"In some respects, the wedding doesn't differ from most others."

December 17, 2014 4:44 AM

The BBC's Ouch blog tells the story behind a 1940 Pathé newsreel showing a Deaf couple's wedding.

(More information on the history of British Sign Language, including the oldest known film of BSL, here)

posted by Catseye (10 comments total)

Interesting story, although you probably could pick up the thread of any long-lost individuals from an old newsreel or newspaper and come up with stories just as interesting, no?

Honest question: every deaf person's worst fear: to lose your child to the authorities, and to die alone possibly without knowing where you are. Is that really a common fear among deaf people? Because I'm a hearing person and I would not like that either.
posted by stupidsexyFlanders at 6:23 AM on December 17, 2014 [1 favorite]

I agree, stupidsexyFlanders, that's a terrible sentence. I'm not deaf, but heading in that direction way too quickly, and I can think of a lot of things related to not being able to hear that I'm much more afraid of.
posted by still_wears_a_hat at 6:56 AM on December 17, 2014 [1 favorite]

It's not exclusive to the Deaf, but marginalized communities even today stand a much higher chance of losing their kids. And why is shown pretty well right there. We aren't sure what happened, it says, but people are willing to speculate that maybe she couldn't hear the baby crying and was accidentally neglecting him! It's like saying maybe she was going to burn her house down because she couldn't hear the oven timer. A Deaf parent would not be waiting on auditory signals that a child needed attention... but there was definitely a time when you could lose a kid just because the authorities thought you were doing parenting wrong, just because you weren't parenting like other people.
posted by Sequence at 7:25 AM on December 17, 2014 [6 favorites]

It's a fascinating and sweet/bittersweet article.
posted by davidmsc at 9:32 AM on December 17, 2014

That brand-new headstone seems so weird to me. Nesta doesn't get to have her own last name?
posted by lauranesson at 9:43 AM on December 17, 2014

Thank goodness for England. Both the original Pathé film and this follow-up report are just so, well, human. Human interest. I guess the American equivalent is Honey Boo Boo.
posted by Nelson at 9:51 AM on December 17, 2014

Interesting story, although you probably could pick up the thread of any long-lost individuals from an old newsreel or newspaper and come up with stories just as interesting, no?

I'm trying to read this as charitably as possible, but this reeks of a "Deaf lives are newsworthy" vs "No, ALL lives are newsworthy" argument, and that sucks because it is very rare that we see archival footage of Deaf people, much less one that involves something as important as a wedding.
posted by Hermione Granger at 10:09 AM on December 17, 2014 [2 favorites]

> That brand-new headstone seems so weird to me. Nesta doesn't get to have her own last name

It's not how I'd want things, but it's not weird; that's pretty common to see, if you walk around graveyards.
posted by The corpse in the library at 10:10 AM on December 17, 2014 [1 favorite]

I'm trying to read this as charitably as possible,

Well I do appreciate that. I was referring more to the part of the story that followed up their lives, not the content of the newsreel itself and the contemporary context of it.
posted by stupidsexyFlanders at 1:35 PM on December 17, 2014

My deaf grandparents got married in 1940. No newsreel footage, though. And there was much shock when their first child (my mother) was born hearing. A different time.
posted by mmb5 at 4:23 PM on December 17, 2014