Seventy-Four Emails
Seventy-four outreach emails. Eight regions. Six categories. Two people and a spreadsheet. That is the state of the project’s contact pipeline as of this week, and the responses have been more interesting than I expected.
I wrote about the first response in Before the First Frame - the Secretary of the British Artist Blacksmiths Association, who offered an introduction and a newsletter slot before I had finished composing a reply. That set a tone I was not prepared for. The Makers, as a group, responded fastest and most enthusiastically. Within ten days of the first batch going out, we had replies from fourteen of the eighteen Maker contacts. Blacksmiths, thatchers, dry stone wallers, a coracle builder, a willow weaver, two chairmakers, a stone mason. Most said yes within a paragraph. Several said something along the lines of: nobody has ever asked about this before.
That phrase keeps coming back. Nobody has ever asked. Not the heritage organisations, not the local press, not the universities. The Heritage Crafts Association tracks endangered crafts with a Red List, and it is an extraordinary resource, but it is a list - it documents the craft, not the craftsperson. When you email someone and say you want to document not just what they do but who they are to the thing they do, the response is different. It is personal. Several of the Makers wrote back at length, unprompted, about how it felt to be the last person doing what they do. One man - a rake maker in the Cotswolds - wrote three paragraphs about what it was like to watch his father do the same work and to know that nobody would watch him.
The Keepers were more measured. These are institutional people - churchwardens, clerks, custodians - and institutional people respond institutionally. Several forwarded the email up a chain of command I had not anticipated. One churchwarden copied in the diocese. A clerk of a Livery Company forwarded it to the Master’s office. The responses, when they came, were positive but careful. Yes, we would be interested, but we would need to understand the scope, the timeline, the intended use of the material. Fair enough. Institutions protect themselves because they have learned that not everyone who asks for access deserves it.
We have firm yeses from seven Keepers. Two are conditional on approval from a board or committee that does not meet until May. Three have not responded at all, which in institutional language usually means the email is sitting in someone’s inbox waiting for a meeting that will decide whether to reply. I am not worried. The Keepers are cautious but they are not hostile. They just need to know that the project is serious, and the only way to demonstrate that is to be serious.
The Carriers were the ones I expected to be hardest, and they are. These are community-embedded people - bonfire society captains, morris dance squires, wassail leaders, people whose traditions are communal rather than individual. They do not respond to emails from strangers because the traditions they carry have taught them to be wary of outsiders who arrive with cameras and leave with something the community did not agree to give.
Of the twenty Carrier contacts, nine have responded. Four are clear yeses. Three want to talk by phone before committing, which I interpret as a good sign - they are taking it seriously enough to want to hear the voice behind the email. Two said no, politely but firmly, and I respect that completely. The Lewes Bonfire societies have not responded at all, which does not surprise me. Lewes has been written about, photographed, and filmed so many times that the societies have developed a justified scepticism about outside attention. I will try again through a different channel - an introduction from someone inside rather than a cold approach from outside.
The Rememberers presented a different problem entirely. You cannot cold-email an eighty-three-year-old retired farmer. Most of them do not have email. The outreach for this category went through intermediaries - local history societies, parish councils, Women’s Institutes, Age UK branches, the kind of organisations that know who the memory-keepers are in a given community. The response rate has been slow but the quality has been remarkable. A local history group in Norfolk sent back a list of seven names, annotated with notes about who remembered what and who was still well enough to talk. A WI president in Herefordshire replied within an hour with a name, a phone number, and the instruction: “Ring her on a Tuesday morning. She’s sharpest on Tuesdays.”
We have eleven Rememberer contacts confirmed through intermediaries. The constraint here is not willingness but time. These are old people. Some of them are very old. The ten-year window I keep talking about is, for some of them, a five-year window, or a two-year window, or a window that could close next month. That urgency shapes everything about how we prioritise. The Makers and the Keepers will still be there in three years. Some of the Rememberers will not.
The Stewards - the landscape managers, the fell farmers, the reed cutters, the hedge layers - sit somewhere between the Makers and the Carriers in their response pattern. They are practical people who respond practically. Most of the yeses came with a caveat about timing: yes, but not during lambing, not during hay-time, not during the shooting season. The steward’s calendar is dictated by biology, and biology does not accommodate photographers. We have eight confirmed Stewards, all with specific windows that Bhavani is mapping onto a master schedule that is becoming, week by week, more complex than I had imagined.
Seventy-four emails. Forty-three confirmed contacts. Eleven pending. Eight intermediary relationships being developed. Two firm nos. Ten silences that may become yeses, or nos, or simply remain silences. The pipeline is real. It is messy and human and full of conditionality, but it is real.
The spreadsheet is doing its best.
