The Pudsey Pudding – Christmas on a giant scale

Christmas shopping, something caught my eye in the window of a charity shop.
It wasn’t the thought that this would be an ideal present - far from it. I can’t really think of many people I’d want to give it too.

Let me explain. It was a print, possibly an original print, of a newspaper item from 1846. The local article demonstrated an event that made Pudsey a well known place in England long before anyone had knitted a bear for the BBC. It was also seemed festive, although I later found this not quite to be true.

Although public relations is seen as a modern practice, it’s something practiced for millennia even if the term “PR” is something new.

This article talked of the Pudsey Pudding, a giant steamed Christmas pudding, made in the town to celebrate the repeal of the Corn Laws. The gesture had to be original and capture the mood that saw one of the most unpopular laws in British History consigned to the dustbin. The pud represented the end of an import duty that left many poor people starving and the gesture saw a democratic sharing of a celebratory dish made by the community, for the community.

The pudding may have been made to a Christmas recipe but it was actually steamed on 31st July by the radical free traders of Pudsey. The details are staggering even to the modern media. I’ve seen a “world record tower of pompadoms” that looked barely two foot tall and managed to squeeze into the papers:

The result was a pudding weighing nearly 1000 lbs.

Twenty housewives each mixed her twentieth share to the proper ingredients ready for the final blending.

One of the dye-pans at Crawshaw Mill was thoroughly cleaned and filled with spring water.

The twenty dames, with assistance, brought their twenty bowls containing the mixed flour, fruit and suet and tipped them into a large and strong and new canvas "poke" specially made for that purpose, and by means of a windlass which had been fixed over the pan, the "weighty matter" was hoisted into the vessel.

For three days and three nights the pudding was kept boiling, along with half a dozen smaller puddings, to keep it company.

On July 31, 1846, the pudding was craned out of the huge copper and placed upon a wherry. There the steaming monster sat in triumph, with the smaller puddings around it.

A procession was formed, and went round the town, with thousands of people looking on.

The final scene was in Crawshaw Fields, where tables had been arranged in the form of a large military square, and with a special "spade" provided for the purpose, the pudding was "dug up" and served to the crowd."

This historic story shows that communication has always been key. Engage a community with a common purpose is the “new PR” of the social media age – yet this feat could not have been created without a real community coming together.

May be the modern media is trying to re-engage with a sense of community that is fragmented and no longer as strong as it was in those days. May be we don’t have the political events to celebrate.

Sadly the largest Christmas Pudding no longer resides this side of the Pennines. The current record weighed is 7,231 pounds, and was made in Aughton, Lancashire, on July 11, 1992. The village has a once every 21-year tradition of producing puddings to celebrate the cutting of their reed beds.

I can only see records going back to 1886, so may be it was inspired by the Pudsey Pudding – let me know if you have more information than I do.

But there is an opportunity for Pudsey to get find some community spirit again and regain the title and start a friendly war of the roses. Aughton is due to break the record again in mid July 2013, so maybe we should start planning for the 31st of July and hold the record for 21-years.

Getting a sense of community in the snow

The weather has brought more than a knee deep torrent of snow, freezing the icy hills of Leeds into an impassable blockade. It has also brought about a sense of community which tends to vanish as fast as the snow vanished under the heat from the sun. But while it lasts, hopefully we will be able to rediscover the joys of community.

I’ve been thinking about community thanks to events like TEDxLeeds and the launch of the Leeds Community News Hub. Hopefully this blog will draw together some key learning points into something demonstrable.

On a basic level, the snow actually brings people out. Bizarrely the bad weather forces us out of the comfort of our cars and onto the streets. Most people on my street have been walking to work, or at least to the bus stop. Rather than rushing past they’ve been stopping to chat.

While one foolish driver attempted to get up one of the steepest roads in my area, first one, then two then three and four people went over to help push the back of the car. The car got up the hill, but it was a sense of community that helped get the vehicle up over the hill and onto the top road.

Community can be defined as people coming together for a common purpose or for a shared interest. I’ve also heard comment that communities are not created. They are sometimes latent, but rarely can you force a death metal music fan to enjoy watching the X-factor.

I think communications professionals miss the point about latent communities. They sometimes hit on a community in need of a social glue and mistake it for creating a new community that hasn’t existed before.

On my street, I’ve always tried to keep my driveway clear – mainly so I can get my two wheel drive cars out if there was an emergency. Last year I got some comments from neighbours saying I should keep up the good work, and one negative comment that I was wasting my time and causing more ice to form. The area near my cars cleared sooner and the other half of the cul de sac turned into a skating rink.

This year I did the same. I noted that many of the 4x4 vehicles able to drive on the snow used my ‘cleared’ area as it was less slippy. Unfortunately the warm tyres create ice tracks which are nigh on impossible to shift – but shift it slowly I do.

Now a couple of days ago, a few of my neighbours were out clearing the space out of their drives. We engaged in conversation and discussed the weather, the airport, the struggles of other locals on the roads and general chit chat.

Today that escalated. Far from just clearing the drives, we moved on to the main bit of the cul de sac. There were more of us and we had a common purpose – clearing the snow.

We’d created a community. We’d also created momentum and were picking up on the latent potential of the cul de sac. More people came out to help. One person joked to a twenty something girl that she’d have to bring her shovel out when she came back. Amazingly she took the joke to heart and came out to help. One of the men with a 4x4 took up the shovel and snow plough despite not needing to. In no time at all, the cul de sac was cleared.

Further down, the hill section of our road had been cleared and now just a narrow strip of road is still clarried with snow.

Once a community becomes successful and an aim seems achievable, you can draw in people to the community- much like a blackhole draws in material around it because of its gravity. The caveat is that those who might join in the community must have a latent interest in joining the group.

And what of the one person who made the negative comment? Well they’re enjoying the benefits of the community, but is one person I’ve yet to see with shovel, snow plough or brush in hand - proving that you can’t force people to join a community.

To recap:
• Community can be defined as people coming together for a common purpose or for a shared interest.
• Communities are not created
• Some communities are latent and need some way of bring people together
• Some potential community members may not be active
• Creating achievable aims for a community can invigorate it and create a movement and gravitational pull for potential new members
• You cannot force someone into joining a community

At the hub of Leeds community

The Leeds Community News Hub held its first forum at Trinity and All Saints University College in an event bringing together journalists, bloggers, community groups, charities and those interested in their locality.

The presentation by Meg Pickard of the Guardian might have been on the changing nature of media and the need to engage with the wider community, but the overall theme was very much about connecting; connecting not only people, but technology, data and content.

A joint venture between the college (or is it a university) and the Guardian, the hub throws the doors open to the school of journalism. The media courses ground students in community engagement, but the hub switches this around offering community based projects the ability to gain expert knowledge from the hub (not just from Trinity). For example, a community project might work with journalism students to help work on a news story relevant for a small locality but not gaining the attentions of the wider regional press.


Sarah Hartley, who is in charge of the guardian local projects in Leeds, Edinburgh and Cardiff, discussed the need to be more collaborative and bring together multiple points of view and contribution to a story – much in the way that wikis work – to bring a greater insight to a news story. She also discussed the use of space. So far the Guardian local project has been focused on virtual space and the Guardian Leeds blog. The new forum events bring the event into the real world and help those who might not actually blog or tweet.

I’ve seen Meg Pickard speak before. She is an engaging speaker with a passion for her subject. Not a journalist but a social anthropologist by trade; I wanted to see what had changed since I last spoke to her.

It started much in the same way her last talk did – the discussion around a picture of a bus stop. Are these people in a queue for the bus a community? The answer is potentially – there share many things in common but equally they are all different as well. If they begin to chat about the weather, the lateness of the bus or something quite random they start to engage in a community which will grow if they visit the site on a regular basis. Their journey does not affect who they are and their passions, but they might find other like minded person on their bus route. Or not.

She used Jake McKee’s definition of community:

A group of people who form relationships over time by interacting regularly around contexts which are of interest to all of them for various individual reasons.

However, Meg added this definition was loose as what constitutes time, relationships, what a group is or what is of interest. In the words of Mark Zuckenberg: “Communities already exist”. |what this means is it is a lost cause to ‘create’ a community. Echoing words I’d heard last week at TEDxLeeds, community projects often ignore the infrastructure and the people already there and are intent to overlay a new template to create a new community – often in failure. People are passionate about things for a reason and that’s what binds them. You can’t make some interested.

It is easy to “create content” and to consume it, but if something is driven by a passion, you want to do more with that information. You can react to, curate and create new content but not everyone will have the passion to do all. While some will read an article and move on, others will vote on a discussion, fewer will added the link to their twitter site and fewer people will be moved enough to blog about it.

But why do people do any of these things? There has to be a reward for it; a greater sense of being a member, an ego massage for someone wanting to be influential, a channel for venting your spleen or just an interest being sated by reading an article and doing no more.

The mechanics of a story also have to be in place. This is not just words. Increasingly it is pictures, video, sound and data flows. It is also a community voice.

Meg then discussed how crowdsourcing can play a valuable part in modern journalism. She gave the example of how the Guardian opened up the expenses documents for MP and got people to engage with them. It meant 27,000 people helped identify the stories within the expenses scandal through varying layers of engagement. Some clicked on poll buttons which basically said nothing of interest to interesting information.

This created a filter for the journalists to investigate further. Others wrote notes on what they believed they had uncovered.

One student challenged Meg on the exploitation of the public, but the response is that journalistic rigour has to be behind the opening up of the story. The motivation of the individuals was to gain the information and feel a buzz from uncovering a scoop. (I remember doing this and finding not a dicky bird on my local MP). It would be possible to exploit people, but it would be short-lived as people would not help again.

The contribution moved to mutualisation and citizen journalism. By this Meg meant the involvement of multiple groups in creating news. Rather than an editor commissioning a story, researching it and publishing it, a more organic model sees opportunities to engage, contribute and react to news, creating additional news angles that could not be opened up in other ways. But the editor needs to remain to determine fact from fabrication and to ensure the information is the right side of the law.

A case study of @abc_investigates on twitter demonstrated that community needs a context. The Australian TV channel offered the opportunity to have people’s questions answered. They meant investigative journalism questions. The public sent questions about odd socks. Only by further engagement did the account work by demonstrating it meant it would investigate trading standards and council abuses.

But the point of community is that what is relevant to me isn’t relevant to many. I’ve often pondered the failure of Social media is that it pigeon holes you into twitter lists, Facebook friend connections and LinkedIn colleagues even though you may have multiple ‘lives’. Am I the communications manager, the father, husband, football fan, rower, media law geek or ... I could go on but I hope you get the point.

The Danger is that we pigeon-hole audiences and communities and, worse, mix up the difference between opinion and fact.

What will community groups gain from this forum? I think it’s an understanding of where they fit into the story and encouragement that their voice can be heard. If the hub is to work, they will need much more support. In my mind the community groupings need to be identified and a way of bringing them together needs to happen. This includes new media, the forum and other events.

The problem is these groups are not obvious and it will take time for people to get involved. Equally there is an issue of creating an infrastructure to enable people to talk without imposing one that disrupt the existing infrastructure. Equally, it will need to be easy to involve as many people as possible.

The advantage is that an art exhibition in Beeston might be able to link to the Leeds art community, to the locals in the area, to people interested in the subject matter rather than art – and Leeds can benefit from people coming together to talk. Isn’t that what community really means?

(Picture courtesy of http://www.freeimages.co.uk/)