Recording oral histories from retired harbour workers

Why harbour voices are worth recording

Walk along almost any British quayside and you will meet people who worked it when the cargo came over the rail on a hook, not in a container. Retired dockers, trawlermen, ferry crews, lock-keepers, shipwrights and chandlers carry a vocabulary and a set of skills that exist nowhere else. They know how a hold was trimmed by hand, which fog signal meant what, how a boat was brought round in a following sea, and what the harbour smelled like at four in the morning.

Once those memories go, they go for good. Recording them is not simply nostalgia. Oral history fills gaps that written records leave — the texture of a working life, the nickname of a crane, the reason a crew walked out in 1968. Museums, family historians, university researchers and local schools all use these recordings. Best of all, it is a genuinely pleasant way to spend an afternoon.

Before you press record: preparation and consent

Start with a conversation, not a project. Visit, have a cup of tea, explain what you hope to do and why. Then put the practicalities in writing.

• Consent: a simple form covering the purpose of the recording, where it will be stored, who may listen to it, and the right to withdraw or ask for a section to be sealed.
• Copyright: ask the speaker to assign or licence the recording to you and to the archive. Without this, an archive may be unable to publish it.
• Data protection: recordings of identifiable people are personal data under UK GDPR. Store them securely, and never publish details about health, wages or family disputes without explicit permission.
• Research: read up on the port first — vessel names, dock schemes, tide tables, old maps. Knowing the context helps you ask better follow-ups, but resist showing off.

Prepare twelve to fifteen prompts rather than a script. Good ones are open and sensory: “Take me back to your first day.” “What did the fish hold smell like?” “Who was in charge and what did he shout?”

Choosing equipment that survives a quayside

You do not need a studio. A handheld recorder with a furry windshield, or a phone with an external microphone, will do a fine job if you use it carefully.

• Record in WAV, 24-bit, 48 kHz. Compressed formats are for copies, never for masters.
• Use a lapel microphone clipped to the speaker’s collar, with the recorder as a backup. Two sources beat one.
• Set levels so peak speech sits around -12 dB. Test with the person talking normally, not whispering.
• Carry spare batteries, a spare formatted card and a USB power pack. Check everything before you leave the house.
• Record indoors where you can: soft furnishings, curtains and carpet absorb echo. Avoid kitchens and conservatories. Switch off the fridge, the boiler, the radio and your phone.
• Outdoors, shelter behind a wall and fit a furry windshield. A harbour wall in a north-easterly will defeat anything less.

Finish by speaking a slate into the microphone: date, place, full names, interviewer, equipment. It takes ten seconds and saves an hour later.

Running the interview well

Interview one person at a time. If a spouse or grown-up child keeps answering for them, gently suggest they listen from the next room.

Sit at a slight angle, close enough that the microphone does not have to strain. Begin with easy ground — where they were born, their first job, how they got it — and save difficult material for later. Ask for stories rather than opinions: “What happened next?” is the single most useful question in oral history.

Then learn to be quiet. Count to five before you speak. The second answer, offered into that silence, is usually the better one. Do not correct names or dates; ask instead, “And roughly what year was that?”

Props work wonders. A photograph, a union card, an old chart or a notebook on the table will prompt detail that questions alone never reach. Keep a sheet beside you and jot down keywords — vessels, places, nicknames, trades — as an index for the recording.

Cataloguing and archiving the recordings

A recording nobody can find is a recording lost. Spend a little time the same evening.

• Back up three copies on two different types of media, with one kept off-site. Never rely on a single hard drive.
• Name files consistently: 2024-03-11_Smith_Arthur_Track01.wav.
• Write a metadata sheet: full names, dates, places, vessels, interviewer, equipment, consent terms.
• Produce a timed summary — even rough timings for each subject make the recording usable.
• Deposit copies with your county record office, local archive or maritime museum. Ask which formats they accept and hand over the consent forms at the same time.

Keep the original files untouched and edit only working copies.

Sharing the results

With permission, these recordings can do real work: audio trails along the quay, school projects, exhibition listening posts, community radio. Give the family their own copy on a USB stick — it often matters more than you expect. Consider a listening evening at the heritage centre, playing two-minute extracts and letting the room fill in the rest.

Finally, stay in touch. Memory prompts memory, and a second session a year later is frequently richer than the first.