her own bodyweight in babycham
last night I was invited by jwllrs to share some writing as part of their pub/lic(k) nights. I read this text about the queens of industry, babycham, and bodybuilding.
a mill girl drenched in opulent white fur / a delicate silver tiara handed around the factory / a plush throne for the queen of the tracks.
Once upon a time, one hundred years ago, a young woman called Ella Wooton was crowned Queen of the British Railways. She was given a crown, and sent on her way to a new life. Though Ella scarcely knew it, this was the beginning of a new, and very particular kind of dynasty. Four years later, Frances Lockett, from Hyde, was crowned the first Queen of Cotton. After hopefully sending her photograph through the post, Frances was plucked from her factory, and dressed in white, fur, robes. Though it wasn’t until 1969 that the coal industry would formally follow suit, Coal Queens had been anarchically crowned in mining communities across the UK for decades prior.
Aside from this big three, minor royalty ebbed and flowed, too: silk queens, salt queens, fish queens, preened.
For years and years, the Queens of Industry reigned symbolically over Britain’s labouring class. Women were chosen through pageant style contests to represent trades that they, or their families worked in. Once selected, they often travelled the world, giving speeches, meeting politicians, and being seen to be seen. Bonkers pomp and genuine civic responsibility, blurred.
It’s only recently that academics have started to peer closely at these queens, helping us to understand the civic role played by these women, and how they might change our perception of the relationship between state, industry, and community in early twentieth-century Britain. Historians like CR Scott are beginning to do this work much better than I could, but what I’m interested in is images, bodies, and feelings. Images of the Queens of Industry drip with fantasy.
What fantasies? Whose fantasies? What do we do with those fantasies?
I read these images as interventions into industrial histories that we are repeatedly told exist only in muted monochrome, histories that we are told only concern particular kinds of labouring bodies. These images are slices of magic, they’re jokes, they’re displays of extreme pretension, they’re fantastical escape routes, they’re forgotten flair. And there’s a darkness to them, too, as women are fashioned into benign mistresses of exploitative industries, as the white skin of young beautiful girls is grafted and plastered to smooth over jagged chains of international commerce, exploitation, and racial violence.
Tracing the Queens of Industry takes me out of the period I usually work on: their prominence had waned by the sixties, which is when my project really starts. Waned, maybe, but still, there they were. As the processes of deindustrialisation began to intensify in the 1970s in Britain, these tiaras remained atop the heads of working-class women up and down the country. Factories across Britain held their own pageant contests and beauty contests, part of a wider drive to attract a new, young, female workforce. Other kinds of violence begin to surface, as pageantry paints a glossy distraction to the ongoing political struggles that characterised British industry at this time.
In 1982, Deborah Barry, Northumberland Coal Queen, said: “I don’t have blood in my veins, I have coal dust.”
In 1977, the winner of the Coal Queen competition was presented with her bodyweight in Babycham.
From the very beginning, these competitions saw a gloopy breaking down of the boundaries between work, the state, women’s bodies, and mass-produced commodities. Sticky, hard to separate, like a lipstick stained Babycham glass gripping onto a wet beer mat. How did this phenomenon feel once industry itself began to be slurped away? For one, an excess, a visible effort, seems to creep in more and more as time goes on, as if these women’s bodies must do more and more to compensate for the fading industries to which they were tied.
In 1984, as part of a residency in Rochdale, performance artists Evelyn Silver and Shirley Cameron visited the Besco textile factory, where they camply crowned their very own Ms Besco, a spin on the Textile Queens. The residency was charged by the reverberations of deindustrialisation: the miners’ strike had ended just a few months earlier, and the project was especially interested in the kinds of women’s work, through and with their bodies, that had been forgotten by history. They were also interested, like me, in creativity, curled away in dusty corners and below desks, where we’re told we’ll never find it. Their visit to Rochdale also posed some difficult question: what place do performance artists have in the factory? I wonder if, for one, they might alert us to the kinds of strange entanglements between work, bodies, and creativity that had long existed in working-class women’s spaces.
The Queens of Industry were, and continued to be, an opportunity for young working-class women to adopt positions of civil power, to travel, and to make money. They were creative forces, shaping their bodies to gain these roles, and then shaping the roles to suit them. They were also racist and misogynistic spectacles, increasingly producing the kinds of images that now make us want to look away. At their root, these spectacles were part of a broader phenomenon: the beauty contest, both dependent on, and helping to shape, an incredibly public version of a particular kind of white feminine ideal.
Those contests were happening both inside industry and out. Between 1956 and 1989, Morecambe was home to the Miss Great Britain competition, one of several beauty contests hosted in seaside towns across the UK. These competitions were distinct from the Queens of Industry, but there is obvious overlap, too, just as there was with the Miss World competition, the Glamorous Grandmother competition, or even, a particular favourite, Margate’s Miss Socialist.
When digging around for all of this, I found that in 2017, the pop-punk bank Alimony Hustle released a single, called “Miss GB.” The first line reads:
“I'm feeling strange...”
On the cover of the single, there’s a painting of Zara Holland, former Miss GB winner and Love Island contestant. In 2016, Zara was stripped of her Miss GB title for having sex on TV. Holland was said to be particularly worried about the disapproval of her mother, who before her was a Miss Hull, too. Holland joined the ranks of several disgraced Miss GB winners, caught up in the nasty traps set by new forms through which young women might use their bodies to make something new of their lives in the twenty first century. The creative and bodily labour of these women is routinely dismissed, largely because it declares its own effort a little too proudly, it is constant, all-involving, work.
I’m feeling strange, rustling through a dusty archive, finding boxes with waist measurements and dreams packed inside. In the Arndale Shopping Centre sits the Morecambe Heritage Collection, which hold archival materials relating to the Miss GB competition throughout the years.
There, there are sweating worlds, worlds you feel you feel bustling to be let out of brown cardboard. Sometimes, archives bring with them an expectation of good behaviour, but in the Arndale, I find myself teetering on a rusting step ladder, reaching for a box of rosettes. There are cheap, bureaucratic files stacked on a sagging shelf, and in them, menus promising melon cocktail and cigarettes by Churchmans, and photographs of monkeys scratching beautiful preened blonde hair. There are endless beautiful bodies, clashing with repeatedly declared roots in Rotherham and Wigan, and long, handwritten lists of women’s names.
It is hard to hear the women’s voices. I am stuck in the strange frame the pageant mandates, scrutinising, overexposed, but not quite able to see. Then, two pieces of pale blue paper:
SEMI-FINALISTS 22nd AUGUST.
NAME / AGE / OCCUPATION / HOBBIES / AMBITIONS.
to see as much as the world as possible
to be happy and content with life
to holiday in jamaica
to see and do as much as possibleto study egyptology, in Egypt
to win a large sum on the premium bonds
In the constraints of the latter column, these women’s feelings are neatly typed out and filed away, unlikely to be dusted off often. I teeter on my stepladder, trying to find deepest dreams and complex inner lives in the backroom of a municipal shopping centre. At 4PM, the shops will close, and I will have to leave. The women will be packed away. I have the urge to take something with me, and find that in the visitor centre downstairs, I can buy a postcard, a slice of these women to greedily slip into my bag. I place the postcard on my mantlepiece, and now several women competing at the 1963 Miss Great Britain contest grin down at me as I watch TV from my sofa, shaming me into sitting up just a little straighter.
In a clip I found online, the camera pans over these women, who are facing away. Seeing only their shoulders, the effect is, momentarily, a little sinister. We’re chasing these women, hounding them. In the archive, rifling through for some grasp of the “real,” I know I have been chasing them, too. The women smile, clutching numbered hearts whilst grey men frown at clipboards. We are far too close to the women’s legs. Then, a perfect crown. One of the grey men tries to kiss the winner. Stiff. A brief moment of reprieve, as into the Summer Swimming Stadium, the grey men seem to tumble. The women are still standing tall.
They are united by white stilettos and white skin, both of which details matter. In the long history of Miss GB, there have only ever been two women of colour given the crown: the grimly ubiquitous whiteness of the competition continues, quietly perpetuating harm with a bright smiling face. Raphael Albert’s portraits of Black and Beautiful contests provide breaths of something different, not only for the inclusion of Black bodies but for the change in tone these images bring, often defined more by joy and solidarity than stiffened grins. Glimmers from more local competitions complicate these questions, too – in 1975, Beverley Heath-Hoyland was a runner up in the Miss Margate competition, photographed below. She went on to dominate West Indian beauty contests in Britain, and to forge a career as a successful buisnesswoman, too. Though this changes nothing about the structural violences threaded into these spectacles, it does remind us that illusory all-white line-ups were being inevitably and quietly challenged by women of colour in towns up and down the country.
Those stilettos, meanwhile, have clip-clapped, sometimes precariously, along the same path that my research is slowly trying to walk. They have skipped from a newfound sixties’ brashness to being a stand-in for the Essex slag. The white stilettos also help walk us towards two of the feelings at the core of all of this: discomfort, of course, as any stiletto wearer will know, but importantly, glamour, too.
The boxes, nondescript and flimsy, are a small repository of the history of glamour, and so too are those photographs of those women from further back in history, plucked from factories, promised silk and crowns. I wonder if the bigger story I’m trying to tell might partly be defined by glamour, a story about the newfound glamours of post-war Britain, about the refusal of false glamours by inexhaustible political activists, about the reinvention of glamour by post-punk artists, about topless glamour girls in the tabloid press, about the benign glamour of the hun.
Glamour is where bodies and dreams meet in the middle. Glamour is a form of violent control. Glamour is a specific socio-political and historical phenomenon, but it is also a vector that allows us to think about how capitalism feels, to think about less obvious types of labour and how the body performs them, to move between the material and the psychic.
Glamour is a woman’s bodyweight in Babycham.
And glamour is an intensely creative practice, which renders the Miss GB contestants not just victims, but active practitioners, too. In one interview I found whilst researching seaside glamour contests, a woman recalled her entry in the early 1970s, wearing a party dress made of net curtains. Textile Queen, DIY style. The work of a great many sociologists and historians can help us to see this kind of body work as a fundamentally creative one, which isn’t to negate the function played by capitalism, nor the restrictions that still surround working-class women’s lives, nor the violent systems that these women were often helping to perpetuate, but is simply to reinsert creativity back into the story, to let ourselves think capaciously about them, to let ourselves be wowed by the glamours they cast, and then turn our eye to ask how and why they do it, in what circumstances, and to what ends.
The artist Linder Sterling writes that “glamour on a slender means has always fascinated me.” Parts of Linder’s work are interested in bursting the bubble of glamour magazines, and deconstructing patriarchal impositions, but other parts are just as interested in a celebration and subversion of glamour as a classed, feminine, phenomenon, one with its etymological roots in a dark form of transformative magic. In the 1970s, Linder photographed a different kind of Queen at the Dickens Club, while other works too trace a fluid, ambiguously celebratory history of feminised glam. Linder’s is a history that asks how that kind of work feels for the bodies it touches.
Part way through her career, Linder started to attend a gym in Moss Side, where she slowly trained as a body builder. It was an experiment using the rawest of materials, the flesh itself. Both alike the women of the pageants and entirely not, Linder worked on her body, playing with expectation, creating something new.
Now, Linder herself is celebrated as a pioneer of avant-garde feminist bodywork, but the classed figure of the pageant contestant, or the bewitching queens of industry, are still embarrassing footnotes to history. Only one of these figures tends to get the critical attention they deserve. How can we begin to tell the story that I think belongs to both?
I’m still not sure, but for now, an opening scene:
A podium in the Super Swimming Stadium, a rainy day lit up by bright lycra. At the top, Linder Sterling as body builder supreme. I watch her lift a glamorous coal queen, and her bodyweight in Babycham, one in each hand, with ease.
I’m really grateful to Amy and Jamie at jwllrs for inviting me to share this work. I read it in a room in a pub where you could see the Midland Hotel and the sea beyond it from the window, which felt a bit magic given how much thinking about Morecambe is embedded into my work. The work they do with jwllrs is fab, and I’d really reccommend checking it out. x