Meet the aural historians preserving the lives of ‘normal people’
Audio-recorded memories are on the rise. Marie Kelly meets the historians documenting the way we were for families – and for posterity – in a fast-moving world.
The last thing historian Turtle Bunbury expected his 103-year-old interviewee to tell him was a filthy joke. The centenarian is the second oldest person the best-selling author has interviewed for one of his Life Story documentaries, an audio recording of a personal history that can be enjoyed and treasured by future generations. The oldest was 108 years. “As a young woman she’d gone to church with the Republican revolutionary Maud Gonne,” recalls Bunbury with the particular relish of someone who has a passion for the past. “Her memory was awful, but we got about two minutes of pure gold,” remembers the Lisnavagh House native with affection.
Over the past decade, industries have been shaped around the unlikeliest of commodities, from sleep and sex to clutter and social capital. There’s money to be made from memories now too as a growing number of companies have identified a desire among ‘ordinary’ people not to be forgotten, but to have their everyday lives elevated in narrative form complete with a beginning, middle and end, though not necessarily with the good, the bad and the ugly. These aural histories give people the power to frame their own stories and the opportunity to craft them either as autobiographies, hagiographies or sometimes even apologies. It’s a modern-day This Is Your Life for the masses, but instead of being presented with a big red book, clients receive an MP3 recording.
As a historian, Bunbury is particularly interested in people’s location, their ancestry and family background. For Waterford-born Karen Tomkins, founder of The Treasure Vox and a journalist with 15 years’ experience working as a documentary maker in local radio, she approaches every commission with a broadcaster’s ear. Each documentary she produces is evocatively embellished with sound effects, music score and narration. “If someone is recalling a happy childhood memory on the beach, then it can really add to the narrative to have the sound of waves breaking gently in the background,” she explains.
Both oral history businesses were launched in lockdown, although the idea for The Treasure Vox was more than a decade old, having taken shape when Tomkins was at a loss as to what to gift her grandmother as an 80th birthday present. “She was a brilliant character, and when I was a child, she’d tell me stories about her own childhood that I’d only half listen to; tales about how she’d made clothes out of flour sacks,” laughs the 42-year-old. “But as I grew older I realised what a shame it would be if these anecdotes were to die with her, so I asked her to sit down with me and tell me her life story in her own words.” When 70 members of Tomkins’ extended family each wanted this little piece of family history for themselves, she knew it had the potential to become a business.
For Bunbury, it was the years he spent sitting in kitchens chatting with Ireland’s “old-timers” for his series of coffee table books called Vanishing Ireland that planted the seed for Life Story. For a historian, it’s a dream job. “It really colours in my understanding of the past,” explains the 52-year-old, who has documented the personal histories of more than 60 over-65s since he launched Life Story four years ago. “It feels like I’m banking data, preserving the precious memories of people and places disappearing all the time,” he explains. He’s also memorialising what he describes as “the really wonderful old-world accents and turns of phrase” of Ireland’s older senior citizens.
It feels like I’m banking data, preserving the precious memories of people and places disappearing all the time.
Both Bunbury and Tomkins reveal that business is booming. Jane O’Keefe of Dingle-based Irish Life and Lore, another memoir-making service, says she’s noticed “a remarkable upsurge in interest” among families looking to record and archive their personal family histories. Across the water, UK-based Story Terrace has taken the autobiography industry by storm, with its agency of more than 600 writers producing thousands of book-bound memoirs a year.
Scaling up is something Tomkins is not comfortable with, however. Although booked up six months in advance, she says she’s keeping the business small on purpose and employs only one trusted fellow journalist to conduct Treasure Vox interviews. “I don’t think you can mass-produce this kind of work,” she says. “I give each interview space to breathe in my mind. Each one is so personal and it’s difficult not to feel emotional when someone shares their story with you. The authenticity of what I do lies in being able to travel to someone’s home and sit with them, chat with them. It’s not about pulling out a stopwatch and saying ‘Right, your three hours start now!’”
Some commissions necessitate an online interview. “If people are at an end-of-life stage, they will often choose to do the interview remotely, and it works fine,” says the mother of three. Most of Bunbury’s interviews are carried out this way due to time pressures. “I send a recording device to clients and then it’s about making them feel as comfortable as possible, maybe in their favourite chair and with a cup of tea. You do need an ally – a son, daughter, nephew or neighbour – to help with the technical side of things,” he explains. “Some elderly people need a moment to adjust to chatting through a computer screen, or a little bit of coaxing, but others jump straight in.” Most people seeking out the service are over 80, but Bunbury interviewed a flurry of people in their 60s last year. “I was approached by a lot of children in their 20s and 30s who wanted their parents’ stories documented, which was brilliant because sometimes we wait too long to have personal histories recorded.
“Our memories can become less sharp as we age. Having said that, I’ve met a 98-year-old who was sharper than I’ll ever be,” laughs the father of two. Bunbury also recalls a 97-year-old who had an incredible memory for detail, though this comes with its own issues, he reveals. “It can be quite difficult when someone has such a good memory because they tell you all of the minutia down to the colour of the walls, so it can take a lot longer to move the interview along.” This particular gentleman told a wonderful story about being at school in Cork 90 years ago. His teacher, Sister Benedict, brought in buckets of beach sand and poured it all over a billiards table in one of the school buildings and taught the class how to make sand castles. “I thought that was just lovely,” says Bunbury. “He was completely happy with the Sisters who had educated him. One was even nicknamed Sister Santa Claus.”
Bunbury has met plenty of people who didn’t enjoy their education though, and Tomkins says she’s noticed a collective trauma around the topic. “A hatred of teachers comes up time and time again,” she reveals. “Some people won’t talk about school; they simply shut down. Teachers could be rough. Corporal punishment was standard. The impact this has had on a generation in this country is unbelievable.”
She sees many common themes emerge from her conversations with men and women who grew up in the 1920s, 30s and 40s. “A lot of the local women in Wexford, where I now live, have very similar stories. Many of them reared pigs and chickens in their back gardens and operated a barter system because money was so tight. Some told me how they’d pull the wool out of a jumper and use it to knit up something new,” she adds. “Lots of men revealed how they’d had to emigrate to support their families.” Tomkins says that generally her interviewees’ happiest memories are the simplest ones: enjoying a sixpenny bag of chips after a day’s work, flying down a hill on the back of a bike, or receiving a chocolate bar on Christmas morning during ration times.
Generally interviewees’ happiest memories are the simplest ones: enjoying a sixpenny bag of chips after a day’s work, flying down a hill on the back of a bike, or receiving a chocolate bar on Christmas morning during ration times.
Others have fewer happy memories. Bunbury reveals that one woman he interviewed wanted to tell her difficult story so that she could set the record straight. “She had become estranged from her children after going off the rails 20 years ago and she booked a Life Story so that she could explain to them what that had been all about. It was a mind-blowing experience,” he says softly, “Very emotional.” Tomkins had a similar encounter with a woman who wanted to communicate her painful history to family members and found this medium the best way of expressing it. “Often when an individual comes to me themselves to book an interview rather than one of their relatives, there’s been some sort of fallout, difficult childhood or strained family relations that they want to address.”
Tomkins finds the aural medium incredibly intimate, with none of the distractions, such as lighting and cameras, that filming would require. “Everyone’s senses are heightened. It’s just about the story,” she explains. She has no fewer than three centenarians lined up for interviews in the coming months in Dublin, Cavan and Athlone. While some of the very elderly people interviewed have had cognitive issues or a degree of memory loss, both she and Bunbury agree it’s never not enjoyable teasing out their stories. Bunbury admits it’s rare he comes away from an interview not thinking, “Wow, that was so interesting”.
Documenting ordinary people’s lives may be a popular trend right now, but it has ancient roots in this country, from the local lore exchanged in pubs to the fireside stories of the traditional seanchaí. Author Charlie Connelly once remarked: “The past is all around us…It’s not in lists of monarchs or dates of battles that it truly comes alive; it’s in people and places. Everyone and everywhere has a story.” Yes they do, and once again, we’re listening.
This article was originally published in the Sunday Independent, July 2024