Oral history interviews

Oral history is the recording of people's memories, experiences and subjective responses to events they lived through.

For this research project, we conducted interviews with the families of striking miners and their supporters in Wales, London, Nottinghamshire, St Albans, and Cambridge.

Retired engineer Peter Brown being interviewed about the Miners' Strike and displaying some memorabilia

We want these oral statements to be a resource for anyone interested in the history of late twentieth-century Britain, especially students at ARU and other universities, the majority of whom were not born at the time of the strike.

Watch the interviews

You can watch interviews on our Labour History Research Unit YouTube playlist.

Unfortunately some of the original interviews no longer exist but the ones that you can still see can be located by typing in the words ‘Cambridge Miners’ Strike’. The interviews which are still available are indicated with ^^ after the name of the interviewee, below.

Participants

We conducted interviews with:

The interviews conducted in Mansfield were originally recorded in 2015 as part of a Heritage Lottery funded oral history project and were organised by the miners themselves. The recordings were made by Eric Eaton, Secretary of the Notts NUM Ex and Retired Miners’ Association, and took place in their headquarters in Mansfield.

Among our participants, Vivien Bailey was active in the St Albans Miners’ Support Group which adopted the villages of Newstead and Annesley in Nottinghamshire. Anne Campbell was Labour MP for Cambridge. At the time of recording Professor Morag Schiach was Deputy Vice Principal of Queen Mary, University of London. Dr Frank Wilkinson was a founder member of the Institute for Employment Rights and Emeritus Reader in Applied Economics at the University of Cambridge. Jon Lawrence was Reader in History at the University of Cambridge.

We have been deeply saddened to learn of the deaths of Lucy Munby, Frank Wilkinson and Tony Williams since their recordings were made.

Why oral history interviews?

How the interviews were conducted

  • Each participant was asked several questions relating to their experiences.
  • These were discussed briefly with them beforehand.
  • Video and audio footage of each interview was made using either an iPad or a video camera.
  • The Nottinghamshire miners and their families were all recorded in the offices of the Nottinghamshire NUM in Mansfield. Jim Line and Tony Williams were interviewed in Abertillery. All other interviewees were given the choice of being recorded in their own home or at Anglia Ruskin University.

Ethical methodology and informed consent
Each interviewer completed training in ethics at Anglia Ruskin University, which is mandatory for staff and students conducting research which requires the co-operation and informed consent of living people.

Each participant was made aware of their the right to:

  • stop the interview at any time
  • refuse to answer any of the questions with which they did not feel comfortable
  • take a break if they become distressed for any reason or end the interview completely.

Each participant was asked to sign a form stating that they understood:

  • recordings would be edited and shared via the Labour History Research Unit web pages
  • they had the right to view the final video and listen to the audio before it was published online and to have anything they said or did removed
  • if they were unhappy with the recordings, or no longer wished to be part of the project after the footage was taken, this would not be used and all recordings destroyed.

How the participants were chosen
All the participants were chosen because they have a connection with the Cambridge Miners’ Support Group, and a special insight into the subject area of the project.

The miners and their families in Nottinghamshire and South Wales were chosen because they were willing to talk about their first-hand experiences of the effects of the Miners’ Strike of 1984 on their own lives and the communities in which they lived.

Likely benefits to those who took part
This project gives a voice to those who participated in the Miners’ Strike and their supporters, and allows them to share their experiences of the strike and its effects upon ordinary people.

The questions we asked
We asked participants in Cambridge why they supported the strike, in an effort to find what motivated them and what words such as solidarity meant to them at the time.

We asked participants in Nottinghamshire and Wales for first-hand accounts of what happened to them and their families, and what their communities were like before, during and after the strike.

When the interviews were conducted
The oral history interviews were conducted in July and August 2015 by Shona Hoey, a second-year BA (Hons) History student at ARU, as part of an undergraduate research programme supported by the faculty (now the Faculty for Arts, Humanities, Education and Social Sciences). The research programme enabled students to gain develop the skills for research at postgraduate level.

The interviews were filmed by first-year Film student, Alexandra Petkova.

Five further interviews were added at a later date. Tobin Aldrich, Phillip Brown, Jon Lawrence, Zoe Munby and Bethan Rees were interviewed by Mary Joannou. Alexandra Petkova filmed Philip Brown and Zoe Munby. Raymond Parr filmed Tobin Aldrich, Jon Lawrence and Bethan Rees.

Oral history:

  • enables individuals to tell their own stories in their own words
  • is a form of 'history from below' in that it give a voice to individuals and groups who have been marginalized or hidden from history and whose experiences might otherwise be omitted from the historical record
  • allows the historian to ask whatever questions they wish and then to acquire the information that helps to answer these same questions, removing their reliance on resources produced by others
  • can provide alternative explanations and different insights and is a source of new perspectives that may challenge our view of the past
  • creates new knowledge in instances where written records were not created at the time or have been subsequently lost or destroyed
  • is interactive and cooperative, letting the interviewer and interviewee participate in the experience of making history together
  • can convey feelings and emotions vividly and effectively to the listener, as well as the richness and variety of local accents and dialects
  • records personal and subjective forms of evidence that allow individuals to express their own values and beliefs and to reflect upon, at a distance, the events they narrate from memory
  • records and helps us to understand failure as well as success
  • is a way of preserving first-hand testimony which would otherwise be unavailable to future generations, since many who lived through events that are subsequently of interest to historians will be older by the time they come to be interviewed.