Food practices in Westmorland in the early twentieth century: Using archival oral history data

JULIA BRANNEN

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Aims of paper

Focus on food practices • farming practices • food production • meals • hardship and self-sufficiency • food and celebratory occasions

Methodological issues in analysing these data

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Ambleside Oral History Archive

Reasons for selecting this Archive

- Online accessibility and search terms -http://www.amblesideonline.co.uk

- High quality of the provenance

- Substantial number of interviews for period

References made to food

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Focus of analysis

- 26 interviews with those born 1890-1920

- Mainly men and women living in the isolated valleys of Langdale in the Lake District

- (slate quarrying and farming; mains utilities and mechanical transportation and tractors came late to the area)

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Food production

- harvesting potatoes with a horse and plough girl aged 12

- milking, making buttermilk and churning butter girl aged six- - making (‘haver’) bread

- killing a pig multiple uses for macon (salted meat), black puddings, sausage and ‘all the fat rendered down for lard’

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Meals

- ‘We always ate rough but good’

- Meals centred around the men’s working day

- ‘Mother had a hard life. She was always baking and making food’

- Unappetising meals for hired labour

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Harry

‘We would be working from six in't morning till eight, milking eight o'clock at night, and it was funny, for meals, morning you got porridge, but we got dog head porridge. They used to tip all t’meal into a girt pan on top of old fire and nivver stir it. And it used to come up like dumplings. Well when you broke in, eat in to them, they were dry. So we called them dog eats’ (working for farmer aged 14)

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Self-sufficiency of the community

Dorothy, daughter of a primary school teacher, talking about WW 1:‘things were very difficult but in the country I think we had much the

best of it because the farmers were allowed to butcher their own cattle, for example, and you could always get somebody to give you a rabbit if you were short of meat. We kept hens and ducks ourselves… It wasn't so bad in the country. People who stayed with us from the town always went home with a gift from the country when they came. We have a funny family story about my eldest sister who was getting rather cross with an aunt who was staying with us and said, when she was a very young child one morning, "Kill an old hen and get away home!"

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Celebrations and food

- Food integral to celebratory occasions with special foods not eaten at other times of the year - –‘treasure trove stories’ that mark the contrast with their mundane everyday lives  

- ‘Currant pasty’ on Christmas morning (a forerunner of Christmas pudding), ‘rum butter’ at christenings, ‘feg sow’ (fig soup) for funerals, and ‘Easter ledges’ (at Eastertide)

- ‘Shilling hops’ followed by ‘good suppers with ham or salmon’

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Insights from substantive analysis

- The centrality of food and food production to sustaining a rural way of life in an isolated area

- The part that food plays in everyday life

Contextualised in changes over more than a century

The events that people recall - the highpoints that mark the calendar of rural life

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Methodological issues

- As users of the material we were not involved in original study/ data collection

- We accessed transcripts and not the tapes- Purpose of analysis specific (food) and not that of original researchers- Distanced in time, place, culture, context (academe/ social science)- Process is one of recontextualisation - All analysis carried out ‘in the moment ‘ (Andrews 2013) – no single

interpretation

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The dialogic form of the interview - Missing data relating to interviewer-interviewee dialogue off tape - Missing data and the context, setting etc

- Interviewer has clear aim to elicit cultural and material practices

- Interviewer draws on, and works hard to show, their ‘insider knowledge’ of the community and the people

Use of ‘restricted communicative code’

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Issues of temporality: memories of the past- Remembering provokes ‘small stories’ (Bamberg)- Interviewees in old age focussed on their early lives- Historical time rarely referred to - time ordered by life course, dramatic

local crises and regular events in the community calendar - hiring fairs, tup fairs, the Langdale Gala

- Interviewees dwell on how how routines and rituals of everyday country life have disappeared in context of a changing society – possible artefact of the interviewer’s questions

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Issues of temporality: looking back at the past from the presentEvaluations of the past given in context of the present

e.g. Hannah ‘But I think we were fairly well fed and well clothed at the time within reason for those days you see. And having your own milk… and this is a good thing for children isn’t it?

Past is ‘a foreign land’ in the context of rapid technological change – – seen via rose-tinted spectacles – seen negatively

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Performativity

- Dramatic quality of the talk- Narrative skills displayed and narrative devices deployed by

intervieweesspecificity of references‘small stories’direct speechhumourdrawing in the listener

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Some issues for secondary analysts / (re) users of data- Difficulties for outsiders to make sense of data

- How to set accounts within the local and broader historical context

- Issues concerning selective recall

Evaluations of the past from values and perspectives of the present

BUT these data bring us close to a particular time and a very particular place

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Questions?

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