The Lockdown Diaries of the Working Class

 

Dr Lisa Mckenzie started the project three years ago at the beginning of the first lockdown in March 2020, when she first came up with the idea of asking working class people to send me their diaries from those early days of lockdown.

After trying unsuccessfully to get financial support through the normal academic routes, we launched a Kickstarter campaign, published the diaries ourselves, and now have a mad yellow book that will be hard to ignore. The words and illustrations in the book stand up for themselves today and we are sure they will become stronger, and more poignant and important as history moves on.

That was the whole point of the project: to provide a solid and beautiful testament to the diarists and to the British working class whose experiences and stories are usually misrecognised, ignored or rewritten by those with power. The testimony inside the Lockdown Diaries of the Working Class is filled with emotion, laughter, anxiety, pain and hopefulness in a unique period of our history. Those of us in the Working Class Collective who put together the book and the 800 people who gave money to the Kickstarter campaign were all working in pure solidarity with the diarists.

The book is beautiful, and part of its beauty is down to the six artists who brought the diaries alive, not forgetting our two youthful, talented and enthusiastic book designers Oli and Ash who work under the name Focus Group. We met in person for the first time in April this year at the book launch in Tooting Market in South London. The entire writing and production of this mad little yellow book had taken place online during the two-year lockdown period from March 2020 to April 2022. This was a triumph of solidarity working. We are a working class collective meaning none of us singularly could or should take credit for the object we had created.

When the book came out in 2020 Dr Lisa Mckenzie wrote for Transforming Society an online Blog -
"As I write this, I am returning from a conference in Oregon, USA for the Working Class Studies Association where I introduced the book to my fellow working class academics. While looking around a junk shop with an American colleague, I picked up a small framed picture. It was a cartoon strip from the early 1900s of the ‘Yellow Kid’ – a working-class Irish boy and trickster popular in the New York papers from 1908 up until the 1930s. I knew about the Yellow Kid – I had written about him in our book as an example of how important working-class storytelling through image and art is – and here he was in a junk shop, laughing at a couple of posh gents looking stiff and uncomfortable in their attire. Is there any truer example of how powerful working-class storytelling is – 100 years on the Yellow Kid is still laughing at ‘his betters’. My friend bought it (it belonged to him on the ‘finders, keepers law of bargain hunting’ apparently) but the power in the story is with me to tell"

The power, empathy, passion and talent of the illustrators and their illustrations in the Lockdown Diaries brings another dimension to what are already powerful stories. Colum Leith, a lecturer at UWE, and now given our grand title of ‘Creative Director’, was responsible for finding most of our artists. Colum was the only person back in 2020 who answered my tweet ‘Does anyone know anything about art?’. He did, and had been using his own images for over 20 years in political pamphlets under the name ‘Social Commontating’ (sic). This is what he has to say about working in the collective for two years:

 

Illustration by Colum Leith

Lucy Morris is our own pocket rocket from Warrington, researching working-class history and art. Lucy is not only a talented artist but also is a volunteer looking after the archive at the Working Class Movement Library in Salford. Lucy says:

Illustration by Lucy Morris

Daisy is another young artist featured in the book. She actually argued with me about being an ‘artist’, thinking you needed to be published before you could claim such a title. Well Daisy, let’s not argue anymore – you are a bloody amazing artist. Daisy says:

Illustration by Daisy Howarth

Find out more about the illustrators:

Colum Leith: @socialcommontating/www.socialcommontating.com

Lucy Morris: @lucymorris_illustration

Daisy Howarth: @howarthdaisy/www.howarthdaisy.wixsite.com/daisyhowarth