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Jo Brand, the commedienne, hails from Shropshire herself and has dubbed our latest heritage media project, Fieldwork "......a joy! These are wonderful, engaging stories from rural Herefordshire in the 40's, 50's and 60's. Often comical, sometimes sad, and occasionally harsh, they give real insight into the lives of a group of fascinating characters, whose lives need to be remembered." |
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The Stallion and His Groom
Storyteller: John Thacker
The stallion has arrived to serve the mares. And the groom is keeping him frisky.  |
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The Railway
Storyteller: John Davies
The Hereford to Brecon railway line was a lifeline for villages like Eardisley. The steam trains took vegetables to Neath, cattle to Hereford Market and sugar beet to Kidderminster.
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The Women's Land Army
Storyteller: Joan Watkins
A late recruit to the Women's Land Army, Joan recalls an exhausting round of milking and washing before going to bed by candlelight.
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Hiring Fairs
Storyteller: Ron Langford
"The boys were just like a drove of sheep," recalls Ron in this extraordinary account of finding work at the Brecon and Hay Hiring Fairs.
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Cider Ted
Storyteller: Ted Jones
Ted is giving up making traditional cider after more than thirty years and he's sad to see the old craft dying. out but he swears: "I may be retiring, but I'm not going to stop drinking cider."
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Keeping Chickens
Storyteller: Ella Price
Ella's mother can't gift wrap her wedding present: it's a flock of fifty hens. They prove a lifeline in the years to come.
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The One Armed Smithy
Storyteller: Mike Roberts
After his apprenticeship as a farrier on London's horse-drawn trams, Mike's grandfather almost lost his life in an accident with a chaff cutter.
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Pigeon Pie
Storyteller: Rona Jenkins
In the snowy winter of 1947, pigeon pie was the order of the day. With four birds to a pie, and lashings of home-grown veg, this was good, wholesome, nourishing food.
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The DVD is available to purchase for £10.00 from Natalie Preece at The Rural Media Company Tel: 01432 344039 or email nataliep@ruralmedia.co.uk
The Rural Media team will now begin distributing the DVD's to archives, museums, libraries, schools and tourist information centres.
Fieldwork screened at Borderlines Film Festival in April 2009 at the Courtyard, Hereford and many of the 30 stories were also shown as shorts at the 25 Flicks in the Sticks Borderlines screenings in village halls in Shropshire, Worcestershire and Herefordshire.
Launch screenings were held in January 2009 for the volunteer storytellers and their local audiences. Nearly 200 people attended in Bromyard at The Conquest Theatre on 20th January and in Eardisley Village Hall on 22nd January and celebrated their farming heritage with presentations from the local history societies, some of the digital storytellers and The Rural Media Company team. The storytellers - all members of local farming communities -collected their copies of the Fieldwork DVD to show their families, friends and other village organisations.
Digital Stories
Fieldwork digital stories are like very short videos - up to 2 minutes long - narrated by a local person, illustrated with photos of people, artifacts and places, and conveying a vivid sense of the texture and feeling of the bygone days and a sense of how modern, mechanised farming has changed so much. The project offered both participants and audience a chance to reflect on low-impact methods of food production and how peak oil and climate change may require us to reintroduce them in the future.
Building on its growing body of digital stories work with rural communities, begun several years ago with Gypsies and Travellers, (http://www.ruralmedia.co.uk/remember/) Rural Media worked closely with Bromyard and Eardisley local history societies, running media and IT skills workshops for the local agricultural community and history society members. Herefordshire Council\'s Museum and Archives services were on the Advisory Group, and provided in-kind funding to make archive photographs available, gave their advice on copyright and curating and disseminating through the Museum Forum and the Local History Forum.
Young children delivering farm milk in the early hours, goose fat used to soften leggins, how to make pigeon pie, catching rabbits during harvest, the one-armed blacksmith, the mole-catcher\'s tale - these are some of the intriguing subject of the digital stories told by farming families from these two Herefordshire villages.
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Similar Projects
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"For anything to go wrong in those days was an absolute disaster."
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"Digital storytelling is an excellent tool for bringing history to life" |
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Rural Media was awarded a Heritage Lottery grant in 2008 to work closely with two Local History Societies (Bromyard and Eardisley) to develop, record and illustrate farming life and customs through the 1940's, 50's and 60's.
The DVD is available to purchase for £10.00 contact Natalie Preece at The Rural Media Company Tel:
01432 344039 or email nataliep@ruralmedia.co.uk
 Read the full Evaluation Report of the Fieldwork digital stories project by Philip Kiberd.
http://www.hlf.org.uk
You might be interested to see another heritage project:
Our Working Lives
http://www.ourworkinglives.org
Digital:works are working with a group of volunteers from Poole and Parkstone along
with Poole museum local history centre. Together we are investigating the difference
in working practices from when people started work in the 1940/50s and compare
this with the present day. |
Fieldwork
