Colchester project under threat
Oral history project could be forced to stop digitally indexing its recordings
The future of one of the largest and longest-running oral history projects in Britain is in doubt because of plans to move a local resource centre.
Colchester Borough Council is planning to sell the current home of the Museum Resource Centre on Ryegate Road and move it to Heckworth Close.
This would mean that volunteers for the Colchester Recalled project will lose the office where they are currently working on digitally indexing the project’s 3,600 hours of recordings.
Although the museum will continue to store the Colchester Recalled archives, project organisers are in talks with the council to see if alternative facilities can be found so that work on the index can continue.
Colchester Recalled began in the 1970s, with its earliest interviews conducted on cassette tapes. In total, the project has involved over 1,000 interviewees and over 100 volunteers, and is estimated to be the largest oral history archive dedicated to a specific town and district in Britain.
It has preserved interviews with people whose experiences are now outside living memory, such as First World War veterans and a former Colchester Hippodrome stagehand who remembered seeing Charlie Chaplin perform in 1912.
“Because we have been going so long, it’s a treasure trove of people’s memories,” Andrew Phillips, secretary of Colchester Recalled, told Who Do You Think You
Are? Magazine. “It’s for future generations. We haven’t shouted about ourselves much, but perhaps we should have done.”
He explained that although the archives have now been digitised, they are so vast that if one person listened to them continuously for an eight-hour working day, it would take them a year and a quarter to reach the end. The index is needed to allow researchers to find the recording they want to listen to.
“Making it available to the public is one of our main goals now,” he said. “If people don’t know what’s there they can’t listen to it. There has to be public access.”
Mr Phillips added that the Colchester Recalled organisers didn’t want to make the archive available online because of privacy concerns, so it is particularly important to have an index to help visitors explore the archives on site.
However, he said he was optimistic that the talks with the council would lead to a solution.
“It’s a concern, but with good will I hope we can find a home somewhere, because we want to keep going,” he said.
Colchester Recalled is currently carrying out Mercury Voices, a project to record the memories of people who worked at Colchester’s Mercury Theatre. Plans for the future include research into multiculturalism in Colchester.
Councillor Tim Young, portfolio holder for business and culture at the council, said the council wanted to “maintain a strong and active partnership with Colchester Recalled” after the resource centre moved to a new location.
“Discussions on future arrangements with Colchester Recalled continue, including an offer to house their archives and provide some meeting space,” he added.
In total, the project has involved over 1,000 interviewees and over 100 volunteers