Oral History Interviews
In March 2022, just a couple of weeks before I retired, I carried out an oral history interview with the Rt. Rev. Bishop Rachel Treweek, the current Bishop of Gloucester, and the first ever female bishop in the Church of England. We recorded her talking for about an hour, and answering questions on her life and work. Much of the interview covered her aspirations for the people who live and work in Gloucestershire. We know Bishop Rachel is always immensely busy, so we are very grateful to her for making time for the interview, and would like to express our thanks.
It was part of a trio of bucket-list tasks I wanted to complete in the run-up to my retirement. An oral history interview with Bishop Rachel had been on my “to do” list for a considerable time! It was appropriate, as Gloucestershire Archives holds the records of the Diocese of Gloucester within our collections.
I’ve carried out several oral history interviews during my time with Gloucestershire Archives, and it is something I’d be very keen to do more of, despite retirement. A colleague at work gave me some training on how to do an oral history interview, some years ago, and we are guided by advice and information from the UK’s Oral History Society. Their website is a useful resource on issues like ethics, sample permission forms, the type of questions to ask, and so on.
The first time I did an oral history interview (recorded on an old cassette recorder, and self-taught) was in 1984, when I was an assistant (unqualified) social worker, near London. I interviewed a client who was in her 90’s. She had been born in around 1890 and was an abandoned orphan by the age of 6, in 1896. She was a Cockney, born in London’s East End, and was admitted to the East Ham workhouse when her mother died and the absent father could not be traced. England’s workhouses came into being through the New Poor Law Act of 1834 (championed, at the time, by Charles Dickens), and were only abolished in 1930. There were workhouses in every town and city in England. The history of the Poor Law can be traced back to Elizabethan England, when arrangements were made within each parish to provide “relief” for the poor.
I carried out this first ever oral history interview prior to undertaking an MA in social work. Part of my future dissertation was going to look at the history of social care institutions in Britain from 1790 to 1985. Bessie (not her real name) remembered very clearly what the workhouse had been like. She described her experiences and memories of shared clothes (in reality, workhouse uniforms provided by the institution’s Board of Guardians), having no personal possessions, lots of noise, and the pervading smell of stale food. I will forever recall her outraged comment that – young child as she was – “they put me in 8’s in boots, when I was admitted!” In other words, an adult sized pair of boots for a 6 year old child. The experiences she told me about, first hand, influenced my choice of career and the settings in which I worked for the next nearly 20 years. Listening to someone’s personal testimony is a powerful influencer. We all have a story to tell, and her story affected me deeply – it was about poverty, abandonment, never having a place to really call home, never having a history that was in any sense shared with others, having no family or kinship ties. And never (until well into adulthood) having anything of one’s own.
But, now, back to the present. What about Bishop Rachel’s story? I’d never met a bishop before. I had no idea, really, what they do day to day, and what they may or may not be responsible for. I have no dealings, professional or personal, with the Church of England, and so wasn’t sure quite what to expect. A colleague and I arrived at College Green, a few minutes before our appointment with Bishop Rachel, with 25 questions we wanted to ask, and all in the space of an hour or so!
Although I have no faith, I’m very interested in theological and ethical issues, and could have happily discussed these with Bishop Rachel for the rest of the afternoon. But the oral history interview was to look at the bishop’s ecclesiastical career, her ministry to the people of Gloucestershire, her leadership, her life, and her thoughts on the world today.
The oral history interviews we conduct are kept for posterity, as part of our diverse, and very large, collections. People visiting Gloucestershire Archives will be able to listen to Bishop Rachel’s interview and hear what she has to say about being Bishop of Gloucester in the first quarter of the twenty-first century.
In the course of the oral history interview, I discovered I had something in common with the bishop; we have been (or still are, in the bishop’s case) responsible for some of the work that goes on in HM Prisons. The bishop has been Anglican Bishop for HM Prisons, in England & Wales, for some time, and I once managed the library service at HMP Gloucester. At that time, we reckoned that in excess of 60% of convicted prisoners had low (or no) literacy skills. This is shocking. Prisons are yet another example of institutional life worthy of research and resources, especially in tackling functional skills deficits amongst inmates.
Oral history interviews are all about communication. Not in terms of questions and answers – those are the nuts and bolts, yes. But about expression, thoughts, inclusion, telling one’s story, reaching out, being self-aware, and aware of others, telling others about your experiences in ways that are meaningful. Effective communication is all about these skills.
I have an interesting anecdote about the power of communication. A close friend of mine once undertook a week long retreat, with a silent Order of nuns. She went on a pre-stay orientation visit, along with others intent on the retreat, to find out if it really was for them, and what to expect. I remember her telling me that one member of the cohort asked how she would know the person sitting next to her, at meal times, needed the salt and pepper, as it was a silent Order. The Mother Superior answered that it should not be necessary to ask what another needs; you should, as in life, always anticipate the needs of others, and act accordingly. This, to me, was a lesson in communication. Which, as we all know, is not always about words.
So, how did we get on with Bishop Rachel? We didn’t quite manage to get through all of the 25 questions we had prepared for her oral history interview. This is hardly surprising; you quickly learn that, when conducting an oral history interview, interviewees want to answer fully, and tell you their story. It is always a dilemma when you run out of time, and still have a few questions left. So we asked the bishop to choose one or two from the few that were left.
Oral history interviews make up an important part of our collections. They tell, first hand, about an individual’s experiences, work and interests. If you’d like to find out more, please go to the Oral History Society’s website at www.ohs.org.uk The OHS was founded in 1969, and its strapline is “everybody’s story matters.” This echoes Bishop Rachel’s words to me – that we are all equal, and we all have a story to tell.
Everybody's story matters
Oral history is part of a long tradition of social research which reached its peak, here in the UK, with the Mass Observation Project, set up in 1937 – mid-1960’s. Mass Observation was very much about giving ordinary people a voice (often through their written diaries and letters, but occasionally films), describing – in their own words – their day to day lives in Britain at that time.
I have read first-person accounts, from the Mass Observation archive (held at the University of Sussex) from World War 2, and it’s fascinating to read what preoccupied the people of Britain during the war. It very much constitutes what we would call a “people’s history”. It pre-dates the golden age of documentary film-making in the 1960’s and 1970’s, with such seminal documentary films as “The Family”, mirroring the “kitchen sink” dramas of the second half of the twentieth century, and the ever popular “Seven Up”.
If you want to explore the history of documentary film-making, go to the British Film Institute’s website at www.bfi.org.uk and – if particularly interested in World War 2 and the Home Front – search for the government’s GPO Film Unit.
Sally Middleton
