Emily Hewitt & Beth Thomas- Wales Regional Advisors
Since retiring from Amgueddfa Cymru/National Museum Wales, Beth’s OHS activities have mainly focussed on redeveloping and growing the Society’s website. Over the past year, direct enquiries to her as Regional Advisor have been few and much of the training for Welsh projects covered by Julia Letts, Regional Advisor for the West Midlands. As a result, it has been difficult to maintain awareness of current oral history activity in Wales. Welsh Government cuts to Amgueddfa Cymru/National Museum Wales, resulting in the loss of sound archive staff have been a matter of concern, but it has been encouraging to hear that Amgueddfa Cymru have recently appointed a Curator of Oral History, Grace Todd.
Amgueddfa Cymru has also been involved with a Wales-wide oral history project by the Chinese in Wales Association, who have been awarded a £100,000 National Lottery Heritage Fund grant. The testimonies of multi-generational ethnic Chinese individuals and those with mixed heritage will be collected along with photographs of interesting items and documents. The materials collected will be archived by Amgueddfa Cymru and made accessible via People’s Collection Wales.
Archivists at the Richard Burton Archives worked with colleagues in the Academy of Inclusivity at Swansea University on two projects (Bridging Cultures and Reclaiming Narratives) in 2023/2024, which explored the experiences of international students at Swansea. The projects have included a combination of workshops and exhibitions, utilising archival material found in the University archive collections and oral history interviews with international students. The interviews explore themes such as food, early life and childhood, friendship, language and home, and have been added to the collections at the Richard Burton Archives for long term preservation. With the help of funding from Swansea University Libraries and a grant from Archives and Records Council Wales Audience Development Campaign, Archives staff were able to purchase an audio kiosk to present the stories from the oral history interviews, as well as a selection of interviews from Swansea University’s centenary project, Voices of Swansea University, 1920-2020.
To mark the 40th anniversary of the 1984/85 Miners’ Strike, extracts from a selection of oral history interviews held at the South Wales Miners Library in Swansea were featured in a number of television documentaries about the Strike. These included Striking with Pride: United at the Coalface (Story Films/Sky TV) and Strike! The Women Who Fought Back (Frank Films/BBC) which won 2 awards at BAFTA Cymru in October 2024.
Since 2023 Emily has been providing archival support to PhD student Katherine Watson, who, as part of her research, conducted An Oral History of the Fishing Industry in South Wales. This project includes 8 interviews with individuals who are or have been involved with the fishing and seafood industries. The aim of the project was to record and capture the views, experiences and recollections of those who have worked within these industries, and to explore sustainability and equitable uses of fishing heritage. The recordings have now been deposited with the Richard Burton Archives, and it is planned for them to be made available to public access on completion of Katherine’s PhD viva in c.2026.
In September 2024, Emily was invited to speak at UCL about oral history in Higher Education Archives at the ‘Oral Histories of Institutions and Communities’ workshop, part of the project Generation UCL: 200 years of student life in London.
