Craig Fees
Planned Environment Therapy Trust, Archive and Study Centre, Church Lane, Toddington, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire GL54 5DQ
Telno: 01242 620125
Email: Craigtfees@aol.com

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Kayleigh Milden
Associate Research Fellow in Oral History
University of Exeter, Dept. of History, Cornwall Campus, Penryn, Cornwall, TR10 9EZ
Telno: 01326 371891
Email: K.M.Milden@exeter.ac.uk

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Garry Tregidga

CAVA, Institute of Cornish Studies, University of Exeter in Cornwall, Tremough Campus, Penryn, Cornwall, TR10 9EZ
Telno: 01736 371 888/891
Email: g.h.tregidga@exeter.ac.uk

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Marilyn Tucker
Wren Trust, 1 St. James Street, Okehampton EX20 1DW
Telno: 01837 53754
Email: marilyn@wrenmusic.co.uk

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Cornwall, Plymouth and the Tamar Valley

The ‘Britons and their Pasts’ project is conducting multi-generational research on family memory through a cross-section of oral testimony interviews located in Mid-Cornwall and Plymouth. It is incorporating a number of families from a variety of social backgrounds from two contrasting rural-urban environments, and has included participants aged from 19 to 93. I am co-ordinating this project alongside Dr Anna Green (University of Exeter).
The ‘Truro Community Oral History Project’, an AHRC Knowledge Transfer initiative, is creating a partnership between the University of Exeter and Truro City Council. The project was established as it was thought that Truro’s history has concentrated too much upon the story of the centre of Truro, and has ignored the story of the housing estates that circle the city, which have also played an important part in Truro’s history in the post Second World War era. The project team is working with residents to create an oral history of five council estates around Truro through 70 recorded interviews. It explores topics such as family, community, health and crime. In addition to academic publications, this project is disseminating research through a public history exhibition and website with downloadable teaching packages.
In May 2009, the National Trust opened a new museum at Cotehele Quay in the Tamar Valley. It incorporates an oral history exhibition about the history of servants’ lives at Cotehele House and of river transport on the Tamar (which was an important element in the distribution of produce from the local mines and market gardens). It also includes oral testimony regarding a barge named The Shamrock, which is still docked at Cotehele Quay. Oral history interviews were recorded by me on behalf of the National Trust.

Kayleigh Milden

Gloucestershire

The Planned Environment Therapy Trust Archive and Study Centre in Toddington, Gloucestershire, celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. It was founded in 1989 to gather, look after, and make available the archival and personal memory of an area of life and work which is indicated by terms such as therapeutic community, planned environment therapy, milieu therapy, and alternative/democratic/
progressive education generally.
Oral history has been at the core of the Archive and Study Centre's work from the outset. During the course of this year it has added 62 recordings to its oral history/audio-video collections, raising the total number to just over 1,600 (not counting films and production videos). As the archivist, I have been supporting oral history locally as the Gloucestershire representative for the Oral History Society Regional Network since 1998; and, through training, as an Oral History Society trainer since 2003. I have conducted three training sessions during the year, and responded to a wide range of queries by phone, email, and personal visit.
To mark the 20th anniversary of the Archive and Study Centre in 2009, the Archive hosted a series of events, submitted a major grant application to the Heritage Lottery Fund, and concluded with a presentation by the archivist on ‘Value-Added Archiving’ to the Society of Archivists' annual conference in Bristol in September 2009, a key element of which was the contribution of oral history to the sustainability and growth of the Archive and Study Centre. The proposed oral history project for which HLF funding has been sought is entitled ‘Therapeutic Living With Other People's Children: an oral history of residential therapeutic child care c. 1930- c. 1980’. A full description of this is available on the project's website, http://www.otherpeopleschildren.org.uk.
There were three 20th anniversary Hosted Events of relevance specifically to oral history. The Founding General Meeting and inaugural Conference of the Child Care History Network was held on October 23, 2008. The conference theme was ‘Child Care: The Need for History’, and both audience/participants and speakers came from the wide range of those concerned: former children; academic historians; child care workers, managers and consultants; information and memory professionals (museum curators, archivists, librarians, oral historians); national organisations; students and researchers; therapists. Recordings of the talks are on RadioTC International at http://www.tc-of.org.uk/wiki/index.php?title=20081023.
The Oral History Society Regional Network business meeting and Annual Event was hosted by the Centre on 21 – 22 November 2008. Regional Networkers came to the Centre in Toddington from around the country, and regional oral history projects were represented during the Saturday Event by Geoff Bishop and Alison Hobson of the Fairford History Society; Eliza Botham of Droitwich's Community Mind Map project; Elizabeth Cowley and Genevieve Pearson of Bewdley Museum; Ann-Rachael Harwood of Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum; Dr Lindsey McEwen, Professor in Physical Geography at the University of Gloucestershire; and Jackie Sims and Jane Tozer of Filton Community History, all of whom spoke about their various projects, and mingled with Networkers and featured Speakers during breaks and lunchtime.
The featured Speakers, with prepared presentations on their areas of expertise and discussion afterwards, were D. Rob Perks and Mary Stewart of the British Library Sound Archive; Dr Viv Cothey, Digital Archivist for Gloucestershire Archives; John Benson, Archivist at the Cheshire Record Office; Dr. Joanna Bornat of the Oral History Society Committee and the Open University; and Colin Hyde of the East Midlands Oral History Archive.
In a departure for the Regional Network Events, the format of bringing together a range of experienced oral historians with local projects appears to have been a success. A member from one of the local projects wrote afterwards ‘I came away feeling really enthusiastic and inspired’. Another commented ‘how helpful everyone was at the conference. They seemed to adopt us and we got a lot of advice. It is good for us to see and hear the big players in our game’; while a third called it ‘invaluable’. A Networker sealed the experience, reflecting on the ‘Wonderfully tranquil setting, very comfortable accommodation and a warm and friendly welcome by all ...The food was great too’.
The Oral History Society residential Review and Forward Planning Weekend was also hosted by the Centre on 6 – 8 February 2009. Every five years the Oral History Society Committee meets with a facilitator to conduct an organisational audit - examining the charity's work and progress over the previous five years, looking to and planning future developments, and reviewing the working of the organisation itself. This year's event was enlivened by a massive snowfall, laid on especially to enhance the sense of community and adventure.
I also travelled to Cambridge to record the reminiscence and discussion of women who had been involved in the founding and work of the National Association for the Welfare of Children in Hospital, or NAWCH. NAWCH celebrated the 50th anniversary of its founding and of the influential Platt Report from which it took its name (The Welfare of Children in Hospital, Ministry of Health, 1959), with a conference of remembering and shared experiences at Lucy Cavendish College.
A number of other projects have been active around Gloucestershire. Oral History – at least as an aspiration - appears in Cirencester's Townscape Strategy, Our Future, (http://www.cirencester.gov.uk/ofc_townscape_strategy.pdf) and has been part of Cheltenham-based FairGame Theatre's HLF-supported ‘Low Spirits’ production, which toured Gloucestershire pubs during the Spring, ‘conducting an oral history project, gathering memories, anecdotes, stories and ghost stories of pubs (past and present) from across the county’, with the recordings to go into Gloucestershire Archives.
The Yate and Sodbury District U3A History and Social Studies Group has enlisted Filton Community History's Jane Tozer to help with an oral history on ‘Our School Days’ in Spring 2010, and the South Gloucestershire Mines Research Group is seeking interviewees. The Chipping Campden-based Campden and District Historical and Archaeological Society (CADHAS) celebrated its 25th anniversary in2009 with a special exhibition in the Society's Museum and Archive, located in the old Campden Police Court. CADHAS has a long-standing, active oral history programme. The Society's new Chairman, Judith Ellis, is a Campden native, whose mother Dorrie Ellis took the lead in and was a founding member of the Society's oral history programme, making her first recordings well before the Society itself was founded in 1984. Dorrie Ellis was present and an honoured guest at the official opening of the Exhibition on April 18th.
Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum's Zeitgeist project kicked off in 2007 to record living memory and experience "from a vast array of Cheltenham people in order to capture a range of unique perspectives on what it is like to live or work in Cheltenham today", and continued to spill over into YouTube during the past year (http://www.youtube.com/virtualarts).

Professor Lindsey McEwan of the University of Gloucestershire has been working with Sue Wilson of Gloucestershire Women's Institute, and Radio Production students under Jason Griffiths, to record Women's Institute members' memories of the extreme 2007 Gloucestershire floods, transforming them into short pieces suitable for broadcast and combining audio and visual materials into broadcast quality digital stories. Students presented their digital stories at the recent 90th anniversary celebration of Gloucestershire Women's Institute in Tewkesbury Abbey, which had itself been surrounded by the floods. The intention is to build on the past year's experience to develop the collaboration between the University and the Women's Institute further.
The Regional Network Event in November 2008 brought together and helped to illustrate how lively oral history is in the Region. It would be good to hear from anyone doing or planning oral history in and around Gloucestershire, not least with a view to networking, and meeting more regularly to share experiences and discoveries (and good food) on the Regional Network Event model.

Craig Fees