Now we have finished the 3-year long Herefordshire Life Through a Lens #HLTAL project, so we thought we’d celebrate the project by telling you all a little bit more about how it all came about and what we’ve achieved, with the help of our Catcher Media staff, partner organisation staff, volunteers, interns and all of the people who have so generously added their stories to the project.
The photo shows Actor Alfred Marks in charge of the Nail family’s Spinner, Hereford May Fair circa 1965
How to tell a good story…
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Rick and Julia Goldsmith with Keith James (Dereks former business partner)
Marketing Manager, Rebecca, had a chat with Catcher Media’s Founder and Creative Director, Rick Goldsmith, and Producer and Co-director, Julia Goldsmith, to ask them how the project got started in the first place.
“We’d done another heritage project, called Chewing the Cud about the old livestock market – that was our first project as a CIC [Community Interest Company]. Keith James, Derek’s business partner, provided some photos, which really stood out – they had a charm and a real quirkiness. They were the standout images that we used in the film project and Keith told us about the extent of the archive.”
“We thought, ‘How many other amazing photos are available?’ It was 2014 and Keith said he had a great many negatives and other amazing materials. The cattle market images of Derek’s had piqued our interest and then we realised some of the standout images from our first heritage project about Hereford’s Cathedral Close were also Derek’s. By then, Keith had logged everything with Herefordshire Archive & Records Centre (HARC), but they hadn’t had the time to catalogue the vast number of images or to digitise them. It became clear that, unless an outside project helped, there would never be capacity within the archives to do it by themselves. Of course, they were looking after the archive carefully, but you couldn’t access it because it hadn’t been sorted and logged. Our idea was born: to sort the pictures and negatives and to do some form of outreach work, including collecting the many stories that people had about the photos.”
After a development phase, and a successful funding application to The National Lottery Heritage Fund, Rick and Julia found that there was a huge collection of pictures on one particular subject in the archive, “We started with the hop picking photos. There was such a rich collection of hop imagery. Firstly, we made connections with people on hop farms and the British Hop Association [formerly known as The National Hop Association] such as Ali Capper. We initially approached the ‘gatekeepers’ of the topics (the people in charge) and picked out the recurring themes in Derek’s archive. For example, he had what he called ‘Diary stories’ that were repeated each year. However, the hop-picking part of the archive was so rich, it seemed the obvious place to start the project. We thought it was wonderfully nostalgic, but also forward-looking – with links to current concerns like Brexit and immigration.”
The project got in touch with groups of people who are still putting on events that connect to our collective past, “Many of the archive’s subjects link to events that are still happening now – they are part of living traditions. We spoke to the committee of Fownhope Heart of Oak Club and they put us in touch with members who shared their stories. We contacted Abie Danter who was chair of the Showman’s Guild of Great Britain at the time; Ali Capper, the Director of the British Hop Association; Hereford United Football Club’s committee member, Mike Langford. These people told us who else we’d need to speak to, but we also wanted to talk to all kinds of people: like the old pickers from the Black Country, the Gypsy Roma people and current Polish hop-pickers, so we put stories and photos out on social media, and in the Hereford Times newspaper, to find people who remembered some of the events photographed by Derek.”
“Trust and relationships are a very important part of the job, as you are asking people to talk on camera for the oral history films. We discovered we could have interviewed half the county for the Stories From the Hop Yards film! We spent time building a rapport with Gypsy Roma people for the film and, in the end, we had built good relationships with three people – both on and off camera. The Polish migrant workers were really busy, so it was hard to find time, but we did a bit of filming and had a chat when the farm machinery broke down. They shared photos that they’d been taking on their phones – we shared an edit we’d filmed of them working, and some English beer! We had a Polish subtitled screening in a hop farm barn. Another farmer brought the Polish workers from his place over so that they could view the film together.
For the second film, Carousel, we visited the May Fair and Fownhope Heart of Oak Walk for 2-3 years, to build relationships with people. We took a slideshow of Derek’s images into Hereford city centre for the fairground people to see, and the stallholders came to have a look and spoke to us. Our Oral Historian, Marsha O’Mahony, was phoning people and talking to them – the main thing was to identify people who can tell a good story.”