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The Oral History Group

Bradford on Avon Museum, Wiltshire

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A group has been set up by Bradford on Avon Museum to record memories of residents of Bradford and the villages of the Bradford Hundred. The recordings will form part of the Bradford on Avon Memory Bank.

The group will build on the experience of Margaret Dobson, who collected reminiscences of Bradford people for her book Bradford voices: a study of Bradford on Avon in the twentieth century, published in 1997. A second edition of the book, greatly expanded and using photographs from the Museum’s collection, has been published in November 2011.

Digital recording equipment has been acquired and recordings, in both raw and edited versions, will be kept in as durable and future-proof media as are available. Recordings are transcribed and recordings and transcriptions will then become treated as objects in the Museum’s collection, with copies given to the Wiltshire & Swindon History Centre. In future, some recordings may become accessible on this website.

In November 2011 some of the Group, headed by Jenny Arkell, began a project to record memories of the J.& T. Beaven leather and glove factories in Holt.

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See an article about the project in the > Wiltshire Times.

Watch a film of reminiscences of Avon rubber factory workers