| Reading Lives: Reading
Museum Service's Oral History Collection Javier Pes
Oral history is a unique and often vivid source of
Reading's history. We can discover and preserve some
of that history, which would otherwise go unrecorded,
by interviewing people now, about their lives.
Reading Museum Service has been collecting Reading's
oral history on audiotape for the last five years.
The memories we have recorded so far are as evocative
as they are diverse.
| 'It was a very strange day when
I returned to Reading on the Monday after the [Huntley
& Palmers factory had stopped producing
biscuits. When you arrived at work there was
always a hustle and a bustle and a big hum about
the factory and the Monday after it closed there
was silence.' Midge Harris. [interview no. 199,7.127.5b] |
As well as biscuit makers like Midge Harris, we
have interviewed an artist, two architects, a brewer,
a cinema usher, a carnival costume designer, a die-hard
Reading football fan, a manager at Sutton's Seeds and
founding members of Reading's Progress Theatre. So
far we have recorded over 8o hours of interviews. We
believe that this will be a rich and unique source of
information for future generations interested in the
social history of Reading.
Early in her museum career Karen Knight, the
director of Reading Museum and Archive Service, led
an oral history project in Birmingham. The impetus to
establish oral history as an integral part of the
Museum's work and the decision to purchase the
necessary recording equipment came from the very top
of Reading Museum Service. We began talking to people
on audiotape in 1995 for a temporary exhibition about
the experience of the home front in Reading during
World War 11. Excerpts of the interviews were
included in a temporary exhibition 'Home Front' held
at Blake's Lock Museum that year.
| 'I always remember the first
Yanks that came in. I didn't realise they were
Americans because they didn't sound like the
Americans you heard on the films. These two came
in and one of them said to me "Excuse me,
miss, can I have two cups of java and two tomato
sandwiches", and I'm walking them up and
down the counter trying to find out what tomato
sandwiches was and it took me a long time to find
out what the java was: coffee.' Olive Green [interview
no.1997.1.27.Ic] |
When I took up the new post of Curator of
Contemporary History in 1996, Reading Museum Service
had the tools in place to create a collection of real
breadth and depth. We wanted to use what we were
recording in a variety of public history projects:
long term and temporary exhibitions, in talks and in
multimedia and traditional publications. To ensure
that the collection was accessible to researchers now
and in the future we wanted to base the collection on
sound principles of collections care. This has meant
that we have never allowed a backlog to grow of
interviews awaiting documentation and safety copying.
The next opportunity to use the collection in the
Museum's public programme arose with the temporary
exhibition 'Making Progress' in 1997, about the
history of Reading's ground breaking theatre company.
Working with theatre members, we created a lively and
colourful exhibition which featured oral history as
text on banners and on a soundtrack broadcast from a
specially edited minidisc into the exhibition space.
| 'We were trying hard to think of
a name. 'Dramatic Society', there were other
dramatic societies, there were other players,
like 'The Earley Players'... We could perhaps
call it something to do with a word that was very
much in the air when everybody was discussing the
Beveridge Report. And the word was progress' '
And John Hall came up with the idea of 'Progress
Theatre'... One of our number objected, said,
"Why, we haven't got a theatre". We
felt we were working on the theatre, and so far
all we'd got was the progress. 'Norman Bishop [interview
no. 1997.127.i6] |
Over the last three years at Reading Museum
Service our priority has been to create six new
galleries at the Museum of Reading, part of a
Heritage Lottery Funded refurbishment of the Town
Hall and Museum. Two of the galleries feature oral
history sound points. They are the Huntley &
Palmers Gallery and Reading: People and Place. In
addition, several of the programmes in 'Touch Base',
the new multimedia gallery interactive, feature
extracts from the oral history collection. This
memory of the 1943 air raid on Reading accompanies a
photograph of its aftermath.
| 'My mother was behind the
counter in the Post Office and the overseer heard
the shhhh of the bomb and he shouted to all the
staff to get behind the counter because they were
those big old sturdy wooden ones and they all got
behind the counter and all the panel glass came
in, blew the whole lot out'.... 'Funnily enough,
the manageress of the People's Pantry, her son
was at Bluecoat [School] with me. His bicycle was
buried under that lot and they fetched it out a
few days later and it was unscathed except it was
covered in brick dust. Of course there were about
36 people died in that bomb'. D. Embery [interview
no. 1997.1.27.3c] |
The sound point in Reading: People and Place, is
designed as a 'talking table', so that visitors can
sit in comfort while they listen to memories such as
this person's childhood evacuation from London to
Reading:
| 'We didn't know where we were
going to be honest, well, not at that age. I mean
nobody knew. I think everybody was sort of crying
and more frightened really than anything, because
we just didn't know where we were going and I
mean my aunt saw me off, my mum's sister, but you
know she said it will only be for a few days ...
we landed in Reading.' Irene Moore [interview no.
1997.127.1] |
The important histories of biscuit making and the
allied trade of tin box making in Reading are well
represented in the collection. Amongst the many
former workers in these two industries we have
interviewed someone who was an apprentice in the tin
design department of the biscuit tin makers Huntley,
Boorne and Stevens in the 1950s. We have also
interviewed a person who rose to become managing
director of the same company. Like many of his
generation his working life was interrupted in 1939
with the outbreak of World War II. Here is his memory
of how he felt during the retreat through France to
Dunkirk.
| 'We'd got well back into France,
on the retreat, but we weren't worried about it...
the lack of information we had, didn't worry us...
We just thought somewhere we'd make a stand and
fight these swine... I wasn't worried. I was
worried about getting shot, but that was all.'
Basil Tarrant [interview no. 1997.127.23] |
A person's first day at a new job is often a
memorable experience. This is how one person, who
rose to become head of public relations at Huntley
& Palmers, remembered his early days at the
biscuit factory.
| Mr Maslam will take you down,
you are going to the tin department. So I
followed Mr Maslam ... he took me down and I went
into another world and I went into a huge
warehouse. There seemed to be hundreds of women
hammering tins, square tins, with wooden mallets,
hammering them and hammering them and there was
an enormous machine that was washing empty
biscuit tins that had come back from the grocers
and I couldn't believe it.' Michael Paxton [interview
no. 1997.127.10] |
Because so many Reading people have an association
with Huntley & Palmers I have often found myself
unwittingly interviewing an ex Huntley & Palmers
worker when I had actually gone to interview them for
another reason. For instance a man who had organised
the Reading Show from its beginning as a wartime 'Dig
for Victory' event turned out to have also been in
charge of Huntley & Palmers production planning
and so was an invaluable source of information about
how the company had to adapt its production to
wartime conditions in 1939. Another couple whom I
interviewed because of their association with Huggins
the bakers, formerly in Crown Street, and now on
display at Blakes Lock Museum, turned out to have
both worked at the biscuit factory in the 1920s,
where they first met.
A valuable source of information about Huntley
& Palmers was a former factory tour guide. Her
interview also tied in with her guide's uniform that
had been acquired by the Museum several years before.
The costume's historical value has been greatly
enhanced by the acquisition of its personal history.
| 'In the early days, of course,
the biscuits were baked in coal ovens and they
had bakers putting the trays of biscuits into the
oven on peels. They were small travelling ovens
and it used to be quite amusing too, because when
we walked through the ovens, they were coal
fires, and we had to walk past the thermoses,
which people found very hot. When we got to the
other end they were offered a hot biscuit as it
came out of the oven.' Mary Cottrell [interview
no. 1997.127.26] |
Huntley & Palmers factory tour guides c.
1950
We have not neglected Reading's other '3B'
industries: brewing, and selling bulbs and seeds. So
far we have interviewed a member of the Simonds
family who was also a brewery director and we have
recently interviewed someone who worked for almost 50
years at Suttons Seeds, beginning his career there as
a 15 year old shop boy.
| 'You had to be very careful with
seeds, there was a story once... there was a
brussel sprout called 'Market Rear Guard' and
there was a savoy called 'Rear Guard' and somehow
they got muddled up, and because of that market
growers had the wrong seeds, which is quite
serious. And they had to grow lots and lots of
plants to compensate these people." Jack
Warner [interview no. 1997.127.35] |
We seek to integrate oral history into the
mainstream of the Museum's work and so often an
interview has been made to accompany the acquisition
of a new object. Three Reading Carnival costumes were
specially designed and made by Reading's leading
carnival costume designer for the new gallery,
Reading: People and Place. We interviewed the
designer to find out more about his life story and
his experience of carnival as a young child in
Trinidad.
| 'The competition [in Trinidad]
is very fierce. Everybody wants to win but there
is only going to be one Carnival king and queen.
Every year costumes have a different theme. I
remember on Carnival night when it finishes at 12
o'clock people discarded their costumes ... they
are big and they have nowhere to store them and
they have ideas about what they are going to do
next year. And so the streets are littered with
fantasy, bits of glitter, bits of costume .... My
first costumes ]for the first Reading Carnival in
1977] were Native American. It was not easy to
get materials; we only had two weeks to prepare.
For wire I used bits of clothes line and for
feathers I went all the way down to a peacock
farm in Pangbourne. I got some beads from Heelas
and bits of velvet. We worked day and night'.
Herman Philbert [interview no. 997.127.32] |
When we record an interview we always have in mind
that we are building a public collection. We seek to
obtain a recording with the best possible sound
quality. This might mean avoiding interviewing
someone in a room with a lively budgerigar in the
background. Likewise, because Reading lies under the
flight path of Concorde, sonic booms have interrupted
several interviews. The issue of good sound quality
also meant that we chose to record on digital
audiotape as opposed to analogue cassette tape. This
made Reading a pioneer museum service to go digital.
We are also careful to ensure that whoever we are
interviewing is happy that other people can listen to
their memories. We always explain the purpose of the
interview and obtain the written consent of the
interviewee, that their memories can be made publicly
accessible. As a matter of courtesy we always make a
copy of the interview for the interviewee. From
personal experience the interviewee's family often
appreciates this.
In addition to recording oral history ourselves,
Reading Museum Service is keen to encourage and
advise individuals and groups to undertake their own
oral history projects. We have written a simple 'how
to' guide, called 'Reading Within Living Memory'
which is available free of charge from the museum.
The guide covers areas such as which tape recorders
and microphones to use, through to simple dos and
don'ts.
As with any primary source oral testimony cannot
be judged on face value. Oral testimony, like any
written document, can contain biases, silences,
unreliable facts or even fictions, which the
historian needs to be able to evaluate. Oral history
is a particularly good way of finding out how people
felt about an experience or event in their life.
Sometimes the emotional truth of a memory does not
match its factual reliability. My colleague Jocelyn
Goddard was formerly Oral History Officer in
Oxfordshire. She remembers this telling incident:
| 'At a talk I played a piece from
an interview which 1 had found very moving - it
was a story from the Second World War about a
woman at home waiting for news of her husband. She
had heard on the wireless that the hospital in
Chittagong, where he was posted, had been bombed
and there were no survivors, but she never got
any official notification that he was dead. For
months she could not tell her young children and
went on helping them write letters to their
father, even though they never received a reply.
She kept on telling them he must be too busy to
write, but she was becoming convinced that he was
dead. Then one day she came home from work and
the front door seemed to be jammed. When she
finally pushed it open she found the hall floor
covered with letters - her husband had been moved
to China and several months of his letters had
all arrived on the same ship.
Someone in the audience put his hand up and
made the point that this story demonstrated the
unreliability of oral evidence - the interviewee
had said 'the Germans bombed Chittagong', when in
fact it was the Japanese.'
I agree that for hard facts, dates and so on,
oral testimony should be carefully compared with
other sources. 1 still think this story was
valuable as historical evidence, because it took
me so vividly into an experience shared by so
many people at that time, almost ordinary to them
then and extraordinary to us now. You can find
out from an encyclopaedia who bombed Chittagong.
You need a person to tell you how it feels to
live through a war.' Jocelyn Goddard, Education
Officer, Reading Museum Service.
|
When we interview someone for the oral history
collection we are very much an 'outsider' or stranger.
People interviewing other family members have created
very interesting oral histories. They will therefore
have a very different 'insider's' perspective and
knowledge. This will naturally affect the content of
the interview. A technique open to a family member
who is recording an in depth family oral history
would be to repeatedly ask questions about the same
subject over several interviews held at different
times. By doing this, one family historian was able
explore experiences and events about which the
interviewee, who was their mother, was initially
hesitant to recall.
The Museum's oral history collection has been
formed with a social historical intention. However, 1
want to conclude this brief introduction to the oral
history work of Reading Museum Service by recalling
how researchers at the University of Reading found a
quite unintended linguistic value in the collection.
They were researching how the Reading accent was
changing as younger generations spoke in a less
localised south-eastern or 'Estuary English' accent.
Several of the interviews that we have made have been
with people born in or near Reading between 50 and 70
years ago. They were ideal sources of the more
traditional Reading accent. We were delighted to be
of assistance. It also impressed on me how we cannot
wholly predict what will be of interest to current
and future generations. However, one thing we can be
sure of is that the growing collection of interviews,
complimenting the Museum's rich collection of objects
and images, will form a unique and vivid resource for
future generations.
Javier Pes is Curator of Contemporary History,
Reading Museum Service and formerly worked at the
Museum of London.
|
