Dave Clarke is a board game designer and the founder of Sinister Fish Games, a tabletop gaming publisher based in Lincoln. He used the British Library’s digital database (Images Online) to create the board game Great Scott!

I’d never considered being a game designer. It was an accident that worked out. It’s great, because you actually get to make a product that brings joy to people, and that’s hard to beat. Everything I’ve managed to do has been because of Great Scott! And I wouldn’t have been able to make Great Scott! without the British Library. 

When it all started, I was a web designer, but I’d been into gaming since I was a kid. It came to my attention that there was a renaissance happening in the world of board games, accelerated by Kickstarter. Kickstarter is an online platform where people can present an idea – for a game, an art book, an album, anything – and have it funded by the end user. 

 

You can design board games for free

It’s absolutely perfect for board games, because you can design board games for free (other than time), with bits of paper and a couple of dice. One person can do it. You can force your friends and family to sit and play-test it with you until you think you've got something. I’ve always been very keen on that punk rock DIY thing. When I was younger, I was in punk bands, where you record your own music and arrange your own tours – not because you have a desire to be successful at it; you just do it because you like it. 

I didn't really expect Great Scott! to be a massive success. I think my funding goal was about £5,000, which was what I figured I needed to have the game manufactured and shipped. We ended up making about £9,000 on Kickstarter. I had spent so much time researching everything that I needed to know, and designing the game, that it ended up being a financial loss. But it gave me just enough credibility to be able to do the next thing, which was a collaboration with someone else. I got very lucky with that, and that allowed me to quit my day job. 

 

The British Library collection was perfect

I needed artwork for the cards in the game, but I can’t draw, and I had no money to pay an artist. I was looking for a database of public domain art that was expansive enough to cover a massively wide variety of subjects. The British Library collection was absolutely perfect; I wouldn’t have been able to make the game without it. The idea of a historical game was actually suggested by what was available. 

Great Scott! is set in this kind of quaint, Victorian England. The players become inventors who are vying for the favour of Queen Victoria, so that they can become the royal inventor. It was inspired by my interest in steampunk, and my early obsession with films based on novels by Jules Verne: Journey to the Centre of the Earth; all that kind of stuff. 

The gameplay is based on combining words and phrases to make something funny. It’s like Consequences, the game where you’re given a prompt, you write a phrase and you fold the piece of paper over and hand it to someone else – then you unfold it and read them out. You’re creating these ridiculous situations. I’d always found that amusing, so I thought maybe I could make a game where you combine random elements. The theme that occurred to me was crazy Victorian inventions. 

 

The best part of the game is reading out your silly invention

I wanted the game to be as simple as possible: easy to learn, so a family could sit and play. I conscripted a bunch of my friends to help. We went round in circles for probably the best part of a year, coming up with all these different ways of playing the cards, and in the end we went back to the very first idea, more or less – because the best part of the game was getting to the end and reading out your silly invention and telling people about, for example, your deluxe duck-deployed donkey detonator. 

It’s the absolutely ridiculous Pythonesque combinations that amuse me. I think the game was successful because I managed to connect with enough people who have a stupid sense of humour like mine. 

After Great Scott!, I approached a guy who was posting images of his game online as he developed it. The game was called Villagers: it just looked really cute. He was a Norwegian designer called Haakon Hoel Gaarder. I approached him, and we chatted for about a year, and then he said, okay, you can publish my game; I think I’d rather concentrate on design. The year after that, we launched it on Kickstarter, and it was a crazy success. It’s still the 11th most backed UK Kickstarter of all time, within all categories, not just board games. So we were off to the races. I’ve done three games with Haakon now, and we’re about to do a fourth. 

 

Board games have been around for thousands of years

Board games are social: you’re interacting with real people, and I think we need that. People are discovering that you don’t have to be a stereotypical nerd to enjoy a board game. There are a lot of very light, easy-to-learn games that can really enhance a social gathering. 

As I was going through the British Library database, I started a couple of folders of images that sparked ideas that I knew I wouldn’t use for Great Scott! I might go back to them one day. I had the idea of doing a game about Victorian explorers, because in the database there's all this amazing artwork from explorers’ journals; these fabulous landscapes. 

To me, the British Library is about preserving history: it’s an important archive of knowledge and creativity. Board games have been around for thousands of years. It's a very human thing to want to do. They’ve discovered Roman and Egyptian and Viking board games: people have always sat together and played games and we probably always will. 

 

As told to Lucy Peters

Folk musicians Pete Dilley, Katy Ryder, Alice Jones and Simon Robinson wrote new music for 19th-century ballads found in the British Library’s collection. The group recorded and performed the ballads as part of the Living with Machines exhibition, co-curated by the British Library and Leeds City Museum. 

 

Pete Dilley

I’m a singer-songwriter and guitarist, and I’ve always drawn on the folk canon in my music. Leeds Museums and Galleries asked me who would be the go-to people in Yorkshire to write new tunes for some broadsheet ballads, for an exhibition with the British Library called Living with Machines. It was a bit like assembling the Magnificent Seven, or Ocean's Eleven. I asked people I knew from the scene who like to delve deep into folk music archives.

Living with Machines was about how machines developed, and how this impacted people's lives in positive and negative ways. For example, it showed very intricate textiles that were created using early machines like looms, and right next to them there would be a ballad sheet, about the demise of the weaving industry because of technological advances, and our recording of the song. A lot of the stories are about the North and the area around Leeds. 

The broadsheet manuscripts from the British Library archives are quite interesting to see, because a lot of them have been pasted into different books. Often they were kept in books which don't have that much relevance to them: it was just a good way of storing them, a bit like dried flowers. Musicians and songwriters probably wouldn’t think of going to the British Library to find things like this, but you can. I think the curators looked at them and said, they should be sung.

We’ve managed to give these songs a new lease of life

A lot of people say that folk music isn't really folk music unless it's being performed. It’s a beautiful thing that we’ve managed to take these songs that were sat around in the British Library with no music to them, and give them a new lease of life. Who knows, maybe one day people will take the tunes we wrote and sing them with new words.

A lot of the ballads are decorated with nice woodcuts which give a sense of the era that they were written in. When it came to making a CD of our music, and doing the lino cuts for the album cover, the ballad sheets themselves were so special that I incorporated them into the artwork. 

 

Katy Ryder

Before the project, I was already aware of broadside ballads. They're basically a combination of tabloid newspapers and songs in the charts. People would sell them on the streets, and maybe sing the songs so that if you wanted to buy them, you could learn the tune. It was a massive industry throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. While I had used them before, I don't think any of us had come across these particular ballads from the British Library. 

When Pete asked me to join the project, it was like getting to delve into hidden treasures. Looking at these ballads, one thing that struck me immediately was the level of detail they contained about different professions, and how much skill went into them. One of the songs that we sing, that I arranged, called ‘The Felting Machines’, contains so many words for different jobs in the textile industry. I still don't really know what half of them mean. 

There’s a ghost of a tune still in the words

Simon and I each came up with a tune for that one, and sent it to the group at about the same time to ask what they thought of it. The tunes that we came up with, completely independently of each other, were very similar. It was almost as if there's a ghost of a tune still there in the words.

As I was writing the music, I was thinking about the workers whose lives were affected by the mechanization of industry. You also try to imagine the context that the songs would have been sung in, perhaps people sitting at home, coming up with their own tunes. There wasn't such a distinction back then between a musician and an ordinary person. Broadside ballads were really entwined with people’s lives. A lot of people would paste them on the wall, almost like wallpaper: they were surrounded by them. 

Playing these songs is an act of solidarity through time

We had a really good time playing the songs live and I think we all thought it would be a shame to put them to bed. Very kindly, the museum gave us permission to produce a CD of the tracks. It always takes you longer than you think to make an album, but we’re hoping to release it later this year. 

The other night I was at a gig supporting a folk musician called Jon Wilks. He said something that I really agreed with: that playing these old, traditional songs is an act of solidarity through time. 

 

Alice Jones

I do a lot of work with archives and broadsides. We were all interested in the idea of these old ballads and creating new music for them, or finding the original tunes. We're from a very similar area, so we had all come across each other in different folk settings. 

I chose to write music for a Lancashire song called ‘The Colliers’ New Hymn’ which was all about people dying in a mining disaster – it's very profound and depressing. A lot of the most successful ballads represent lived experience. That’s what made them popular, because there were similar things going on all around the country. When I searched for ‘The Colliers’ New Hymn’ online, I found several other versions which change the details of the colliery accident. It’s really interesting to see that some of the ballads were so poignant that they were used again for other causes and events. 

The things the ballads describe are still happening 

We’d essentially constructed the songs in the studio, and then they asked us to perform them live at the exhibition. It was quite a task to deconstruct everything and work out what was feasible. It's always a little bit nerve-racking to debut a new group of people, but once we’d managed to cram all of us onto the stage, I enjoyed it immensely. We were doing chorus songs and trying to get people to join in with tunes they’d never heard before, and everyone was with us: there was a really nice communal feeling. 

It’s amazing how you find yourself singing these songs from a hundred years ago and realising that the things they describe are still happening. I perform a song called ‘Adieu to Old England’, which is all about people being absolutely on the bread line while a small percentage of those with all the money are controlling what's going on. I think the ballads are always going to resonate because the situations keep coming back round again. It’s almost as if the past is reaching forward into the future. 

 

Simon Robinson

I love the idea of the ballads being like a public service broadcast, a way of people getting news out. They were printed in Leeds, and Manchester, and all over the place, but they all have a very similar message. Even though the songs are from the 18th and 19th centuries, a lot of what they’re saying is very relevant today. We're doing a gig in Manchester soon and it's been postponed now three times because of train strikes: there's a massive irony in how similar things are now. 

We each picked two songs to go away and focus on. It was quite diplomatic: some of them just spoke to individuals more than others. We were each in our own little world, coming up with bits of melodies. I would occasionally send something across to the others to say, what do you think of this idea? A lot of the arranging happened in the studio: we didn't really have a chance to get together beforehand. This group has a nice mixture of instruments, I think, and I like the split of male and female voices. It just so happens that we all offer different things.

It was powerful hearing all the instruments together live

It sounds really corny, but the melodies just came to me as I wrote. You just look at the words and sort of feel what the message of the song and the rhythm of the words gives you. I think Pete managed to find one of the original tunes but some of them we couldn't find any reference for. Hopefully these new tunes will give them a new life. 

We recorded the tracks with a friend of mine, Tim Hay, who works at Leeds Beckett University. They've got some incredible equipment there so it was a really cool experience. There was a grand piano, and a studio engineer with a fear of accordions. Apparently he couldn’t deal with that wheezy kind of sound, so when Alice brought her harmonium in, he had to stay away. 

I don’t think we ever initially planned to perform the ballads for an audience, but when we did, it was quite a powerful moment hearing all the instruments together live for the first time. There’s something almost primal about the emotions in some of the songs. 

 

As told to Lucy Peters

The Living with Machines album will be released later this year. The exhibition was based on the Living with Machines research programme led by the British Library and the Alan Turing Institute. The programme was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) via UK Research and Innovation’s (UKRI) Strategic Priorities Fund.

Writer Rachel Hewitt used the British Library to research her non-fiction book, In Her Nature. Weaving together history and memoir, it’s a gripping exploration of how women encounter the great outdoors. The book was awarded the 2019 Writers Award for non-fiction by our Eccles Centre for American Studies.     

The book starts with a story about a time when I went into a shop to buy some new running shoes. There was an overwhelming choice of running shoes on the shelves, but I was told by the shop assistant that, out of this plethora of different options, only four were fitted for women’s feet. When I asked why, he said – well, men have been running since Ancient Greece, but women only started in the 1970s, and so kit designers have been designing for the male form for thousands of years, but for women, only 50. 

At the time, I nodded and smiled, but afterwards I wondered if it were true. It suddenly seemed to me quite an extraordinary claim to make, that women only started running and hiking and mountaineering in the 1970s. But it was a claim I found repeated by a number of scholars and writers. One historical scholar described women’s place in sport as ‘handkerchief-fluttering spectators’. The cursory research I did led me to conclude that the man in the shop was right, but then I found Lizzie Le Blond. 

 

The photographs demolished what I’d been told 

She was a mountaineer, and a photographer of sport and outdoor landscapes. I came across a digital archive of thousands and thousands of photographs of women, charging up and down mountain slopes, playing ice hockey and tennis, tobogganing headfirst, 70 miles an hour, down the Cresta Run in St Moritz in Switzerland. This was in the 1880s and 1890s. The photographs demolished what I’d been told, and that stereotype of Victorian women as afraid to show an ankle, reclining on sofas. Instead, here they were, muscular, sweaty and getting joy out of sport. 

Lizzie’s photographs showed me a world I hadn’t known existed. She herself started mountaineering in the 1880s, and was incredibly successful and well known, but around the beginning of the 20th century, there was a shift in the culture of sport and outdoor leisure, in which women were progressively marginalised. The book is about why women were driven out of sport, and, arguably, out of feeling comfortable in the public sphere. For a long period in the 19th century, women’s outdoor achievements were celebrated, but now this history has been forgotten. 

 

My working life runs according to the Library

The British Library’s been my main place to work since I was doing my PhD. I used to have a very specific desk that I worked at. I think everyone has their own sense of which is their desk. I've always worked in the Rare Books & Music Reading Room, but when I was writing my first book, which is about the history of the Ordnance Survey, I did quite a lot of work in the Maps Reading Room.

Even now, when I live in Yorkshire and don’t go to the Library very often, I always think of my working life as running according to its opening hours. Eight o’clock is clocking off time, because that’s when the British Library shuts. I absolutely love the Boston Spa reading rooms, and did a lot of work on the book there. The staff are so helpful, and it feels like such a privilege to be in a village in North Yorkshire and able to access collections that normally you'd expect to have to travel four or five hours to see. 

I was completely over the moon when In Her Nature was awarded an Eccles Prize. The money was hugely helpful, and it was also a vote of confidence in the book. The support of the Eccles Centre, and the international texts and historical figures they introduced me to, helped me make the book more impactful.

 

There was a wealth of stories about witches

What I really love about the British Library is the speed with which books and journals can be ordered to your desk. It allows you to go down little rabbit holes, explore threads of ideas and ascertain quite quickly whether they're going to pay off into something that becomes an important part of a book.

The last chapter of In Her Nature is about a long-distance walking path called the Lyke Wake Walk, which spans the entire historical width of the North York Moors. There's this mythology that's built up around it. In Boston Spa, I was reading some old editions of The Dalesman magazine, dating back to 1955, by Bill Cowley, the person who devised the walk. He wanted any woman who completed it to be known as a witch. 

So I ordered up all these books on the witches of North Yorkshire, and realised that in Glaisdale, where Cowley lived, there was a wealth of stories about witches: women who enjoyed running through the heather; hares that might be witches in disguise. It chimed beautifully with the idea explored in my book that women are seen as transgressive when they seize their freedom outdoors. It also showed me the history of the area I live in – in a slightly different light. 

 

When I first started running, I was often afraid

In Her Nature includes a memoir strand, about my experiences running and exploring outdoors. I feel that those experiences are very much shaped by the fact that I'm female. I think any woman going outdoors – say, walking a particular path across a dark park at night – consciously or unconsciously undergoes some kind of risk assessment. She thinks – well, it would be ten minutes quicker for me to get home if I cross this park, but then again, I might be killed.

One of the things I do when I'm running is to weigh up the benefits of going for a run, versus the things that I'm scared of. When I first started running, I was often afraid. Writing the book, I came to realise that when I underwent these risk assessments in the past, I hadn’t valued how significant freedom is: the ability to move freely and comfortably around outdoor space. For women, it’s important to get out there and assert our right to freedom. 

As told to Lucy Peters