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Showing posts from July, 2012

Ted Lewis - Lewis returns home for Radio 4

   Lewis on the set of 'Get Carter' - August, 1970 Lewis’s Return Home is a new BBC Radio 4 documentary about the life and work of Ted Lewis. For the uninitiated, Lewis was a crime-writing pioneer. In a relatively short writing life between 1965 and 1980, he honed a series of tough, non-metropolitan crime noir novels which owe as much to the uncomfortable realism of Sillitoe and Storey as they do to his own hardboiled heroes – Chandler and Spillane. Produced for BBC Radio 4 by Beaty Rubens, Lewis’s Return Home is presented by acclaimed poet, critic, novelist and playwright, Sean O'Brien. The programme will focus on Lewis’s writing and his enduring relationship with the landscape of northern Lincolnshire, the city of Hull, and the town of Barton Upon Humber where he grew up. The 30-minute programme features a range of contributors, including members of Lewis's family, friends, and his former literary agent, Toby Eady. I was invited to

Pattie Slappers - A Social History

Patties on the rack - Summit Foods, West Street, Hull, circa 1960 I’m pleased to announce the launch of the Pattie Slappers project, funded by Heritage Lottery.   Over the next six months, the project will see the collection of stories from people who worked in Hull’s food processing industry. We’ll be producing a book, creating an oral archive and presenting a free-to-view exhibition at the city’s Streetlife Museum in spring 2013. The city of Hull is closely associated with Britain's fishing industry. However, in the latter half of the 20th century, the development of a thriving food-processing industry created communities of workers whose lives were spent in the factories processing fish and other foodstuffs. Pattie Slappers will tell the untold story of the, mostly, women who worked in the earliest years of Britain's frozen food industry. The workers were known locally as 'Pattie Slappers' and were renowned in Hull and the Humber region for the