Julia Letts
Oral History Producer
(based in Worcestershire)
Telno: 01905 453023
Email: julia.letts@virgin.net

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Helen Lloyd
Oral history consultant
Birmingham
Telno: 0121 689 0681
Email: info@oralhistoryconsultancy.co.uk

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Margaret Tohill
Archivist
Worcestershire Record Office, County Hall, Spetchley Road, Worcester, WR5 2NP
Telno: 01905 766358
Email: RecordOffice@worcestershire.gov.uk

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This year Julia Letts and Maggie Tohill, both West Midlands Networkers based in Worcestershire, are combining their annual report.

Julia has been involved in two main projects, one in a rural part of West Worcestershire and one in Droitwich Spa. ‘Harvesting the Past: Memories from Rural Worcestershire’, funded by Worcestershire County Council, has two main aims: to record (for the Worcestershire Record Office Archive) at least 25 oral history interviews reflecting the lives of those who farmed and lived in West Worcestershire in the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s, and secondly to share some of these stories with the local community through a specially written 90-minute play, staged at the local school and performed by local people and students. The interviews have been done and will now be edited for various purposes (a CD, website, local talks, travelling exhibition). The play has been written by a local playwright and auditions are underway at the school. Rehearsals begin in October and the play will be staged in April. Two of the interviewees, both in their 80s, will have main parts in the play.
‘Our War: An Oral History Archive for Droitwich’ has been developed by an older people’s group in Droitwich, which wanted to encourage some of the more isolated members of the community to come along to its meetings. The group, the Droitwich Area Forum for Older People, decided to focus on collecting wartime recollections and experiences, and successfully applied for an ‘Awards for All’ grant of £10,000 to enable them to collect about 25 recorded interviews and create an oral history archive for the library, along with a sound post and compilation CD. The project was launched on the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of war in September with an event in Droitwich Library. Recording is now underway and the group has already uncovered some extraordinary stories. The project will also be working with students in two local schools.
On the whole it has been a quieter year for oral history at the Worcestershire Record Office, with us supporting other projects such as ‘Harvesting the Past’ mentioned above rather than embarking on new projects of our own. One of the reasons for this is that the project to build a new Library and History Centre in Worcester moved on a further stage this year and actual construction work may begin before the year is out. As the project progresses Record Office staff will have to scale back other work, including oral history, to concentrate on preparations for moving to the new building and then pick up tasks again once we are settled.
In the meantime we have decided to put our main energies into working with what we already have. The Oral History Team therefore continued checking the transcripts of the 160 World War II project interviews with the help of our volunteers. The transcribing work has been a very time consuming task, much more than we imagined when we embarked on it, but once it is completed we will be able to look at how we make the collection more widely available to researchers, possibly tying it into our efforts to establish an online catalogue of our archive collections generally.
We have been concerned for some time that, excluding the World War II project, we only have one copy of the majority of our sound recordings, and that some of our older material is at the mercy of technological obsolescence. We have therefore embarked on the task of making a preservation copy of recordings for which we do not have a second copy. This also gives us the opportunity to check generally on the condition of our sound recordings. Our volunteers have started with the Redditch Dialect Society’s recordings, and will progress to other collections as time and resources allow.
We have continued to make recordings of individuals wishing to have their reminiscences recorded but for whom there was no suitable local project they could join. One particularly interesting and lively interview involved two ladies in their 80s who had met when they were five and had kept in touch ever since.
During the course of the year we were contacted by a small number of local projects and individuals looking for some advice and guidance, information about our holdings for their research or for a place to store the fruits of their work for posterity. We are pleased that increasingly local projects are looking to us as a place of deposit for a copy of their recordings even if we haven’t had direct involvement with their work and as part of the work on the new building we will be looking at how to make our holdings of sound recordings more readily available for research.
In terms of our overall role as networkers, we have had fewer enquiries than usual and do not have a very comprehensive picture of what is going on in the huge West Midlands patch. This year we had hoped to set up informal regional meetings to discuss projects and share best practice, but this has yet to get off the ground due to everyone’s extensive commitments.
Other projects that we do know about taking place in the West Midlands include Enterprising Minds’ ‘Our Roots’, a collaborative intergenerational radio project based around six schools in Coventry. The project will focus on recording oral history from people who have moved to the city and settled there from the 1950s onwards. They will be working with two facilitators, one with audio expertise and the other with video production expertise (and with a heritage and broadcast background), who will support the schools in researching, professionally recording, and eventually archiving, each story for a specially commissioned website designed for public use. A DVD will also be made available to the schools and to the Oral History and Archive societies so that they have a master copy for their records.

The ‘History of HIV in Birmingham’ is an HLF-funded oral history project with an aim of recording at least 50 interviews with people living with and affected by HIV in the region, and with professionals who have worked within the sector. The main outputs are a website, a PSHE pack for schools, an exhibition, and two theatre productions – as well as the archive itself. Birmingham Central Library will be taking the interviews and associated materials, and the archive will be launched in December 2010. Project leader Catherine O’Byrne is working with a team of about 12 volunteers who are helping with the research and undertaking some of the interviews.
A huge amount of preparation work has been completed on the ‘Evesham Mop Fair’ project to record people who have had an involvement with the Mop Fairs in and around Evesham in Worcestershire. Mop Fairs are an ancient tradition in this part of the world. Young unemployed men and women would go along to the fair bearing the tools of their trade (a mop for housemaids, a fork for field hands etc) and try to find work. The fairs still take place annually in the autumn. The project seeks to conduct life story interviews with show people, using an experienced oral history producer and trained volunteers. There will also be interviews with residents, including those who met or courted at the fairs. The material will be used to create an archive, an exhibition in Evesham’s Almonry and to work creatively with young people producing art and drama related outcomes.
‘Grand Memories, Grand Theatre Wolverhampton’, a major project funded by a £43,000 grant from the HLF and coordinated by Louise Bent, has just been completed at the Grand Theatre in Wolverhampton. The aim was to capture memories from patrons, performers, theatre goers and anyone else involved with the Grand in order to chronicle the building’s history. Over 130 interviews were conducted by oral historian Helen Lloyd and film-maker Phil Brown. Young local volunteers were trained in interviewing and filming techniques so that they too played an important part in this process. These interviews were then painstakingly edited to provide wonderful material for a booklet and film. Photographs, old programmes, tickets and autograph books were donated by patrons and local establishments to illustrate these memories. The information has also helped to shape the development of an online resource and in-house display. The ‘Grand Memories’ website is at www.grandmemories.co.uk .
The aim of the ‘Gypsy Wagons Project’ was to enable a group of traveller children at Stourport High School to interview some of the older people in their community to get first hand accounts of living in gypsy wagons. The students did some training and worked with Julia Letts to record interviews. They then voiced up their own tracks for an audio guide. This was used in the Wagon Shed of the Worcestershire County Museum at Hartlebury on an extremely succesful gypsy heritage themed open day in June.

Julia Letts & Maggie Tohill