This year was a continuation of the projects started the previous year:
I produced fifteen oral history interviews for the Chelmsford branch of the O5BM (Over 50s Black Men Forum) for an exhibition in June at the Essex Record Office. The interviews highlight their members’ successes. The excerpts can be found here and further information about the group and its goals can be found here.
And in the summer months, Sam Smith and I recruited and ‘onboarded’ ten new Regional Advisers to join the network. I stepped down as joint coordinator in September and Siobhan Stevenson took over with Sam.
This year I ‘mastered’ a new technology for my skill set with the help of a short tutorial from one of our RA colleagues, Julia Letts. I now know how to use an online recording ‘studio’ called Riverside FM and I’ve found this to be invaluable, and it’s enabled me to record narrators remotely excellent sound quality. There is also a feature which creates ‘magic clips’ – automatically generated sound bites – which you can programme with themes for 30 seconds to 3 minutes if you wish. I have also trained up a local oral historian in Riverside and passed the skills on.
Early in the year I was contacted by the team from Midlands and East National Lottery Heritage Fund and asked if I could be their contact to send oral history enquiries to with their applications. So I have definitely noticed an increase in enquiries this year as a result of this new channel of communication. I have had a little over twenty enquiries across the region as part of my RA role and these have been logged on the enquiries database if anyone would like to see them.
In January I met with the Suffolk Record Office (Bridget Hanley) to ask if they would be interested in storing a collection of oral history interviews I would like to record with former military and civilian personnel who worked at the American bases during the Cold War (Twin Bases known as RAF Bentwaters and RAF Woodbridge). There is a gap in their catalogue for these types of interviews, and I have started to build the collection slowly and will continue to build it over the coming years. This is where Riverside FM has been invaluable as a means for recording remote interviews and so far, I have recorded former Veterans from their homes in Alaska, Seattle, Massachusetts. I have also visited the RAF Bentwaters Cold War Museum and recorded a few people locally in person at the museum. The Trustees have offered to introduce me to a squadron of former Cold War pilots who will be visiting Suffolk in the autumn of 2026, and I hope to record some of their memories of working at the bases.
