Subseries 09 - Oral history archive

2 boxes

TO BE COMPLETED

Access status to be reviewed on migration of recordings to current media.

• English

• Latin

Cassette tapes are vulnerable; currently no surrogates exist.

Draft

Partially closed

An interview with Charles Arthur Rivington and George Riddell, conducted by Peter Hames & Robin Myers, was recorded by the National Sound Archive for the National Life Story Collection: City Lives in 1989. Subsequently, in 2002, Honorary Archivist Robin Myers and Liveryman Peter White proposed conducting an oral history project to commemorate the Company’s sextcentennial in 2003. It was conceived of as an accompaniment to Robin’s The Stationers’ Company: A History of the Later Years, with no further scope or aims being defined at the time. The project was turned down by the MWC for Company funding and consequently run on a reduced scale. The interviewees were Arthur Buckwell, Barbara Eden, Peter King, Bill Sessions, Christopher Thurston Rivington, David Wyndham-Smith, Nigel Harrison, Peter Hames, Sir John Sparrow, Vernon Sullivan and William C. Young. These interviews, originally recorded onto audio cassette tape, were digitised by Adam Matthew (AM) for their Literary Print Culture resource and are accessible via that platform (consent forms were signed by either the interviewees or their families before this was done). The cassette tapes and audio files are now held in the Stationers’ Company Archive. AM included the interview with Charles Arthur Rivington and George Riddell in Literary Print Culture.

Robin Myers was interviewed by Peter White in 2003, and she also gave two BBC interviews, one alongside Sascha Ruben in 1980 for BBC World Services, and another for BBC Radio 4. She did not want her 2003 interview to be made available via the AM resource, and the BBC own the copyright to their recordings, so none of these were digitised by AM. The audio cassettes are in the Stationers' Company Archive.

In 2017, possibly due to the digitisation of the original cassettes by AM and the administrative issues this gave rise to, the LAC became interested again in the oral history project, and decided to run it as a Committee-led project. Candidates were suggested by LAC members. John Waterlow and Sir Clive Martin were proposed at the LAC meeting of 12.12.2017. Another LAC member, Dominic Vaughan, reported that one of his colleagues, Church Times journalist Ed Thornton, had experience of podcast production, and would be willing to present and record the archive interviews. Dominic and Ed completed interviews of both John Waterlow and Sir Clive Martin before the project was interrupted by the pandemic, which forced Ed to withdraw from the scheme. The interviews were taken over by Rev. Chris Damp in 2022, who conducted remote interviews with Past Masters James Benn, Kevin Dewey, Nigel Stapleton and the Rt Revd Dr Stephen G Platten.

In parallel to the LAC-driven project, during the lockdown of 2020/2021, the Master the Rt Revd Dr Stephen G Platten conducted a series of remote video interviews with members of the Company to br hosted on the Company’s YouTube channel.