Oral History Training Success

Oral History training event participants

Oral History training event participants

The Movies and Memories Project has now completed its set of Oral History training days across the West Sussex coast. Training days were held in Brighton, Shoreham, Worthing, and Bognor Regis and all were well attended by enthusiastic  participants.

Our final session was in Bognor Regis where potential volunteers met up at the Regis Centre to take part in training in oral history recording, theory and practice. It was a great day and the volunteers had much to contribute to the session and to the project as a whole.

To date we have recruited over 50 volunteers to the project, coming from a variety of backgrounds, including retired Social Workers, Students, Journalists, Film-makers, Counsellors, Home-makers, Local Historians and Librarians, to name but a few.

All are now ready to go out into the region to listen to and record people’s memories of the local area.

If you would like to share your memories and stories of Bognor, Littlehampton, Worthing, or Shoreham in the past, please contact us and we will make arrangements for an interview to take place.

Even if you haven’t been in the area very long, we would still be happy to record your memories – just get in touch.

Everyone has a story to tell…..

 

For further information, please contact:

Sara Duffy or Gillian Edom at Screen Archive South East
Telephone: 01273 643213
Email: moviesandmemories@brighton.ac.uk

Life’s a (Shoreham) Beach blog

Liz Coward has written about the Movies and Memories project on her blog ‘Life’s a (Shoreham) Beach’, in which she’s included a lovely childhood memory of her own. Many thanks Liz.

Here’s a link to Liz’s very interesting blog:

http://lifeon-shorehambeach.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/movies-and-your-memories.html

Worthing Heritage Trails

Movies and Memories Project Officer, Gillian Edom attended the Worthing Heritage Trails event. This is her account of the day.

“Whilst on my way to a heritage event at Worthing Library I found myself thinking of the past. Once upon a time if you got onto the wrong train, you could get off again quite easily, even if the train had started to move away from the platform. These days, with automatic train doors, this is no longer possible, so when on that morning I got onto the train at Barnham, I found myself trapped and on the way to London Victoria instead of my intended destination. Ah well, this sort of things happens to me all the time and I did get to Worthing eventually.  I arrived at the Worthing Heritage Trails project event only a little late but had difficulty in finding an empty seat at this well attended session.

Running the session was Chris Hare, a well known local historian, who is leading this Heritage Lottery funded project, aiming to create guided heritage walks around the town. He very kindly allowed me to say a few words about the Movies and Memories Project to his large audience at the end of the meeting. As a result, I was able to hand out a few of our postcards and several people said they would be happy to be interviewed by one of our Oral History volunteers. It was also good to meet Jacqueline, one of our own newly signed-up volunteers, for the first time on this occasion.

Another friend and former colleague at the event was Barbara Shaw, who currently has a display on view in the library about the heritage of the Worthing shoreline. This is on behalf of Transition Town Worthing, a group that has a particular focus on the heritage of the natural environment but are also including the history of the area. Hopefully there may be a way we can work with Barbara to hold a mutually beneficial event later on in the project.”

Click here for more information about the Worthing Heritage Trails project.

Click here for more information about Barbara’s events with Transition Town Worthing.

Worthing Heritage Trails project

In the picture:

Richard Childs, former WS County Archivist and now Chairman of Worthing Heritage Alliance (top left); Chris Hare (top right); Barbara Shaw (bottom right)