Sound and vision blog

This week’s selection comes from Giulia Baldorilli, Sound and Vision Reference Specialist. 

Photo by Ahmad Odeh on Unsplash.

In this 1991 interview from the collection ‘ICA talks’ (C95/795), the renowned artist and dancer Trisha Brown considers the experience and exploration of gravity in her works, and discusses the role of gender in improvised partnering performances. 

Listen to Trisha Brown

Download Trisha Brown transcript

Years ago I used to practice contact improvisation, a movement technique and art dance style that originated in downtown New York in the late sixties.

The central idea of contact improvisation is around finding the body’s balance in relation to the partner by sharing weight and touch; forms and movements are thus created when the bodies meet, initiated and transformed by the music or simply by vocal instructions.

Movement awareness is intrinsically related to how much information we can gather from other people’s bodies, through the constant dialogic sharing of touch points. There are no rules, only bodies listening to each other in their search for a shared centre of gravity.

Trisha was one of these pioneering artists who explored the idea of what kind of movement can be improvised in a dance.¹

An interesting point that Trisha considers is around the importance of physical strength and gender roles in this improvised dance: how much of the silent communication of movements is in fact created by the male partner?

Ultimately, it makes me wonder how much we are aware, in the process of making, of who is the final ‘creator’ of a performance.

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[1] Nancy Stark Smith, 'Harvest: One history of contact improvisation', Contact Quarterly, The Place Issue, 32/2 (2006): https://contactquarterly.com/cq/unbound/view/harvest-a-history-of-ci#$.

By Dr Madeline White, Curator of Oral History.

Reflecting on the Holocaust Memorial Day 2023 theme of 'ordinary people', I wondered what – if anything – the word 'ordinary' meant to the people who survived the genocide. In a time that was by all accounts extra-ordinary, what value does the word 'ordinary' have in talking about it? Who do the survivors think of as 'ordinary people' in the context of their own persecution?

The British Library Sound Archive is home to more than 600 Holocaust oral testimonies. The word 'ordinary' appears with surprising frequency in them.

But interestingly, there is no consensus between them on who the 'ordinary people' are.

Some survivors identify themselves – and the Jewish people in general – as the 'ordinary people'. Ivan Cybula does so in the opening moments of his 1988 interview.

Ivan Cybula on his place of birth [BL REF C410/032]

Download Ivan Cybula transcript

For Ivan, there was nothing extraordinary about his family; they lived modest, working lives, in keeping with the lives led by many other Jewish communities in Eastern Europe. The picture that Ivan paints of an 'ordinary' family in an 'ordinary' community that largely kept itself to itself sets the scene for what we know follows: a community that would be persecuted and ultimately murdered as a perceived anomaly, before Ivan had barely entered adulthood.

Other survivors draw a distinction between themselves and the non-Jewish people around them, but instead characterise non-Jewish people as 'ordinary' and themselves – or the notion of being Jewish – as some kind of other. Here, Eric Bluh talks about working in Bournemouth, England after the war. He describes his fractured relationship with an employer, who despite being Jewish themselves, did not think he lived up to the standards they expected of a Jew.

Eric Bluh on working in Bournemouth [BL REF C410/057]

Download Eric Bluh transcript

Eric describes himself as behaving ‘like an ordinary person without Jewish ways’ as a way of distinguishing himself from the Jewish stereotype, demonstrating in the process that the persistent ‘othering’ of Jewish people which had underscored the Holocaust continued into the post-war period, and beyond continental Europe..

Elsewhere, we hear survivors speak of their persecutors as 'ordinary people', making the same argument that scholars such as Christopher Browning and Hannah Arendt set out eloquently in their historical analyses: that genocides are not simply perpetrated by 'evil' people, but often ordinary people who under certain conditions are capable of making evil choices. By emphasising the ordinariness of their tormentors, the survivors challenge us to make sense of the extraordinariness of their actions. In the following clip, Naomi Blake describes the German soldiers who attempted to bury her alive as 'in normal circumstances law-abiding, good people, professional people':

Naomi Blake on digging a grave [BL REF C410/076]

Download Naomi Blake transcript

The outcome is not to absolve perpetrators of their responsibility or to underplay the severity of their crimes, but instead the opposite: to emphasise the extent to which their crimes lay beyond comprehension, yet firmly in the realm of the everyday possible.

The word 'ordinary' appears as an adjective to describe many other types of people and circumstances in survivor narratives. Heidi Fischer - who hid as a child in Hungary under Christian papers - describes sitting on a train listening to 'ordinary people - peasants and suchlike […] talking about the Jews […] in a very awfully derogative manner' (BL ref C410/088). In stark contrast, Alice Schwab speaks of 'the help, and the love, and the kindness, from ordinary people' she received after arriving in England in 1937 (BL ref C410/089).

In his 1989 interview, the interviewer asks Henry Kohn to describe 'an ordinary day' in the Czeldź ghetto (BL ref C410/002).

What does this tell us?

It tells us that the Holocaust was an event perpetrated and experienced by ordinary people. Though used in different contexts, the word almost always serves to emphasise the extremity of the situation, or the incomprehensibility of people's choices. After all, the word 'ordinary' only has meaning if the word 'extra-ordinary' can be used to describe something outside of its boundaries.

In speaking of the event in these terms, the survivors force us to see ourselves in their stories, at all stages and in all parts of the narrative. Believing ourselves to be 'ordinary people' is no longer a valid defence, a reason to believe that it couldn't happen to us or by us or under our watch. By describing those involved as ordinary - perpetrators, bystanders, and the persecuted alike - the survivors confront us with the possibility that, in fact, it could.

When asked whether he thought the history of the Holocaust ought to be shared, Michael Lee responded that the lessons must be learned precisely because of how ordinary those involved were:

Michael Lee describes experiencing antisemitism in Britain [BL REF C410/014]

Download Michael Lee transcript

Michael made these observations in an interview given in 1989. One might ask what he would think now about the parallels between the past and the present day, 34 years later.

Follow @BL_OralHistory and @soundarchive for all the latest news.

Madeline White is the Curator of Oral History at the British Library. She holds an MA and PhD in Holocaust Studies from Royal Holloway, University of London, where she conducted extensive research into the history of archival collections of Holocaust testimony in Britain and Canada. 

This Disability History Month, staff from across the British Library have collaborated on a series of blog posts to highlight stories of disability and disabled people in the Library’s collections. Each week a curator will showcase an item from the collections and present it alongside commentary from a member of the British Library’s staff Disability Support Network. These selections are a snapshot insight into the Library’s holdings of disability stories, and we invite readers to use these as a starting point to explore the collections further and share your findings with us.

This selection has been made by Dr Madeline White, Oral History Curator.

Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash

The theme of UK Disability History Month (UKDHM) 2022 is Disability, Health and Well Being. The theme was chosen to shed light on the societal barriers that compromise the health and wellbeing of disabled people. In particular, it seeks to highlight the ways in which the Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated many of these inequalities.

The UKDHM website draws together some of the research into the impact of the pandemic on disabled people and communities. Reports and statistical analyses reveal above average rates of preventable death, exacerbated mental health issues, and increased isolation and poverty among disabled people. This excessive suffering was not inevitable, but the result of structural inequality, discrimination, poor communication and government action.

The oral history collections at the British Library offer us an opportunity to explore beyond the statistics and hear people’s lived experiences and emotions. We can use oral history, for example, to listen to disabled people describe their experiences of living through the pandemic, in their own words. In doing so, we can begin to get a sense of the human impacts of policy decisions and ableist attitudes.

The Voices of Our National Health Service collection – now archived at the British Library – comprises thousands of interviews recorded by the University of Manchester between 2017 and 2022. Given its sheer scale and scope, the collection offers an unparalleled insight into healthcare provision in the UK as experienced by patients, staff and communities across the country – including during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Within this collection are hundreds of stories that speak to the UKDHM theme of ‘Disability, Health and Wellbeing’. Individuals with pre-existing health conditions or disabilities designated ‘Extremely Clinically Vulnerable’ by the government describe their experiences of shielding during lockdowns. In other recordings, patients experiencing long Covid symptoms describe the lasting impact of their new illness on their day to day lives. Throughout, these interviewees explore how their health needs were at times met and at others missed by government public health policy, by the medical profession, and by the communities they live in.

Photo courtesy of Stephen Lightbown.  Image not licensed for reuse. 

Stephen Lightbown is one such interviewee. Stephen was a Director of Communications in the NHS until March 2020, when he took early retirement on health grounds. In his interview, Stephen reflects on life as a wheelchair user before and during the pandemic, exploring the extent to which society has adapted – or failed to adapt – to meet his needs and the needs of other disabled people over time.

In this first clip, Stephen recalls some of the discrimination he encounters in his daily life as a wheelchair user and some of the ways in which the pandemic exposed the ableist attitudes that are prevalent in UK society.

Stephen Lightbown on ableist attitudes of society being laid bare during the pandemic [BL REF C1887/700]

Download Stephen Lightbown on ableist attitudes - transcript

In addition to recording personal experiences at various intersections of disability and healthcare, the Voices of Our National Health Service collection offers an insight into individual wellbeing in the context of a global health crisis and beyond. Within the collection, people with disabilities describe how the pandemic and the measures to combat it impacted on their wellbeing. In this next clip, Stephen offers an illuminating perspective on access to social events. He argues that the swift move to online events during lockdown undermines the oft-made argument that providing regular access for disabled people to events and spaces is often too expensive or too difficult.

Stephen Lightbown on accessing events online during the pandemic [BL REF C1800/700]

Download Stephen Lightbown on accessing events - transcript

The nature of oral history as a methodology means the material it produces often offers unmatched insight into events as experienced by individuals, many of whom would not otherwise record their stories or be represented in the historical record. The Voices of Our National Health Service collection in particular has preserved for posterity raw and honest accounts of the pandemic from those who experienced it at its most extreme, of whom disabled people represent a significant demographic.

As the British Library and other archives continue to collect oral history material in the future, we will capture more stories from disabled people about their lives, including experiences of the pandemic. The legacy of the pandemic and its lasting impact on the rights of disabled people remain to be seen, but these archives will provide a vital source of information long into the future.

Reflection from British Library staff Disability and Carer Support Network member Barbara O'Connor:

Stephen’s words echo mine and those of many who are struggling to understand what is happening to our rickety constructs, created by us so we can fit in and function. I saw lockdown-levelling-up, this pandemic by-product, as a boon. On 23 March 2020 my life became normalised: everyone was housebound, working remotely, socialising and culture-consuming on-line. Puff! Gone overnight the anxiety and exhaustion of the daily foray into hostile territory. In Stephen’s words, it was 'liberating.' Come-wheel-with-me, my able-bodied friends, I’ll show you how this works - I’ve got form! I felt guilty about these thoughts, worried that I would be seen as gleeful. I too was optimistic that we would emerge with a fresh vision of new ways of being, of delivering, of including. On 21 November 2022 my life remains, de facto, in lockdown. The gap between our worlds has not lessened, nor an interest in closing this gap increased. Many appear unaware or unwilling to recognise that their privilege to choose remains in intact whilst mine remains arbitrary. This is as crushing as anything done to my body by the virus. As Stephen, my benign doppelganger says, 'it feels like we are dispensable' and 'it is heart breaking.'

Find out more:

The interviews in the Voices of Our National Health Service collection are now available for listening on site at the British Library and a large number will be available online via British Library Sounds from 2023. You can search for the collection using reference number C1887 in the Sound and Moving Image Catalogue.

You can listen to more extracts from interviews in the Voices of Our National Health Service collection and explore material from the British Library’s other Covid-19 collections on the web resource Covid stories.

For more information on the wide range of disability oral history collections at the British Library, consult our oral histories of disability and personal and mental health collection guide.

This week’s post comes from Giulia Baldorilli, Sound and Vision Reference Specialist.

Above: Photo from train window taken by Giulia Baldorilli

Living in London, as I do, means commuting to work every day, and I find the quality of my daily commute really affects my mood and well-being.

It’s my belief that you need to entertain yourself when commuting. Taking the underground in London always fascinates me. The variety of faces and colours is what keeps my mind busy even during rush hour when the tube is packed.  People are a good source for stories and day-dreaming. I tend to imagine where the person in front of me might be from, what their plan is for that evening, or for the next year.

In the interview excerpt below from the National Life Stories project, the artist Ian Breakwell talks about why he prefers taking public transport. He discusses how it allows us do all the things we want to do, many of which are not possible with other forms of transport.

Listen to interview with Ian Breakwell

Download Ian Breakwell interview transcript

His last point about viewing landscape through a train window resonates with me in particular. As I and many in the UK return to working on-site most days of the week, the commute makes its gradual shift back into our daily routine. I like being a passenger. It is a chance to enjoy the landscape outside the window and lose myself in an unexpected inner conversation, or reverie.

This interview is available in full as part of a collection on the British Library Sounds website. 

This week’s post is by Victoria Hogarth, Data Protection and Rights Clearance Officer for Unlocking Our Sound Heritage.

The Vicinus Music Hall Interviews, digitised as part of the Unlocking Our Sound Heritage project, are a treasure trove for music hall enthusiasts. Martha Vicinus, an American scholar of English literature and Women’s studies (now at the University of Michigan), visited a number of retirement homes for music hall and variety artists during the 1970s. She interviewed a range of artists, all of whom were active during the golden age of the music hall circa 1910 to 1950.

As well as the good times, the interviewees also touch on more difficult experiences. Many were part of The Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA), set up to provide entertainment for British armed forces personnel during World War II.

The excerpts I’ve chosen for this recording of the week describe Don Ross’ experiences managing a travelling circus during World War II. Don was an artist turned promoter and producer who enjoyed a long career in music hall and variety.

Above: Portrait of Don Ross. Photographer unknown, published in the Guardian on 30 June, 1971.

I chose these clips because they provide an alternative wartime experience. Many of our oral history collections document the effects of the war on everyday life, but we don’t often hear about the effects on the entertainment business, and certainly not the circus! 

In the first clip, Don describes a particularly heavy bombardment that took place in Norwich during the circus tour. The city of Norwich was very heavily bombed in April and May 1942 as part of the so-called Baedeker raids. Don recalls keeping a vigil all night next to the lion cages, speaking softly to the lions while bombs rained down.

Listen to Don Ross on calming the lions

Download Don Ross 'Calming the lions' transcript

The second clip describes the intense difficulty of getting food for the circus animals during rationing. Don recollects his efforts to source herring for sea lions, hay for elephants and oranges for monkeys.

Listen to Don Ross on feeding the animals

Download Don Ross 'Feeding the animals' transcript

It’s easy to forget the bravery of the artists providing entertainment up and down the country, often in coastal towns highly vulnerable to bombardment. Later in the interview, Don describes losing three artists when one of his shows was bombed, and recalls having to entertain audiences during air raids. These clips offer a fascinating insight into the morale-boosting efforts of the ENSA performers, as well as a vivid description of life during the blitz.

This week’s post comes from Myriam Fellous-Sigrist, Data Protection and Rights Clearance Officer for Unlocking Our Sound Heritage.

Above: Photo above of a U3A display table taken by George Redgrave. Sourced from Flickr under a CC BY-ND 2.0 license. Link to licence. 

It is never too late to learn about oral history, or any other subject. In the 1990s, dozens of members of the University of the Third Age (U3A) trained to conduct oral history interviews in collaboration with the National Sound Archive. As a result, more than 300 life stories were recorded across Sussex, Somerset and London, with and by members of local U3A branches.

Most of the compact cassettes were archived at The Keep in Brighton (collection AMS 6416). In the last few years, they were digitised and reviewed by the Unlocking our Sound Heritage project (UOSH). As part of my work for UOSH, I have had the privilege of listening to the 59 interviews preserved at the British Library (collection C516). The narrators reflect on their social background, education, lifelong learning, careers, leisure, family life, friendships, experiences of migration, World War One and World War Two, and much more. This collection also features many pioneers of U3A who explain how this UK-wide movement was created 40 years ago.

The recordings give a sense of the key social and intellectual role of the University of the Third Age in the narrators’ retirement years. One of the interviewees is Pauline Cowles, who was born in 1919 in Brighton. At the end of the interview that she gave in 1995, she described some of the activities organised by U3A Lewes and the ‘new life’ that U3A has given to her and to fellow members.

Listen to Pauline Cowles

Download Pauline Cowles interview transcript

This week’s post comes from Sarah Kirk-Browne, Cataloguer, Digital Multimedia Collections.

One of the most exciting things about exploring the sound archive is all the unexpected things you stumble across. While researching the Nottinghamshire dialect, I listened to this recording of Mr Arthur Sharpe (British Library reference: C707/190).

Arthur Sharpe was a Co-op grocery manager, recorded for an oral history project in 1971. The Family Life and Work Experience Before 1918 project made recordings of speakers from a range of backgrounds talking about their memories from the late 19^th and early 20^th century.

Most of the interviews in the collection follow the same structure: with questions about parents, home life, school and employment. They provide a lot of insight into life at the time, plus plenty of linguistic interest too. However, on the final tape with Mr Sharpe the interviewer goes off-topic to ask him directly about something alluded to in some of his earlier answers: how did you know D. H. Lawrence?

What follows is a personal description of his connections with the Lawrence family, with D. H. Lawrence being his close neighbour and sometime teacher. In the clip you can hear Arthur’s anecdote about a disagreement with a schoolmate, which D. H. Lawrence calmly resolved.

Listen to Arthur Sharpe

Download Arthur Sharpe transcript

Somewhat sadly, recordings of this kind are as close as we are going to get in terms of audio documentation of D. H. Lawrence himself. Despite his living well into the era of recorded sound, it seems there are no extant recordings of his voice.

The Family Life and Work Experience Before 1918 collection - often known as ‘The Edwardians’ - was a pioneering project co-ordinated by Paul Thompson, Thea Thompson (who also published as Thea Vigne) and Trevor Lummis at the University of Essex.

Over 500 audio interviews were conducted across all of the UK with people from a range of socio-economic backgrounds and occupations. The collection provided the source material for Paul Thompson’s 1975 classic book The Edwardians: the Remaking of British Society, and Paul then became one of the pioneers of oral history both in the UK and internationally.

All of the recordings in this collection are available at the British Library, and transcripts can also be consulted at the UK Data Archive at the University of Essex.

The Spoken English and Oral History archives are full of ordinary people telling their extraordinary stories - so I look forward to discovering and sharing more hidden gems in the future!

This week’s post comes from Myriam Fellous-Sigrist, Data protection and Rights Clearance Officer.

Above: Wartime Activities, women picking fruit, Bedfordshire, 1941. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Source: LSE Library.

One of the many joys of oral history is learning about unexpected topics. Whether recording an interview or discovering another interviewer’s work, oral history - and especially life story recordings - is full of information that we would not suspect if we were to only read the catalogue records and summaries.

In the last few months, I have worked on three collections of interview cassettes that were preserved by the Unlocking Our Sound Heritage project. These are An Oral History of British Horticulture (British Library ref. C1029), An Oral History of the Post Office (C1007) and the Hall-Carpenter Oral History Archive (C456). Most of the interviews are several hours long, sometimes up to 13 hours. Unsurprisingly, they cover much more than the topics of horticulture, the Post Office, or gay and lesbian experience in the United Kingdom. Some of the transversal themes are fascinating to observe, and one of them is women’s work in the mid-20th century, across social classes and geographical areas.

A large part of my work as an UOSH Rights Officer is to review newly digitised and catalogued sound recordings before deciding whether they are suitable for online open access. When it comes to oral history recordings, conducting a sensitivity review requires paying attention to the interviewee’s family members, key life events and relationships. Each time, I am reminded of the wealth of sociological and historical information that is usually captured in the first hour of most interviews, which often depicts the origins of two parents and four grandparents, as well as their occupations and roles inside and outside the home.

Listening to these recordings shines a light on the power of sound archives, and on the limits of their written description. The four extracts below show the importance of diving into the audio version of any interview, to go beyond the misleading categories that are inevitably created by cataloguing and summarising. This includes the simplistic, and often wrong, category of 'housewife' used to describe an interviewee’s mother. Often the interview summary also hides the many paid and unpaid occupations that many women had in the 20th century. These jobs are revealed when oral history narrators talk about their mothers, aunts, grandmothers and themselves. Although my selection is only of female narrators, the shift in women’s and men’s roles is also described through these personal accounts, as can be heard in the last extract.

My selection starts with Pamela Schwerdt, who was co-interviewed for the Oral History of British Horticulture project in 2002. She was born in Esher, Surrey in 1931. Her father was a naval officer and her mother’s occupation is described as 'none given' in our catalogue. Yet, the first part of the interview unveils a busy trio of women who, between themselves, set up and chaired for a century the National Wildlife Society. Its success culminated in Pamela’s mother receiving a CBE in 1986 for her work as President of this Society.

In this clip Pamela talks about the three Presidents of the National Wildlife Society. The British Library ref. is C1029/08.

Listen to Pamela Schwerdt

Download Pamela Schwerdt transcript

In the same oral history collection dedicated to horticulture, Peggy Cole described in 2003 the many paid jobs that her mother had in the 1940s and 1950s. Despite being catalogued as a 'housewife', her mother worked as a hospital cleaner, a woodcutter and fruit picker. In this extract, Peggy, who was born in 1935, recounts how her mother worked after the birth of her last son in 1950 as one of a hundred other female seasonal workers near Easton, Suffolk. The British Library ref. is C1029/11.

Listen to Peggy Cole

Download Peggy Cole transcript

In the third extract, we hear about Gladys Hillier who worked as one of the few postwomen in the 1940s in Gloucester, where she was born in 1917. In the interview that she gave in 2002 as part of the Oral History of the Post Office project, she described how she went from working in an aircraft factory during World War II, to delivering the mail in 1947 until her retirement in 1982. The British Library ref. is c1007/57.

Listen to Gladys Hillier

Download Gladys Hillier transcript

Women’s new paid professional activities during World War 2 are discussed in our fourth interview. Jackie Forster, who was born in 1926 in London, reflected on the impact this social change had within her own family. In an interview for the Hall-Carpenter Oral History Archive, she explained how her mother worked as an ambulance driver during the war and started making money in the Stock Exchange to support her two children. Jackie’s mother became the breadwinner after her husband, who was an army doctor posted in India, was declared missing in 1939. In this extract, Jackie describes the new family roles and dynamic, and how these had to be accepted by her father, who eventually returned to England in 1945. The British Library ref. is C456/87.

Listen to Jackie Forster

Download Jackie Forster transcript