By Nosheen Iqbal TheGuardian
Oral histories are big business as families hire the professionals to record their parents speaking for posterity
When the writer Anna Davies lost her mother in 2010, she didn’t expect that her most vital emotional connection would become a shopping list. Specifically, a voicemail left by her mother while she was sick in the hospital, listing hamburgers, chips, bin bags “and anything else you want”.
After her death, Davies listened to it all the time on her old iPhone 4, which she carried everywhere. “It’s my only recording of her voice,” she wrote. “It’s as if the phone itself is a time machine that allows me to step into the past – if only for the 22 seconds of the recorded message.”
The value in evocative, deeply personal audio memories has led to a wave of businesses looking to save the voices and stories of loved ones for posterity. recordable create memoirs in book and audio form, employing professional historians to interview and capture a person’s life. Afternote allows users to upload their memories and messages.
But it is services that offer broadcast-quality documentaries that have seen a huge spike of interest in recent months. Ordinary people are interviewed about their lives and this is edited into slick, radio-ready shows. “We’ve been busier than we have ever been in the last year – and we’ve been going for 12 years,” says Lucy Greenwell, founder of Lives on Record. Business is also booming for Record Them – demand has seen prices rise from £299 to £899 for an audio documentary since the service launched last October.
When Russ Chamber’s father died, he was left with photos and mementos but only had memories of the sound of his father’s laughter or of his voice. “And so I was really determined to capture my mum’s stories, I wanted to celebrate her life,” he says. “She’s 86 and lives in Hull where I grew up as a kid, but the family is spread around the UK and she lives alone now.”
Chambers stumbled across Record Them, set up by ex-BBC producer Dave Creasey. “I’d been looking for something like a Desert Islands Disc thing for ages and I gave it to my mum as a Christmas present,” says Chambers. Unsurprisingly, it was a fraught business – how do you ask a loved one to be interviewed so you can save the CD or MP3 for when they’ve gone?
“I was a bit nervous as I didn’t know she’d respond,” says Chambers. “Luckily, she thought it was wonderful and all the family was there encouraging her to capture her life for her children and grandchildren, so she embraced it.”
The family arranged a weekend of swapping stories and sharing timelines before her big interview with Creasey, who set up a mini recording studio at her home and spent hours interviewing her. “She felt like a queen for the day. Everyone was interested in her life story – it was so lovely to listen to.” Chambers recalls the details about his mother’s life he hadn’t known before he listened to her audio documentary. “I’m choking up … it’s not the big stories like her evacuation in the war or meeting my dad, it’s the little ones she told – like how she’d always wanted to be a teacher.”
Not everyone needs to hire help in order to record the voices they want to remember: in the spirit of DIY, Elbow frontman Guy Garvey launched a radio campaign last November urging listeners to record their parents and relatives themselves. Garvey spent a decade recording his now late father telling stories, sharing anecdotes and spending time with his family. The results aired as a documentary on BBC Radio 6 Music.
For author Kishwar Desai, recording her parents’ testimony – of them growing up through and surviving the partition of their homeland, their lives in Pakistan and India, their thoughts and memories – became politically as well as personally urgent.
“We need their lives and all those other lives of our people [in South Asia] recorded in oral history because there is no other real documentation and we have to capture them before they’re gone. It is immensely emotional but we have to acknowledge what they went through,” she says.
In 2017, on the 70th anniversary of the bloody division of British India into India and Pakistan, Desai opened the world’s first partition museum in Amritsar, which houses thousands of interviews from survivors – including those of her mother and father.
“My father is in his 90s and is able to talk about his life in an analytical way, his mind is really sharp,” she says. “With my mother, we had heard snatches here and there before but it was incredible how much we didn’t know, or could not have asked because it needed someone outside the family to ask them.”
In the radio memoir business, an outsider’s perspective is considered the key to success. “I’ve made thousands of our bespoke personal documentaries,” says Greenwell, “and often the children will tell me they will have heard things they never knew before. We hear amazing stories, family secrets, things that just aren’t shared in day-to-day busy lives because there is something about talking to a stranger where you can gently get to the heart of the matter. That is difficult for people to do with their own parents.”
Tact is also essential. Creasey urges families to talk more openly about how and why they want to save special memories. “I’m pushing 30 and I’ve recorded my own and buried it,” he says, laughing. “It’s an amazing tribute to have … I tell people that a recording will last longer than you or me or anyone else which is why it’s so unique.”
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