Brunel Business School – Doctoral Symposium 27‐28th March 2012 Student First Name: Catherine Isobel
Student Second Name: Darlington
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Key Words
ambiguity, affect, authority, dirt, heuristics, local rhymes, place, public ritual, the sacred
Late-stage candidates may discuss the decisions they are taking concerning
how their theoretical, methodological or empirical arguments will be
presented through persuasive writing
(BBS Symposium Guidance 2012)
Dirty Dartford, Peculiar People:
a Heuristic for them and for us
Introduction
This paper considers how theoretical, methodological or empirical arguments may be
presented and is our third attempt at expressing knowledge succinctly.
The field remains public administration. The focus is the affective basis of local authority
and the findings are of practical value to place-marketers. Previously we showed how
exemplars can aid the presentation of qualitative research, finding deft use of exemplars in
Brody’s Inishkillane (1974) which demonstrates how large amounts of qualitative data can be
shaped into a coherent account. A year earlier we demonstrated how object theatre involving
grouped items can be used to objectify knowledge of different places in the form of
installations. Objectivity was involved because, as was shown, respondents and researchers
can work together to represent and inspect their knowledge in physical form; thus:
2 fig. 1 Pictorial Heuristics of ‘Rival
Radios’ representing rival authorities in
‘Eastville’
fig. 2 ‘Gathering of Bears,
threatened by Sinister Masked Figure’,
representing dissimulation behind
‘Westville Traders’
This third paper also considers how to articulate theory and evidence concerning local social
relations over a long period of time. The solution seems simple enough; a heuristic gifted to
us by our respondents: a rhyme. This rhyme has luminous properties and has been recited for
many generations, encapsulating both what we wish to say about Dartford and what we think
Dartfordians knew already: the authorities governing their town have an unusually passionate
and positive preoccupation with dirt. Indeed the Borough Council’s authority (legitimate
3 power) was fashioned out of disease-fighting and squalor-eradication, in order to attain a
‘brighter and more beautiful’, ‘airy’, ‘wide-awake’ and ‘garden-girt Dartford’.
What are Heuristics and What do they do?
Heuristics must be useful and possess a certain currency. Ours seems to meet both criteria as
the rhyme has circulated for a long time. Abbott describes heuristics as:
gambits of imagination, mental moves [social scientists] employ to hasten discovery.
Like gambits in chess, these mental moves are formulas for the opening, developing,
and realizing of possibilities. Some are general gambits implicit in the nature of
argument and description, while others arise in conceptual issues that pervade the
disciplines.
(Abbott, 2004:4)
We push this imaginative and expansive use of heuristics further by suggesting that heuristics
can be generated not only by researchers but by their respondents (and may be written, oral or
pictorial). Our heuristic is also theirs. It is concise, portable and plastic, providing for
concepts which are otherwise difficult to express. ‘Respondents’ re-telling of the rhyme over
long periods suggests that there is ‘something in it’ as locals have acted on the implications of
the rhyme by pursuing public health, ‘airy’ green spaces and cleansing open-air festivals,
processions and parades at every opportunity. Though locals know not who devised it nor
exactly when, it dates from no later than 1910 when the town was involved in planting-out
extensive parks gifted to it by two local industrial magnates. Earlier rhymes also provide
circumstantial evidence of the affective social relations out of which the ‘Brighter and More
beautiful Dartford Movement’ grew.
4 Heuristic Rhyme
Dirty Dartford,
Peculiar people
Bury their dead
Above the steeple
This is the best-known version of the best-known Dartford rhyme. Other versions include:
Dirty Dartford,
Stuck-up people,
Put their churchyard
Above the steeple
Alternatively
Dirty Dartford,
Wicked people,
Bury their dead
Above the steeple
There are between ten and fifteen versions in current use. This enigmatic little verse is
recited by Dartfordians part-ironically, part-humorously, without dwelling on what the poem
is about for they are already ‘in-the-know’ about Dartford. It is officially acknowledged:
Dartford Borough Council has reproduced the poem on a plaque at the entrance to a burial
ground above the steeple. The Council has also repeated the poem on post-cards designed in
conjunction with Dartford’s ‘heritage trail’.
5 fig. 3 plaque at the entrance to St.
Edmund's Pleasance, quoting ‘Dirty
Dartford’
fig. 4 Dartford ‘Heritage Trail’
Postcards
6 By turning one’s back on the plaque and moving a short distance, the following view is
obtained of the church below:
fig. 5 Holy Trinity church from
cemetery
The poem begins clearly enough: ‘Dirty Dartford’ is boldly unequivocal, but ‘Peculiar
people’ is ambiguous as it may mean ‘special’, ‘distinguished’, ‘unusual’, ‘odd’, ‘eccentric’,
and ‘somehow different’ most, but not all of which are pejorative 1 . The poem explains that
what’s peculiar about Dartford is that they ‘Bury their dead above the steeple’. It is clear to
locals that the ‘steeple’ refers to Holy Trinity Church at the foot of East Hill. The place
‘above the steeple’ is St. Edmund’s Pleasance graveyard on East Hill, though peculiarly this
graveyard was closed well before the poem is believed to have been devised.
The verse divides insiders from outsiders to whom it is sinister, containing free-floating skyburials (like a Chagall painting). However the verse alludes to an anti-dirt tendency
(Improvement) in such a cryptic way that it may be overlooked even by locals; Improvement
well-served by strict regulations governing the burial of the dead, not here at this cemetery
but at the later ‘licensed cemetery’ further over East Hill.
1
The Peculiars were also a strict branch of Methodism 7 The flip side of Improvement is dirt. Pollution was produced by local cement factories;
foundries; paper-works; stamping mills; breweries; and engineering-works nevertheless many
of their owners supported Improvement (for example, as members of the Association of
Dartford Industries and subscribers to the journal ‘Wide Awake Dartford’). This dialectic
between The Pure and The Impure is implied by the rhyme. On a Durkheimian reading, we
think we see different variants of the Sacred acted out not only in the poem but also between
Improvers and Economisers as they vied for supremacy.
fig. 6 1932 flyer for a pageant
attracting 60,000
A heuristic for them and for us?
We use the word ‘them’ (meaning ‘Dartfordians’) advisedly. The rhyme can be read both as
an abject and ironic riposte to ‘Brighter and More Beautiful Dartford’ and as an urgent call
for fresh improvement. The implication for place marketers may be that if the incantation
can be kept going, further improvements can be accomplished.
Dartford has had a passion for improvement for over a century and the poem winks at this:
during the nineteenth century, local authority, public feelings and ethics were hotly contested
8 between Economisers and Improvers, especially between the 1870’s and the 1930’s.
Improvers promoted a ‘Brighter and More Beautiful, garden-girt Dartford’, better streetlighting, sanitation and numerous other services. Dirt was their sworn enemy. Economisers
resisted in the name of ‘self-help’ and hated the tax increases and encroaching regulation that
accompanied improvements. The triumph of the Improvers remains evident in the
exceptional acreage of public green space demanded by ‘townspeople’ amid passionate
public protests and legal challenges to C19th land enclosures. Parkland was bought and
returned to Dartfordians by Everard Hesketh (partner in an innovative engineering company)
and by Colonel Kidd (owner of Kidd’s Steam Brewery).
Detailed contemporary descriptions of grand openings survive, including elements that are
still being re-used: firework displays, silver bands, historical re-enactments and pageants;
repeated over and over again for crowds of up to 70,000. In this way the improver ethic was
incorporated into modern local government and fresh rounds of ‘regeneration’ continue to
this day. But here is the paradox, which the poem also betrays: Dartford remains attached to
dirt.
Dartford/ Dirtford
There’s a hint of ‘abjection’ in the enjoyment of a poem which describes Dartfordians as
‘dirty and peculiar’ (see Kristeva, 1982). Dirt persists in Dartford’s alter-ego ‘Dirtford’, a
slang place-name found on the Internet, identifying Dirtford as a ‘Top Ten Chav Town’. So
why might a Borough Council also acknowledge and reproduce an apparently bleak
message? Look beyond the rhyme at Dartford’s Annual Festival, and you will see that as
well as being justly proud of their parkland, the organisers also entertain parody, absurdity
and coarseness for example inviting Stavros Flatley to the Dartford Festival
9 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvFmGoaKO3I) and hosting the World’s Strongest Man
Competition which involved pulling a refuse truck
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGL0haB9g6M . The Borough is pleased with its Mick
Jagger Centre and welcomes back its dissolute son as often as possible and the custodians of
its past, the Historical and Antiquarian Society, meets here. Several new streets will
commemorate Rolling Stones songs. We conjecture that by giving dirt an official place the
local authority makes it safe.
Can we also make the poem work as a theoretical device? Durkheim’s account of the Pure
and Impure Sacred and of their ambiguity (1912) seems encapsulated in the abjection,
veneration and ambiguity of the poem-on-the-plaque. Durkheim might note the way that the
spectre of the pure and impure has been invoked by Dartford’s public re-enactments and
historical tableaux. Although Durkheim’s account remains underdeveloped (Riley, 2005) and
has been taken in directions we would not take, nevertheless it works for us. Thus:
fig. 6 Dartford Festival, 1951, a celebration of the Pure Sacred?
10 fig 7 Messrs. Burroughs
Welcome anniversary
celebration. Butterfly
pollinating flower with
maypole dancers dressed
pure white.
The rhyme helps us to read Durkheim. In it we find a type of ambiguity which Durkheim
alludes to, which inhabits Dartford and which the Borough memorialises and makes safe.
Conclusion
Heuristics have universal application. However (and unusually) we are toying with a
heuristic that means something to Dartfordians and Durkheimians. We suggest Dartfordians
know something which Durkheimians also know, however locals manage to express it more
simply. Our excursion around a heuristic is part-methodological, part-empirical, and partspeculative and it leads us to at least one practical suggestion. Unwrapping the poem
uncovers Dartford’s paradox: ‘peculiar’ dedication to improvement, coupled with ‘peculiar’
attachment to dirt. The Improvers were producers of dirt (foundries and cement factories)
and, though not officially sanctioned, the ‘Dirty Dartford’ they wished to eradicate persists.
The rhyme encompasses these ambiguities, and for us, Durkheim’s Pure and Impure Sacred.
These different forms of the Sacred, sublime and absurd, continue to bemuse and to animate
Dartfordians.
The rhyme holds up a mirror to the affective life of public Dartford and qualifies as its ‘metaritual’. It has persisted for at least a century and is plastic enough for current use. This
11 plasticity is reflected in minor revisions. Easy to remember, it still has practical uses. Keep it
alive. Pass it on.
fig. 8 the 1933 Charter
Day celebrations are
recalled and updated as the
Borough prepares for the
space age.
Bibliography
Abbott, A. (2004) Methods of Discovery: Heuristics for the Social Sciences. New York:
W.W Norton & Company, Inc.
Brody, H. (1974) Inishkillane: Change and Decline in the West of Ireland. Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books Limited
Durkheim, E. [1912] tr. 1915; 2nd ed. 1976. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life.
London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd.
Kristeva, J. (1982) Powers of Horror:an essay in abjection. [online]. Available at
http://www.csus.edu/indiv/o/obriene/art206/Readings/Kristeva - Powers of Horror[1].pdf
[accessed 23/02/2012]
12 Riley, A.T. (2005) ‘Renegade Durkheim and the transgressive left sacred’ in Alexander, J.C.
and Smith, P. (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 275-301
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