Born: 1940, United Kingdom
Died: 2023
Country most active: United Kingdom
Also known as: NA
This biography is shared with permission from the Academics’ Wives project, created by Rosalind Edward and Val Gillies and supported by the British Academy / Leverhulme.
PAT MARSDEN (1940-2023)
Pat grew up in a working-class household in Huddersfield in the North of England. She left school at 16 and worked in a library and for a local newspaper. She met Dennis Marsden in a jazz club in Huddersfield and they married in 1961. Dennis was working at the Institute for Community Studies at the time. Pat accompanied Dennis as he travelled around Britain doing interviews for an Advisory Centre for Education ‘Parents and Schools’ survey. Dennis then got a job at the Salford Royal College of Advanced Technology (now Salford University) and began work on a new community study – the Salford Slum and Rehousing Study. Pat, Dennis, their young son and young baby moved into Davenham House on Trinity Estate in Salford in 1963 and lived there for 18 months.
Pat kept a handwritten diary in two exercise books for six months, starting shortly after she arrived. The diary material involves lively descriptions of life on a local estate, with discussions of family life, parenting and childhood. Dennis Marsden’s detailed notes and research diary contain observations of the Tenants’ Association, political processes, and so on, while Pat recorded the everyday life in the flats, happening in the square outside the window of her maisonette at number 2 Davenham House. The diary entries include an engaged account of poor working class children’s life on the Salford housing estate, capturing characters and activities, heralding late 20th century ethnographies of childhood that detail aspects of the minutiae of children’s cultures.
The research was never written up because Dennis Marsden was recruited to a position at the University of Essex before the study was completed, and the Marsden family moved to the South of England. Nonetheless, it is evident that Dennis intended to draw on Pat’s diary in analysis and writing up from the careful logging he made about its contents. In the diary itself, using a red pen, he numbered the pages and inserted codes next to most of the adults and children that Pat mentioned in her entries.
Dennis also thanked Pat in the acknowledgements section of his 1973 book Mothers Alone: Poverty and the Fatherless Family, for her ‘continuing interest and help with the project’.
An interview conducted with Pat in 2009 can be accessed here.
Papers from the research studies Pat worked on can be found in the Dennis Marsden collection at the University of Essex Special Collections.