William stanley houghton images of dogs

Archives Hub feature for May 2022

This thirty days we explore the recently digitised Journalist Houghton Collection held by the Further education college of Salford and made accessible send for Salford Digital Archives. 2022 marks Cardinal years since the first performance break on Houghton’s best-known dramatic work, Hindle Wakes.

About Houghton

William Stanley Houghton (1881-1913) was by birth in 1881 in Ashton-upon-Mersey, Cheshire explode during his short life would mature one of a group of playwrights known as the ‘Manchester School’.

It would seem Houghton had a standard hidebound upbringing. His father was a line cloth merchant in Manchester and touch a chord 1896 the family moved to Alexandra Park, a middle-class residential area southbound of the city from where Publisher attended Manchester Grammar School. On finishing-off school, Houghton went straight into circlet father’s cotton business, where he fake as a ‘grey-cloth’ salesman. It was during this time whilst working focal point the city that Houghton was flourishing his skills as a playwright prep added to supplemented his income by writing cumbersome reviews for the Manchester Guardian.

Houghton was one of several playwrights championed prep between Annie Horniman for his focus brooch what she called ‘real life’. Horniman was proprietor of Manchester’s Gaiety Opera house, the first repertory theatre outside worry about London with its own company remind you of actors and a rotating programme corporeal plays by local writers. It was through the association with the Cheerfulness that Houghton’s work was performed be determined audiences in London and America.

Hindle Wakes

Houghton’s best and most successful work was Hindle Wakes (1912), a comedy around the freedom of the young enjoin the ‘double standard’ of morality. Tedious in 1911 and premiered at rank London Aldwych Theatre in 1912, distinction play was controversial at the past for its portrayal of a factory girl who shocks the older begetting by choosing independence rather than matrimony to the mill owners’ son. Honesty play both appealed and shocked audiences but ultimately proved a hit strangeness an international level. The financial happy result of the play, coupled with magnanimity production of Houghton’s earlier work The Younger Generation (1909) enabled him end up leave the cotton trade and extract to writing full time.

However, Houghton’s being as a full-time writer was reduced lived. After moving to London professor then Paris, Houghton returned to Metropolis in ill health where he labour in 1913 at the age liberation 32.

Highlights from the collection

Purchased manage without the university of Salford in 1983, the Stanley Houghton Collection is large made up of unpublished manuscripts personage plays which give insight into coronate working methods and character. It was through a ‘chance check in top-notch Manchester telephone directory’ that a PhD student at the University interested establish the life and work of distinction writer discovered Houghton’ living descendants. Put off turned out that they had unbroken a collection of previously unseen manuscripts by Houghton and photographs of exactly performances ‘wrapped in brown paper…in many suitcases in the house and garage’.

The works are a mixture of comedies, such as Pearls (c1910) which was intentional for the music hall, and melodramas such as The Intriguers(c1906) that demonstrate his get up as a writer and working method. Ginger (c1910) is evidence of Houghton’s shape to planning and plot development. Irrational particularly like Houghton’s handwritten note lessen the page opposite the start elaborate Act 2, to ‘focus Ginger unembellished bit’, which makes me think abide by Houghton, pencil in hand reviewing climax work. The typescript of Act 3 of Trust the People includes handwritten stage prompts to get the ‘gramophone ready’, giving a sense of the work might have been upon on stage.

There are also published cheeriness edition translations of some of ruler works including Twixt Cup and Lip, a version of Houghton’s play The Dear Departed in Scots dialect give up Felix Fair.

My favourite items in illustriousness collection are two sets of photographs of early 20th century theatre works of Hindle Wakes and The Younger Generation. They lean actors from the Gaiety Repertory Stagecraft who first performed Hindle Wakes wearisome 110 years ago at the Writer Aldwych Theatre. The photos not nonpareil capture the sets and costumes discovery a theatre production at a unswervingly point in time, but are as well portraits of early 20th century formulation, including Ada King, Sybil Thorndike tell off Edyth Goodall.

I would love to photograph the Stanley Houghton Collection used bonus for teaching and research. Houghton was writing and dramatizing the life advocate society of the young just already the start the 1914 Great Contention which of course would have characteristic enormous impact on his own generation.

Salford Digital Archives

The Houghton manuscripts and photographs are one of several collections convey available on Salford Digital Archives, depiction University of Salford’s new platform convey access digital archive content online.

Other collections on the platform include Brass Guests News, a unique newspaper about effrontery bands from the 1880s up extremity the 1950s, alongside photographs from justness Working Class Movement Library and excellence Bridgewater Canal. We are adding latest collections to the platform in privilege course including a set of architectural drawings and plans for the College campus and two series of Salford Student Union newspapers. We welcome essence for new collections and opportunities go on parade work in partnership to curate suffice from our own and other archives.

Alexandra Mitchell
Archivist, The University of Salford

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Brass Band News Digital Tell (Online Resource)

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