Working-class archive goes online
The archive features interviews with residents of Barrow, Lancaster and Preston
The Elizabeth Roberts Working Class Oral History Archive, featuring first-hand accounts of life in the North-West dating back to the 1890s, is now available online thanks to a project by Lancaster University.
A team from the Regional Heritage Centre (RHC), based at the university’s History department, led the £45,000 project to publish online transcripts of the interviews, which were conducted with Barrow, Lancaster and Preston residents in the 1970s.
The archive was launched at the university’s Oral History in the North West conference on 19 May.
Dr Sam Riches of the RHC called the Elizabeth Roberts archive “one of the most important 20th-century oral history archives in the UK”.
“Thanks to the degree of skill and sensitivity shown by the two interviewers, Elizabeth Roberts and Lucinda McCray Beier, the veracity and impact of the material are unusually high,” he added.
Dr Roberts undertook her first oral history project, ‘Social Life in Barrow and Lancaster, 1890–1925’, as a postgraduate student in the mid-1970s. At the time, oral history was a fairly new form of data collection. She then carried out further research – ‘Social Life in Preston, 1890–1940’ – before working with Dr Beier on ‘Family and Social Life in Barrow, Lancaster and Preston, 1940–1970’ in the 1980s.
The Elizabeth Roberts Archive consists of 548 reelto-reel recordings of interviews with more than 260 local people about their lives and memories, accompanied by typed transcripts of the interviews, subject indexes and biographical details of each respondent.
The archives formed the basis of Dr Roberts’ ground-
breaking work on working-class life in industrial towns and her books, which include A Woman’s Place: An Oral History of Working Class Women, 1890–1940 and Women and Families, 1940–1970.
The transcripts of the first two projects are now available in searchable form online. In many cases, the RHC team had to re-type them, since the original documents are now hard to read.
The transcripts, many of which exceed 50 pages, are anonymous, accompanied by notes of each interviewee’s location, gender, religion and occupation.
However, each transcript has a list of the themes it covers, which can be anything from ‘Fish and Chips’ to ‘Disadvantaged Families’ and experiences of the two world wars. Users can also search the site for a particular keyword.
The RHC is in the process of digitising the 1940–1970 transcripts, which will be added to the website later this year.
Organisers are also looking to create an online exhibition, as a result of a community history project developed in collaboration with archive offices at Barrow and Preston. This will involve volunteers gathering historic photographs of the locations, occupations and activities described in the interviews, and perhaps photographing relevant artefacts.
In addition Mirador, a Lancaster-based arts and heritage company, developed ‘Walking in Others’ Footsteps’, a project where artists brought the archive to life in Lancaster, Preston and Barrow. A documentary about the project was shown during the conference.
You can find out more and view the archive at
The archive consists of 548 recordings of interviews with more than 260 local people