Didn't realise foot got his clothing from Harrods
Champagne socialist
From Michael Foot’s ‘donkey jacket’ to Barnard Castle beer … inside the People’s History Museum
The Manchester museum owns 60,000 objects tracing Britain’s political history, including a pike from Peterloo and Andy Burnham’s famous coat. Now it’s up for a £100,000 prize
Helen Pidd North of England editor
Tue 10 May 2022 10.48 EDT
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Museums still tend to celebrate the Mr Bigs in society: their stately homes and vanity portraits, their inventions and ideas. But on the banks of the River Irwell, opposite Manchester’s high court, sits a curvaceous modern building dedicated to the often ordinary men and women who have fought for Britain’s rights and freedoms. Cloaked in the same weathered steel as the Angel of the North, the People’s History Museum transmits the same warm welcome as Antony Gormley’s winged monolith, but with an excellent gift shop and lovely cafe selling mostly vegan and vegetarian fare.
Its aim is to inspire the next generation of “active citizens” via its 60,000-strong collection, which includes the world’s oldest trade union banner, a pike used in self-defence by a protester at the Peterloo massacre in 1819, and a board game used as a propaganda tool for the suffragettes. More recent acquisitions include Andy Burnham’s navy workers’ jacket, which spawned a mini industry in think-pieces after he wore it to berate the government over the Covid tiering system in 2020; an empty can of BrewDog Barnard Castle Eye Test beer, which marked Dominic Cummings’ infamous lockdown dash to the north-east; and a knitted Black Lives Matter bannerette.
People’s History Museum, Manchester..
Warm welcome … the People’s History Museum, Manchester.
One of just two national museums based in Manchester (the other is – of course –
dedicated to football), the PHM also calls itself “Britain’s national museum of democracy”. It transports visitors from the 1700s to the present and beyond, exploring not just the freedoms we enjoy today but also the many causes that still need fighting for. It is one of five institutions in the running for the £100,000
Art Fund museum of the year prize, alongside the Museum of Making (Derby); the Horniman Museum and Gardens (London); The Story Museum (Oxford); and Tŷ Pawb (Wrexham), a museum in a north Wales market with makers, traders and galleries all under one roof.
Burnham’s jacket, donated by the mayor of Greater
Manchester at the museum’s behest, is not yet on show. But current visitors can admire another famous coat, worn by Labour leader Michael Foot at the Cenotaph for the 1981 Remembrance Sunday service. Derided by the rightwing press as a “donkey jacket” more suitable for a building site than a site of national mourning, the dark brown tweedy number was in fact bought by Foot’s wife from Harrods especially for the occasion. But the press – then, as now, largely owned by wealthy supporters of the Conservative party – portrayed it as deliberate disrespect for the nation’s war dead from the pacifist Foot. Visitors are invited to conclude that Donald Trump did not invent the concept of “fake news”.
