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Oral history clips online
Are you sitting comfortably? Then we'll record... Life in the past century and earlier - from the mundane to the memorable - is uncannily resurrected by voices that speak across the decades. Sophie Campbell picks her top ten oral histories from the audio archives
It is a surprisingly shrill voice, crackling down the years with absolute authority. This is what Lady Bracknell would sound like if she were run through a mangle. In fact, these are the vowels of one of our national heroines, Florence Nightingale, recorded on to a wax cylinder – the late 19th century’s recording technology du jour – in 1890, as she very firmly states. To be honest, it is hard to decipher much else in the tantalising burst of sound, but it still makes the hairs rise on the back of your neck. As does the truncated roar of the 500-brake-horsepower, 24-litre aero-engine of the Napier-Railton – possibly the world’s greatest pre-war racing car – bursting into life at Brooklands in the early 20th century; or the sound of Torres Strait islanders singing in the 1890s; or the voice of Titanic’s Second Officer recalling the freezing night of the disaster in April 1912.
There is something magical about sound. It allows the imagination more latitude than the visual image, letting one plunge into other times and other worlds. The minute that the technology was available – developed by Thomas Edison among others – people began to record other people. They captured songs, poems, lectures and declamations, stories, shanties and disappearing dialects. In this country, the BBC and other organisations went on the road with cumbersome tape machines as early as the Thirties, but oral history really took off with the arrival of the portable cassette recorder in the Seventies, when academics made classic collections of recordings, such as Edwardians (see opposite). Then came Heritage Lottery Funding, two decades later, and suddenly communities had a voice.
Now digital recordings are available online (if you have no access to the internet, try your local library) and you can hear treasures from organisations such as the Imperial War Museum. Florence would probably not approve, but here’s our Sound Archive Top Ten anyway.
Florence Nightingale
Like many audio archives, the British Library (which holds the bulk of our significant sound collections, including the BBC and National Trust archives) has only a limited selection of clips online for copyright and technology reasons. This 30-second gem somehow manages to conjure up a straight-backed Nightingale enunciating clearly but firmly into the recording trumpet, storing her voice for posterity. It seems quite miraculous that it has survived.
British Library Sound Archive Collections (www.bl.uk). Click on Collections, Sound Archive, Collections, Oral History. You can search the archive online then apply for a reader’s pass to go into the library and use the Listening Service or SoundServer drop-in service.
Teasel harvest Somerset
Anyone nostalgic for rural life should download some of these interviews simply for the accents. The realities of country living in the early years of the 20th century were, of course, mixed. One woman used to walk two miles to milk at 6am, spend the day “charring and washing”, knitting in the evenings and then go milking again. Fred Cousins was born in 1915 and worked in the willow industry on the Somerset Levels; he also grew teasels for combing wool. “You used all these old tools, you see. The spitter for a single plant... get it out, and you had to beat the dirt all off, like half the root, else you wouldn’t get it in the hole.”
Titanic disaster
Although the BBC Archive is now kept at the British Library, this website has some wonderful clips, including a selection on the sinking of the Titanic. Second Officer Commander CH Lightoller talks in a regional radio interview of the missed signal warning of icebergs ahead: “Almost certainly we would have stopped the ship altogether” and his recollection of the call “Ice ahead, sir!” is terrifying. He jumped into the sea; the most senior officer to survive. Another account is by Edith Russell, interviewed in 1970 at the age of 90. She was a fashion writer and climbed into the lifeboat in a tight sheath dress. “There was a bump… sort of little pushes, nothing very violent. A great grey building was floating by, we just picked up the ice and started playing snowballs. It was fun. We asked the officers if there was any danger and they said ‘No, nothing at all’. We were told there was no danger whatsoever.”
Dr Who
I know it’s not exactly oral history, but it is TV history and it is oral – and who could resist? I’ve only ever heard these clips from behind the sofa before. Spine-chilling classics include Davros (“Do not anger me, Doctor. I can destroy you… and this miserable, insignificant planet”) and of course “Exterminate! Exterminate!” as well as the Cybermen (“So we meet again, Doctor!”) and the doctors themselves, all eight of them, plus assistants and some vintage dialogue (“Look at the size of that thing, Doctor!” “Yes Jamie, it is a big one”).
Edwardians
This collection of 444 interviews was subtitled “Family Life and Work Experience Before 1918” and set the standard for academic oral history in the early Seventies. Many of the jobs are long gone: skep [beehive] and basket maker, Swiss embroidery mender, baker and roundsman, etc. Class was a predominant theme. A mill owner in Harrogate recalls rigid divisions between workers (“Spinners the lowest grade, twisters the next, winders the next, weavers the next, menders the top grade”), while an Essex farm labourer feels that church was divided into “first, second and third class… my mother and her friends were poor and would sit in the back pews, in the middle were the local shopkeepers, at the top were the local farmers, the local bigwigs, posh people.”
The raising of the Mary Rose Portsmouth
This excellent Royal Navy website has much to listen to online, including interviews with the divers who surveyed Henry VIII’s flagship, the Mary Rose, salvaged in 1982. The diver John Towse describes Alexander “Mac” McKee – who found the wreck – and his unorthodox methods: “He had made some totally ineffective markers – Fairy Liquid bottles with inadequate weights on them, and he was gaily throwing these over the side.” Later, the sub-bottom sonar picked up the distinctive “W” shape that indicated the Mary Rose.
Belonging Voices of London's refugees
This is unusual in that it is a contemporary collection, recorded from recent immigrants (the Museum of London also has recordings of working life and London history) and the content is far more emotional and political than that of earlier archives. “When I read the letter [from my mother], it was like I saw her face,” says Gao Peiqi, a refugee from Communist China. “When I received a letter, I felt close to them and my heart was filled with warmth. I was alone in Britain, and it meant a lot to me that my family still cared about me.”
Welsh traditions
Dr Robin Gwyndaf recorded more than 3,000 folk tales, poems and songs from Wales’s rich oral tradition during more than three decades, from, he says, people “who could remember them when prodded”, rather than professional story-tellers. Most are in Welsh, but there are English transcripts. “There was this old character [Rhys Morgan] who used to come to us twice a year and sit with us all night, telling tales,” says the elderly Mary Thomas, before singing a song. “And he told ghost stories, and I was so scared of the ghost stories, my father would have to carry me to my bed that night and wait until I’d fallen asleep.”
The Laughing Song George W Johnson
This list is meant to be English, but I came across the American website Tinfoil.com (named after the earliest recording method of all – indentations on tinfoil – and “dedicated to the preservation of early recorded sounds”) and couldn’t leave out this recording of The Laughing Song by “America’s first black recording artist”, made by Edison’s Phonograph Company in 1898. While some of the lyrics are borderline acceptable today, the laughing… well, you’ve just got to listen to it yourself; I defy you to keep a straight face.
Recipe for beesmilk pudding Orkney Islands
Mrs Ethel Findlater was an Orkney islander, recorded in 1969 singing six island songs, but she also gave one of her mother’s recipes: “The cow’s first milk when they calve is called beesmilk and it’s very rich and yellow. Me mother made a puddin’ out of it, and called it beesmilk puddin’.” This sounds better than the Harris recipe for Bonnach Ghruthan (“take five fish livers…”) or the Receipt for Nourishing Sick People; an egg yolk with spermaceti powder.
This article was first published in Saga Magazine, October 2008
