Dr. Julian Grant
As the new year has graced us with bright cold sunshine and roof-rattling gales, the Leith St. Andrew’s Trust’s (LSAT) local history project has been shifting from one gear into the next one. I am now in the midst of interviews with members of the congregation and wider community about their involvement with the church. Earlier on this blog, I introduced the project and wrote about the insights emerging from archival research. Here I will turn towards the oral history phase of the projects, focusing on the background of this people-centred approach to learning about the past and sharing some insights into the process of planning and carrying out interviews.
What is oral history?
Oral history is a way of recording and learning about the past from the perspective of those who lived through it, as expressed verbally in their own words. Used by historians, archivists, museum curators and community activists, this approach typically involves recorded interviews with people who were in some way involved with the topic in question. The direct perspective on history captured in the interview can be used as evidence in research, archived for future generations, or shared with the wider public through museum displays or digital projects. This approach to preserving and sharing individual voices from the past gives us a more personal way of relating historical knowledge.
For millennia, the spoken word was the way that societies understood the past and passed it along through stories, poems and songs. This changed with the rise of the written word and the spread of printed material, which together gave birth to new practices among Western historians. Written documents were seen as a more reliable, empirically verifiable form of historical evidence than the more personal and contextual insights drawn from oral sources. As a result, dominant narratives about the past excluded important experiences and forms of evidence. This particularly affected marginalised communities whose experiences didn’t fit into established narratives, and groups who had alternative, largely unwritten ways of recording and sharing their own histories.
In the mid-20th century, some historians began recognising the value of oral sources. They were aided by the development of technology that allowed them to go out and make field recordings. Here in Scotland, ethnologists at organisations like the School of Scottish Studies (founded at the University of Edinburgh in 1951) began using oral history to document disappearing dialects, music and folk traditions in areas like the Outer Hebrides and rural Aberdeenshire. Oral history became an important tool for recovering the hidden histories of women, inspiring others to work with LGBT+ people and immigrant communities. And labour historians used oral sources to document the lives of Britain’s working class, whose experiences at work and at home were largely absent from the mainstream written record. Taken together these diverse forms of oral history have stretched the study of the past in important directions, allowing us to understand a broader range of historical experiences in more intimate and nuanced detail.
What role does oral history play in this project?
Against this backdrop, oral history forms an important part of this project about Leith St. Andrew’s Church. In my previous blog post, I shared some of the insights that came from working with old documents, photographs and memorabilia. They are useful for gaining an understanding of the important dates in the church’s history, the wider context of church splits and mergers, and the weekly routines of worship and community life. But archival sources can only go so far. They struggle to capture the details and textures that spring from an individual’s lived experience, the personal meanings that people attach to the past, and the emotions that course through their memories and stories. These are dimensions of the history of Leith St. Andrew’s and its wider community that are better conveyed and understood through in-depth interviews with the people who have shaped (and been shaped by) this church.
Personal Experiences with Oral History
Oral history has been a big part of my life and my career. During my undergraduate studies, I used oral sources to write my dissertation on the post-war fishing industry in the East Neuk of Fife. This meant spending many hours down at the harbour in Pittenweem, getting to know current and former fishermen and their families and hearing about their experiences at sea and on shore. My masters dissertation involved interviews with activists who were involved in creating community-based housing associations and community centres in working-class areas of Glasgow during the 1970s. And my PhD research centred on interviews with local residents living around the North Coast 500 tourism route in the far north of Scotland. After asking participants to take photographs documenting their own sense of place and the impact of tourism in their everyday lives, I interviewed them about the meanings behind their images. I then worked with local heritage organisations to make these local perspectives on the NC500 visible through a series of exhibitions.
Through these projects and others, I have met wonderful people whose spoken words have given me insights into their communities’ histories from their own perspective. Beyond this, I have also gained plenty of practical experience in how to plan and deliver a successful oral history project. But each project is different, with its own challenges and dilemmas to work out. Who would I choose to interview? How would I ensure that interview participants were adequately informed about the oral history process? What questions would I ask? And how would interview recordings be stored and shared with the wider public?
Planning and Conducting Interviews
With the help of the LSAT committee, I drafted a participant information sheet outlining the purpose of the project, what it involved, and how interview recordings would be stored and used. Once participants had read this sheet, I would ask them to sign a pair of consent forms confirming their informed consent for participation. And I worked with LSAT volunteers and members of the church to begin compiling a list of potential interviewees. At the heart of the project, of course, are the members of the congregation who have worshipped in this building for decades. With this in mind, I reached out to the tradition-bearers of the church – some of whom have a family history stretching back generations at Leith St. Andrew’s. But I also wanted to hear from other users of the church, who came here as part of the nursery, the Boys’ Brigade, the dance school or any number of other groups. This was particularly important given the Trust’s vision of the building as a space for community groups, new and old, to pursue their interests, socialise, and support one another. Taken together, I hoped to draw into the project a range of voices which could attest to the many different roles that the church has played within its community since 1881.
This vision for the project has been borne out in the interviews carried out so far. I have sat down for interviews with the longstanding conductor and musical director of the Capital Concert Band, which rehearses and performs at Leith St. Andrew’s; with two members of the congregation who have been each important figures in the running of the church through the decades; and with the manager of the nursery which has called the building home for more than fifty years. Several more interviews are lined up for this week, and after that the thankless task of transcribing the interview recordings awaits!
What’s next?
In my next blog post, I will go a bit deeper into some of the insights coming from these interviews… featuring a Salvation Army brass band in a County Durham mining town, musical jitters when two congregations merged into one, and reflections on what has changed (and what hasn’t!) in Leith. Stay tuned for more soon!
And finally, something for your diaries… the exhibition that marks the culmination of this history project will be launched on the evening of Friday 21 February at Leith St. Andrew’s Church. It will be open to the public on Saturday 22nd and Sunday 23rd and the following Saturday and Sunday (1-2nd March) as well. There will also be a special panel event on the evening of Wednesday 26th February with local writers and historians, which is not to be missed.