Friday the 16th March was the first meeting of the Tideswell Tales project since the news that the Heritage Lottery Fund awarded a grant to the Tideswell Living History Group.
Bill is working with the group of people in Tideswell, Derbyshire, to develop the oral history project, following on from the success of theTideswell Trails project.
Bill worked closely with the group to create a series of self-guided trails, funded by the Peak Park’s Sustainable Development Fund. The desire to conduct oral history interviews was born out of the Trails project and Bill facilitated the project development then grant application which led to the successful award of the grant in mid-March. We set up the Tideswell Living History Group as interest in the village widened and we realised there was a strong community demand for the oral history project.
The project will collect the memories and old photographs of Tideswell and district residents, ex-residents and visitors – adults and children – in order to preserve and communicate over 150 years of community life through voices and pictures of all ages. It runs from March 2012 to September 2014.
We have identified three themes:
1) Childhood now and then: recording adults and school children talking about school, home life, holidays, activities and games in Tideswell.
2) Community Celebrations through time, from Tideswell Wakes Week to VE day and Coronations to Jubilees (linking to the Queen’s Golden Jubilee in 2012).
3) Tideswell Traders through time, shoppers and shopworkers at shops, mobile shops and markets (linking to the 75th anniversary of the last cattle fair in 1937). This includes Holdsworth’s which was Swift Levitt’s magnet factory during WW2. Workers are still alive and we’d like to create resources ready for the 60th anniversary of VE Day in 2015.
We are currently organising memories days, oral history training and will soon be creating a dedicated website for the project. We’ll post details of the website and events here as we finalise them.
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