ABSTRACT
Raphael Samuel once parodied the ‘great chain of being’ stretching from the tea room of the Institute of Historical Research in London, where the high priests of history discussed lofty matters, down to the amateur historians (such as the genealogists foraging in county archives for information about their ancestors). The lowest rung of the ladder was reserved, he complained, for oral historians whose critics accused it ‘of practising a naive empiricism in which the facts are supposed to speak for themselves’ (Samuel 1994). One could say that oral history itself has a hierarchy, a shorter one, which does not stretch so far into the historical stratosphere but runs across a spectrum of professional academic oral historians and local historians conducting a considerable amount of oral historical research within their own communities. For this reason, oral history could be considered the most democratic of historical methods – it does not require a wealth of technical equipment, or a depth of historiographical knowledge, and is immediately accessible to many amateur historians who volunteer their services to the local communities. It is its very popularity, of course, that makes the quality uneven, and which has partly resulted in oral history not receiving the credit it deserves in bringing the history of everyday experiences to large audiences. However, it has popularised ‘history’, taken it outside of the confines of the academy, and that can be no bad thing.
