L A N O I Life T A N stories Review and Accounts 2010/2011 National Life Stories When many people think about history, they think about two decades it has initiated a series of innovative interviewing books and documents, castles or stately homes. In fact history programmes funded almost entirely from sponsorship, is all around us, in our own families and communities, in the charitable and individual donations and voluntary effort. living memories and experiences of older people. Everyone has a story to tell about their life which is unique to them. Whilst Each collection comprises recorded in-depth interviews of a high some people have been involved in momentous historical standard, plus content summaries and transcripts to assist users. events, regardless of age or importance we all have interesting Access is provided via the Sound Archive Catalogue at life stories to share. Unfortunately, because memories die www.cadensa.bl.uk and a growing number of interviews when people do, if we don’t record what people tell us, that are available for remote web use. Each individual life story history can be lost forever. interview is several hours long, covering family background, childhood, education, work, leisure and later life. National Life Stories was established in 1987 to ‘record first- hand experiences of as wide a cross section of present day Alongside the British Library’s other oral history holdings, society as possible’. As an independent charitable trust within which stretch back to the beginning of the twentieth century, the Oral History Section of the British Library, NLS’s key focus NLS’s recordings form a unique and invaluable record of and expertise has been oral history fieldwork. For more than people’s lives in Britain today. PRESIDENT SENIOR ACADEMIC Dr Paul Merchant TRUSTEES Lord Asa Briggs CONSULTANT (An Oral History Bob Boas Dr Tilly Blyth of British Science ) Sir John Craven PAST CHAIRMAN (An Oral History Sarah O’Reilly Roger Gavin Martyn Goff CBE of British Science ) (Authors’ Lives ) Sir Nicholas Goodison FOUNDER to December 2010 Dr Elizabeth Wright Penelope Lively OBE Professor Paul Thompson Dr Sally Horrocks (Crafts Lives ) Dr Robert Perks (An Oral History of British Prof Dorothy Sheridan MBE CHAIRMAN FREELANCE ORAL Science ) from April 2011 Sir Harry Solomon Sir Nicholas Goodison HISTORY INTERVIEWERS Professor Paul Thompson TRANSCRIBERS Martin Barnes DIRECTOR Caroline Waldegrave OBE Susan Hutton (Oral History of British Dr Robert Perks David Webster Susan Nicholls Photography ) Jennifer Wingate DEPUTY DIRECTOR Business Friend Louise Brodie Mary Stewart (Pioneers in Charity NLS ADVISORS VOLUNTEERS and Social Welfare ) Eric de Bellaigue ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR Claire Fons Rachel Cutler Lord Bragg Jennifer Wingate Sophie Ladkin (Oral History Professor Mary Chamberlain Bethany Lamont TREASURER of British Athletics ) Sir Roger Gibbs Audrie Mundy Bob Boas Professor Mel Gooding Dr Mark Girouard PROJECT DIRECTOR PROJECT INTERVIEWERS (Artists’ Lives ) Martyn Goff CBE Cathy Courtney Frances Cornford Victoria Lane Dundas Hamilton CBE (Artists’ Lives, Architects’ (Crafts Lives ) (Artists’ Lives ) Professor Leslie Hannah Lives, Chefs, Legacy of the Dr Harriet Devine Shirley Read Dame Jennifer Jenkins English Stage Company) (Legacy of the English (Oral History of Sharon Johnson Stage Company ) British Photography ) Lord Rees of Ludlow OM SCIENCE PROJECT Niamh Dillon Jenny Simmons Jonathan Taylor CBE CO-DIRECTOR (Architects’ Lives, Chefs ) (Artists’ Lives ) Bill Williams Dr Katrina Dean Dr Alison Gilmour Paula Thompson (British Library) (Oral History of (Legal Lives ) to January 2011 the Water Industry ) Robert Wilkinson CATALOGUER Dr Katharine Haydon (An Oral History Dr Alex King (An Oral History of Barings ) of Oral History ) Dr Thomas Lean Dr Jon Wood ARCHIVE ASSISTANT (An Oral History (Artists’ Lives ) Elspeth Millar of British Science ) Chairman’s Foreword y r a r b i L h s i t i r B , r e n r a W r e t e P Our Oral History of British Science programme self-evidently Our active projects have continued to make good progress. analyses technological change, but we have been using life We completed seventy-nine new interviews in 2010, bringing stories to document technological transformations in other our total recordings to 2241. Over the coming year we will areas too. Our interviews for An Oral History of Barings , for be scoping another new area of technological change – the example, have shown the impact of the arrival of computers electricity supply industry – the latest of our projects on the on business and finance, long before the ‘Big Bang’ that utilities, which we expect to launch in 2012. And we continue transformed the City of London. Recordings in the water to work hard to secure the funding which we need to start industry are charting the impact which post-war technological our final two science strands relating to biomedicine and developments such as auto-analysers brought to the testing cosmology, together with a newly-scoped programme about of water quality. Artists’ Lives interviewee Harold Cohen the development of ‘talking therapies’ in post-war Britain. spoke about using computers as early as the 1960s to generate his work. In the Authors’ Lives recordings some I would like to thank all our trustees, staff and volunteers who writers have talked about the effect of moving from the have worked so hard to make the past year such a success; typewriter to the word-processor, others preferring to hang and our donors and funders for making it all possible. onto their pens and pencils. It is the speed of these transformations that life stories can track: their excitement and their human dimension. In the 1960s seismic refraction scientists using sonobuoys in the Red Sea to study the composition of ocean floors as part Sir Nicholas Goodison of developing theories about ‘sea-floor spreading’, used Chairman of Trustees eighteenth century technology – the sextant – to plot their location. In a few short decades Global Positioning System (GPS) became available on mobile phones locating us to within an accuracy of a few metres anywhere on the earth’s surface. When National Life Stories began its work people travelled to London to listen to our analogue cassette recordings. Now anyone anywhere in the world can listen to and read, and increasingly comment on, many of our life story interviews via the internet. 1 Review of 2010 Rob Perks Director of National Life Stories Collections and projects uncompressed audio. It has produced impressive results: on location in Birmingham with Ray Bird and the ‘HEC1’ computer Our major new programme An Oral History of British Science which he developed in the 1950s (on which Tom reflects later in was successfully launched with a well-attended event in the this Review); and at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, British Library’s conference centre and excellent media coverage. where Joe Farman explained the workings of the Dobson At the end of 2010 thirty-seven interviews had been completed, spectrometer used to measure ozone in the Antarctic which led of which sixteen are now online ( http://sounds.bl.uk/ ) in to his discovery of the ‘hole’ in the ozone layer. We also filmed their entirety including: zoologist Robert Hinde; soil scientist electrical engineer Melvyn Mason talking about seismic refraction David Jenkinson; Desmond King-Hele, pioneer of satellite using sonobuoys in the 1960s to chart the composition of ocean orbit analysis at the Royal Aircraft Establishment; glaciologist floors as part of developing theories about ‘sea-floor spreading’ Charles Swithinbank; computer pioneers Geoff Tootill and (which audio interviews with Fred Vine, Dan McKenzie and Sir Tony Brooker; and Janet Thomson, the first woman to be Anthony Laughton explored in depth). Our careful selection of permitted to join a British Antarctic Survey research party. relevant artefacts and locations for filming has added significantly to the longer audio life story recordings which remain at the core Made in Britain interviewer Tom Lean initially focussed on of the project. We aim to add video clips to the programme computer pioneers and managed a short interview with Sir website alongside full access to the audio interviews and Maurice Wilkes shortly before his death at the age of ninety- transcripts, together with links to related materials and collections seven. He has also recorded software entrepreneur Dame held elsewhere. So far funding remains elusive for the remaining Stephanie ‘Steve’ Shirley, Andy Hopper, Dai Edwards and early two science strands, Cosmologies and Biomedicine . programmers Mary Coombs and Frank Land who worked on the Lyons tea shops’ LEO computers. More recently he has Cathy Courtney compiled moved on to rocketry and aeronautical engineering: Bob a double CD publication, Parkinson, John Scott-Scott and Roy Dommett have talked Connecting Lines: Artists Talk about Britain’s little-known space and rocket programmes, n About Drawing , funded by the i t r Roy Gibson about his time as the first Director of the European a Rootstein Hopkins Foundation M g i Space Agency. Closer to earth, Ralph Hooper’s work led to the a and using extracts from the r C l Harrier jump jet, Sir John Charnley’s interview covers his work e over three hundred recordings a h c flight testing Britain’s first jet aircraft, and Ray Wheeler i from Artists’ Lives . We have discussed the development of the hovercraft. M distributed 6,500 copies to art schools and colleges, and to the libraries of higher education Paul Merchant, the interviewer for A Changing Planet , is institutions running related courses across the UK. Copies also capturing stories of key developments in the ‘Earth Sciences’ went to delegates at the Oral History Society’s annual including the influence of physics on glaciology (Charles conference at the Victoria & Albert Museum in July, ‘Record Swithinbank, John Nye, John Glen), the formulation of the Create: Oral History in Arts, Crafts and Design’.