I think oral histories are a great way of capturing memories, individual memories, unique memories.
'He mentions in this book…'
You’re making a connection with somebody.
A lot of the time people are maybe telling you something they haven’t spoken about for years
and that’s really important.
Things have changed and that is actually because people are better off,
although we complain about unemployment or this and the other,
but people have more opportunities than they had in those days.
I am going out into the community of Ystradgynlais in the Swansea Valley area
collecting digital stories of the characters who do have first-hand memories of Josef Herman
and those who have worked in the mines around the area and have turned to the creative side of painting and writing.
What do you think the relationship between the miner and the artist is?
Most of us left school at 14, but that’s why a lot of miners - because they could draw and because they had something to say - that’s why they did it.
I think the things that matter to artists are very different, the way they hear things, the way they see things,
the way they assess things, their investment in that event and in being a professional artist,
will be very different from that of a critic.
And this painting here we have on the cover of Miner Artists: The Art of a Welsh Coal Worker,
is this by yourself, isn’t it?
That painting is my painting, see, and it’s of my brother.
The girl next door came in, he’s in the bath, my mother’s got…she’s coming to ask for something.
My mother’s gone in there to fetch it and he’s got out of the bath, see, to annoy my mother.
The difference in hearing an artist speak rather than reading it off the page is the very directness of it,
the amount of personality and background that’s conveyed in that sound.
You realise just how much is expressed in a very simple sentence in audio form.
You wanted to tell people about things, and they didn’t, you know,
that was going on in every village in Britain not just in Wales, from Scotland down to Kent,
there were coal mines in Kent, there were coal mines everywhere.
I don’t ever remember being unhappy underground.
Usually there’s an introduction at the beginning of an oral history. I’m willing to do it myself.
The date, where we are, who we’re with and why we’re doing it.
This is for obvious reasons because in 50 years’ time, this oral history might pop up somewhere
and people will be, well, who are these people?
When preparing for an interview you have to research as much as you can,
but you then need to do the interview as though you didn’t know it
because your aim is to get the person to express it in their terms, not in your terms,
and you are obviously getting people to recollect but in so far as you can you want them to relive,
you want them to be back there remembering their first day at art school,
remembering first going into that building, what the building was like.
Because the following day, he had to go back underground
and these men you’d been talking to the day before were burned to a crisp like a leg of a lamb out of the oven,
so they just had to wrap him up in bandages and carry him out
and it’s quite a thing to do to somebody that you’d been talking to the following day, like, and been working with.
When I’m recording oral history I try to keep my own voice at a minimum.
It’s important to let the interviewee talk.
It’s best to let them finish their sentences, and to let them even breathe, right at the end of the sentence,
just in case they’re about to spark off of something else.
Some of the most valuable treasures come up when people start talking again, when they’ve had a little time to think.
If you want to create something that’s of archival quality for a museum and gallery purposes,
get the best equipment you can and know that you’ve got enough life in your batteries,
if you’ve got enough space on the memory card and then to check the level of the sound on your actual recorder
so if you do a sort of spot check with the interviewee and yourself so you know the recording will be of a decent quality.
Preparation, equipment and then content, that’s the key to successful oral history.