Black lives and the ‘archival pulse’: the murder of Neil “Tommy” Marsh and other stories

16-year-old Neil ‘Tommy’ Marsh was murdered in the Birmingham Pub Bombings. A recent immigrant from Jamaica, Tommy came to Britain to join his family in Handsworth. Now he is the only 1 of the 21 pub bombing victims for whom there is not a single photograph. When pictures of the other victims are displayed, Tommy is represented by a silhouette, or by an image of his mother in mourning at his grave.

The absence of material to document Tommy Marsh’s life in Britain speaks to a deeper lacuna of Black British lives within government records, mainstream public accounts and even public histories. Where records of Black lives exist, they are frequently built from foundations of Black people’s encounters with the state, perpetuating structural racism through white recordings of Black lived experiences. This article will use Tommy Marsh’s case to question how the fragmented documentary and community archives of Black life in Britain offer methodological insights into history as/and recovery. It will discuss the extent to which it is possible to construct historical narratives of Black life that acknowledge and speak from that for which government and public records fail to provide an account. Drawing from the work of scholars including Michel Rolph-Trouillout, Saidiya Hartman and Ann Laura Stoler, we will interrogate the processes of archival production and offer a critical examination of archives produced in the aftermath of injury, violence and death. We question the potentials and limitations of the spaces that can be mined by historians, and how appropriate they are for the production of historical knowledge. In doing so, we probe the extent to which alternative archives curated at the individual, family and community level may potentially support the recovery of the histories of Black British communities and individuals.