Mel Bassett on Sport and the Royal Dockyard in Portsmouth
Sport in the Royal Dockyard in this week's podcast brought to you by the British Society of Sport History in association with the Institute of Historical Research with Dr Melanie Bassett, who is a Research Fellow at the University of Portsmouth, where she manages the PTUC (port Towns & Urban Cultures) website. Mel talked to Geoff about a paper she gave at the IHR that was based on her PhD research into the sport and leisure activities of civilian employees in the Royal Dockyard in Portsmouth in the Edwardian period, including the incorporation of female workers during World War 1. Mel's work means that she is very active in public history, acting as a consultant on projects at Portsmouth City Museum, as well as helping to set up other public history projects in Portsmouth, and she talks about the judgements one has to make being an academic historian working in a public history environment. As part of this work she talks about the Portsmouth contribution to Supernatural Cities and DarkFest, whose app was going live on the day that the podcast was recorded. Dr Melanie Bassett is a Faculty Research Fellow at the University of Portsmouth. She manages the PTUC website and social media outputs alongside undertaking her own research on port towns. Her PhD research, 'The Royal Dockyard Worker in Edwardian England: Culture, Leisure and Empire' re-examined the concept of a monolithic imperial identity and tracked the nuances of working-class imperialism.