In the days before television, video and computer technology, the arts of conversation and story-telling were of much greater value to working class people in Britain and Ireland than they are today. Of course, other forms of mass communication were obviously around before the IT boom of the last two decades of the 1900s; live theatre dates back for centuries; books and newspapers have also been available for a long time - although the mass of common people were not literate until the start of the 20th century; early cinema developed from the 1920s and similarly radio became a popular form of media in the 1930s and 1940s. But prior to these important developments, most working class people used story-telling and the oral tradition as the main means through which to pass on local and family history, customs and culture to future generations.
The recording of oral history in Britain was made popular by George Ewart Evans in a series of books published between 1956 and 1987. Evans’s first book was called Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay which centred on the memories of people born in the Suffolk village of Blaxhall in the last part of the 19th century. Evans showed that personal memories and testimonies should be treated just as seriously by historians as other types of evidence. In 1976 Melvyn Bragg produced a community history of his Cumbrian birthplace called Speak for England and from the mid-1980s Brummie historian Carl Chinn has continued the oral approach through a series of books about the history of the urban West Midlands.
In rural Ireland, the tradition of oral history has always been particularly prevalent and powerful, possibly because formal education and the means to literacy were denied to the Catholic majority of the country for very long periods, but also due to the well-established Bardic traditions of poetry and tale telling. The transmission of wisdom, legend and folk-lore through story was known as glefisa or ‘the bright knowledge’. Researchers John and Caitlin Matthews, internationally renowned writers on the Celtic Tradition describe how “the importance of story to the Celts can scarcely be overestimated. Story was literally the stuff of life, providing information and wisdom as well as entertainment for the long dark nights, in ways that would otherwise have been lost forever”.
Even today the tradition of the seanchai or local rural storyteller is alive in many parts of Ireland. For example there is a gentleman who lives near the town of Moate in Westmeath named James J Hackett who is renowned as the local Culchie King - a story teller, poet, philosopher and self-educated man – the son of a saddler who rides around the country lanes on his push bike sporting Wellington boots and a donkey jacket – unlikely garb for a man who recites Yeats and Shakespeare with the fluency of a seasoned thespian whilst also being a primary authority on local folk-lore and community history.
My wife Theresa and I first became acquainted with James in the early 1990s whilst visiting her mother Kitty Dwyer at Tubber, a tiny village on the Clara Road out of Moate. One memorable Christmas Eve we drank bountiful pints of the ‘nut-brown liquid’ with James and his neighbours until the early hours of Christmas Day, as he entertained and enthralled the packed bar of the Cat and Bagpipes with tales of local saints and of the Viking raiders who sailed up the Shannon to plunder the early monastic community of Clonmacnoise (35 times between 834 and 1163), which lies some 10 miles to the south west of Moate.
A favoured local tale told by James J Hackett is that of a wake held by a local man from Ballydrown for his greyhound in 1905. As a final farewell to his noble canine companion, the gentleman placed his dead dog in a scoured out pigs trough placed in the centre of his kitchen floor. He then invited all of his friends from the Tubber hunters who between them brought 22 hunting dogs to the wake. The craic was great that night in Ballydrown and according to James J the assembled dogs began to moan and howl in the early hours of the morning and the sound was heard for miles around. In his book Days Gone By, James J Hackett writes ‘And now dear readers you may think that the story of the Dog in Ballydrown is a fable, no, that is not so. Another elderly man named Joe, who died in the 1980s aged 93 told me the story’.
In Britain we are only beginning to wake up to the importance of keeping the art of story alive. Not just story in the sense of publishing great or acclaimed works of literature, but story in terms of recording and passing on memories and anecdotes connected to simple human experience. In setting out on making a study of my own family roots, starting from the present day family based largely in Birmingham in England, my starting point was to begin recording the wealth of knowledge and family story available from my older relatives. Instead of switching-off with raised eyebrows every time an elderly aunt or uncle began to ramble down memory lane, instead I reached for a biro and notepad and began to scribble down names and dates in my own form of shorthand - notes that would later act as memory aides when it came to the process of making chronological sense of this mine of personal anecdote.
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