Mary Stewart, Lead Curator of Oral History, writes:

The key mission of the British Library Oral History team is to gather as many stories about life in the UK as possible – to create a tapestry of experiences, reflections and insights for use by researchers today and in the future. But why would someone agree to record their life story? In a recent recorded discussion at an oral history symposium, celebrated artist Hew Locke explains why he accepted our invitation:

Hester Westley in conversation with Hew Locke at the NLS Symposium. Photo: Camille Johnston.

Hew Locke on recording his life story

Download transcript

Although Locke’s recording with Hester Westley for the extensive Artists’ Lives collection is closed in his lifetime, he sums up in a phrase the aims of the Library’s life story programme: we capture the unofficial histories of people and of moments.

A central pillar of the Library’s work in oral history is National Life Stories (NLS), the oral history fieldwork charity established in 1987 by Paul Thompson and Asa Briggs, supported by founding Trustee Jennifer Wingate. The in-depth biographical interview – the ‘life story’ – is the core methodology of National Life Stories.

But how do we attempt to accomplish the gargantuan task of recording life stories across the UK? How do we conduct a life story, and how does this methodology contrast with other oral history techniques? What value can a life story collection bring to wider policy debates? What specific challenges do we face in archiving life story interviews?

To explore these and related questions, a permanent, open-access (free to all) edition of the leading journal Oral History presents for the first time a comprehensive volume of articles interrogating the life story methodology. The special issue of the journal offers many insights and features numerous embedded links to audio files, which we are confident will be essential reading for scholars and practitioners – whether you are just setting out in oral history or have decades of experience.

This special edition of Oral History arises from the papers and discussions from National Life Stories’ International Symposium on the Life Story in summer 2023. The journal was edited by Mary Stewart (NLS Director) and Rob Perks (NLS Trustee and former Director), and the publication features contributions from many members of the National Life Stories team, in conjunction with internationally acclaimed oral historians and colleagues who discuss various aspects of oral history and life story practice.

Alongside the full transcript of the conversation between Hew and Hester which introduced this blog, the highlights include:

• Canadian scholar Alexander Freund’s thoughtful and provocative paper on the nature of the life story interview, considering who it is for, how it captures a ‘life’, some of the ethical implications particular to the method, and the re-use of the material now and in the future.
• Indira Chowdhury’s (founder of the Oral History Association of India) reflections on institutional histories and life stories in the context of post-independence India. NLS Project Director Niamh Dillon then adds her own experience of conducting numerous institutional histories for NLS.
• Alistair Thomson’s (Monash University, Melbourne) retrospective assessment of his career researching using the life story. Weaving in examples of his work in the UK and Australia he articulates the value in the long-form interview and gives some practical tips on how we can approach the cataloguing and re-use of material.
• Donald A Ritchie’s (Historian Emeritus of the United States Senate) comprehensive review of publications on the life story, which contextualises the debates in the journal.
• Elizabeth Wright (NLS Interviewer), Madeline White (NLS Deputy Director) and Wendy Rickard’s (a frequent collaborator with NLS and the British Library) insights on the practice of life story interviewing, including how we frame questions, what we can gain from conducting life story interviews with younger people, interviewing over time and how life stories compare with other types of interview.

In addition to these articles, three panel discussions from the Symposium are printed in full:

• An animated session focusing on the spectre of new technology for the reuse, analysis and ethics of archived life stories, which brought together experts in the field. NLS Archivist Charlie Morgan introduces the key issues and is joined by academics Julianne Nyhan (Technical University Darmstadt and University College London) and Doug Boyd (Louie B Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries), in a discussion chaired by NLS Trustee Andrew Flinn (University College London).
• For the past fifteen years NLS has made great strides in capturing oral histories of science, technology and the environment. Paul Merchant (NLS Oral Historian and Researcher) outlined five observations from the 50 interviews he conducted for An Oral History of Farming, Land Management and Conservation in Post-war Britain - a project funded by Arcadia. NLS Trustee Jon Agar (University College London) then chaired a wide-ranging panel discussion on the value of life stories of the environment with Paul, Sally Horrocks (NLS Senior Academic Advisor for Science and Technology) and Fiona Harvey (environment editor at The Guardian).
• The final part of the Symposium brought together all of the international panellists with Rob Perks and Mary Stewart, chaired by Don Ritchie, to speak to the future of the life story. The discussion draws together themes addressed in the entire issue of the journal and responds to reflections on the life story method contributed by Symposium attendees.

Thanks to the speakers and authors, the editors, designers and proof reader of Oral History, the Symposium attendees, the NLS team and Trustees, British Library events team, and – of course – to all our past and current interviewees. This special edition of Oral History contains something of interest for anyone involved in the study and collection of life stories. Visit the Oral History Society website to download the journal. 

A key figure of British jazz, Coleridge Goode worked with the likes of Stéphane Grappelli, Django Reinhardt and Ray Ellington. He performed frequently and his double bass playing graced countless London jazz clubs. He kept diaries in which he noted his bookings, at venues like the Marquee and Ronnie Scott’s – names redolent of incandescent evenings and brilliant sounds.

Music permeated Goode’s early life in Jamaica, where he was born in 1914. His father had a studious interest in classical music, was a choirmaster and played the organ, whilst his mother was a chorister; he was named after the composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Goode became an accomplished violinist. When he moved to Glasgow to study engineering, he led the university orchestra’s second violins.

As a student, he also came across a new kind of music – music with a rhythmic swing. He heard it on the radio, visited the city’s dance halls and collected records by Count Basie and Duke Ellington. He started to contemplate a career in jazz but, being classically trained, found that he couldn’t switch styles on the violin. He duly took up the double bass which, to the vexation of his landlady, he practised for eight hours a day. ‘Other studies eventually got left far behind’, he wrote. ‘But I felt I had to make sure I was capable of mastering this instrument.’

He began working as a musician in Glasgow, then moved to London in 1942, and quickly got to know the city’s clubs. One of these was the Panama, a venue he played at with Johnny Claes and his band. When the Panama closed for the evening, he would go on to another job, at the Slip In near Regent Street. Goode recalled the Panama’s clientele of ‘well-heeled people who lived around Knightsbridge’. In contrast, the Slip In was ‘a haunt of gangster types’, its name fittingly hinting at the clandestine. He fondly remembered the Caribbean Club in Piccadilly, where he started working in 1944. This was ‘small and compact’ and ‘a genuinely mixed club in terms of race and class.’

These quotations are from Goode’s autobiography Bass Lines: A Life in Jazz. Its illuminating details of people, places and events help to contextualise the appointments jotted down in his diaries. His diary from 1958 is on display at the British Library in the exhibition Beyond the Bassline. Its pages, open on the week commencing Sunday the sixth of July, show the names of venues along with other particulars, like time of performance and time of rehearsal. The Star Club, the Marquee and the Flamingo are amongst the bookings entered that week.

Coleridge Goode’s diary for 1958, open to show the days for 6-12 July © British Library Board. Used with kind permission from Coleridge Goode’s family.

One of Goode’s major affiliations was with saxophonist Joe Harriott. It was at the Star Club on Soho’s Wardour Street where the two first met; this was probably in March 1958. ‘Sitting in’ on performances was commonplace at the club, and one evening Harriott dropped in and played alongside Goode, pianist Alan Clare and drummer Bobby Orr. That evening, Harriott asked Goode to join the band he was forming. They would go on to collaborate for years in the Joe Harriott Quintet, first playing bebop, and later exploring Harriott’s pioneering concept of ‘free form’ music.

The Marquee was originally located below a cinema on Oxford Street. The space was a ballroom before it was a jazz club, and its interior incorporated a striped, canopy-like design. In 1958, Harry Pendleton, who headed up the National Jazz Federation, started programming events at the Marquee. The Joe Harriott Quintet would rehearse at the venue and performed there regularly on Saturdays. Goode recalled that Harriott secured this slot for his group ‘even before the band had been unveiled… or the personnel had been fixed’ – such was his standing. The Marquee Club – as it became under the auspices of Pendleton – moved to Wardour Street in 1964.

The Flamingo opened in 1952 below a restaurant on Coventry Street. An upmarket venue with plush surroundings, it hosted the big names of British jazz, and counted Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan amongst its star American guests. The Flamingo moved to Wardour Street in 1957. The Don Rendell Jazz Six and the Tony Kinsey Quintet were two of the many bands who played at the Wardour Street venue; the Joe Harriott Quintet were regulars there on Sunday afternoons.

Whilst Coleridge Goode’s diaries are illuminated by these histories, they are intrinsically informative, too. They chronicle the engagements of their keeper and, as compendia, record venues which shaped the history of British jazz. They also possess an evocative and an emotive quality, written in Goode’s hand, intertwined with his life on the scene.

Quotations in this article are taken from ‘Bass Lines: A Life in Jazz’ by Coleridge Goode and Roger Cotterrell. The British Library Sound Archive holds a collection of Coleridge Goode’s diaries and a significant collection of his recordings.

Coleridge Goode’s diary for 1958 is on display in the British Library exhibition Beyond the Bassline: 500 Years of Black British Music, which runs to 26 August 2024.

Blog written by Jonathan Benaim, researcher for the exhibition Beyond the Bassline.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor quoted in Norwood News (7 Sept. 1912).

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor © Alamy

Interview with Dr Catherine Carr, conducted by Fiona Stubbings

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was one of the most eminent composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was born in 1875, with mixed Sierra Leonean and English heritage, and grew up in Croydon. Defying societal conventions, he was celebrated as a promising musician both in the UK and the USA and was often referred to as the 'Black Dvorak' or the ‘Black Mahler’. Much has been written about his fame, popularity and his support for pan-Africanism.

His most famous work is undoubtedly The Song of Hiawatha, which premiered in 1898 at the Royal College of Music. The musical composition was based on an epic poem written by American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. It was hailed as a masterpiece and hundreds of thousands of copies of the score were sold.

Coleridge-Taylor’s popularity continued after his death – from 1924 until 1939 his Hiawatha trilogy was regularly staged at the Royal Albert Hall, usually conducted by Sir Malcolm Sargent. It was shown for two weeks every year, and was attended by thousands of people, among them the Royal Family.

Programme for Hiawatha, performed at the Royal Albert Hall in 1935, © Alamy

Whilst all of this reflects his popularity and his standing in his own lifetime and the inter-war years, performances of his work slowly declined after the Second World War. This might explain why there is a disproportionate amount of literature written about him, compared to the prestige with which his work was held. 

When researcher Dr Catherine Carr decided to focus her PhD research on the music of Samuel Coleridge Taylor, she was motivated by the lack of scholarly literature on the composer’s work: ‘One of the reasons I did the PhD was because as I looked and researched, everything referred to his race… I thought, but what about the actual music?’

Dr Catherine Carr

Whilst she noted that it was important not to disregard his race altogether, it seemed that in some ways superficial accounts of his life and achievements overshadowed his sheer musical genius.

In 2003, as part of her PhD for research at the British Library, Dr Carr uncovered a full manuscript of Coleridge-Taylor’s opera Thelma, previously thought to be lost. In her own words, she describes:

When I was researching Coleridge-Taylor I kept on coming across mentions of the opera as being lost. It was even discussed in several critical writings that it may have been destroyed, because he did that with the finale of his Symphony - he'd ripped it in half and tossed it away and his friend William Reed had rescued it, I believe it was taped back together and is now in the Royal College of Music. So yes, I thought, well, maybe it does still exist and if so, I need to find this manuscript. Unbeknownst to me, I had seen it in 1997 when I first started my research because I was working off a list of his works from the British Library, but at that point it wasn't catalogued….It was in boxes of music with ‘unsorted’ written on. So I had seen it in the early stages of my research but didn’t know what it was.

And then I found a letter at the Public Records office in Kew from a musical director to Coleridge-Taylor's wife Jesse, and it was talking about the performing rights for the opera. The letter was written in 1913. And Coleridge-Taylor died in 1912, so I knew it was still in existence when he died. I knew it had to be somewhere. So I went back through all of my research and reviewed everything again with fresh eyes…when I looked back at the box of unsorted manuscripts in the British Library I had the real sort of Eureka moment when the penny finally dropped – there it was, unbound, but with all three acts complete. I had been discussing it at length with my supervisor, about how great it would be to assess Coleridge-Taylor through this ‘missing’ opera. I think if he could have done cartwheels, he would have done when I told him I’d finally located it.

I then applied to reproductions for a working copy so that I could analyse the music and it became evident that it's really top drawer stuff. And from my research I knew that it was really dear to Coleridge-Taylor's heart. It was great to be able to actually find it and for people to be able to see it and perform it, as it eventually was done.

Opening page of Act I in Thelma, BL reference Add MS 63809 A

My longer-term goal after completing my PhD was to try and get a performance of the opera. I wanted to get it for 2009, which was the 100th anniversary – the work is signed it at the bottom ‘15th of March 1909’. I finished the PhD in 2005-2006 but it took longer than I’d hoped to bring that dream alive. Perhaps I didn’t have the right opera connections, or a business mind, but I struggled to get much interest from opera companies in the UK and US.  Some years later, in 2011, Jonathan Butcher, from Surrey Opera, got in touch with me, as they were mounting a production. His dedication and expertise in bringing it to life as was brilliant, and it was performed in 2012 in Croydon as part of a year-long festival on the centenary of Coleridge-Taylor's death.

Performance of Thelma by Surrey Opera, image © Peter Marr

To see it on stage for the very first public performance ever was surreal, and I was elated  that it had finally been produced.  As I've been doing this research, it became apparent that the opera was something he had poured all his aspirations into. I knew that it was a really important work to him, so it was wonderful to actually hear it and to see it.  When I’d been researching it I was absolutely immersed in it – analysing the musical intricacies. But to see it actually performed on the stage was emotional. It was said that the reason it wasn't performed in Coleridge-Taylor's lifetime was because there were insurmountable problems to do with the staging (and the libretto). But Jonathan Butcher and the Surrey Opera found a way round those, in a splendid production.

In 2022, nearly two decades after Dr Carr’s discovery, the Royal College of Music discovered in their archive a previously unknown composition by Coleridge-Taylor, called Nourmahal's Song. Despite being compared to renowned composers such as Mahler and Dvorak, the extent of scholarly research of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s work is reflected by the fact that new works of continue to be uncovered.

Dr Carr’s thesis can be found here: The Music of Samuel Coleridge Taylor (1875-1912): A Critical and Analytical Study.