George Ewart Evans collection

Long description:

Recordings in this collection can be played by anyone.

These recordings of interviews and songs were made by oral history pioneer George Ewart Evans between 1956 and 1977, many in Suffolk, with a smaller number in Wales, Ireland and Scotland. The recordings document rural life and agricultural work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, folk beliefs about animals, medicine and witchcraft, folk and popular songs.

Oral history recordings provide valuable first-hand testimony of the past.  The views and opinions expressed in oral history interviews are those of the interviewees, who describe events from their own perspective.  The interviews are historical documents and their language, tone and content might in some cases reflect attitudes that could cause offence in today’s society.

Writer and oral historian George Ewart Evans (1909-1988) is widely regarded as the 'grandfather' of British oral history, although he always said that the term 'oral history' reminded him of 'the filing cabinet of a well-equipped dentist'. His preference was for 'spoken history', the title of the last of a series of books based on recorded reminiscences published between 1956 and 1987.

This collection comprises around 250 recordings of interviews and songs made by Evans between 1956 and 1977, involving about 170 people. Most recordings were made in Suffolk, with a smaller number in the Midlands, Wales, Ireland and Scotland. The principal subjects are rural life and agricultural work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, folk beliefs about animals, medicine and witchcraft, folk and popular songs, entertainment and education in rural communities (with some material on domestic service, transport and mining). The collection consists of copy tapes dubbed from originals loaned to the National Sound Archive in 1976.

George Ewart Evans was born in the pit village of Abercynon in Glamorgan in Wales in 1909, and struggled to make his way as a writer during the depression, working as a PE teacher in Cambridgeshire before national service during the war. He eventually moved in 1948 to Blaxhall in Suffolk where his wife Florence had become the village teacher. George stayed at home to look after their children. It was whilst chatting to his neighbour Robert Savage, a retired shepherd, that he stumbled upon the rich vein of oral testimony and folklore amongst the villagers that was to be at the heart of his books about East Anglian rural life and work, evocative of what George called 'an unbroken continuity...the last generation of a line that had extended from Biblical times.' His first major work, Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay,  appeared in 1956 and was followed by further books over the next thirty years, many of them illustrated by David Gentleman, establishing Evans as a chronicler of ordinary working people in their own words.

Although we know George began interviewing his neighbours in 1952, the earliest sound recordings we have date from 1956, the last from 1977. In 1956 George borrowed his first Midget portable open-reel tape-recorder from the BBC in Norwich, its battery power giving him freedom of movement not accorded by previous models. In fact George's enthusiasm for recording technology was unusual amongst early oral historians and reflected his determination to record not just information about the past but the sound of his interviewees voices: an important key to understanding his work.

There are 170 or so individual interviewees in the collection, nearly all born in the 1880s and 1890s. The oldest are Aldeman Ling, born in 1875, discussing bell-ringing; George Messenger, born in 1877, who talks about threshing and about working on the barges at Snape; and Susan Mullenger, born in 1878, recorded in 1967 talking about eating fried mice as a remedy for whooping cough! George's youngest interviewees were members of the Blaxhall Band of Ringers (bell-ringers) including Sheila Shaw who at the age of sixteen had just finished her first peel involving over 5000 changes. And although George is very much associated with documenting disappearing Suffolk rural working life, he also tape-recorded people talking about a host of other topics including brewing in Burton-on-Trent, coalmining in Wales, Zeppelin attacks on Bungay during the First World War, an outbreak of bubonic plague in Ipswich around 1910, and working as a servant to actor Charles Laughton in London.

Evans was instrumental in establishing what we now call the oral history movement in the UK and attended the first oral history conference to be held in Britain on 13 December 1969 at the British Institute of Recorded Sound in Exhibition Road in London (BIRS later became the National Sound Archive and now the BL Sound Archive). Fifteen people attended, including Theo Barker from Kent University, Stewart Sanderson from the Institute of Dialect and Folklife Studies at Leeds University and Paul Thompson from Essex University. Together they formed a committee which published the first issue of Oral History: an occasional news sheet and went on in 1973 to establish the Oral History Society (www.ohs.org.uk).

George's remarks at that first meeting, published in an article entitled 'Flesh and blood archives', still read forty years later as good sound advice to any budding oral historian: the importance not of asking a lot of questions of your interviewee but of listening; the value of preparation but of not allowing this knowledge to intervene in an interview; the benefits of quickly establishing a rapport in a relaxed and unhurried manner; of avoiding audible interjections; the importance of following digression; and of making a high quality audio recording so that accent and dialect might be heard. His maxim 'plenty of time and plenty of tape and few questions' remains as relevant today as it was in 1973.

Bibliography

Ask The Fellows Who Cut The Hay (Faber 1956, 1965; Full Circle Editions, 2010).
The Horse in the Furrow (Faber 1960, 1967).
The Pattern Under the Plough: Aspects of the Folk-Life of East Anglia (Faber 1966, 1971).
The Farm and the Village (Faber 1969, second edition 1974).
Where Beards Wag All: The Relevance of the Oral Tradition (Faber 1970, second edition 1977).
The Leaping Hare by George Ewart Evans and David Thomson (Faber 1972, 1974).
Acky (Faber 1973).
The Days That We Have Seen (Faber 1975).
Let Dogs Delight and Other Stories (Faber 1975).
From Mouths Of Men (Faber 1976).
Horse Power and Magic (Faber 1979).
The Strength of the Hills: An Autobiography (Faber 1983; Farrar Straus & Giroux, New York).
Spoken History (Faber 1987).
The Crooked Scythe. An Anthology of Oral History, edited and illustrated by David Gentleman (Faber 1993).

The British Library is grateful to the Evans family (Matthew, Mary, Susan and Jane) for their permission to make these recordings available.

All recordings on this site are governed by licence agreements.