Chapter 5: Oral History, Local and Community Radio and Social Gain

5.1 The Millennium Memory Bank and The Radio Research Project

In Chapter 4.8 we explored a form of micro-local radio created by producers working for public service broadcasters (the BBC and RTÉ), in which the recorded stories or oral histories of a single street provide an invaluable microcosm of social history. We can now turn to Millennium Memory Bank (MMB), a national project that marshalled the collection of social history at such a local level across Britain to create a survey or ‘snapshot’ of the country at the turn of the century. MMB was a joint collaboration between BBC Local Radio and the British Library National Sound Archive between 1998 and 2000, which involved forty BBC local radio stations across the UK in the gathering of 5429 oral history interviews on Minidisc, which have since been catalogued, archived and digitised by the British Library. This project resulted in one of the largest single oral history collections in Europe, and a unique study of Britain at one particular moment in its history.

At each of the forty stations a full-time oral history producer plus a researcher were appointed, on a nine-month contract between September 1998 and June 1999. Approximately 120-150 interviews were carried out per station, and these were edited into a radio series called The Century Speaks, broadcast by the local stations between 12^th September and 26^th December 1999. The 640 individual half-hours were then repackaged into eight programmes for the national network, and broadcast on Radio 4 during October-November 2000.

As Perks has noted (2001; 2005), there were few historical precedents to draw upon in designing such a project. The New Deal Works Progress Administration (WPA) Federal Writer’s Project of 1938-1942 in the United States was an excellent example of a large-scale national project to collect oral history and folklore. During this period, Federal Writers scribed the oral histories of more than 10,000 men and women from a variety of regions, occupations and ethnic groups (it is worth noting that this has been cited by David Isay as a major influence for his StoryCorps project, see Chapter 4.9). However, Perks notes that this is not an entirely appropriate precedent, as it resulted in a written, rather than an audio collection, and that it took place over a longer time frame than the MMB project. It can also be observed that the Federal Writer’s Project was a work relief program for writers, who were expected to interview knowledgeable members of special and previously undocumented groups, for example, the surviving freed slaves (Abelmann, Davis et al. 2009: 257).

In terms of broadcast-based precedents the only previous comparable radio project in the UK was the BBC’s epic series Long March of Everyman (which we discussed in Chapter 4.6), which was first broadcast in 1971, in which 800 interviews were collected for inclusion in 26 programmes of approximately 45 minutes length each.¹⁶¹ However, the intention was predominantly to record what we might term the ‘characteristic speech’ of the modern-day counterparts of traditional figures – a medieval merchant or a 14^th Century baker, for example. The series made groundbreaking use of ‘non-professionals’ reading material selected from diaries and memoirs, and other historical documents, and attention was given to matching speakers with the class, dialect and geographical location of the original writer. The series therefore took a new approach to the scripting of aural history, in order to reassert the cultural and creative importance of the oral tradition:
This gradual emergence of Everyman’s voice is something which the series must itself enact in its early programmes – and it must also show how the split between elitist poetry and common speech is a feature of later literate society rather than earlier oral tradition (Mason 1971: 684).
A more appropriate American precedent for Millennium Memory Bank can be located in the form of the Library of Congress’ Radio Research Project, which was contemporaneous with the Federal Writer’s Project. Funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Project consisted of a group of fieldworkers headed by Philip Cohen, including Joseph Liss, Charles Harold, Jerome Weisner, and as consultant, the ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax. This group took the Library’s portable recording equipment into the field to gather material for a series of documentary programmes about life in the United States. Programmes of this kind that used people, not actors, had been experimented with by BBC producers like D. G. Bridson and Olive Shapley, but were practically unknown in America (Barnouw 2003: 78). Archibald MacLeish, the Librarian of Congress, who made some memorable and vital contributions to the medium of radio during his lifetime, regarded the project as an invaluable living record of a moment in the country’s history, and as a natural extension of a library’s function (ibid, p. 78).

The Radio Research Project fieldworkers travelled across the United States, recording the unscripted, spontaneous speech of ordinary Americans discussing their problems, singing songs, and telling eloquently the story of their regions, their own experiences, and their folklore. Examples of the work of the Radio Research Project included recordings of farmers, merchants, day labourers, and bankers from the Eastern Shore of Maryland, fortune tellers, weight guessers and burlesque dancers at a travelling Strates carnival near Washington D.C., the inhabitants of an ‘Okie’ migrant labour camp in southern California, and participants at a folk festival in Asheville, North Carolina (Taft and Hoog 2003).

The project’s staff believed that most commercial radio broadcasts at that time were dominated by programming created in the great urban centres, which failed to reflect regional culture, local talent, and people’s stories (Taft and Hoog 2003). On December 8^th 1941, the day following the bombing of Pearl Harbour, Lomax sent a telegram to fieldworkers in ten different localities around the United States, asking them to collect ‘man-on-the-street’ reactions to the bombing of Pearl Harbour and the declaration of war by the United States. This request resulted in approximately four and one half hours of recordings that were used to create a fifteen-minute radio programme for the Mutual Broadcasting System (MBS).¹⁶² On December 11, 1941, field recorder Fletcher Collins, in a letter to Lomax, expressed his support for the man-on-the-street interviews:

You have my profound admiration for having conceived the idea and having spurred me — and no doubt other folklore people — to try it out. It opens up a field which has not before been touched by the radio, and a field of enormous importance to Americans. It heightens their consciousness of themselves as Americans, and it contributes vitally to civilian morale in expressing what the common people of the nation are feeling and thinking, an expression of others than governmental leaders, radio commentators, and newsmen.¹⁶³

As a collection these recordings provide a glimpse of everyday life and social history in America as the nation entered World War II. There was no contradiction between the field-workers’ activities in recording such impromptu testimony and their usual work recording folklore. For the contemporary historian this testimony represents, like folklore, a repository of attitude and opinion, and the survival of the voices of those typically excluded from historical accounts.