Archive Interviews

D-Day Remembered

Manhunt On The Downs

Rough Music

🔉The following link is an extract of an interview I recorded with Nobby Kinnard of Clapham in 1997, where he describes the last rough music demonstration in his village.

Edith Geere

This short extract from my interview with Edith Geere very nearly wasn’t recorded at all. My interview with her took place in December 1999, when she was 92. She told me a lot about growing up in Sompting and the difficulties poorer people had in making ends meet. In those days all my interviews were recorded on C90 audio cassettes; and it was just as the tape was running out that Edith told me about the poor beggarman who called at her house on his way to the workhouse at East Preston.

This photograph was taken in 1904, Edith Geere was born on 1907, so she would have started attending Sompting School in 1911 or 1912

Literally, as she finished telling me of the beggar being arrested and her mother’s reaction, the tape ran out. The indignation in Edith’s voice is still palpable, even though she was describing an event that had taken place so many years earlier, before the First World War.