Black Lives and the ‘Archival Pulse’: The Murder of Neil “Tommy” Marsh and Other Stories

Gavin Schaffer, Saima Nasar*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

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Abstract

On 21 November 1974, 16-year-old Neil “Tommy” Marsh was murdered in the Birmingham Pub Bombings. The youngest of the twenty-one victims, Marsh and his friend Paul Davies were walking past the door of the Mulberry Bush pub when the blast inside killed them as it burst through the front doors onto the street. A recent immigrant from Jamaica, Tommy came to Britain to join his family in Handsworth. Now he is the only one of the twenty-one pub bombing victims for whom there is not a single photograph. When pictures of the other victims are displayed, Tommy is represented by a silhouette, or by an image of his mother in mourning at his grave.

The absence of material to document Tommy Marsh’s life in Britain speaks to a deeper lacuna of Black British lives within government records, mainstream public accounts and even public histories. Where records of Black lives exist, they are frequently built from foundations of Black people’s encounters with the state, perpetuating structural racism through white recordings of Black lived experiences. This article will use Tommy Marsh’s case to question how the fragmented documentary and community archives of Black life in Britain offer methodological insights into history as/and recovery. It will discuss the extent to which it is possible to construct historical narratives of Black life that acknowledge and speak from that for which government and public records fail to provide an account. Drawing from the work of scholars including Michel Rolph-Trouillout, Saidiya Hartman and Ann Laura Stoler, we will interrogate the processes of archival production and offer a critical examination of archives produced in the aftermath of injury, violence and death. We question the potentials and limitations of the spaces that can be mined by historians, and how appropriate they are for the production of historical knowledge. In doing so we question the extent to which alternative archives curated at the individual, family and community level may offer invaluable insight into histories of Black British communities. Accordingly, this article reflects on the types of historical recovery made possible, and those that remain illegible, by the processes of public and family history.
Original languageEnglish
Number of pages19
JournalRethinking History
Early online date11 May 2023
DOIs
Publication statusE-pub ahead of print - 11 May 2023

Keywords

  • Black British History
  • Birmingham
  • archival production
  • public and community histories
  • black history
  • Neil Marsh
  • community history
  • racism

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