John Burgess
Retired - Journalist/Producer (BBC Radio)
Coatelands, Sampford Arundel, Wellington, TA21 9QN
Telno: 01823 672173
Email: johnburgess400@btinternet.com

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Craig Fees
Planned Environment Therapy Trust, Archive and Study Centre, Church Lane, Toddington, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire GL54 5DQ
Telno: 01242 620125
Email: Craigtfees@aol.com

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Kayleigh Milden
Project Officer for the Peninsula Quarry Industry Social History Trust
Plymouth Museum & Art Gallery, Drake Circus, Plymouth, Devon, PL4 8AJ
Telno: (01752) 306396
Email: K.M.Milden@exeter.ac.uk

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Garry Tregidga

CAVA, Institute of Cornish Studies, University of Exeter in Cornwall, Tremough Campus, Penryn, Cornwall, TR10 9EZ
Telno: 01736 371 888/891
Email: g.h.tregidga@exeter.ac.uk

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Marilyn Tucker
Wren Trust, 1 St. James Street, Okehampton EX20 1DW
Telno: 01837 53754
Email: marilyn@wrenmusic.co.uk

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Gloucestershire

1. Around Gloucestershire (and some environs)

It has been a busy year in Gloucestershire.

Cashes Green on the Map
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Cashes-Green-on-the-Map/254829625936
Although its Facebook site has quietened down, "Cashes Green on the Map" is an ambitious local  oral history project centred on the Cashes Green area of Stroud.

Churchill and Sarsden Heritage Centre (Oxfordshire)
http://www.churchillheritage.org.uk/
Although in Oxfordshire rather than Gloucestershire, Churchill and Sarsden Heritage Centre visited to discuss and take advice on the oral history component of their Heritage Lottery Fund-supported project to refurbish and develop a special exhibition on the impact of World War Two on the village.

Fair Shares
http://www.fairshares.org.uk/timebanking-in-gloucestershire/stroud-stonehouse-dursley-a-beyond/9-articles-stroud/26-life-histories-project.html
Time banking organisation Fair Shares announced a project through which Fair Shares members would "visit older members to take notes and make recordings of their memories, then write them up into a 'life history'."

Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust
http://tinyurl.com/cn9ylxe
The Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust initiated a Wild Daffodil oral history project, with funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund.

Hidden Lives of Barton and Tredworth
http://www.glos.ac.uk/latestnews/archive/february11/Pages/hiddenstories.aspx
The "Hidden Lives" project of the University of Gloucestershire,  the Gloucester Theatre Company and Gloucestershire Archives was awarded £48,000 by the Heritage Lottery Fund to gather the stories of people living in the Barton and Tredworth areas of Gloucester. According to the press release, "Some of the stories [collected] will form the material for a piece of Reminiscence Theatre, which will be devised and created by young actors recruited from the local area and toured across the county. Contributors can also be involved in turning their stories into short films, using an approach called Digital Storytelling. All of the contributions will be uploaded to a community website, providing a window onto the diversity of experience within this multicultural area."

John Moore's Museum, Tewkesbury
 http://www.johnmooremuseum.org/Our-Collections/Living-Voices.html
The John Moore's Museum in Tewkesbury began to go online with their Heritage Lottery Fund-supported project  recording the memories of individuals who have lived in or been responsible for the upkeep of the Merchant's House/Abbey Lawn Cottages over the past few decades.

Kempley Tardis
http://www.kempleytardis.org.uk/heritage.php
Welcome, too, to the Kempley Tardis, gathering together in one small but internally expansive place the documentary and narrative heritage of the two landmark churches within Kempley Parish, featuring both written and oral history.

Tales of the Riverbank
http://www.glos.ac.uk/latestnews/Pages/TalesoftheRiverbank.aspx
The University of Gloucestershire supported work by third year radio students Kris Surtees and Ben Wayland in recording a series of oral history interviews about life and work on the River Wye, as part of the Wye Valley Area of Outstanding Beauty’s "Overlooking the Wye" project. The two students were contracted and paid through the University Media School’s Student Media Projects, "set up to up to handle the increasing number of requests for students to work on media projects for small to medium-sized local businesses and third sector organisations."

Transition Town Cheltenham
http://www.transitiontowncheltenham.org.uk/evdiary.php
Transition Town Cheltenham invited people to sign up for its oral history project to remember when Cheltenham used to grow more of its own food.

University of Gloucestershire and Flood Heritage
http://livingfloodhistories.wordpress.com/
The University of Gloucestershire's ongoing engagement with local communities, memory and flooding (see http://www.jisc-content.ac.uk/collections/community-flood-archive-enhancement-through-storytelling-co-fast) continued with a second Workshop at the beginning of January 2011 on "Flood heritage: exploring flood archives for understanding the known pathways to resilience". Oral History Regional Network representative for Worcestershire Julia Letts presented a paper on 'the potential of oral history in exploring flood heritage', the video of which is on the University of Gloucestershire website: http://flashmedia.glos.ac.uk/resources-general/videos/flood_heritage/julia_letts.mp4

2. At the Planned Environment Therapy Trust Archive and Study Centre
Craig Fees
http://www.archive.pettrust.org.uk

Personally, it has been a busy year.  Alongside answering queries and offering advice as Regional Networker, as co-tutor for the Sound and Vision Module of the University of Dundee's Centre for Archives and Information Studies, I have completely revised the unit on oral history, and seen several cohorts of students through to completion; presented a session in the Wiltshire Local History Forum's "Voices from the Past: A Day School on Oral History" in Bromham; and conducted a two hour session on oral history with history students taking Dr. Iain Robertson's  'Methods of Historical Enquiry' module at the University of Gloucestershire. As a Trustee I have regularly attended meetings of the Oral History Society Committee, and chaired a session at the Annual Conference in Sunderland.

At the Planned Environment Therapy Trust Archive and Study Centre, which is my base as Regional Networker for Gloucestershire, life has been more than dominated by our Heritage Lottery Fund-supported project, "Therapeutic Living With Other People's Children: An oral history of residential therapeutic child care c. 1930 -c. 1980".

"Therapeutic Living With Other People's Children: An oral history of residential therapeutic child care c. 1930 to c. 1980"
http://www.otherpeopleschildren.org.uk

Technically, this ambitious project began in January 2010, but the full project team of oral historian (Gemma Geldart), project archivist (Frances Meredith) and project administrator/transcriptionist (Chris Long) came together in April 2010 for an eighteen month project which (as this is being written) is just coming to an end. Against the backdrop of organisational change within the Planned Environment Therapy Trust itself, the team quickly got into stride with an Open Day and an Archive Weekend within a matter of weeks. Archive "Weekends" are three-to-five day residential events in which, typically, former children and staff from different generations of a therapeutic school or home live together at the Archive, handling and helping with archives, being recorded and recorded, and generally exploring with the project team the memories, realities and emotions of their lives, and especially their lives in relation to the specific therapeutic home or school. We had twelve of these of Archive Weekends, in one of which we brought together former children and staff from a number of communities with students and staff of Trinity Catholic School in Leamington Spa to focus on Performance: The students are putting together a production which will later go on tour, and the Weekend provided opportunities for training, recording, and learning together with the former children and staff who were there.

A feature of the project were Assessment, Training and Advisory (ATA) Events - Events in which people with experience and expertise from outside the project are brought together with members of the project team and volunteers to explore various areas of the work, and the issues and questions that had, might, and should arise. The ATA Event devoted specifically to oral history had all the excitement and depth of a CPD Event, as did a second, exploring Transcription. Transcription proved to be an extremely stimulating area for the project, as described in an article for the Spring 2011 issue of the Oral History Society eNewsletter by Chris Long, "It's not just typing - reflections of a transcriptionist".

As well as fieldwork and Archive Weekends, the project has worked closely with Assistant Principal Stephen Steinhaus, up to 35 students, and other staff of Trinity Catholic School to create a performance based on existing archives and the archives and oral histories produced by the project (some recorded by students themselves). The first taster of what the students are creating came on day two of the two-day project conference. The conference was entitled "The Struggle of Memory Against Forgetting: Telling the story and sharing the experiences of residential child care", and was organised in partnership with the History of Medicine Unit at the University of Birmingham, and the Institute for the History and Work of Therapeutic Environments; taking place in September in the CPD Centre of the University of Birmingham Medical School. ( for recordings of presentations see http://www.otherpeopleschildren.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=215:project-conference&catid=86&Itemid=22 ).

The second outing for the students came at the 'end-of-project' celebration at the Archive and Study Centre in Toddington, when members of each of the five participating communities took part. Drawing on his own twenty years of professional performing, Stephen Steinhaus stressed what a unique opportunity it was for the students to be able to work so closely and gather such rich and meaningful feedback from the people most closely involved in the stories the students are trying to tell. As this report is being written, venues and opportunities for performance are being solicited: Please get in touch with Chris Long (see below) if you have a potential place or occasion.

A project booklet was compiled in the run-up to the conference, and is an excellent record of the background, activities, outcomes, and responses of participants. For a copy, please contact Chris Long at chris.long@otherpeopleschildren.org.uk. That mention indicates another of the positive outcomes of an immensely rewarding project: Both oral historian Gemma Geldart and administrator Chris Long have been retained by the Planned Environment Therapy Trust, along with archivist Craig Fees.
(Craig Fees)