A Century's Memories
From spring 2017 to autumn 2018, I had the huge pleasure to be part of the small team that delivered this wonderful project. A Century's Memories aimed to build relationships across the generations in Bath and North East Somerset. I trained young people aged 15-20 from the Health and Social Care course at Bath College and the Midsomer Norton Platoon and Keynsham Detachment of the Army Cadet Force, in interviewing techniques. I then paired up the young interviewers with people mostly aged 80-99, from the Age UK Day Centres in Keynsham and Midsomer Norton, Larkhall Friendship Circle in Bath, and the Bath Branch of the Women's Royal Army Corps Association, and via Somerset District Miners' Welfare Trust and Radstock Museum. Working closely with Project Manager Helen Daniels, whose skills in getting large numbers of people in the right place at the right time are second to none, I facilitated several aural history recording sessions, helped by a fabulous team of volunteers, who then transcribed the recordings. These I then collated and edited for our book, A Century's Memories, which is wonderfully illustrated by the enormously talented Karen Donnelly. We ran lots of launch events for that at the end of 2018, and I was repeatedly touched by the response to it by both our older contributors, and young interviewees. It was a privilege to work with both age groups, and magical to bring them together for this project. Thank you so much to everyone involved. It was a brilliant project to work on. I always knew it would be, but it proved to be far more rewarding, thought provoking and, ultimately, life-enhancing, that I could possibly have anticipated.
A Century's Memories was funded by Bath & North East Somerset Council and the Heritage Lottery Fund.
The full recordings and transcripts of the interviews are deposited and publicly accessible at Bath Record Office.
A Key Stage 2 Learning Pack was developed in collaboration with this project. It can be freely downloaded, adapted and shared from sustainablelearning.com
