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The Linguistic Mapping of the UK for Broadcast Purposes
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5.2 The Linguistic Mapping of the UK for Broadcast PurposesHaving noted this precedent of a project supported by the American Library of Congress, we can state that the contemporary involvement of libraries, archives, universities and museums (what we can term ‘the heritage and education sectors’, for the sake of convenience) in both oral history and radio broadcasting in the UK is a rich and under-researched field. This chapter will attempt to offer some indications of avenues for future research in this area. Before presenting some examples of the involvement of the heritage and education sectors with community radio, however, it may prove useful to focus briefly on the exemplary role the BBC has often played in the collection of dialect, folklore and folk song, often in collaboration with university groups and archives. The recent BBC Voices project was the biggest-ever survey of recorded linguistic fieldwork in the UK, which culminated in a week of broadcasting in August 2005 across all the BBC’s local and national radio stations. The project set out to capture how we speak today by encouraging contributors (1,312 people) to talk about the languages, words and accents they use, their styles of talk and their attitudes to language (see Linfoot 2006). Also in 2005, the MMB recordings were brought together with recordings from the Survey of English Dialects (SED), as part of a web resource called Collect Britain, designed to make the British Library’s collections accessible to a broader set of public users than it usually reaches (Perks 2005). These recordings currently form part of the educational web resources Archival Sound Recordings164 and Sounds Familiar165. The SED was carried about between 1950 and 1961 under the direction of Professor Harold Orton at the University of Leeds to create a kind of ‘linguistic atlas’ of Great Britain. Interviews were conducted with dialect speakers at a total of 313 locations by fieldworkers using a sophisticated questionnaire methodology, to capture examples of vernacular speech for later analysis. Although this was ostensibly a written survey utilizing phonetic transcription, sound recordings were made with informants from 1952 onwards. Speakers were encouraged to use their most natural form of speech and the sound-based interviews were unscripted and unrehearsed. 304 recordings were made which were then edited and dubbed to gramophone discs, and later digitised for pubic access at the British Library Sound Archive. They cover a myriad of topics, typically associated with the speaker’s occupation, for example, ploughing, harvesting, hedging, pig-killing or breadmaking (Perks 2005: 82). As Perks notes, although the recordings made for the SED were intended to aid the analysis and interpretation of written data and hence were recordings of only about ten minutes length; “They are a rich resource of social history from a period when very few such recordings with ‘ordinary’ people were recorded, and still fewer archived” (ibid, p.82). The pairing of the MMB and SED collections demonstrates the value of oral history collections for the study of dialect and vice-versa, re-establishing important links between oral history, linguistics and folklore. Many of the social historians who pioneered oral history methodology benefited from a cross-fertilisation of ideas with folklorists and linguists. For example, one of the founders of the modern oral history movement in Britain, George Ewart Evans, pursued an interest in the ‘Chaucerian’ speech patterns of East-Anglian villagers, and in some ways felt more comfortable with the ‘tag’ of folklorist than oral historian. Evans made many BBC radio features about rural life and folkways in collaboration with David Thomson, and, in fact, it was with a tape-recorder on loan from the BBC station in Norwich that Evans made his first recordings: The Midget had its own battery-power, which was very important thirty years ago as mains electricity was far from being supplied in all the villages. Yet just as important for me as the recording apparatus that the BBC lent me was the opportunity it gave to get the recorded material on air (Evans 1987: 141). It can be noted that the BBC has long played a significant role in this area, having made field recordings of English folklore and folksong since at least 1935 (Gregory 1999/2000). The idea of the inter-relation between oral history, oral tradition, folklore, folk song and dialect in a continuum of vernacular culture was reinforced by the BBC’s collection of all these manifestations of as material for archival preservation and broadcast. This fact and the role of the BBC and its sound archive in shaping both oral history and archival practice in Britain are often overlooked. In this respect the BBC (which began to build up its sound archive in the early 1930s) has played a pioneering role, especially as the collection of oral history material by other large and centralised archives in the UK, such as the Imperial War Museum and the British Library’s National Sound Archive, have been relatively recent developments (of the 1970s and 1980s), whilst federal and state archives in Canada, Australia and the United States have been collecting oral history material as part of their regular programmes since the 1950s (see Thompson 1988; see Mazé 2006). The BBC Departments responsible for Sound Archives and Radio Features had always considered the recording and preservation of dialect, folklore and folk music as an important part of their remit. Between 1952 and 1957 the BBC conducted its Folk Music and Dialect Recording Scheme, initially proposed by Brian George and administered by Marie Slocombe, respectively Director and Librarian of the Recorded Programmes Permanent Library (later to be renamed the Sound Archive). Slocombe not only pioneered the preservation of important BBC programme materials but also successfully advocated and pursued an active collection policy. The resulting scheme was a five-year project to record the fast-disappearing folk songs and vernacular speech of the British Isles as an important archive collection (Slocombe 1964), for which the BBC employed the services of Peter Kennedy (from the English Folk Dance and Song Society) and Seamus Ennis (from the Irish Folklore Commission) as fieldworkers, often in collaboration with BBC feature producers such as W. R. Rodgers and David Thomson. Many of these invaluable recordings were incorporated into the series As I Roved Out, the successor to Country Magazine, which began in 1952 and ran until 1958, and which featured folk songs from the likes of Harry Cox, Fred Jordan, Maggie Barry and Frank McPeake amongst many others.166 The BBC was very quick to recognize the importance of the recording and preservation of folk song, and the Corporation’s activities extended to other fieldwork disciplines. For example, the BBC had planned to broadcast a large-scale survey of English dialect as early as 1939. Ian Cox of the BBC Talks Department corresponded with Harold Orton, then working at the University of Durham, about plans for a 10-part series called The Voice of the People, to be broadcast in October and November of that year.167 This series was to be co-ordinated across the BBC Regional stations, as The Century Speaks would be sixty years later with the BBC Local Radio stations. A programme on each dialect ‘region’ was to be presented by a ‘sympathetic expert’, and recorded examples were to be used as short illustrations in the talks. Recordings were to have been made (with the BBC’s recording van) of speakers selected by each BBC Region, speaking both scripted and unscripted ‘dialogue’. The series clearly showed promise, not least because several of the Regional Programme Directors clearly possessed a keen interest and even expertise in the dialects of their region.168 Unfortunately the advent of the Second World War made the production of the series logistically impossible, but this was not the first of Orton’s associations with the BBC (he had been appointed to the BBC’s Advisory Committee on Spoken English, discussed in Chapter 1.4) and it would not be the last.169
This was a period in which the preservation of folklore was recognized by the first Fianna Fáil government as part of the ‘Gaelicization’ policy of the new state, and the schools project was intended to play a role in “rescuing from oblivion the traditions…of the historic Irish nation” (Egan 2004). The original project encouraged children to scribe stories, songs and curses from their elderly relations and family friends, which were then sent to the Folklore Commission. The sixteen schools that took part in Young Heads, Old Shoulders were presented with photocopies of the seventy year-old material, and workshops were held with the schoolchildren, volunteers from the radio station, and with the people from the local community who had participated in the original project when they themselves had been schoolchildren. It was left to each school to determine how their workshop would proceed – some involved inter-generational question and answer sessions, some organized concerts, and some incorporated 21st century examples of folklore collection. These workshops were recorded, and a team of volunteers, including volunteers drawn from the catchment areas of the schools, worked to produce a series of 16 radio programmes based on the workshop recordings. The final editing of the resultant programmes was co-ordinated by a station staff-member, and the series was then broadcast on the community radio station West Limerick 102 (CRAOL 2007). Wythenshawe FM in South Manchester broadcast a series of five one-hour shows in 2005 to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the end of World War 2, all of which were based on the reminiscences of local residents and veterans. The project, which was funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund’s Home Front Recall programme, began with the interviewing of over 200 residents of Wythenshawe on their experiences of WW2. Some of the interviews were used as inspiration for a play, A Film in Our Own Backyard, written by local writer Jane Barnes. This play was performed by professional actors, and toured around ten Wythenshawe primary schools. Then, after the tour of the play, the schools were revisited, and the children were taught interview techniques with which to interview their families to collect experiences and memories of WW2. Finally, the last programme was based around interviews with local residents, academics and experts, on the subject of what would have happened if the Nazis had won the war. All this material (actuality, radio drama and interviews) was edited together with music from the period to form the five one-hour shows, which were broadcast as part of a WW2 week in August and November 2005 (Brennan and Barnes 2005). Two Lochs Radio, based in Gairloch on the West coast of Scotland, has been conducting oral histories in Gaelic and in English to gather memories pertaining to that area, and has interviewed many people who were resident in the Loch Ewe area during the Second World War (Loch Ewe was one of the most important naval bases in the war). These particular interviewees include people who were on active service in the area, or who sailed on the Russian convoys, and local residents, most of whom were children at the time. One oral history interview was recorded with an American who survived a disastrous shipwreck at the mouth of Loch Ewe in 1944. Two Lochs Radio has also initiated a project to record interviews with west coast fishermen about their lives, and has broadcast oral histories recorded by the local heritage museum in the 1980s and 1990s. These recordings are generally of poor technical quality, but modern methods have been used to ‘clean up’ some of the recordings, which have then been included in new radio programmes. Two Lochs Radio is licensed as a commercial Independent Local Radio (ILR) station (see below), but, uniquely, it is operated as a not-for-profit company serving the community, and is the smallest ILR station in the UK (Gray 2007). Download 1.05 Mb. Share with your friends:
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