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Blickling Hall voices remember the past |
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Blickling Hall voices remember the past |
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Blickling Hall in Norfolk, the claimed birthplace of Anne Boleyn, has its history of titled gentry feuding, even duelling, living and dying through social upheaval, European conflict and civil war. But now after a six month oral history project there I’ve discovered a lot more previously unrecorded history — that of the ordinary families who’ve called this rural estate ‘home’. I’ve listened to the lady who, as a teenager in the early 1930s, was marched away from her job in the hall by her mother. I’ve met bomber aircrew who called Blickling home during World War Two. I’ve sat with people who started their post-war lives squatting in the huts left empty by the RAF. And I’ve heard about the beginnings of the post-war National Trust as Blickling became a pioneering part of the organisation. The project started when The Trust’s regional curator, Mike Sutherill, discovered a box of neglected cassette tapes of archive interviews with some of the domestic staff from the house who worked there in the 1930s. They’d been recorded in the 1980s looking back to their time there. Mike came up with a plan to use the voices themselves in an innovative redisplay of the working rooms of the house, introducing visitors to the butler, the cook, the footman and gardener with display boards and the sounds of the people themselves in the rooms where they worked. He went to the Heritage Lottery Fund with a plan to put that into action and to produce a new oral archive as a resource for the future. The rooms have now been redisplayed and the archive has nearly 40 different interviews and more than 20 hours of material. It’s being kept at the house and a copy is being held by Norfolk County Archives as well. So, having decided to produce an oral archive how does one go about it? Publicity is all to start with and using my own contacts we got off to a flying start with the regional and local press and local radio, who enthusiastically joined in the search for contributors. Even the local parish magazine published my appeal and I spent a couple of very chilly autumnal afternoons persuading local shopkeepers to display a flyer about the project. However, it was word of mouth which really got the project going. Nothing beats being out there with your microphone talking to those people whom you already know are part of the story. I lost count of the number of times people said: 'Well, I don’t know that I’ve got much to tell you'. But once they realised we were looking for stories of ordinary, everyday life from ordinary, everyday people, most started to tell us fascinating stories about their lives and the people they knew. Then, at the end of the interview and you’ve turned off the recording machine, they say 'I know who you should speak to… you want to call my friend from the bowls club…' and off you go again. Two things I can guarantee when you embark on an oral archive project. The first is that you wish you had started ten years earlier and the other is that it should never be finished. And to that end I have trained some of The National Trust volunteers to undertake further interviews in the future as other people come forward with more stories to tell. One of the highlights of the archive for me was the retelling of a moment when the wheels of history were turning. One woman, as a girl, was a guest, with her parents, of Lord Lothian at the hall for a weekend in August 1939. She even gave us the guide book her mother had bought and then written in recording the fact that her husband was recalled to the army in Egypt the following day — the same day that Lord Lothian, the 11th Marquess, left Blickling to take up his ambassadorship in Washington. He died in America in 1941 without ever seeing his Norfolk home again. Blickling Hall, Gardens and Park, Blickling, Norwich, Norfolk NR11 6NF, tel: 01263 738030, core hours Wed–Sun 11am–5pm (until 2 Nov, also Mon during August), admission charge non-members, tel: 01263 738030, www.nationaltrust.org.uk.
4 Blickling Hall. © NTPL |
22 April 2008 Bob Carter, Community Oral Archive Administrator
Left: The Masque of Anne Boleyn at Blickling in 1938. It involved many from Aylsham and surrounding villages and those taking part included children and youths who came forward and contributed their memories to the oral archive. © NTPL Above: Bob Carter interviewing Florence Wadlow, who was Lord Lothian's Head Cook at Blickling in the late 1930s. Her voice can now be heard by visitors in the kitchens at the hall. © NTPL
Philip Kerr, the 11th Marquess of Lothian who left Blickling to the nation when he died in 1941. © NTPL |
