Volunteer Reflections: Gemma Clarke
Hello my name is Gemma Clarke and I am 20 years old and I have absolutely loved learning about Broomhall! I am currently studying a History degree at Sheffield Hallam University and I spend the rest of my time volunteering at many different places, including Our Broomhall. I love local history and I am very passionate about this and I want my future career to be involved in the sector of archives or museums.
The summer of 2014 was when I first got involved in the Our Broomhall Project and it was very exciting for me as I was beginning to explore Sheffield, and understand the history behind the city and the people that lived there. I have loved meeting people from Sheffield, such as Jennie and Sharon at the Broomhall Centre who have made me very welcome as well as a lot of different volunteers that I have met along the way.
Last summer, my volunteering consisted of a lot of different activities such as working with the donations, organising copyright permission forms for people to sign, scanning, typing up or transcribing the donations. I then got to write some of these donations up into stories which were put onto the website. One particular donation that I created into a story was really interesting as the donator had donated letters which I had transcribed, text information within her emails, as well as pictures and information from the census about her family. I really enjoyed this role as it was the first time during a volunteering activity I had got so much responsibility and trust with people’s personal donations and contact details. It has also helped me to understand copyright permission and its importance when working in archives or museums and on a heritage project. I have been able to take this experience forward with an Oral History Project that I am currently working on for the Gainsborough Heritage Centre, as I decided to take my experience at Our Broomhall into consideration in the planning stages as I could see the importance of copyright forms and how and why I needed to use them in my project.
I did not stop there as last summer I got involved with a lot of other activities which I enjoyed so much. Some examples are taking part in out and about days taking pictures of present day Broomhall! I also got the opportunity to go up some high buildings, the view was amazing from the Hanover Tower Block and our pictures are brilliant. The experience of climbing the ladders to get to the top of St Mark’s Church was another one of our exciting adventures. I also went to the Sheffield University Library to look at lots of maps of Broomhall which I loved and was so fascinating. I have helped out on quite a few events at the Broomhall Centre, as well which I have really enjoyed and it has made me feel part of the community in a place I do not even live! The last event I took part in was the finale event for the Our Broomhall Project which I really enjoyed as my confidence levels over the last year have really risen and I loved talking to all sorts of different people on the sign in desks and helping out with the exhibition boards.
The story of George
When I wanted to volunteer on the Our Broomhall Project I had to have a meeting with Jennie at the Broomhall Centre. I met Dave and Sue while waiting to meet Jennie and they gave me a parcel to pass on to Jennie. This I did, and she let me open it and this parcel was in fact a book by an artist called George Cunningham. This book really caught my imagination as the paintings of what Broomhall used to look like, and the stories of George’s life really interested me and I wanted to create a project with this. However, over the summer I put this on hold as we were struggling to find the copyright owner as the publishers were not in office any longer. But, this helped me as I learnt more about Broomhall over the summer due to my volunteering experiences.
The next part of the Cunningham story started when I began my second year at University and I had a module called Applied History which gave me the chance to work on a project. With the help of Jane and Sharon at the Broomhall Centre we managed to find the copyright owner for the book and I decided that I wanted to do my project about George Cunningham as his paintings and stories of Broomhall had really inspired me. So, my project went from two books that he wrote himself, to an expansion of archive and local studies research. I found publicity leaflets as well as a DVD with George himself on it being interviewed about his life. I also got in contact with George Cunningham’s niece who donated pictures to the Broomhall Archive which created another amazing aspect to my growing story. I have now had the chance in the writing up part of my project, to add the pages into the website myself which is something that I have never done before and it has added another experience to my growing list. I really enjoyed the web editing part of the project as I got the chance to learn how to put the pages onto the website myself and organise the layout of all my different pages with the pictures and text information.
In the web editing part of my project I ended up creating 58 pages because of the amount of research I had done and interesting information I had found. In the writing up stages I split my research into themes starting with an introduction page and then having the history of George’s family, Michael Road, Joseph Pickering Ltd, George’s school life, George’s childhood memories, George’s career prospects, George’s working life, characters of Broomhall, streets of Broomhall and George’s life during the Second World War. When I was web editing I found that the information for one theme was too much and would not fit on one web page comfortably. After discussion with Jennie, I went away and split my themes into parts so for example, the characters of Broomhall go from Parts 1- 17. This means that every page is shorter and will stand alone without a person having to read every single page. I am really happy with the work that I have done about George and I would like to take this opportunity to thank my tutor Alison Twells at Sheffield Hallam University for letting me take this forward as part of her module.
As the Our Broomhall heritage project was in its last stages from march to may they wanted to publicise and promote the website through a newspaper article. Even though my pages have completely different themes, George was the main thread that runs through my 58 pages and as there were so many pages allocated to George on the website, I was asked to write a press release for the Sheffield newspapers. I had never written a press release or understood anything to do with that type of thing before I was asked to do this so I was quite excited. I wrote my story about George in the form of a press release and then Jennie showed me what happens next and we sent the writing along with pictures of George’s paintings which were courtesy of Paul Hibbert-Greaves/Hibbert Brothers who gave me permission to send them to the newspapers.
I was then very excited and delighted when George’s story got published in the Star Retro on Saturday 9th May in a double page spread. Me and Jennie then had a look at how many people visited the Our Broomhall website on that day and the amount of new visitors to the website from the Sheffield region on that day had risen which was brilliant and showed that the newspaper article had been a real success. As a result of this I went to one of the other places that I volunteer (the Gainsborough Heritage Centre) and showed them this newspaper article as I was very excited about it and I then subsequently was nominated and elected as the Publicity Officer at their AGM on 20th May which was an amazing achievement for me to come from all my work on the Our Broomhall Project.
I have really enjoyed my volunteering at Our Broomhall and I will miss volunteering there and Jennie has been fantastic and helped me gain a lot of experience and I wish her well in the future. I have learnt so many new things as a result of volunteering on Our Broomhall and I have loved being a part of the community. I think the legacy of the Our Broomhall project is very important as people need to keep being involved in finding out about Broomhall’s history as well as finding people like George and remembering their amazing achievements and the history that would be forgotten if it was not for people like George who captured Broomhall and his memories through his paintings. I hope everybody that reads the pages about George Cunningham will be as inspired as I was when I first looked at his books. A link to the introduction page about George is below and on the introduction page there will be links through to the pages showcasing my many other themes.
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