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Life Stories of bygone days (Loddiswell) - Doing the Project
Life stories of bygone days (Loddiswell) - Example Pages
Life Stories of bygone days (Loddiswell) - Review
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Life Stories of bygone days (Loddiswell) - Doing the Project
Location: Devon
Loddiswell Life Stories
(As told to Sarah Taragon – LHI Project Advisor)
The project has been fascinating, and we’ve learnt all sorts of things about people living in the village as they have shared their stories.
Many people were reticent about doing an interview initially. However, because we knew them all and were able to talk to them over a period of time about doing the interview, all but two of the people we approached did agree to take part. We selected people based on what we already knew about them so that we got a good spread of stories – making sure we included all the different local industries, some incomers and stories from war-time. We wanted to make sure the book showed the varied experiences of local people. It would have been very difficult for someone who hadn’t been here a long time to know who to interview and to get them to agree – it was really important to the success of the project that we had lived in the village so long.
The most important thing about the project has been knowing people already – we knew what sort of things to probe and where to try and lead the conversation to get people started. For each interview, we made sure we talked informally with the interviewee for at least 15 minutes before starting. This was important to relax them, but also gave me further background knowledge of their lifestyle, work and family so I could lead them into interesting areas of experiences which could easily have been missed. We then switched on the tape recorder and continued with the more formal part of the interview. We used an ordinary recorder with no microphone, as we felt this was less likely to put people off. The quality was fine for transcribing. Some people spoke fluently but a few needed continual prompting and this was eventually edited out to make their story flow more easily.
We transcribed each interview just as it was, and then edited into chronological order, took out unnecessary “ums” etc – we were careful to leave in colloquialisms and not change the way things were worded, to keep the feel of the individual in their story. Editing was a major project so that each story followed a chronological order – a common phrase was “I forgot to tell you just now…..” and then launch into another interesting episode of their lives. Dates of events also needed to be checked to make sure they were accurate. We then checked the typed interview back with the interviewee. Interviewees often took some things out, or added in new information – some interviews went back 5 or 6 times before the interviewee was finally happy with it! One person withdrew their interview altogether but all the others signed the agreement form for their story to be included in the book.
We used part of our LHI grant to pay a local Designer to help us with putting the book together and her advice and expertise were really important – for instance, she suggested the format we used of printing a summary paragraph at the start of each story, so people get a feel for what is included in that chapter and whether they want to read it.
To launch the book, we held an event in the village hall one evening, and also a coffee morning the next day. 200 people attended the launch and we sold 300 books that evening! We continue to sell books at a good rate, and have also had much positive press coverage, including upcoming articles in The Countryman and Western Morning News.
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