Oral Histories of Childhood
Gillian Lamb
Former History DPhil student, Dr Gillian Lamb, reflects upon our experience of undertaking a Micro-Internship with the National Trust Partnership.
As an historian of childhood, I was excited to be allocated a project exploring the National Trust’s collection of oral histories held at the British Library. This collection of over 3416 oral history interviews is looked after by the Library and has great potential as a research resource. The brief for the project was to provide a map for evidence that related to experiences, spaces, and emotions of childhood within collections – and, where possible, to indicate if the material has a connection with particular properties or people.
My first challenge arose when I realised that none of the interviews were available to listen to online, so this information had to be derived from the catalogue! The second came when it emerged that searching the catalogue for entries using key words relating to child/children/childhood or memories returned very few results. I soon realised that the only solution was to review the catalogue information for each entry individually and systematically – a huge task. However, what might have seemed on paper to be an onerous and dull process turned out to be anything but!
Not all the recordings had notes next to them but those that did were fascinating. Split broadly and equally by gender, they included elite children, young servants, residents, children of estate workers and evacuees and covered sixty-six different properties spanning 1899 to 1980. Even in the abbreviated catalogue metadata there was evidence of children’s varied emotions and experiences of National Trust properties that promised even more interesting information in the aural recordings. Children told wonderful stories about play and tantalising tales of interacting with the physical spaces of the properties. Recollections were diverse and complex. Working-class children relayed information about hard work, scrubbing floors, tending fires, gathering firewood, and polishing shoes and memories of class division. However, they also spoke of wandering the estate, playing, poaching, fishing, feeding deer, damming streams, rolling oil drums down hills and being in paradise. Elite children discussed adventures in attics, horse riding in the grounds, playing cricket and sliding down banisters but some also conveyed a sense of being trapped by the responsibilities and history of the property.
The output for the project was a spreadsheet on which I have logged all interviews that relate to childhood, and which includes key information such as time period, property and demographic information as well as notes on the probable content of the interviews. This revealed 241 interviews that are potentially of use. This exciting source base will hopefully prove useful to future researchers wishing to explore histories of childhood within the National Trust.
Since undertaking this micro-internship, Dr Gillian Lamb has gained her DPhil in History from Jesus College, Oxford and is now an early career researcher and member of the University of Oxford’s steering committee for the Centre for the History of Childhood. Her DPhil project examined the life courses of disadvantaged children in nineteenth-century residential care and asked what impact welfare intervention had on their life outcomes. She is currently a research assistant on another project with the National Trust that looks at the histories of childhood within the National Trust, the output from which includes a toolkit aimed at heritage professionals.
Find out more about the National Trust Partnership here.
Find out more about the TORCH Heritage Programme here.
