personal and social history

Revealing Histories: North Staffordshire

Revealing Histories: North Staffordshire

Greatbear are delighted to be working with the Potteries Heritage Society to digitise a unique collection of tape recordings made in the 1970s and 80s by radio producer, jazz musician and canals enthusiast Arthur Wood, who died in 2005.

The project, funded by a £51,300 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), will digitise and make available hundreds of archive recordings that tell the people’s history of the North Staffordshire area. There will be a series of events based on the recordings, culminating in an exhibition in 2018.

The recordings were originally made for broadcast on BBC Radio Stoke, where Arthur Wood was education producer in the 1970s and 80s. They feature local history, oral history, schools broadcasts, programmes on industrial heritage, canals, railways, dialect, and many other topics of local interest.

There are spontaneous memoirs and voxpop interviews as well as full-blown scripted programmes such as the ‘Ranter Preachers of Biddulph Moor’ and ‘The “D”-Day of 3 Men of the Potteries’ and ‘Millicent: Lady of Compassion’, a programme about 19th century social reformer Millicent, Duchess of Sutherland.

Arthur Wood: Educational Visionary

In an obituary published in The Guardian, David Harding described Wood as ‘a visionary. He believed radio belonged to the audience, and that people could use it to find their own voice and record their history. He taught recording and editing to many of his contributors – miners, canal, steel and rail workers, potters, children, artists, historians and storytellers alike.’

The tapes Greatbear will be digitising reflect what Wood managed to retain from his career at the BBC.

Before BBC Radio Stoke moved premises in 2002, Wood picked up as many tapes as he could and stored them away. His plan was to transfer them to a more future proof format (which at the time was mini disc!) but was sadly unable to do this before he passed away.

‘About 2 years ago’ Arthur’s daughter Jane explains, ‘I thought I’d go and have a look at what we actually had. I was surprised there were quite so many tapes (about 700 in all), and that they weren’t mainly schools programmes, as I had expected.

I listened to a few of them on our old Revox open reel tape machine, and soon realised that a lot of the material should be in the city (and possibly national) archives, where people could hear it, not in a private loft. The rest of the family agreed, so I set about researching how to find funding for it.’

50th anniversary of BBC Local Radio

The Revealing Voices project coincides with an important cultural milestone: the 50th anniversary of BBC local radio. Between 1967 and 1968 the BBC was granted license to set up a number of local radio stations in Durham, Sheffield, Brighton, Leicester, Merseyside, Nottingham, Leeds and Stoke-on-Trent.

Education was central to how the social role of local radio was imagined at the time:

‘Education has been a major preoccupation of BBC Local Radio from the outset. Indeed, in one sense, the entire social purpose of local radio, as conceived by the BBC, may be described as educational. As it is a central concern of every civilised community, so too must any agency serving the aims of such a community treat it as an area of human activity demanding special regard and support. It has been so with us. Every one of our stations has an educationist on its production staff and allocates air-time for local educational purposes’ (Education and BBC Local Radio: A Combined Operation by Hal Bethell, 1972, 3).

Within his role as education producer Wood had a remit to produce education programmes in the broadest sense – for local schools, and also for the general local audience. Arthur ‘was essentially a teacher and an enthusiast, and he sought to share local knowledge and stimulate reflective interest in the local culture mainly by creating engaging programmes with carefully chosen contributors,’ Jane reflected.

Revealing Voices and Connecting Histories

Listening to old recordings of speech, like gazing at old photograph, can be very arresting. Sound recordings often contain an ‘element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me’, akin to Roland Barthes might have called a sonic punctum.

The potency of recorded speech, especially in analogue form, arises from its indexicality—or what we might call ‘presence’. This ‘presence’ is accentuated by sound’s relational qualities, the fact that the person speaking was undeniably there in time, but when played back is heard but also felt here.

When Jane dropped off the tapes in the Greatbear studio she talked of the immediate impact of listening again to her father’s tape collection. The first tape she played back was a recording of a woman born in 1879, recalling, among other things, attending a bonfire to celebrate Queen Victoria’s jubilee.

Hearing the voice gave her a distinct sense of being connected to a woman’s life across three different centuries. This profound and unique experience was made possible by the recordings her father captured in the 1970s, unwinding slowly on magnetic tape.

The Revealing Voices project hope that other people, across north Staffordshire and beyond, will have a similar experiences of recognition and connection when they listen to the transferred tapes. It would be a fitting tribute to Arthur Wood’s life-work, who, Jane reflects, would be ‘glad that a solution has been found to preserve the tapes so that future generations can enjoy them.’

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If you live in the North Staffordshire area and want to volunteer on the Revealing Voices project please contact Andy Perkin, Project Officer, on andy at revealing-voices dot org dot uk.

Many thanks to Jane Wood for her feedback and support during research for this article.

Posted by debra in audio / video heritage, audio tape, 1 comment

Digitising & Restoring Personal Archives – 1/4 inch reel to reel audio tape

In today’s digital society most people have an archive. On personal computers, tablets and mobile devices we store, create and share vast amounts of information. We use archives to tell others about our lives, and the things that are important to us.

Gone are the days when archives were dusty, dark places where experts went to research esoteric knowledge. Archives are everywhere. They are dynamic, digital and personal, as well as being institutional, historical, corporate and civic.

The creation of personal archives is of course nothing new, but the digital age forces us to have a far more intimate relationship with information, and its organisation. Put simply, there is loads more information, and if it isn’t collected in a systematic way you may well drown in a sea of your own, not to mention everybody else’s, data. Maybe this is happening to you right now! If so, you need to embrace the archival moment and get your own collections in shape.

Part of this everyday information management is migrating archives stored on obsolete formats, such as the many different types of analogue and digital magnetic tape we work with at Greatbear. Digitising tape gives it new life, allowing it to be easily circulated, shared and used with today’s technologies.

A significant amount of the Greatbear’s work involves digitising the diverse collections people produce in their everyday working, creative and social lives.

Here are two recent digitisation projects which are a good example of our work.

Swansea Sound 1976

We were sent a number of ¼ inch reel to reel Scotch 3M tape ‘made for the BBC’ tape, recorded at the rate of 7 ½ inches per second from local radio station Swansea Sound in 1976. The tapes were all in good condition, although the boxes had some evidence of water damage. Over time the tension in the tape pack had also changed, so they required careful re-spooling before being played.

The recordings were fascinating to digitise because they communicated how little the format of radio programmes have changed since the late 1970s. Jingles, news reports, chat and music were all part of the show, and anyone familiar with BBC Radio 2 would certainly enjoy the recordings, that still seem to be played every Saturday morning!

Brian Pimm-Smith’s recording diaries and tape letters

A collection of Brian’s 1/4 inch tapes

Another collection was sent to us from Brian Pimm-Smith. Brian enthusiastically documented his life and work activities using a Uher open reel portable tape recorder which he acquired in 1963.  The box included many ¼ inch tapes that could record up to 10 minutes at 3 and ¾ inches per second. These tapes could also record up to 4 mono tracks at 10 minutes each, allowing for storage of up to forty minutes at a time. The main bulk of the collection is a series of spoken letters sent to and from Pimm-Smith and his family, who between them lived in Britain, Pakistan, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Japan and Saudi-Arabia, but it also includes recordings of when Brian worked taking weather measurements for the British Antarctic Survey.

Some of the 1/4 inch tapes were marketed by companies such as Scotch and EMI specifically to be used as ‘voice letters’ that ‘links absent friends’. Despite this Pimm-Smith said that making such recordings was pretty rare, something ‘quite out there’ for most people. Brian’s mother nonetheless embraced the activity, as they shared correspondence back and forth between wherever they lived at the time.

Voice Letters

The 1/4 inch tape boxes in themselves are a colourful record of international postage in the late 1960s. Sent from Pakistan, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Saudi Arabia, Australia and Japan, the small boxes are plastered with stamps. The boxes were reinforced with sellotape to ensure the contents didn’t fall out (which is still stuck fast to the boxes, by the way, clearly demonstrating the surprising longevity of some forms of sticky tape). Pimm-Smith’s tapes are fascinating objects in themselves that bear the marks of travel through space in the form of postal stamp marks, and time, as they sit on the desk now in the Greatbear Studio.

Perhaps the most exciting and unique recording Brian has kept is the audio diary of his trip through the Sahara desert. For the trip Brian drove an early 70s Range Rover which had a cassette player-recorder, a technological device only available in Africa which used audio cassette tapes. This enabled him to document his impressions as he drove along. Brian describes how he had taken a portable typewriter with the intention of keeping a written diary, but he used the tape recorder because it was more ‘immediate.’ On hearing the digitised tapes Brian was amazed at how clear the recordings sound today, particularly because he was driving at the same time and there was likely to be background noise. You can hear the hum of the car engine in the extract below, but the voice is still clearly very audible.

http://thegreatbear.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/blog-example-cassette-tape-1.mp3

Listen to Brian talk about problems with his tyre as he drove across the Sahara Desert in 1976

The stories Swansea Sound radio and Pimm-Smith’s collection tell are part of wider social histories. They tell us about communities and places, as well as the continuities of style in broadcast radio. They tell us how people used analogue tape recordings to document personal adventures and communicate with families who lived in different countries.

Both tapes are examples of the sheer diversity of personal, magnetic tape based archives that people have been keeping for years, and which we digitise at the Greatbear. Brian Pimm-Smith contacted Greatbear because he wanted to make his tapes accessible, and preserve them for future use. He is hoping one day to write a book from his many adventures and these recordings can now remind him not only of what he did, but how he felt in the moment he made them.

Posted by debra in audio tape, 20 comments

Nakamichi 680 Discrete Head Cassette Deck and Music & Liberation

In 2012 Greatbear digitised a selection of audio and audio-visual tape for the Heritage Lottery Funded exhibition, Music & Liberation.

The first job was to migrate a short film by a feminist film making collective called Women in Moving Pictures who were based in Bristol in the early 1980s. The film shows how the Bristol Women’s Music Collective were using feminism to politicise music making and includes footage music workshops, group performances interspersed with self-defence classes and intimate conversations.

Film still from ‘In Our Own Time’

Several copies of the film had been stored in the Feminist Archive South, including the master copies. Out of curiosity the U-matic copy was initially digitised, before the original was migrated to high definition digital format.

Film Still from ‘In Our Own Time’

Another job digitsed a series of rare recordings on tape, donated by Maggie Nicols. This included rare footage of the pioneering Feminist Improvising Group, whose members included Sally Potter, Georgina Born and Lindsay Cooper. One of the tapes was originally recorded at half speed, a technique used to get more recording time. We used the Nakamichi 680 Discrete Head Cassette Deck to play back the tapes at the correct speed to ensure the highest quality transfer.

We also digitised a series of tapes from the open improvisation collective Maggie co-founded in 1980, Contradictions. This included the performance ‘Madness in a Circle’ and many other creative experiments.

Music & Liberation re-opens at Space Station Sixty-Five in London for the last four days of its UK-wide tour on 10 January, so if you want to listen to the music or watch the films make sure you catch it.

 

Posted by greatbear in audio tape, video tape, 0 comments

Richard Lewis’ Tapes

At Greatbear we work on a range of digitising projects from national collections to personal one-offs. Today we received a ¼ inch open reel polyester and acetate based tape from Carmarthen based teacher Richard Lewis. The tapes are a good example of the types of personal material we are entrusted to digitise. The tapes are rare and valuable recordings of a choir performance in Hereford Cathedral in the mid-1960s.

Richard sang in Hereford Cathedral Choir from when he was 10-14 as a soprano and his father, Albert Lewis, played the church organ. Richard thinks there may be recordings of his Great Aunt on the tape, but isn’t sure because he hasn’t been able to listen to it for years. He says ‘he is fascinated to know to what is on the tape’ and is looking forward to hearing the digitised results.

 

Posted by greatbear in audio tape, 0 comments