Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
I wish, I wish he’d go away…
Yesterday after an abortive attempt in the week when we found it closed, we finally made it to the Museum of Bath at Work – Bath’s own industrial museum; tucked away in what was once a Real Tennis court in the eighteenth century and is now filled with the perfect complement to Roman remains and Jane Austin worship. Its biggest problem is that it’s rather difficult to find – just off Julian Road and behind Christ Church. Google maps will find it easily enough but if you fancy a visit check the website first because it’s only open at weekends at the moment and then closes entirely for a couple of winter months.
I’ve been keen on visiting for ages because it has a collection of artifacts which I had a very small walk-on part in recording more than fifty years ago when I was an art student in Bath and was lucky enough to become bag carrier for the day to a photographer called (from fading memory), Anne Hard or Hardy who had been commissioned to photograph the old Bowler’s workshops as an emergency record before the entire site was demolished to make way for the ugliest building in Bath -the old Avon Street car park which has mercifully been reduced to rubble. Adam Fergusson didn’t call his book about that era “The Sack of Bath” for nothing.
Bowlers was a Bath institution, but the business went bust in the late 60’s and that day when we let ourselves into the building it looked as if the last of the Bowlers had simply walked away and closed the door on a company that had been in existence since 1872, and during which time not so much as a fizzy drinks label had been thrown away. There was a forge, abandoned we were told, when the blacksmith had died. It looked exactly as it had done as he clocked out the night before. I found this profoundly moving and the memory has remained with me ever since. I’m not a believer in ghosts, but I’m certainly a believer in ghostly presences where the past hangs around like a miasma. Sadly – or perhaps fortunately – the forge hadn’t made the move to the museum, but I’d have felt very vulnerable if I’d seen it once again (as long as it was still set up for the morning’s work). There, in the gloom and dust, was an abundance of old belt driven machinery, marble stoppered fizzy drinks bottles, hand tools and machines for which I felt a strange affinity.
But the machine that most stuck in my memory was a Griffin six-stroke gas engine; mainly, I think, because for whatever reason I’d never thought of gas as the motive power for what in every other respect looked like a steam engine. We photographed the Griffin and another steam engine and moved on to try to record the chaos.
So there in front of the gas engine which I hadn’t expected to see, because I thought it had gone to Bristol; there I met myself like the man in the poem who wasn’t there – wasn’t there as a student in his early twenties with no idea what the future would hold. While Madame wandered around the other exhibits I pondered the paradox of standing twice next to this remarkable engine on occasions separated by more than fifty years, and with a strong sense of ruptured continuity. The connection needed repair as if there was some sort of injury, but such an injury says much more about our sense of fragility than it does about forgetfulness.
The museum also has a section devoted to cabinet making and some exhibits from the Corsham Bath stone mines which we visited several times in the past. My grandfather was a carpenter and the recreated workshop brought back many memories of him. Here are some more photographs.
