Celebrating Your Projects

Rosemary Collins learns how The Littleport Society has preserved its audio recordings

How The Littleport Society is preserving oral history

Oral history provides a priceless first-hand record of the lives of individuals from the past. The archives of The Littleport Society, which is dedicated to the heritage of the Cambridgeshire village of Littleport, held a series of oral history interviews with older residents 20 years ago. But changing technology meant the recordings were at risk of being lost. Assistant archivist Andrew Martin explains how the society upgraded the recordings for the future.

What Are The Audio Recordings?

There are about 45 in total, made in the late 1990s and early 2000s by our archivist Maureen Scott and other members of the society. They take the form of interviews with a large number of older members of the village, or occasionally just an uninterrupted recollection by one interviewee. Each recording lasts approximately 40–90 minutes, and details their early family life. This often includes memories of their schooldays; recollections of going on holiday and Christmas time; their working life; and the impact that the two world wars had on their families.

What Format Were They In?

We have been doing a lot of re-boxing and cataloguing lately, and when we found boxes of video and audio cassettes, a reel of film, and a stack of MiniDiscs, we knew that we had to find a way to hear these recordings again, and also transfer them to digital formats to preserve them before their quality deteriorated further. Very few of the interviewees are still with us, so these recordings are enormously important to us as a community, but also as historical pieces. To convert the audio cassettes, for example, we played the tapes on a modern tape player with a USB connector that was plugged into our computer, and used a free program called Audacity ( audacityteam.org) to record the interviews as WAV files.

Did You Uncover Any Interesting Individuals In The Recordings?

One of the interviewees was a ratcatcher called Syd Smith, and in his interview he talks about how he was working as a gamekeeper in the 1950s. He talks about catching rats, mink and coypu (a type of rodent) along the riverbanks of the fens for Anglian Water. You can hear a bit of a commotion on the recording at one point when he fetches a frozen white mole from the freezer to show the interviewer!

Also Miss Eileen Gill, the society’s first president and a former schoolmistress, appears in recordings made in April 1997 when she was 88. She shares her memories of Christmas in around 1920, when everything was homemade and a roast chicken was considered a treat. She recalls the decorations, and going to Father Christmas’s ‘pick-it-yourself’ showroom. She remembers going eel-catching and having jellied eels, and also recalls the Littleport Feast – a traditional event that took place over three days every July, with sports and games for the children. There’s a real range, and when you listen to their stories you get deep insight into their language and their accents. Hearing the interviewee as they suddenly remember something from decades ago is absolutely wonderful.

What Future Projects Do You Have Planned?

One of our volunteers has scanned and indexed thousands of photos in our archive, and together with our wider cataloguing work, we hope to put a publicly searchable catalogue online in 2019.

‘These recordings are enormously important to us as a community’