Christina’s time. Living on the wrong side of the street is now more “death of a thousand cuts” (or, more accurately, a thousand car exhaust fumes) than death by factory work or tuberculosis, but the disparity is still striking.
Samuel Johnson famously once said that when a man is tired of London he is tired of life. I think we all know the side of the street on which he lived.
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7th July 2019: The Brockley Jack Studio Theatre Scratch Night
Scratch No. 2 of Christina is done and dusted! Nestled in amongst plays about having sex in woods (and no, that is not hyperbole for anyone who’s wondering), childhood trauma and homophobia, I was unsure how my wholesome little performance about the 19th century gentry would go across... but, although the audience were a tad more enthusiastic about my violin playing than my actual show, the feedback was very positive - more so than I’d feared since two people in the front row kept on yawning and checking their programmes!!
The dinky little stage was set up for a different show, one about aliens and 1950s Hollywood, so it was a rather incongruous setting as I tried to encourage people to imagine that they were in 1830s Brechin, but it added to the general eccentricity of the evening...! The other actors were all lovely: it was the first scratch I’ve been to where I ended up chatting to everyone for hours afterwards. The whole thing was run very professionally and I would highly recommend the Brockley Jack scratch night for anyone looking to share a finished new piece of writing with the world - not at all like the rather “make-shift” theatre nights I’ve been to in the basement of cafes or above a pub...! (Although this one was next to a pub. One that did excellent chips.)
Christina is getting put on hold for a little bit whilst I focus on my other show, ROOTS (on at the Edinburgh Fringe, if anyone fancies coming along! More info here: https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/roots) but you never know, there might be time for a research trip or two. If so, I’ll be sharing my journeys with you all!
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Looking forward to performing the 10 minute scratch version of Christina at Brockley Jack Scratch Night on 7th July!
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9th June 2019
I’m sitting here in Oxford (having made a very nice “nest” here in the upstairs level of an Organic cafe) Gathering my thoughts for heading back to London after a weekend here visiting the Pusey Library. (I’m typing this entire blog post on my phone as there’s no WiFi connection on my laptop so apologies for any random typos!)
On Friday I dodged through the bucketing rain and found my way to the imposing wooden doors that led the way into Pusey House. After quite a bit of lost wandering (I found a large church space, a chapel and a broom cupboard) I made my way to the library on the top floor. It had a definite “Harry Potter” vibe, heightened by the mysterious patter of rain outside and the seemingly deserted rows of ancient bookshelves. In the end a nervous assistant appeared from seemingly nowhere and I was signed into the library as an Official Member (with an ID card and everything once the “proper” librarian had retired from her lunch break.)
It took a bit of time for me to settle down - I’d brought a rubbish pencil so needed to ask for a different one...which then needed sharpening, left my water bottle on the table and got told off, inaccurately put the notebook on the table rather than the fancy cushion- but I soon worked out a rhythm as I traveled through Gib’s 1841 housemate J.F.Russel’s many newspaper clippings and notebooks filled with sermon ideas. An amazingly vivid personality had taken clear shape by hour 2; a man who revelled in arguments, took great pride in having “opponents”, didn’t bother to ask permission from Diocese bosses before making rather hasty decisions and who, possibly, was even using the church offertory money to pay bribes and to fund a fancy new altar.
I couldn’t help but wonder what life would be like for poor Christina living with such a “big” personality... I can’t believe staying with someone who, according to his contemporaries, went on at “unconscionable length” made for particularly fun dinner time conversation...
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It’s half-term, which for multitaskers like myself mean a golden opportunity to get work done on a few of our many different projects! Today it’s Christina’s turn, with particular focus on 1840s fashion. Big on gloves, apparently. Not so big on jeans. (Sad.) I think the look of the decade can be summed up in this excellent quote from ‘A Victorian Lady’s Guide to Fashion and Beauty’ by Mimi Matthews: “These were fashions designed for women who were expected to be dependent on those around them”. How very dull.
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First Scratch Performance at Bridewell Theatre
28th May 2019
I write this having survived the first ever scratch performance of the Christina Gib project! Very exciting.
I signed up to the “Women in Theatre” new writing night at the Bridewell Theatre way back in October in the blind trust that I would probably be working on something new by the time May rolled around, and sure enough it’s the CG show that’s ended up being that work in progress!
This was a pretty upmarket scratch night - in an actual theatre space, no less - so I was fairly nervous... After a bout of frantic writing (and even more frantic editing) I managed to get my 15 minute extract together, complete with sound cues and even a couple of props. (The issue of definitely not being able to memorise the whole thing in time was somewhat solved by reading off the notebook - genius prop idea if I say so myself...!
It proved a rather tricky theatre space to find thanks to it being inside a building holding the “History of the Printing Press” exhibition, but despite WeTransfer issues and searches backstage to find suitably 19th C. furniture we had time for two mark-throughs before the show started in earnest.
Onstage run-through (in accidentally appropriate t-shirt)
...Unfortunately there were still a few sound cue...excitements during my actual performance so the extract didn’t run as smoothly as I’d hoped, but I didn’t run offstage or burst into tears so, as I tell my own pupils, that means that in the grand scheme of things it went pretty well!!
After-party comments were very positive about the idea and how the piece might be expanded further. Everyone was very enthusiastic in particular about the idea of “more fiddle!” It was great to be part of an evening championing female writers and actors, and despite nerves it felt good to share the first ideas of the project with an audience.
Onwards and upwards! (Specifically, to Oxford next weekend...)
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British Museum Visit
3rd April 2019
Encouraged by the success of my Enfield Archives trip, I was looking forward to my first ever visit to the British Library Reading Rooms. I got through security and then accidentally found the locker room whilst trying to find the loos (always a bonus!) It turned out that the locker room was more than a little bit stressful so I was glad to have given myself lots of time to fight with clear plastic bags, tiny lockers, fiddly lock systems and the terror of forgetting my locker number. After a lot of swivelling round in circles and squinting confusedly at instruction signs I was off to the registration room, which I’d foolishly thought would just be one person at a desk but turned out to be like a weird, underground Argos waiting room.
Eventually I got called forward, offered all my many pieces of paper (you really have to prove you’re you to get anywhere near any books at the BL) and posed for my registration card. This is where it all got highly entertaining, as endless plastic registration cards started plopping out of my poor office worker’s card machine...none of which had my face on them. After about 20 random cards - some of which dated back to 2017 - lay strewn about our desk area we decided that the next desk over could do my card instead... and, of course, when we’d just finished that process the first machine decided to print out my original one after all. After choosing my favourite (VIP treatment!!) I managed to finally get out of registration and head up to Newsroom on Level 2.
The alarming microfilm.
The final, triumphantly successful registration card.
It was a little dinkier than I’d expected, and a rather alarming surprise awaited; the book on sacred architecture I’d requested was a nice, normal, physical book, but the 1839-1842 Fife newspapers I’d ordered were not, in fact, physical newspapers but MICROFILM. 30 seconds into the nice librarian’s explanation of how to use the microfilm I decided wholeheartedly that I was, in no way, ever going to touch or indeed go anywhere near said microfilm. Anything that includes the words “counter-winding”, “delicate spools” or the words “pretty fragile” in the explanation of how to use them are things that NO FLETTS SHOULD TRY TO USE. EVER. Unfortunately the spool I’d randomly chosen for the librarian to set up for me turned out to be the one for 1842, a year too late to be truly useful, but as it started in January which is really quite near 1841 I decided to give it a go anyway. I quickly realised that my idea of booking so many reels had been wildly optimistic at best anyway - the film roll got “out of line” according to a scary pop-up at about mid-February 1842 and by that point I’d spent 45 minutes squinting at adverts for cough syrup and shipping forecasts and had had quite enough, thanks very much. Not that the newspapers weren’t interesting - on the contrary, they were very effective at giving an insight into people’s lives and what they were thinking in the early 1840s.
After the trauma of microfilm it was a relief to read my sacred architecture book - it turned out that there wasn’t an awful lot more in there about J.F.R than I’d read on the online Google Books extract, but it’s always worth checking... There was at least one fantastic quote about Eagle House being so “richly adorned with Italian specimens of the 14th century that the spectator feels as if transported into a chapel at Siena or Florence”, quite a thing to imagine when we know the rough, industrial town surrounding this seeming utopia of early Italian art. I wonder what J.F.R’s neighbours thought about his lavish, art-driven lifestyle...!
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Enfield Archive Trip
2nd April 2019
I trundled to London Fields Station far too early for a “day off”, sleepy but game. This trip had been in the diary for a long time and I was excited to be finally heading to Enfield Archives to see what they had on Eagle House and its 19th century occupants. Walking out of Enfield station I was greeted with heavy pollution, thick traffic, grimy storefronts advertising mobile unlocking, gambling and home letting services and truly horrible weather. Slightly crestfallen, I looked around at the chaotic mess of buses, cares and vans, the grey concrete, the boarded-up windows. Where were the village streets in the old photographs I’d gazed at online? The cottages, the grand manors, the trees, the hedgerows? I hadn’t expected to walk out into a countryside utopia but I hadn’t quite expected this.
I trudged along the main road towards the Dugdale Centre, home of Enfield Archives, jumping at the endless blaring car horns and hacking in the midst of so many exhaust pipes. A small solace was spotting a tiny street seemingly unchanged from previous centuries - little more than a square, the two rows of houses stood quietly forgotten in the midst of such brutal modernisation. An old engraved street sign chiselled into the side of one of the houses stated that it was “Genotin Terrace”. The terrace gave me hope that there might be other pockets of the 19th century left here and there, a comforting thought that put some sort of spring back into my step as I headed to the Dugdale.
A Poundland, a Lidl, a nail salon called “KRAZY NAILS”, several boarded up shop fronts; the Dugdale Centre is grimly holding on in a street that has definitely seen better days. It was only after trying to force myself into a store cupboard I realised that the downstairs museum didn’t actually lead onto the Archives whatsoever, but had more success upstairs!
The archive door was seemingly designed to be as intimidating as possible, full of signs about what one could and couldn’t bring into the sacred space.
Bottled water ONLY. NO PENS. NO FOOD. Do you have an APPOINTMENT? NO PHONES etc etc.
It was with some apprehension that I opened the scary door but it turned out that John From The Archives was actually very friendly . - if a bit puzzled about who I was exactly and what on Earth I was doing - and he’d amassed a truly awe inspiring amount of material for me to look through.
I spent the morning trawling through newspaper articles, house deeds and many books - all helpfully bookmarked, thank you John! - only leaving my spot for a quick (and not entirely successful... Enfield doesn’t really do Gluten Free) lunch.
The realisation that a locally famous old cinema ran for a short period of time where Eagle House had once stood (before it was unfortunately blown up in WWII, a sadness for people even now according to the two memorial websites dedicated to the building) proved extremely helpful, as due to mentioned nerdy websites I was able to trace the timeline to the modern day and the Red Cross shop that apparently stands on the site now in the 21st Century. My, how the mighty fall... I doubt Christina Gib would be very impressed that her 18th century manor is now replaced with a bleak 1960s build charity shop!
My trip was well worth it - in particular, I loved the diary of John Fuller Russel for its sheer, often unpleasant, “humanness”. His accounts of factory workers are full of narky comments about bolshy women telling him to go away and despairing mutterings about his dim congregation members...
It was a compact little notebook, interestingly started at both ends like the Gib manuscript - perhaps starting from each end and flipping half way through was the normal way to write back then?
He started off using it as a notebook for theological notes and presumably sermon ideas, but it soon ends up with a more practical purpose; noting down his congregation members and who might make a good Sunday School teacher. There was a small pencil sketch of a man on one of the pages...I’d love to be able to know if it was J.F.R who drew it and who the subject was.
The other outstanding find was Leanord Boulden’s 1930s essay on St James, J.F.R’s church - his anecdotes about 19th century Enfield and Russel himself paint a vivid picture in a way that nothing else up to this point had quite managed. His stories about drunken workers, grim living conditions and freezing, poor churches does make me wonder why on Earth 1840s alcohol-stricken factory town Enfield was considered a suitable visiting place for Gib?! There was obviously some sort of gentrified living going on but hardly at the genteel standard Gib would be used to at places such as Maulesden. Perhaps the squalidness was fairly modern - after all, the industrial revolution was still fairly early in the 1840s - and Gib had a memory of a older, “prettier” Enfield...
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Seeing the Manuscript
6th January 2019
As I was in the Wighton Centre on the 6th for a concert it seemed like the perfect opportunity to drop into the archives and have a look at the Christina Gib manuscript for the first time.
As the book was placed in front of me I couldn’t help but feel a sense of anticipation; how would it hold up to my expectations?
And there it was. Sitting innocuously on the table.
Smaller than I’d anticipated; a beautiful marbled cover marked with centuries old ink; worn edges and a battered spine. Mouth suddenly dry as I imagined one overly brisk page turn ripping the old paper in two, I opened the book and had a look inside.
As someone who has tried writing with ink - indeed, had a pretentious phase in her early teens where I would only write with pen and ink - I instantly sympathised with the struggles I could spot here and there. A leaky nib, an accidental splodge, a lack of ink, a misspelt word, a bar written twice and then impatiently scored out. I hadn’t anticipated such an old manuscript being so...relatable. I loved the small touches of personality that could be sensed in the pages - the carefully printed titles, the less carefully printed scribbles about when and where she was when writing, the melodies half finished and then abandoned, the fact that she started out enthusiastically numbering the pages but then gave up on that idea on page 7.
This feeling of the manuscript being more relevant than I’d expected continued for the rest of the day, particularly when I went to a friend’s slow session folk night at her house. There, reading off carefully ordered sheets of music on a fellow player’s stand, I looked at my stand partner’s organised folders of printed out fiddle tunes and realised that I was looking at the twenty-first century version of Gib’s little book, a lovingly gathered collection of this person’s favourite tunes. Maybe the premise of Gib’s book wasn’t as dated as I’d first thought.
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The Brechin Graveyard Trip
January 3rd 2019
After the freezing cold (but very picturesque) fields of Maulesden, the next trip with my ever supportive parents was to Brechin graveyard to see if we could spot Christina Gib’s grave. (We weren’t really expecting such a good find, but it seemed worth a try...)
It was quite an eerie, imposing graveyard - the church loomed ominously above us, the sky was an unearthly grey, the air was silent apart from the crunch of frost as i cautiously wandered round the old, faded stones.
We momentarily thought we’d hit the jackpot when my Mum discovered a large plaque commemorating a Christina Gib, but it was not to be; the dates were wrong, with this Christina dying far too young to be the “right” one.
The feeling of being so close and yet so far was both tantalising and frustrating, and we headed off on a rousing search through the rest of the church graveyard just in case we could pick up anymore clues...but, sadly, apart from my own squawk when I nearly stood on a dead pigeon, there were no big surprises.
Before long i was so utterly, abysmally freezing I could barely think, let alone search for names, and I was reduced to staring at the brittle leaves underneath my boots and absent-mindedly huffing out my breath like Puff the Magic Dragon. It was time to admit defeat, at least for today...
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The Maulesden Trip
January 3rd 2019
Me looking a bit chilly.
Maulesden is off the A90, on the A935, which isn’t so far away from my home town Tayport but far enough that, unsurprisingly to anyone who knows about my abnormally very small bladder, I was eager to visit the nearby Garden Centre loos by the time we arrived at our destination. It was icily cold, and I shivered in the car as my parents and I parked in prime location for stomping around the Maulesden Estate fields. ...Or at least we would’ve been, if a very suspicious face hadn’t twitched back the lace curtains: the residents of Maulesden Lodge, now known as Maulesden, had spotted us and didn’t look too impressed that we were wandering around looking suspicious near their house! (We made our retreat back to the car.)
We had, at least, managed to get an idea of what the lodge looked like - a grey, ominous little building next to an entrance complete with impressive looking pillars. Beyond lay frost-tipped fields, stretching out in every direction, and at the edge of those fields grew a thick, dark forest, the tall trees stretching up into the clear winter sky. The bizarre surreal juxtaposition of the silent fields, the view so similar to the one Gib would have known, and the rumbling traffic that growled along the road behind me, created a sense of standing at the brink of two worlds - one foot in the now, one foot in the past.
When I stepped up to the sturdy estate wall, feet sinking into the deep piles of crisp winter leaves, it felt almost as thought the traffic dim faded just a little, became just a little fainter, and that if I kept on leaning further, and further, I might simply tumble forwards into the time that I was trying to imagine.
The fields were empty, save for a few sheep and, inexplicably, a rusted old bus, and I think all three of us had a moment where we considered trying to sneak past the overly cautious lodge owners to find our Maulesden ruin...
(We didn’t. But it was very tempting.)
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Welcome to the blog!
Welcome to Elisabeth’s blog about the Christina Gib project.
What is the project about?
The Wighton Centre in Dundee has given me funding to research a small 19th century manuscript book in their collection. This book, full of tunes and songs written down in the period between 1836-1841 by a woman called Christina Gib, is surrounded by mystery due to Christina Gib being a very elusive historical figure! She doesn’t appear anywhere in the 1841 UK census and doesn’t seem to have a gravestone... (that I have found...yet...)
Starting in December 2018, I have been travelling across Scotland and England visiting archives, recording sound materials and scribbling in notebooks, collecting ideas and information for a brand new folk theatre performance that will debut at the Wighton Centre in October 2019.
You can follow the story (and share your own information/ideas about the project!) on social media via the hashtag #christinagibproject or by following me on Twitter (@essaflett) and Facebook (Elisabeth Flett, Scottish Fiddler).
Thanks for reading!
Elisabeth
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