This guest blog was researched and written by Jenny Lloyd.

“We had a joint of meat every day.  But the family next door … they were really poor. The children sat round the table with an empty plate and tapped the plates to make out they were eating.”

“Friday and Saturday was Bath Night for the men and boys. You take soap and towel. There were two classes: the nobs paid 2d to use the posh baths … The men of course had baths before the weekend ritual drinking spree.”

“On Saturday nights … the people of the quarter used to gather outside Stilman’s and Mr Stilman would get one or two of his butchers to throw parcels of meat out to us and it’d be one mad scramble … He was a gentleman, Mr Stilman was. The poor round our way could thank him for a lot; they were sure of one meal a week, providing they weren’t killed in the crush.”

Just some voices from People Talking, a collection of memories from working people in Exeter which I recorded, transcribed and published between 1975 and 1979.

The Devon and Exeter Institutions’s West Quarter Research Group, led by Julia Neville, followed up their initial interest in the stories of People Talking by contacting me to arrange to discuss how the memories recorded there could complement the data collected in the house-by-house research done by the group.

The projects overlap but draw on different types of sources to shed light on life in working-class Exeter 100 years ago. The Exeter events of ‘The Festival of Devon in the 1920s’ will feature not only a dramatic presentation based on the lives of real Exeter people from the West Quarter in the 1920s and a Face to Face day at DEI presenting the West Quarter, but also a podcast of extracts from People Talking with the chance to read the full collection not only in the Library at the DEI but also online (see below).

People Talking was inspired by Charles Parker, a BBC radio producer, who collaborated with folk musicians Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger in creating the Radio Ballads which presented the lives of miners, fisher people, motorway workers and more, in their own words.

As a trainee English teacher, I joined a workshop which Charles Parker ran at a conference in 1969 and found myself in a coffee bar in Princesshay armed with a high powered reel-to-reel tape recorder listening to teenagers talk about their lives. And so I learned about the power of oral testimony, about asking open questions, about editing material to tell the stories of people’s lives in their own words without editorial comment.

When I came to start People Talking – spanning the four years I stopped teaching to have my daughters – I didn’t have access to high powered recording equipment. I transcribed everything I recorded on my cassette tape recorder, laboriously typing it all out word for word (only excluding the ‘ers’). I then edited it, taking scissors to the script and sellotaping paragraphs together to achieve a final version. Then I typed it all out again.  Hours of work.

Early volumes (at 10p each) were produced on Roneo, a basic duplicating method. Later we got more sophisticated, producing the text on a golf ball typewriter (where you could change the font), varying the layout by cutting and pasting and including illustrations which I commissioned from local artists.

 

Where did I start?  I took my tape recorder to a pensioners’ lunch club in Newtown and invited members to talk about their memories of the area. There followed a chain reaction of contacts, through word of mouth and through the support of Express & Echo journalist, Geoff Worrall who gave People Talking and its contributors extensive coverage.

The contents of the final published volumes are as follows:

  • Volume 1: Newtown
  • Volume 2: Memorable characters; managing housekeeping pre-WWI
  • Volume 3: Christmas reminiscences; Newtown pre-WWI
  • Volume 4: West Quarter and Fore Street
  • Volume 5: Fairs, the horse parade, and carnivals
  • Volume 6: Working childhoods in Waterbeer Street and North Street, late 1920s and early 1930s
  • Volume 7: St. Sidwell’s WWI-WWII; Exeter Blitz 1942
  • Volume 8: Bartholomew Street and the Mint, including growing up in St Nicholas’ Priory
  • Volume 9: St Mary Arches Street and Stepcote Hill childhoods; Rescuing girls from prostitution

 

Joe Pengelly wrote an article about People Talking 1-7 for The Devon Historian, April 1978, critiquing the methodology while praising the endeavour of “recording the ‘groundlings’ who peopled Exeter” in the first half of the 20th century and giving “voice to a majority who are rarely if ever heard.”

For the early volumes I recorded joint conversations so it’s not clear who is speaking and the memories are somewhat fragmented. Joe Pengelly rightly points out that these transcriptions are too skeletal and disjointed and I’m embarrassed now by the lack of dates.

From Volume 7 the voices become distinct and extended, much to Joe Pengelly’s satisfaction. We are in the Sidwell Street area with the sound of The Devonshire battalion playing their regimental marching song Over the Fields and Turnips from their Howell Road barracks; bullocks being driven up York Road and into Sidwell Street; the clop, clop, clop of horses on the wooden blocks of Sidwell Street. And there are two accounts of the 1942 blitz with both witnesses having to run through the burning streets, machine guns firing from low flying aircraft.

Throughout the series the memories range in more or less detail over how people managed on very little money including pawning possessions and relying on charities and the generosity of some businesses; what they ate; where they shopped; the jobs they did; memorable characters from the streets; meeting their sweethearts; school days; wash days; days out; fights and getting into mischief and more besides. Different voices often cover the same aspects from varying perspectives.

I only spoke to one non-Exonian – and she was the only professional person who shared memories – and that was Minnie Rand. She was 94 when she told me how she was sent to Exeter in the early 1930s by the Church Army to rescue girls from prostitution. Her profound humanity and sense of humour shine through her account (Volume 9).

All nine volumes of People Talking are held in the Westcountry Studies Library at the Devon Heritage Centre, as well the DEI. And they are now available on Internet Archive, where they can be found under the title ‘Complete People Talking (Exeter)’, Creator: Jenny Lloyd.

I’d like to thank historian Julia Neville, who has led the DEI West Quarter Research group, for all her help  in reviving People Talking, now easily accessible.