A heritage project exploring institutional work carried out in Merseyside by people with learning difficulties or disabilities is seeking stories for an exhibition at the Museum of Liverpool.
Liverpool-based theatre and arts company Wicked Fish http://wickedfish.org.uk aims to set up four Friends and Families groups for its Heritage Lottery-funded project ‘Care and Control’. Working with researchers, the groups will share stories about those who worked in local institutions in the last 150 years and their findings will be included in an exhibition at the Museum of Liverpool. Development director Sue O’Brien said: ‘During the 19th and 20th centuries, the “feeble-minded”‘ were kept occupied and “useful”, and usually unpaid, in industrial schools, workshops, laundries, colonies and hospitals. Their skills in carpentry, shoemaking, tailoring and animal husbandry allowed some of the institutions in which they lived to be almost completely self-sufficient, while their physical labours in institutional laundries underpinned commercial services with hospitals, schools, and shipping lines.’
To help, email wickedfish97@hotmail.com