Our monthly round up of oral history happenings from the East Midlands Oral History Archive.

EMOHA collections online

As lockdown continues, construction of the new EMOHA website has been put on hold. However, you can still listen to a wide range of oral history interviews from the EMOHA collections on the Special Collections Online website hosted by the team at the University of Leicester’s David Wilson Library. There’s material available from EMOHA’s own collecting projects alongside older recordings from the Leicester Oral History Archive Collection. Interviews discuss childhood, working lives, social lives and family lives. They touch on conflicts and wars, religion and migration. You can find a wealth of material, some of which resonates with us today as we find ourselves living through extraordinary times.

In this clip, you can hear Louie Sharp’s memories of the Spanish ‘Flu pandemic of 1918.

A search for ‘VE Day’ brings up Mabel Pepper’s memories of the celebrations in 1945.

Oral history in lockdown

Find out more about how the practice of oral history has been impacted by pandemic social distancing requirements in our article, Oral History in Lockdown, which includes comprehensive advice from the Oral History Society.

Coming soon: collecting local voices of life under lockdown

EMOHA is partnering with BBC Radio Leicester to bring you a new project which aims to give radio audiences an insight into local life under lockdown; for audiences right now and in the future. The project will encourage families to gather around and talk about their lockdown experiences. They will be given prompt questions as a starting point and asked to record the conversation and send it to BBC Radio Leicester. The station will edit them down so that as many as possible can be aired. Every conversation will also be preserved in its original format to form a unique collection documenting Leicestershire life under lockdown, which will be deposited with the EMOHA.

We’ll keep you posted on the project as it develops!

Remembering the FA Cup Final 1949

Watch the story of Leicester’s City Football Club’s FA Cup Campaign 71 years ago, captured in a new short video created by Rob Baser using oral history testimonies of the then manager, Johnny Duncan, and players of the time, Norman Plummer, Ted Jelly and Charlie Adam, taken from the EMOHA collections.

Local History Cafe Online

You may have heard of Local History Cafés, a community-based heritage and wellbeing initiative, set up by Katherine Brown at Crafting Relationships. The Cafés offer an opportunity for people aged 50 and over who are experiencing, or at risk of, social isolation, to get-together and share interests in heritage and history. They work in partnership with heritage sites, supporting them to draw on their fascinating collections, knowledge and spaces to positively contribute towards the growing issue of loneliness amongst older community members. In return, organisations open their doors to more visitors and a wealth of stories, adding layers of interest to their own work.

During the lockdown, Local History Cafés have gone online, streaming live talks and demonstrations via Facebook Live. EMOHA was invited to take part in April and offered a gallop through the oral history archives with the opportunity for those listening in to hear local voices from the past reflecting on key events in the 20^th century. Other online events have included a series of mystery objects from Leicester Museums and history quizzes.

To find out more about Local History Cafés Online, go to their Facebook page where followers can share online resources and virtual chat with like-minded folk.

Finishing on a song!

We’re ending this Update with a lovely folk song recently discovered by the Unlocking Our Sound Heritage team at the University of Leicester. In this recording, Mr W English of Braunstone sings a song passed down to him from his grandfather via his father. The song appeared in books of hymns and verse as early as 1829 and has more verses than we hear here. This recording was made in January 1959 at Leicester Museum when Mr English was 79 years old.

Folk singers were also recorded by the Leicester Tape Club in the 1950s, but UOSH suspect the recording of Mr English is one of the earliest local recordings of folk music.

Have a listen for yourselves.

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