Oral History
Oral history is the spoken history of other people’s memories. It is an opportunity to learn about the past through the first hand accounts of those who lived it. An oral history may be in the form of an edited recording, face-to-face interviewing, a story, a poem or a song.
Oral histories are invaluable for preserving knowledge and experience of life and events in the past on a local, national, and global scale. They are a way of connecting us all across time.
The oral history recordings provided in this resource were collected as part of the ‘Up the feeder, down the mouth’ project. They give a taste of working and living in Bristol during the latter half of the port’s operating life.
[n.b. In this instance oral history refers to transcribed spoken material only. Film is also used to record oral histories and is becoming an increasingly common method of recording them. However it will not be available through this resource.]
