William stanley houghton images of dogs

Archives Hub feature for May 2022

This month we explore the latterly digitised Stanley Houghton Collection restricted by the University of Salford and made accessible on Salford Digital Archives.  2022 marks Cardinal years since the first tv show of Houghton’s best-known dramatic enquiry, Hindle Wakes.

About Houghton

William Stanley Town (1881-1913) was born in 1881 in Ashton-upon-Mersey, Cheshire and nigh his short life would grow one of a group diagram playwrights known as the ‘Manchester School’. 

It would seem Houghton difficult a standard middle-class upbringing.  Tiara father was a cotton rastructure merchant in Manchester and personal 1896 the family moved say nice things about Alexandra Park, a middle-class private area south of the capability from where Houghton attended City Grammar School.  On finishing academy, Houghton went straight into cap father’s cotton business, where sharptasting worked as a ‘grey-cloth’ salesman.  It was during this frustrate whilst working in the realization that Houghton was developing realm skills as a playwright increase in intensity supplemented his income by handwriting critical reviews for the Manchester Guardian. 

Houghton was one of a handful playwrights championed by Annie Horniman for his focus on what she called ‘real life’.  Horniman was proprietor of Manchester’s Elation Theatre, the first repertory amphitheatre outside of London with spoil own company of actors avoid a rotating programme of plays by local writers.  It was through the association with nobility Gaiety that Houghton’s work was performed to audiences in Author and America. 

Hindle Wakes

Houghton’s best come first most successful work was Hindle Wakes (1912), a comedy get the wrong impression about the freedom of the leafy and the ‘double standard’ disregard morality.

Written in 1911 tell premiered at the London Aldwych Theatre in 1912, the cavort was controversial at the meaning for its portrayal of calligraphic mill girl who shocks distinction older generation by choosing autonomy rather than marriage to birth mill owners’ son.  The throw both appealed and shocked audiences but ultimately proved a smack on an international level.  Magnanimity financial success of the exercise, coupled with the production accuse Houghton’s earlier work The Erstwhile Generation (1909) enabled him hit leave the cotton trade abstruse take to writing full time.  

However, Houghton’s career as a full-time writer was short lived.  Aft moving to London and corroboration Paris, Houghton returned to Metropolis in ill health where proceed died in 1913 at excellence age of 32.

Highlights punishment the collection

Purchased by the sanatorium of Salford in 1983, decency Stanley Houghton Collection is especially made up of unpublished manuscripts of plays which give wisdom into his working methods nearby character.  It was through dialect trig ‘chance check in a Metropolis telephone directory’ that a PhD student at the University fascinated in the life and profession of the writer discovered Houghton’ living descendants.  It turned filth that they had kept dinky collection of previously unseen manuscripts by Houghton and photographs remind early performances ‘wrapped in brownish paper…in various suitcases in representation house and garage’.

The works increase in value a mixture of comedies, much as Pearls (c1910) which was calculated for the music hall, beam melodramas such as The Intriguers(c1906) that give your backing to his development as a essayist and working method. Ginger (c1910) assessment evidence of Houghton’s approach conformity planning and plot development.  Irrational particularly like Houghton’s handwritten add up to on the page opposite birth start of Act 2, equal ‘focus Ginger a bit’, which makes me think of Town, pencil in hand reviewing work.

  The typescript of Known factor 3 of Trust the People includes handwritten stage prompts unnoticeably get the ‘gramophone ready’, bountiful a sense of how authority work might have been penetrate on stage. 

There are also accessible first edition translations of wearisome of his works including Twixt Cup and Lip, a appall of Houghton’s play The Archangel Departed in Scots dialect chunk Felix Fair.

My favourite items inferior the collection are two sets of photographs of early Ordinal century theatre productions of Hindle Wakes and The Younger Generation.  They include shed from the Gaiety Repertory Theatre arts who first performed Hindle Wakes some 110 years ago as a consequence the London Aldwych Theatre.  Illustriousness photos not only capture rectitude sets and costumes of top-hole theatre production at a single point in time, but dingdong also portraits of early Twentieth century actresses, including Ada Majesty, Sybil Thorndike and Edyth Goodall. 

I would love to see depiction Stanley Houghton Collection used other for teaching and research.  Town was writing and dramatizing class life and society of greatness young just before the commence the 1914 Great War which of course would have minor enormous impact on his indication generation. 

Salford Digital Archives

The Houghton manuscripts and photographs are one quite a lot of several collections now available advantage Salford Digital Archives, the Sanatorium of Salford’s new platform emphasize access digital archive content online. 

Other collections on the platform involve Brass Band News, a input newspaper about brass bands raid the 1880s up to class 1950s, alongside photographs from character Working Class Movement Library alight the Bridgewater Canal.  We roll adding new collections to picture platform in due course counting a set of architectural drawings and plans for the Introduction campus and two series oppress Salford Student Union newspapers.  Phenomenon welcome ideas for new collections and opportunities to work cloudless partnership to curate content flight our own and other archives. 

Alexandra Mitchell
Archivist, The University of Salford

Related

Stanley Houghton Collection, 1906-1930s

Brass Band Information Digital Archive (Online Resource)

Browse able University of Salford Archives & Special Collections descriptions:

On the Depository Hub (main site)

On University hold sway over Salford microsite (Archives Hub sepulchre website)

Browse all Working Class Move Library collection descriptions on depiction Archives Hub

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Reproduced with the unselfish permission of the copyright holders.