Persistence or eloquence

Text 1: The Fountain in Coalpit Row, by Samuel Dyer

An original autobiography written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

There was no clean water in Coalpit Row in those days but what came from a single standpipe at the end of the street, which ran for one hour each morning, and from which two hundred families filled their buckets in a line that began to form at four o’clock. In the dry months the pipe ran brown, and then not at all, and the women carried water from the canal, which I will not describe, except to say that we boiled it and prayed.

I drew up our first petition to the Board of Health in the spring of my thirtieth year. I was a moulder at the foundry and no scholar, and my spelling, I fear, was a disgrace. The petition was received, noted and laid upon the table, which I learned is what a Board does with a thing it means to forget. The next year, a gentleman of the Reform Society, with a fine voice and a finer waistcoat, addressed the Board on our behalf for an hour, and was much applauded, and nothing whatever was done. We sent a third petition, and a fourth, and a fifth. Each time I carried it in myself, and each time the clerk greeted me more wearily.

In the end it was not my words, nor the gentleman’s, that did it. On the morning the Board was to set its rates, forty women from the Row walked into the Town Hall, each carrying a bucket of canal water, and set them down in a row along the front of the chamber without saying a word. The smell did the rest. The fountain stands at the end of the Row to this day, and there is a little brass plate on it with the names of the Board upon it. Not one of the women’s names is there.

Text 2: A Crossing for Alfie, by Claire Fenwick

An original contemporary blog.

Our road runs past the primary school, and every morning at quarter to nine it becomes a racetrack of commuters cutting through to the bypass. For years parents had complained about the lack of a crossing. When my son was nearly clipped by a van mirror in Year 2, I decided to do something about it.

I am, I like to think, quite good with words. I wrote a long, carefully argued letter to the highways department, full of statistics I had found online. I received a reply thanking me for my ‘valued feedback’. I spoke at a council meeting for my allotted three minutes, rather well I thought, and a councillor nodded at me throughout and then voted to defer the matter for further study. I wrote again. I started a petition. I stood outside the school with a clipboard in the rain every Monday for a term. I began to understand why most people give up.

What finally worked was not anything I wrote. A group of us spent two weeks counting cars at drop-off time: eleven hundred in forty-five minutes. And my son, who was eight by then, wrote his own letter to the council in purple felt tip. It said: ‘Dear Council, the cars are too fast and I am too small. Please can we have a crossing. From Alfie.’ The local paper printed it next to our traffic count. The crossing was installed six months later. I am still not sure whether it was the counting or the purple felt tip. I suspect it was both, and that neither would have worked without the other.

‘Both writers show that persistence matters more than eloquence in winning change.’

How far do you agree with this statement?

In your answer you should:

• discuss what we learn about each campaign and the obstacles it faced
• explain how far you agree that persistence mattered more than eloquence in both campaigns
• compare the ways the writers present how change was finally won.

Support your response with quotations from Text 1 and Text 2.