Ieuan franklin

5.6 Connecting Histories

The application of oral testimonies in community radio programme production can be seen as particularly appropriate, given that community radio stations naturally have an obligation to produce programming of local interest and relevance to their community. Oral history volunteers active in their locality may find that their local station is enthusiastic about developing programmes that beam a community’s history back into that community (Dunaway 1984). Oral historians are no longer solely concerned with the archival preservation of recordings for popular publishing or academic research, but are instead increasingly focussing on how they can be incorporated into exhibitions, Internet resources, and broadcasting. Oral history when broadcast may act a stimulus for dialogue and further participation, raising awareness of cultural heritage and promoting regeneration by enabling a community to speak to itself as well as for itself and about itself. Community radio may thus represent the most appropriate and cost-productive forum for the dissemination of recorded oral history today. Community radio stations can benefit greatly from their initiation of or collaboration in local oral history projects - their small scale, geographically diffuse nature and integration within social networks can facilitate teamwork with heritage sector workers, educationalists, artists, oral historians and local history groups, cultural organizations, and academics.

Such a model of collaboration can be found in Connecting Histories, a recent ‘partnership project’ involving Birmingham City Archives, the Universities of Birmingham and Warwick and the “Black Pasts, Birmingham Futures” group, which began in February 2005 and ended in July 2007. It aimed to uncover and explore the diverse historical experiences of ethnic communities in the West Midlands in the 20^th century, which have previously remained ‘hidden’ in archival collections, including photographic, paper and sound documents. Like Commonwealth FM, the project’s aim has been to open up access to these collections to latter-day communities so that connections can be made between the past and present, thereby promoting debate on shared identity and common heritage,¹⁸⁶ and encouraging the initiation of oral history projects.

One archive that has been made use of in this way in Connecting Histories is the Charles Parker Archive. Charles Parker was a BBC Features Producer for the Midlands Region, and he is best known as co-creator (with Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger) of the renowned Radio Ballads series, as discussed in Chapter 4. A pioneer of radio broadcasting and oral history, he was a passionate believer in the value of the testimony of working people, and the creative importance of the oral tradition. In his work he gave voice to a range of remarkable individuals and social and cultural groups otherwise excluded from the historical record, recording folksingers, Welsh miners, Irish labourers, gypsies, Chinese workers, people with hearing and visual impairment, Asian teenagers, and other minorities, many in the West Midlands area. When he died in 1980, Charles Parker left behind a massive archive of sound recordings, production books, papers and correspondence which was subsequently deposited at Birmingham Central Library, where it is administered by a Trust, and made accessible to a wide variety of researchers.

Schools workshops have also inspired new artistic work by schoolchildren. For example, Connecting Histories learning and outreach officers Nikki Thorpe and Izzy Mohammed initiated the Urban Voices oral history project with Holy Trinity School in the Small Heath district of Birmingham. They worked intensively over several weeks with groups of young people across the school, using oral history to track changes in the local community and in experiences of schooling since the 1950s. Their starting point was a series of interviews Charles Parker made with Charlie Burke (a BBC engineer who was a Birmingham native and dialect speaker). These recordings gave them an understanding of interviewing practice, and allowed them to formulate questions and think about the subjects they wanted to cover in their own oral history recordings. Then they listened to the Radio Ballads On The Edge and The Fight Game (both 1963) as potential models for their own project, which used a range of sources to create a multimedia showcase of music, the spoken word, sound effects and images (Roberts 2008).

As someone who was passionate about education (both as a broadcaster and lecturer) and a pioneer of multimedia theatre (Watt 2003), Parker would undoubtedly have approved of this use of his recorded materials. Given the fact that radio has traditionally been thought of as an ephemeral medium, and hence not preserved, this aspect of the Connecting Histories project indicates several very important precedents. Firstly, it is laudable that Charles Parker left behind so many high-quality recordings of interviews and radio broadcasts for posterity. Secondly, it is laudable that those recordings have been used by Connecting Histories in outreach work, rather than solely existing as an archival collection.

In Chapters 2 we witnessed the liberating effect of the use of the tape recorder in radio broadcasting to free programming from the confines of script and studio. In Chapter 4 we witnessed the way in which tape editing could represent a reinstatement, rather than a relinquishing, of the editorial control represented by scripting. In this chapter we can observe that the way in which Connecting Histories has made use of the original interviews Parker made during the production of the Radio Ballads in this kind of community outreach work represents a ‘second wave’ of liberation. The unmitigated oral history has been digitized, catalogued and brought out of the archive to be engaged with and utilized by the contemporary descendents or equivalents of the cultural minorities that Parker originally recorded (the ‘originating constituency’), obviating the mediation and editorial control of a broadcaster or broadcasting institution.