Hear history in the making

This could be an excellent resource for fleshing out characters and more in historical novels!

George Ewart Evans, the pioneer of British oral history, collected 250 recordings of around 170 individuals born largely in the 1880's and '90s. That collection is now accessible online via the British Library, pioneers in their own right.

The George Ewart Evans Collection "document(s) rural life and agricultural work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, folk beliefs about animals, medicine and witchcraft, folk and popular songs."

"The oldest are Aldeman Ling, born in 1875, discussing bell-ringing; George Messenger, born in 1877, who talks about threshing and about working on the barges at Snape in Suffolk; and Susan Mullenger, born in 1878, recorded in 1967 talking about eating fried mice as a remedy for whooping cough!"

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