Oral History Archives and Communities of Experience

by Mary-Ellen Coyte

Oral history is a means of recording historical information in spoken form using audio (sound) and video formats. People were interviewed for the Testimony Project and encouraged to talk freely about their experience of asylums in their own words. Their description of events, what happened, sights, sounds and feelings, comment and opinion are all recorded. In this way their unique memories and life experiences are preserved and documented: real history can be heard in the language and style of those who actually experienced the events.

The Testimony Oral History Project focused on the theme of people’s experience of the mental asylums, and resulted in an archive of material held at the British Library [dates]. It is through their common experience of the custodial mental health services in UK, that these people form a community. They may have nothing else in common socially or professionally, racially or territorially, and indeed may never have actually met or spoken to each other.

A feature of oral history collections is that they can bring our attention to the existence of others, who have similar experience to ourselves. Service users can find it empowering to become aware of, and feel part of, a group with a particular identity, which an organisation like the British Library has felt it worth preserving. The archive can then become like the backbone of the community, concrete evidence of the experience through which the community members are connected.

An oral history like this provides a unique and valuable oral recording of people’s experience in their own words. One of its greatest uses is because it has recorded the thoughts of those who were overlooked, disregarded or marginalised or whose lives were recorded by other, more powerful, people. The lives of those who were consigned to the asylums may have been documented by practitioners in terms of treatments, pathology and observed behaviour. The Testimony archive is undeniably a vivid realisation of how those people themselves, experienced their time in the asylums. Through the existence of the archive, it validates these people, their lives, relationships, feelings and experiences: it identifies them as a community.

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