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School Days - Using and adding to the CADHAS Archives
Launch of 'Trading Places'
Chipping Campden - an LHI story
Chipping Campden Archives - involving a local school
Chipping Campden - taking the project further
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Chipping Campden - an LHI story
Location: Gloucestershire
Jill Wilson, Chairman of Campden & District Historical and Archaeological Society (CADHAS), tells how the Chipping Campden Archives project came about.
I’m the Chairman of the Society, but about 80 people are directly involved in the project - not all from CADHAS, which has between two and three hundred members, but also people from other groups like the Family History society.
The Society had been looking for some time for somewhere to store the records. It started off with a small box, and by the time we got to the millennium we had cupboards full in various people’s houses, and then the lady whose house we had most of it in died, so we had to find somewhere else.
But now we have our own Local History Room. The old police station came on the market and the local council bought it and turned it over for community use. They set up a trust called The Peelers Trust to handle it and we were given the opportunity to have a small room there for local history archives.
Of course that would cost money, and someone suggested that we approach the Local Heritage Initiative.
Our LHI funding has enabled us to set up the room with shelving, equipment, a computer, so that not only can we store the stuff in tidy cupboards but people can actually come in and use it easily without having to make an appointment weeks in advance. We’ve arranged for volunteer helpers to be there for several sessions a week.
We already had a Community Archive going before we got involved with LHI. A group of members had been contacting local people and getting them to record their reminiscences on tape. And now we have wonderful new tape recorder and new equipment. We thought about making a video of the people we interview, but we decided talking heads aren’t all that interesting, so we’re taking photographs instead.
We’ve also encouraged people to bring to the archive room any old photographs or documents that they have, and we’re able to scan them into the computer and they can take their originals back home with them. It’s miraculous!
We already have hundreds of interviews, and thousands of pictures and documents on the computer, and this is in addition to our hard archive in the boxes.
The LHI grant has also paid for two laptops and a digital camera, which we couldn’t possibly have afforded without the LHI. The camera has enabled us to have a record on our computer of an exhibition of silver that was held a couple of years ago to mark the centenary of Hart's Workshop in the Guild of Handicraft. They opened up specially for us one evening so that we could take digital photographs.
We do a major exhibition every year - the most recent have focused on School Days and the launch of our book Trading Places. With the exhibition, we always borrow a digital projector and have a slide show presentation wherever we can lay on tea and coffee for visitors. And we also supply displays for the large open space in the foyer of the old police station.
The LHI grant has really helped us to go the way we wanted to go, interlinking with the community. We try to link in with all ages, from the Day Centre, where we do regular presentations, Women’s Fellowship, W.I., other societies - Probus (the men’s equivalent of W.I.) We seem to be doing at least one presentation every few weeks now - always taking the magic digital projector along.
I was already very interested in local history, but it was mainly going and researching in books and record offices. Being involved in this project has got me on my feet, walking round and looking at it from other people’s point of view, trying to work out how I can present and explain something to people who perhaps never even realised there was such a thing as local history. We’re bringing Campden’s history alive to help other people see that it’s not dead, it’s living and important. I always say I’m into the gossip of history!
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