The eloquent speech of oral history

What George Ewart Evans recorded were not perfectly objective facts, but stories that people live by

George Ewart Evans was frustrated with his life. Having escaped an extremely harsh upbringing in south Wales and earning a Classics degree he served with the RAF during the war and returned to his young family in the English countryside to write novels. But the novels would not be written.

Every time he produced a corpse of a book that no publisher would attempt to resuscitate. His son, Matthew, has quoted the following extract from his unpublished diary: "August 19. A bad day, in discussion with Ellen last night, realised the novel is bad in its present form and is hardly worth going on with. Most of the term and the summer holidays have been wasted. Children difficult, Jane insolent, Matthew unresponsive."

The son remembers a father who was morose at best, obsessed with the fact he couldn't get to grips with long fictional narrative. His obsession went above the need to bring the family an income. Poverty forced the family to a remote part of Suffolk in a small property owned by the school where Evans's wife taught. As he entered his 40s he was taking his family back to the harsh upbringing he was meant to have escaped.

But then something happened. He was a card-carrying communist long after it was fashionable (or even sensible) and these ideals, combined with his search for a story to tell, made him look at those people around him. With the help of a BBC producer, he borrowed some equipment and started recording their stories, letting the farmers he had befriended talk out their lives, their upbringing, their folk tales, unique to that one part of Suffolk.

Those local farmers represented a culture wasn't unchanged but in flux, transforming with the coming of the suburb and mass car ownership. Never again would small British communities be so distinct from the rest of the country.

His interviews were broadcast on the Third Programme and, in 1956, placed in a book published by Faber as Ask The Fellows Who Cut The Hay. It was the first of 11 that made Evans's name forever linked with the recording of British folk memory.

It is no coincidence that Evans's success, and that of Ronald Blythe with Akenfield, coincided with the appearance of the New Left historians of the 1960s. It is a shame how often quoted AJP Taylor's damning definition of oral history is: "old men drooling about their youth." But Taylor has a point. There is a lot of drooling. I confess to getting limited pleasure and education from the Forgotten Voices series about a bunch of chaps who happened to still be alive a long time after a war. Anthony Beevor's new book on D-Day records a very different campaign to that remembered by many of the surviving soldiers there at the time. Memory is an odd thing and not one that can be completely trusted.

But this doesn't mean recorded memories don't make for wonderful stories. Or that they are useless to a historian. Oral history may sometimes be old men drooling, but many of our sources to the past are rather sketchy on their own. Try reading the records surrounding the Wars of the Roses and you're left with a bunch of in-breds ranting. But still they are all part of a patchwork of sources needed for a historian to try and truly relate how the past appeared to those that went through it and how it has been remembered.

That oral history had only become a force in Britain by the 1960s is surprising. The closest we came earlier was with the Mass Observation movement in the 1930s that recorded the present rather than the recent past and, fascinating as it is, never captured the sense of myths and legends in the way individuals such as Blythe and Evans did.
When Blythe and Evans appeared, Britain was already playing cultural catch-up. In America it is odd to think how different our knowledge of early 20th-century blues and folk musicians and their lifestyles would have been without John and then especially Alan Lomax travelling round on the Smithsonian's dime.

In fact, it's the Smithsonian's 1930s New Deal funding for the recording of folklorists that has left America with such a vivid collective knowledge of life in the 1930s, something seen today in the ease Michael Mann has in representing the period's veneration of crime in Public Enemies.

We owe a lot of our cultural memory to the invention of oral history. Of course the records can be subjective, distorted and outright false. They are not pearls of truth in a fraudulent world. Nor do they pretend to be. Blythe and Evans were storytellers, not historians. Their work has more in common with Under Milk Wood than that of the New Left historians who embraced them. Evans's son Matthew was disappointed with his father's concession to the academics when he started including footnotes in his later books. Their books tell us more about the legends and myths of our recent past than what actually happened. And that is what makes them so great.