1Professor Paul Thompson (born 1935), graduated in Modern History at Oxford University in 1958 and obtained a D.Phil from the same University in 1964. He was later appointed lecturer in Social History at the University of Essex (1964), which had been recently established. In 1988 he was appointed Research Professor in Sociology, at the same university, where he continued his research and teaching in the areas of social history and sociology. He is considered to be a pioneer of social science research, specialising in life stories and oral history. He is one of the founders of Oral History Society and was founding editor of its journal Oral History. In 1987 he established the National Life Story Collection in the British Library, an important project gathering oral history interviews on multiple subjects. Since his early years of research, Thompson was committed to the preservation and reuse of qualitative materials resulting from social research, and was director of Qualidata at the University of Essex from 1994 to 2001. This led him to start his life story project with Pioneers of Social Research, Paul Thompson is author to a large number of publications on multiple themes resulting from life story and oral history research. From these we highlight The Edwardians (1975 and 1992), The Voice of the Past (1978, 1988, 2000 and 2017) – one of the most important written books on oral history –, The Work of William Morris (1967 and 1991), Living the Fishing (1983), I Don’t Feel Old (1990) and Growing up in Stepfamilies (1998). 

2This interview focuses on Paul Thompson’s influences, his interest in social research, history, art and architecture. During this conversation Thompson tells us how his work and professional life developed, the influence of W. G. Hoskins and his perspective on the history of landscape — which guided him to look to the nearby history in Eastern England, for instance. He mentions how he came to start working with oral history and the innovative approaches of the Ruskin College, the first steps in the creation of the Oral History Society and its future journal Oral History. Later he mentions his concern about the data generated by oral history and social research and the importance of keeping it for further use by other researchers, following the example of the work developed on the interviews recorded for The Edwardians — the Remaking of British Society project. Finally, Thompson shares the story behind the creation of the National Life Stories Collection in the British Library and his present interests and work. His work and life dedicated to the knowledge of the past, but also with a permanent curiosity for the things of the world, culture and people, are a true inspiration to “learning to listen”.

3I would like to thank Professor Paul Thompson for his kindness in sharing his views and personal story by telephone during April 2020, whilst we were both confined in our homes in London and Lisbon during the quarantine period established to contain the Covid-19 epidemic crisis.

4

5

Luísa Seixas (LS): You’ve mentioned a childhood experience that has influenced you to follow history and research. What took you to make your first steps into research and to approach the past, specifically? 

Paul Thompson (PT): I grew up in an unattractive commuter town south of London. I think I was first interested in history particularly, also in architecture. Well, I know my parents were interested in the arts and architecture so they introduced me, they first got me interested. I went to boarding school at ten [Bishop’s Stortford], an ‘unsectarian’ school just north of London, which was a very unhappy change for me, actually. But right at the end, there was a teacher who introduced me to the history of architecture and to all the different phases of English architecture which I hadn’t really understood at that point. And then, when I went on to the main School there was a wonderful French teacher [Walter Strachan] who was much more interested in art than in the French language [laughter]. I mean he did teach us a bit about that, and I learned to read French certainly and tried to speak it. We first went to France in 1947, when France was completely wrecked by the war and we camped. We drove all the way to Switzerland which was in a better state. We took a lot of coffee and we bartered that for local food. This was with my parents. Our car crashed on the way back so it was quite a scary adventure…

When I got to the main school, this French teacher encouraged my interest in art and architecture. He ran a little club where we would go cycling out into the countryside nearby and find the old buildings and do drawings of them. And that’s when I first learned to draw — doing pen and ink. He was a very big influence. His son [Geoffrey] is my oldest, continuous friend. We met when we were ten. We kind of started as rivals at school and we both took up sketching and painting. He still does those things.

LS: So, this influence of architecture and architectural history made you grow an interest in the past?

LS: You’ve mentioned that you found a very big affinity to the person of William Morris also.

But then at university, I had a new influence: my medievalist tutor, Trevor Aston, managing editor of the left-wing history journal Past and Present, who was a Marxist. A very, very clever man. He took me very seriously. He applied a Marxist analysis to medieval development. So I started writing essays about that. Interestingly enough, for now, I wrote one essay on the impact of the Black Death on the economy. He was very interested about it because I argued that it was because of the Black Death that the English got going, not only in producing wool, because they’d been doing that from the 13th century, with the Cistercian monasteries, but also started to manufacture cloth. So what became my part of England, eastern England, has a particularly rich legacy of late medieval architecture. Really beautiful churches and also farms and houses in the towns. I’d started visiting those as a schoolboy because I could cycle to that area and look at the buildings. I realized that the buildings were very striking. Now I had a kind of Marxist analysis to add up to what I could see with my eyes. So that was quite an important turning point in my thinking. I’m sure it was. I wanted then to have a bridge between the two approaches. I was never a Stalinist type of Marxist. I didn’t join the Communist Party, but for some years, I was a socialist member of the Labour Party.

I’ve been very interested through the recent work I have done interviewing climate change thinkers, to see that in a way they were trying to bring together a green vision and a Marxist vision. Michael Redclift was one of the interviews I have completed. He was the most sustained writer in that whole way. But my colleague Ted Benson was also a critical influence in trying to make that junction between the two. It is happening again, in another way, an attempt to fuse Marxism with another form of a more democratic way of looking at things, I think that is interesting for the present, as well as my own story [laughter].

LS: Landscape and architecture have been a big influence in the way you look at the process of change in history and Hoskins was, of course, a big influence.

LS: And were there any other big influences in your work? You have mentioned a few now, but are there any others? In your early career and start?

PT: There was another one at school actually, that was important, a biology teacher – Arnold Darlington – because he was a researcher. At that time, a lot of people who would now be lecturers at university were school teachers because the universities were much, much smaller. The proportion of the attending population was far less. So, for innovative, creative people one way of having a career where you could combine the two was through school teaching. And we had this school teacher who actually used the boys for his own research. So, for instance, we would cycle out to a nearby field, a grass field, a meadow we called it, and he would take what we would now say a square meter, but by then we called it “a square yard” of field and try and find out what insects were there. And he actually found an unknown, unrecognized species while doing this. The other thing he did, which I remember, was cycling somewhat further, getting up to the higher land. I used to like to get up there because you could get longer views, but that was quite a longer ride. He took the whole group of us with walkie-talkie sets to spot the migration of the birds.

What I realized from that was that I could do interesting research wherever I was. And that’s something I have not forgotten. I’ve done quite a lot of oral history as local projects. One of the projects that I would have never undertaken if not for this attitude, was when I was living in Oxford. I didn’t really like the area very much, because there was a lot of very arrogant people living in North Oxford, in Summertown, which is that north part of Oxford, where I was as a research student when I was doing my PhD. There’s this social cluster where there were a lot of people who too were working in other universities, as well as Oxford, and the people of Oxford University tried to keep separate from the people from the other universities, they were too proud of themselves. That made them rather insular. Anyway, we decided to do a local project and it turned out to be extremely interesting and maybe I understand the whole area much, much better.

LS: This brings me to a question about your work and the practice of oral history. What is the importance of collaboration either when you’re in a dialogue during an interview, or while working with other disciplines and other professionals? I suppose this brings a lot of challenges but also a lot of groundbreaking experiences in research. Could you share your visions on this?

Even more striking was a man that I met called Andy Noble. He was a fisherman from north-east Scotland, he didn’t own a boat, he was what we call a “deckhand”, which meant that he wasn’t part of the local fishing elite at all. He was very interested in history but also in the economics of fishing and the social aspects of the area. So I have spent a lot of time just talking and arguing with him. Because he had ideas about how the social system and the economic system related. Part of it is that when you go on a boat – and I did that actually, going out for several days on the mackerel fishing off north-west Scotland with Andy – there is an egalitarian atmosphere although actually, what we call the skipper, the captain of the boat, is in charge and he tells the people what to do. Socially they have to treat them as equals. So you are trying to pretend that you are something that you are not, trying to pretend that you are a full, independent fishermen, but at the same time being a worker for somebody else. So that is the kind of person that if you’re doing a project on a community is absolutely invaluable.

PT: Well, I still think about it. The interest in the family is part of what’s different with The Edwardians. From the interviews we got all those direct details of non-elite ordinary people's family lives. When I wrote it there weren’t a lot of people interested in that, although very quickly social historians turned and saw its potential. And they were quicker using other people’s data. So that was something. I think that the other thing which it gave me was a surprising theoretical way of looking at the world, a new way of looking at the world which was that social change came from two different directions, one was from the top, particularly from politics, but there was also change being fuelled by individual behaviour. The most obvious example of that was migration. It also happens with who you choose for marriage, and in whether people have children or not, how large a family they are going to have and so on. I mean, governments have never actually succeeded in controlling population change and they get into a lot of trouble about it. So that was completely new, I wouldn’t have thought of all that without doing that project.

LS: Have you thought about going back to those materials and looking at them with different perspectives?

LS: Just going back to the Qualidata project, to which you were the director. This relates to some of the biggest issues around historical and social sciences research. Could you talk about this experience and how you see these challenges today? How can we manage, curate, preserve and make data available for further research?

 PT: We originally kept the Edwardians interviews in a department store room at Essex, and a lot of social historians used it for their own publications. I became increasingly concerned that no effort was being made nationally to archive interviews from other key social research projects and from the late 1980s actively campaigned for a change. We conducted a survey which showed that nothing had been kept from many very important projects, such as the series of early studies of black communities in Britain. This eventually led in 1994 to the founding of Qualidata, which I directed until 2001, with Louise Corti, setting up a national system which means that funded projects need to be considered for archiving. In 2001 its funders, the Social Science Research Council, merged Qualidata with the UK Data Archive, which is also based at Essex. I worked with them until 2008, when I retired. So I was in very active touch with them. And my own materials on pioneer social researchers still go to them.

LS: Yes, and I wanted to ask you about the moment when you founded National Life Stories. How was this process and how did you approach or they approached you to create this collection, and what motivated you?

PT:  You see, what happened, happened rather gradually. First of all, we realised very quickly that the material from The Edwardians which was being recorded from, I think 1968 onwards, would be interesting to other people. So we were lucky that Essex University was a big new building with quite a lot of empty space, so we were given a windowless cupboard next to the Sociology Department and we set up an archive there, as hard copy. You could look at it as a whole interview or according to the themes following the interview guide. We had a lot of people who came and wrote from it. I felt pleased because I thought you could get five times as much use from your material by making it available than you could ever create from it yourself. 

So that was the first stage. The next one was when I began to think that there was a lot of similar material probably in peoples’ offices and homes which would be thrown out when they retired and we ought to try and preserve it. So around 1986 I conceived of the idea of setting up National Life Stories as a project based in a section of the British Library. I used various contacts, but especially my mother-in-law, to recruit the first set of trustees, and crucially through her, I met Jennifer Wingate, who has been an active supporter and interviewer ever since, and who ran our big programme with survivors of the Holocaust. It was through Jennifer and Roger Wingate that I got half of the support to launch National Life Stories, and the other half actually came from me, in a way [laughter]. It was partly an accident. I had decided to try and raise money, and I thought: “Well I should raise some of it myself”. My father had recently died and left me a bronze by Henry Moore — which went back to the influence of my school teacher. He was always saying: “Henry Moore is going to be so important, your father should buy a Henry Moore”. So eventually, one day my father rang up and said: “I’ve bought a Henry Moore, was that the right thing to do?” I think he paid about five hundred pounds for it, you see. Later on, when my parents retired and eventually moved to sheltered housing that statue was in the communal garden. I decided that it wasn’t safe for it to stay there and took it to Sotheby’s. I gave it to National Life Stories, before the sale, and then it was sold for two hundred thirty thousand pounds [laughter] which at that age, was an awful lot of money. So that’s how it got going.

LS: Related to the creation of the Oral History Society, and as I understood it, it was also a reaction to some scepticism being shown by some historians in the academy, is this right?

PT: What actually happened was that, first of all, right at the end of the 1960s, a small number of social and labour historians were experimenting with biographical recording, mainly of older working class people. We were unaware that there was parallel activity in Europe and the United States – we hadn’t even heard the phrase “oral history”.  At that point, there was a place called the British Institute of Recorded Sound, which was mainly music and also bird and animal sounds. There wasn’t a national sound archive of any kind. And I went to them and asked if they would like to be associated. So they seemed quite keen — mainly Patrick Saul, who was the director. I started to deposit materials with him, but then, one of the times I went to their archives to listen to some of what they had, and he couldn’t find any playback machine which would work. So I thought that wasn’t good enough. But it was through him that, in December 1969, we called a meeting of people who we knew were experimenting with oral history. I produced a report on it which was circulated to all the people who we knew were interested in it.

So after that would eventually become Oral History: the Journal of the Oral History Society, of which I was the editor — before there was a society. I didn’t immediately see the need for a society. I thought a network would be enough, but then, the new Social Science Research Council — which at first encouraged experiments in oral history, and that was how I got the money for The Edwardians, which I think was thirty thousand pounds, quite a lot at that time —, after three years [SSRC] decided they wouldn’t give any more money until they had reviewed what had been produced. They were quite generous for a bit. They funded our first national conference. But this soon changed. As you rightly suggest, there was indeed scepticism, even among outstanding social and labour historians. Key supporters included John Saville, ex C.P. labour historian, the urban historian Asa Briggs (soon to be head of the new University of Sussex), and Raphael Samuel, who had been leading spirit of the New Left Movement and became an activist committee member of the Oral History Society. But to our surprise, E. P. Thompson remained sceptical, and Eric Hobsbawm became openly hostile to oral history. He commissioned me to write The Edwardians but then tried to persuade me to cut out the oral history sections. So we were then in a situation where there wasn’t any kind of pressure group to try to press for some kind of ongoing funding for oral history. We decided in 1974, at a meeting at York, which was part of a series which was being organised through the journal, to set up the Oral History Society, to have a chairman and a committee. John Saville was its second chairman and Asa Briggs first chairman of National Life Stories.

LS: Going back to The Voice of the Past and oral history as an instrument for the democratisation of knowledge and the process of building identities and also the connection with communities and history, could you mention how these dimensions have developed through the years in the use of oral history?

PT: Well, there is an immense amount of oral history work in Britain. Politically I would say, it hasn’t changed very much. It is not part of any political programme. There continue to be some projects that are about aspects of politics. The most dramatic examples of that are the Northern Irish ones. Because they were so controversial. But otherwise I feel the current situation is somewhat disappointing. It’s good that so much oral history work has become linked to social work, with the big reminiscence movement which Joanna Bornat led for quite a long time with Help the Aged, using oral history as a form of therapy for old people in homes and hospitals. This has shown to be very effective in encouraging them to talk about themselves and to relate to other people and so on. The danger is that you start promoting an image of old people as just dependent and not active in their own ways. I should like to see more community projects in which historians and local people work together focussing on major historical themes. In fact, there is a huge amount of volunteer activity by older people in Britain. Probably the largest scale example is the National Trust. Their volunteers, drawn from a national membership of two million, effectively staff the opening of their historic houses, and are trained to a high level of historical awareness. This could provide a different model for oral history work in a diverse range of communities, from smart suburbs to immigrant areas around the ports and airports.

And then there is the Heritage Lottery Fund that originally was quite interested in professional historical work and was willing to fund academics. But it ceased to be so in recent years. They are fairly reluctant to have anything to do with academics. Now they focus on the short term impact on the communities, and so what they do there is getting volunteers, or sometimes they pay, training local people in interviewing, transcribing or technical audio skills. That could be younger people or older people. The whole point is that there is a brief training which may have a lot of impact in terms of teaching skills, but is not sustained in terms of developing historical interpretations. They do also try to get the historic buildings accessible and used by the communities.

LS: Could you talk about your main interests and research areas nowadays? I know you have been writing a book called Pioneering Social Research.

PT: Yes, well, with my two colleagues and co-authors, I am trying to finish off that project.

LS: You have just mentioned two of the areas in which you think oral historians could focus on — using oral history as a form of therapy and collaborative community projects. Are there any other areas or main themes that you would like to look at now? 

LS: How did this project [Pioneers of Social Research] unfold? What were your main goals? And how did it develop?  

PT: I came to see that a lot of people were doing interesting research in Britain but not caring about what happened to their interviews, their materials. So I started a campaign to do something about that, to look for what were significant earlier materials and get them archived so it could be used in the long-term. You could look at the change over the long-term and go back and reexamine these interviews. Well, that was 1995, when we set up Qualidata. We were archiving materials. And then I thought that what we really needed to know about was what researchers were trying to do and who they were and their own lives and so on. I only started that in 1997 with Peter Townsend, which was one of the longest interviews I have ever done. Seventeen hours in five sessions, actually. He was a wonderful person to interview because he spoke so clearly and in straightforward English. You could just type that out and almost publish it without any alteration. He was remarkable in that way.