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Appendix C The CBC’s Use of Oral History
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Appendix CThe CBC’s Use of Oral HistoryThe CBC can be cited as the pioneer and initiator of oral history in Canada before the term was even coined (by Allan Nevins of Columbia University, in the United States, in 1948), and the CBC’s early efforts towards the preservation of ‘actuality’ recordings accord it the status of the first oral history archive in the country. During the 1930s, Canadian radio broadcasters acquired disc recording equipment to make ‘instantaneous’ recordings of live broadcasts, or to make recordings of talks, speeches and messages to be kept for posterity or used in later broadcasts (LaClare 1975-1976: 3). In 1939, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), as it became known in 1936 (after becoming a Crown corporation), made a major investment in disc recording equipment to cover the Royal visit, and this led to the recording of a wide assortment of events and interviews. Peter Stursberg, recognised as one of the best CBC correspondents of the Second World War, has suggested that the first oral history recordings of ‘the electronic age’ in Canada were the war reports that he and his colleagues recorded (the equivalent of the BBC war reports discussed in Chapter 2.0): The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation provided its war correspondents with the very latest electronic gear, which was a high fidelity disc-recording machine that was portable to the extent that it could be carried around on a jeep. I remember helping Paul Johnson, the CBC engineer, to lug these small trunks to Sicily and up to the front. The equipment had to be run off the jeep’s battery as it had no power source of its own, and the jeep’s engine had to be kept running to provide it with enough charge so that we could capture the sound of battle…it was a sensation to be able to listen to a reporter describing the battle raging thousands of miles away on another continent and to hear the roar of the guns and the crash of the bombs. (Stursberg 1976-1977: 9) These war reports, the “piles of aluminium backed platters which cluttered up the newsroom of the corporation after VE day”, were eventually donated to the Public Archives of Canada, where the full collection was consolidated, which runs to at least 600 hours of audio (Stursberg 1983: 1). In 1959 in Toronto, and in 1961 in Montreal, program archive departments were set up to formally catalogue and preserve tens of thousands of such radio transcription discs that had accumulated in CBC facilities (Dick 1996-1997: 72). The arrival of magnetic tape in the 1950s meant that CBC producers or freelancers could record longer interviews, which could then easily be edited and incorporated into documentary programming, examples of which I will later discuss at length. Yet oral history recordings were also being made expressly to enrich the biographical record of important figures. During the early 1960s, broadcasters like Peter Stursberg and Mac Reynolds began recording interviews on tape for the CBC Archives, at the prompting of Dan McArthur, the chief news editor and Robin Woods, later to become the first CBC archivist. These interviews were not recorded for use in planned programs; intended for use in news broadcasts only after the event of the demise of the person who had been interviewed, they were the posthumous memoirs of the ‘great and the good’ who had played a part in the development of Canada (Stursberg 1983: 1). One of the largest oral history projects ever undertaken by the CBC as a network was In Flanders Fields, a series broadcast from November 11, 1964 to March 7, 1965, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War. Two years in the making, the series consisted of seventeen one-hour episodes, compiled from 482 interviews with war veterans. These interviews, after being used, were sent to the CBC Archives for storage, before being transferred in 1980 (like the war reports of WWII) to the Public Archives of Canada, in recognition of their historical value. These recordings have recently been digitised and incorporated into a web exhibition, Oral Histories of the First World War: Veterans 1914-1918, where these first-hand accounts can be listened to or read via retyped transcripts. The historical value of such recordings is also demonstrated by the popularity of a book called The Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion by Prof. Victor Hoar, published in 1969. This book relied extensively oral history interviews conducted by the CBC of Canadians who had fought as part of the XV International Brigade on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. The interviews, collected by Mac Reynolds for the CBC Program Archives in 1964-65, led to radio programming as well as the above-mentioned book, which is thought to be the first example of a book published from oral history sources in Canada. The CBC has played a significant role in shaping both oral history and archival practice in Canada. Oral historians in the United States have insisted on the transcription of sound recordings, and many consider the transcript to be the equal of the recording as a research document. In Canada, the fact that the CBC has collected untranscribed recordings and deposited them in the Canada’s national archives has helped to reinforce the insistence of oral historians on the primacy of the audio recording, which has, in turn, become Canadian national archival practice (Lochead 1983: 6; see also Mazé 2006). Oral history in Canada has been influenced from the outset by governmental institutions, and this has meant the large and highly centralised Canadian archives have played a significant role in the promotion and proliferation of oral history. The British Library’s National Sound Archive has played an equivalent role in the United Kingdom in recent decades, often in partnership with the BBC, especially in huge nationwide radio projects like the Millennium Memory Bank and Voices, as we saw in Chapter 5. The role of the CBC in gathering oral history has also helped to establish the validity of recording oral history for other than strictly archival or research purposes, and this had led to the notion of ‘total archives’ (Lochead, op. cit.). A major archival component of the current Sound and Moving Image Department of the Provincial Archives in British Columbia, for example, derives from the work of its ‘aural history’ (a term coined by the CBC producer Imbert Orchard) division during the 1960s, which broadened its remit to include broadcast media (such as Orchard’s radio programmes), oral history, soundscape recordings (recorded by the World Soundscape Project) and other historical sound documents within their ‘total archives’ remit. Download 1.05 Mb. Share with your friends:
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