Reference Specialist, Giulia Baldorilli, writes:

The Direct Method, teaching a language by speaking it (Stray 1992: 12), was originally introduced by W.H.D. Rouse in the late 19^th century and is part of the wider Applied Linguistic interdisciplinary field. Son of a Baptist missionary from India, Rouse attended Regent’s Park College when the family moved back to London in 1880. After a fellowship at Christ’s College (Cambridge), Rouse continued his teaching first at Cheltenham College, and later as a schoolmaster at Rugby Grammar School. Convinced that a radical change was necessary in public school classical curriculum, Rouse laid out a new solution known as the Direct Method. This new progressive approach promoted by Rouse would enable pupils to immerse themselves fully in the learning experience of languages.

According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Rouse’s new way of teaching modern languages can be traced back to Germany, when a polemical pamphlet ‘Language teaching must start afresh!’ by Wilhelm Viëtor was first published. The work - inspired by Viëtor’s own experiences - was conceived as a means of bridging the gap between knowing and living a language in one's daily life (Walmsley 1984: 1).

Several reforms carried out in the educational field were indicative of much broader social and economic developments taking place in England at the end of the Edwardian period: the Elementary Education Act 1891, which removed fees in elementary schools was mainly aimed at promoting more accessible education within a society still dominated by social inequalities.  

The teaching of foreign languages also looks to the living situation rather than a given literary corpus, with emphasis on the direct method and, wherever possible, complete immersion in the target language (especially by living among its speakers). Language in education has often been influenced by political factors: for example, Welsh was proscribed in the schools of Wales for a long time in the 19c, but now many schools in Wales teach through the medium of Welsh and every school teaches the Welsh language (Mc Arthur et al 2018).

The core features of the direct method were conversation, questions, and answers, which belonged to the Socratic method of ancient Greece. In short, this new approach represented a radical renewal in the way of teaching the classical curriculum.

As applied to the teaching of languages, the Direct Method means that the sounds of the foreign tongue are associated directly with a thing, or an act, or a thought, without the intervention of and English word: and that these associations are grouped by a method, so as to make the learning of the language as easy and as speedy as possible, and are not brought in a haphazard, as they are when children learn their own language in the nursery.  It follows that speaking precedes writing, and that the sentence (not the word) is the unit (Rouse and Appleton 1925: 2).

Listen to instruction - in Latin

Side one of ‘Latin Course’ (Linguaphone LAT 1-10 E). BL ref.: 1CS0011839. We hear the teacher start the lesson by encouraging the pupils to repeat a set of Latin words after him - to mimic the sound so as to create a real experience of the language.

In 1911, Rouse organized a summer school on direct-method classical teaching. Its success led to further such events, and at the Cambridge school of 1913 the Association for the Reform of Latin Teaching (ARLT) was founded.

Newspaper article about the Direct-Method from The Daily Mirror (5 September 1949, British Newspaper Archive)

One of the principles of this method is that English language should be avoided during the lessons. However, on rare occasions some teachers might find it beneficial to some extent, such as to confirm a correct understanding of the Latin word by giving the English equivalent (Appleton 1913: 2-3).

Image of front cover of audio booklet “A.L.” Language Tracing Books 1 (Thomas 1914)

In the 1930s, Rouse made a gramophone disc of a Latin course and of Greek passages for the Linguaphone Institute. On page 9 of the accompanying booklet for his Latin Course (BL shelfmark DOC0001278) he notes:

On no account give the Record before the lesson. The direct method makes its unique effect because it is natural, spontaneous, and acts between two humans beings without interference. A mechanical device would spoil it; indeed, these hints are only meant to help those to whom it is new, for when they have got all the matter in their heads, they will use it quite naturally, each in his own way, and all hesitation will disappear.

Listen to instruction - in Latin

Side ten of ‘Latin Course’ (Linguaphone LAT 1-10 E). BL ref.: 1CS0011839. In this second clip we hear more of the lesson as the pupils repeat a set of Latin words after the teacher - to mimic the sound so as to create a real experience of the language.

This approach relies on the idea that a more immersive, interactive way of learning a language, which doesn’t start with plain grammar books, should be promoted: the use of words (and idioms) is the ultimate tool of the whole learning experience. In this reformed method - a conversational method - the correct use of constructed sentences should be preferred. Thus the pupils should be able to write and speak in a completely constructed language before they can fully understand that vernacular expressions like idioms, often do not require them (Stokes 1917: 11-14).  

References

Appleton, R. 1913. Some Practical Suggestions on the Direct Method of Teaching Latin. Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons.

McArthur, T., J. Lam-McArthur, J. & L. Fontaine. 2018. The Oxford Companion to the English Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rouse, W. & R. Appleton. 1925. Latin on the Direct Method. London: University of London.

Rouse, W. Latin Course. [gramophone Disc]. UK: Linguaphone, LINGUAPHONE LAT 1-10 E

Stokes, E. 1917. A Reformed Method of Teaching English: Being a Practical Exposition of the Direct Method for Teaching English as Used in an Indian High School. Calcutta: Longmans & Co.

Stray, C. 1992. The Living Word: W. H. D. Rouse and the Crisis of Classics in Edwardian England. London: Bristol Classical Press.

Thomas, D. 1914. The A. L. Language Tracing Books, for use with the “A. L.” “Direct Method” Readers, and with the “Teaching of English by the Direct Method”. Leeds: E.J. Arnold.

Walmsley, J. 1984. ‘Quousque Tandem: Wilhelm Viëtor's Language Instruction Must Do an About-Face.’ In The Modern Language Journal 68 (1), pp. 37–44.

This week's selection comes from Cheryl Tipp, Curator of Wildlife & Environmental Sounds.

The White-throated Dipper (Cinclus cinclus) is a bird that just loves water. Normally found alongside fast flowing rivers and streams, this little songbird has evolved to dive, swim and even walk underwater. Though it’s almost impossible to believe that a bird not much larger than a sparrow could survive in such precarious conditions, the dipper has a number of special adaptations that allow it to thrive. Strong legs help individuals brace themselves against the current while their feet are able to firmly grip slippery rocks and pebbles both above and below the surface. They also possess powerful, rounded wings that act much like flippers when swimming underwater.

Hand coloured woodblock print of a Dipper, produced by Alexander Francis Lydon for Volume 3 of A history of British Birds.

A lovely description of the Dipper's song can be found in A History of British Birds, a multi volume collection written by the parson-naturalist Reverend F. O. Morris and published by Groombridge & Sons between 1850-1857. Morris wrote:

‘The song of this interesting bird is melodious and lively, though short. It is to be heard in sunny weather at all seasons of the year – a sweet accompaniment to the murmuring music of the rippling trout-stream, which soothes the ear and the heart of the solitary fly-fisher, as he quietly wends his way along, at peace with all the world.’

This close proximity to water makes recording dippers notoriously difficult; all too often its song and calls are drowned out by the rapid current. Despite the challenges, the sound archive does have almost 100 recordings of the White-throated Dipper in its collection.

The following example was recorded near the River Vrynwy in Wales by wildlife sound recordist Richard Margoschis. A breeding pair used rocks in the middle of the fast-flowing river as their songposts and it’s from one of these that the male in this recording was captured delivering his song. Though certainly melodious and lively, the song appears to be much longer than described by Morris.

Dipper song, recorded in Powys, Wales on 16 March 1980 by Richard Margoschis (BL ref 10563)

This recording was digitised as part of the Library’s Unlocking our Sound Heritage project. Now in its fourth year, this UK-wide project aims to digitally preserve and provide public access to some of the nation’s most unique and at risk sound recordings. Thousands of wildlife recordings from all over the world have been digitised so far and you can keep up-to-date with the project’s progress by following @BLSoundHeritage.

For International Day of Women and Girls in Science, PhD candidate/researcher Emmeline Ledgerwood looks at the careers of women government scientists in a new article for Women’s Rights. Here, she discusses the research that revealed the opportunities and challenges these women encountered as working scientists.

I met Carol Atkinson, Susan James, Sarah Herbert and Shirley Jenkins during 2018-2019 when I interviewed them for my PhD research into the impact of organisational change in government research establishments. I conducted 23 oral history interviews with former government scientists and these interviews are being added to the British Library sound collections, alongside the larger collection of interviews with British scientists, An Oral History of British Science.

Carol Atkinson, Susan James, Sarah Herbert and Shirley Jenkins. Images © Bill Knight.

Six of my interviewees were women who had worked either at the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) in Farnborough or the Building Research Establishment in Watford during the second half of the twentieth century.¹ While the interviews focused on organisational change, memories of childhood and education were explored alongside those of working life, revealing some of the influences, opportunities and challenges that defined their careers in science.

Sarah Herbert on the inspiration from her Physics teacher C1802/13

Download Transcript - Sarah Herbert on the inspiration from her Physics teacher

The women featured in the article are not those who have made brilliant scientific breakthroughs or who will become the subject of biographies.² More importantly, perhaps, they represent and refer to the curious, practical and intelligent women who embarked on a working life in science as the natural choice for a satisfying and enjoyable career. Their stories are of women who were valued colleagues, contributed to their field at many levels, whether as technicians or experts on international committees, and held senior positions of responsibility in the workplace.

At the same time interviewees' experiences of working in science illuminate the widespread challenge of navigating male-dominated environments before the establishment of equal opportunities practices in the workplace. The prevailing attitudes are reflected in the 1980 Review of the Scientific Civil Service, which made no attempt to analyse staff diversity in terms of race or gender, rather it was concerned with numbers, qualifications and scientific disciplines.³ While there are no references in the interviews to active efforts by women to collaborate in changing their standing within the system, the article shows how individual women responded to the workplace culture.

Women such as James progressed to positions of standing in the professional scientific community, but there have always been many women who have played an integral role in the conduct of scientific research who are far less visible to historians of science. At RAE there were technicians, cleaners, administrators and librarians, such as interviewee Pam Turner who was a subject librarian responsible for answering enquiries from the materials and structures team.

Pam Turner. Image © Bill Knight.

My PhD oral history interviews have allowed the stories of their working lives to be preserved. The beauty of the life story approach is the bonus of tantalising glimpses of other women who inhabited these worlds of science, such as ‘this admin officer, she was like the God-like person in charge of admin for the department’; or ‘she was one of the WAAFs employed at Bletchley Park operating all these things to keep track of what was happening’; and ‘she used to fly Met Research Flight and go thunderstorm hunting, she was a great glider pilot.’⁴ If only we could track down more women such as these and record their stories for another oral history project.

Explore the journeys of Susan James, Sarah Herbert, Shirley Jenkins, Carol Atkinson and their colleagues on the Women’s Rights website.

Blogpost by Emmeline Ledgerwood (@EmmeLedgerwood), AHRC collaborative doctoral student with the University of Leicester and the British Library Oral History department. Her research looks at how the privatisation policies of the 1980s and 1990s affected government research establishments and the scientists who worked in them. She also writes about parliamentary history, including the scrutiny of science at Westminster and political ambition in women. Her interviews for the History of Parliament oral history project (C1503) and with Conservative party activists (C1688) are archived in the BL sound collections. Emmeline is co-convenor of the University of Leicester oral history reading group @hypirohrg which welcomes new members.

References:

1. British Library, C1802 Privatisation of UK Government Science: Life Story Interviews.
2. Paola Govoni and Zelda Alice Franceschi (eds), Writing About Lives in Science: Autobiography, Gender, and Genre (Göttingen, 2014); Sally Horrocks, ‘The Women Who Cracked Science’s Glass Ceiling’, Nature 575, no. 7781 (6 November 2019), pp. 243–46.
3. Management Committee of the Science Group, Review of the Scientific Civil Service (London, 1980).
4. Claire G. Jones, ‘Women and Science’, in Routledge Historical Resource: History of Feminism (Routledge, 2016); C1802-16 Interview with anonymous, Track 2 00:21:22; C1802-17 Interview with Shirley Jenkins Track 5 00:06:14 and Track 1 00:27:24.
   

This week's selection comes from Harriet Roden, Digital Learning Content Developer for Unlocking our Sound Heritage.

Imagine a land where flowers pave the streets, energy is solely reaped from the sun and air-cars transport people to universities, laboratories and observatories. Imagine this land is run entirely by women, because the men are all locked away in purdah.

This is 'Ladyland', a fictional utopia envisioned by Begum Rokeya (1880 – 1932) in her 1905 novel Sultana’s Dream.

Sultana’s Dream was originally published in the Indian Ladies’ Magazine in 1905.

Rokeya was a Bengali feminist writer and educator who is widely regarded as a pioneer of women's liberation in South Asia. She held the belief that women in her society were disadvantaged because of ignorance around their own rights and responsibilities.

She campaigned to change this.

In 1909 Rokeya founded the first school in Bengal for Muslim women which is credited as allowing the first generation of women to become literate.

She later established the Muslim Women’s Society, which advocated for women’s legal and political rights. The actions of the society has since been praised by Tahmima Anam as ‘the cornerstone of the women’s movement in Bengal’, creating a foundation for a politically progressive feminist movement in contemporary Bangladesh.

Her influence has continued to be felt in the creative outputs and work of women across the globe.

A small, white cassette tape sits on a shelf in our sound archive. The four tracks of Aliyah Hussain’s EP take their titles from key moments in Royeka’s novel. This track titled ‘Koh-i-Noor’ is directly inspired by the conversation between the main protagonist, the Queen and Sister Sara who, whilst touring ‘Ladyland’, describe its creation. With universities, ‘manufactories’, laboratories and observatories on the horizon, the Queen states:

Koh-i-Noor from Sultana's Dream, EP by Aliyah Hussain

Men, we find, are rather of lower morals and so we do not like dealing with them. We do not covet other people's land, we do not fight for a piece of diamond though it may be a thousand-fold brighter than the Koh-i-Noor, nor do we grudge a ruler his Peacock Throne. We dive deep into the ocean of knowledge and try to find out the precious gems, which nature has kept in store for us. We enjoy nature's gifts as much as we can.

In the year that Bangladesh turns 50 years old, join us on 22nd February when Tahmima Anam and friends Monica Ali, Nasima Bee and Leesa Gazi take this visionary work as a starting point in an exploration of fiction from across the Bangladeshi diaspora. Book now.

Explore the worlds imagined by women science fiction writers on the Women’s Rights webspace.

Follow @BLSoundHeritage and @soundarchive for all the latest news.

At Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp on 7 October 1944 there was an event that confounds many people’s assumptions about Nazi death camps: that resistance was impossible. In fact Jews did resist Nazi oppression throughout the 1930s and 1940s.

In a carefully-planned operation a group of prisoners known as the Sonderkommando – those who were forced on threat of their own deaths to dispose of gas chamber victims – fought back against their captors.

For months young Jewish women had been smuggling gunpowder to the camp resistance from the munitions factory within the Birkenau complex, and this was used to create makeshift bombs and grenades. On 7 October, having learned that the SS was going to liquidate much of the squad, the Sonderkommando at Crematorium IV rose in revolt during a roll call. One of the prisoners calmly walked up to a Nazi officer and struck him with a hammer. In the ensuing chaos SS guards were attacked with knives, stones and explosives. Crematorium IV was set alight. Three guards were killed and many injured. But although some of the prisoners managed to cut their way through the barbed wire to flee into the woods, the revolt was short-lived. The escapees were recaptured, and they and as many as 450 more were executed.

Freda Wineman, then aged 21, witnessed the aftermath, as she remembered in an interview for National Life Stories in 1988/9 (C410/13). Born in Metz in France, she and her family were evacuated to south-west France in 1939. Following the Nazi invasion of 1940 Freda’s whole family were arrested and sent to Drancy concentration camp near Paris. From there they were taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau where Freda was separated and sent to work.

Child survivors of Auschwitz. Source: USHMM/Belarusian State Archive of Documentary Film and Photography via Wikimedia

Freda Wineman 'tell the world what was happening' (C410/013)

Download Freda Wineman 'tell the world what was happening' Transcript

Soon afterwards Freda was taken to Bergen-Belsen until February 1945 and from there to Raguhn camp and Theresienstadt, from where she was liberated in May 1945. Freda subsequently discovered that her parents and her brother, Marcel, had been killed at Auschwitz. She returned to Lyon in June 1945 where, despite being hospitalised with typhoid, she attended Klaus Barbie’s trial. In August 1945 she was finally reunited with her brothers David and Armand and in 1950 Freda married and moved to the UK.

In 2018 Freda, who has received a British Empire Medal for her extensive work with the Holocaust Education Trust, issued her own message on the importance of Holocaust education in an interview with CNN:

We have to be aware there are some right-wing movements that have to be stopped and eliminated… We must not let them get to the top because they are evil. Let's hope somebody will fight them. In several countries it has been happening and it is very worrying indeed.

We have testimonies in many museums and we hope that some of these young people will look up some of these and learn from them…Of course it won't be the same because they won't hear us speak about it and tell our own experiences. It will be different but we have to trust the future generation

If we don't live with hope we are finished.

Be the light in the darkness. Source: Holocaust Memorial Day Trust

27 January is Holocaust Memorial Day. The theme for Holocaust Memorial Day 2021 is Be the light in the darkness. It encourages everyone to reflect on the depths humanity can sink to, but also the ways individuals and communities resisted that darkness to ‘be the light’ before, during and after genocide.

Freda Wineman was interviewed for ‘The Living Memory of the Jewish Community’ in 1988-89 by Taffy Sassoon and her full interview is available at the British Library Sounds Website.

The British Library Learning resource ‘Voices of the Holocaust’ is currently being updated and redesigned.

Blog by Rob Perks, Lead Curator of Oral History.

This week's selection comes from Finlay McIntosh, World & Traditional Rights intern for Unlocking our Sound Heritage.

In 1988, the investigative journalist Paul Lashmar attended a concert in Kashgar, where he was treated to a performance of traditional Uyghur music. Luckily for us, he recorded the whole event and donated the recordings to the British Library.

The concert includes narrative songs accompanied by the dutar long-necked lute, solo performances on the rawap lute and qalun dulcimer, and large suites performed by a full ensemble of musicians, singers and dancers dressed in colourful costumes.

Uyghur dancers performing to an audience of tourists. Photo courtesy of Paul Lashmar.

The recordings display the rich musical traditions that have matured over centuries of trade along the Silk Road. Along these trade routes, oasis towns like Kashgar became confluence points, where people coming from far-away places would pass through, bringing new musical instruments, styles and practices with them. This created a fertile ground for the creation of a vibrant musical culture that fused everything from Chinese to Central Asian, Persian and Middle Eastern influences.

A dancer and singer accompanied by musicians playing the qalun and ghijäk. Photo courtesy of Paul Lashmar.

However, when listening to this performance of traditional music, what really caught my attention was a less-than-traditional instrument—the electric guitar.

Of course, this modern instrument did not come to Kashgar through the ancient Silk Road. The guitar (or rather its sound) arrived through international media like cassettes, which were imported from neighbouring Central Asian countries or further afield. This inspired local musicians to acquire one of these exciting new instruments and start using it to make their own music.

Uyghur Singer Playing the Guitar. Photo Courtesy of Paul Lashmar.

Unfortunately, we do not have much information about the performer of these songs but he was probably a wedding singer, hired by the art troupe to entertain the audience of tourists with some popular music.

I have selected an excerpt from each of the three songs he performs. As they were recorded in 1988, I believe they document an early example of the presence of the electric guitar in Uyghur music.

In this first excerpt, we hear that although the performer’s instrument is Western, his music sounds undeniably Eastern. One of the musical elements that contribute to this is the rhythm—specifically the bouncy, limping aqsaq rhythm essential to Uyghur music—which is created by the driving interplay between the electric guitar and drum-kit.

Uyghur concert - excerpt 1 (BL REF C436/1)

This second clip begins with a punchy rock ‘n’ roll-sounding riff. Afterwards, the subtle guitar accompaniment contrasts with the musician’s highly ornamented nasal singing, which employs all of the melisma, minute tone shifts and swooping melodic lines you would expect from Uyghur singing.

Uyghur concert - excerpt 2 (BL REF C436/1)

At the beginning of this final excerpt, we hear another, twangy riff, played on the electro-acoustic guitar as pictured in Lashmar’s photos.

I like this specific clip because we can really hear how the guitar has been adapted to local music. The guitar might sound out of tune to a Western ear but it has probably been tuned to allow the performer to play microtones that lie beyond Western scales.

Uyghur concert - excerpt 3 (BL REF C436/1)

Whereas many ethnographic recordings are made by researchers seeking to document the world’s musical traditions in their purest and highest forms, these recordings are different. They don’t boast the best audio quality and you can even hear people talking throughout the performance. The use of guitar in the region is hardly an age-old tradition and it’s perhaps arguable whether the musician has necessarily mastered it yet.

But I think it is this rawness that makes the recordings so fantastic. They capture an exciting time when new musical elements were first entering the region and local musicians were picking them up, experimenting with them and mixing them with their own traditions. Here, we are not hearing the ‘pristine’ canonized versions of traditional music but the very moment where traditions are developing and morphing into something else.

Throughout the 1990s, the electric guitar would gain notoriety in the hands of musicians like Ekhmetjan, often credited as the first Uyghur superstar. The instrument’s popularity only increased as more and more global music genres entered the Uyghur market. As ethnomusicologist Rachel Harris shows in her article “Reggae on the Silk Road: The Globalization of Uyghur Pop,” guitar-driven styles like rock, heavy metal and reggae all trickled into the region. And in 1996, there was even a flamenco trend inspired by The Gypsy Kings. Musicians soaked up all of these influences and continued to refashion them into their music.

The electric guitar may not be a traditional Uyghur musical instrument but the Uyghurs certainly made it their own.

I am grateful to Paul Lashmar for the generous donation of these recordings and photographs. If you want to find out more about the recordings in the Paul Lashmar Collection, their catalogue entries can be found in the Sound and Moving Image catalogue.

References:

Harris, Rachel. 2005. “Reggae on the Silk Road: The Globalization of Uyghur Pop.” The China Quarterly 183: 627-643. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305741005000391.

Follow @BLWorldTrad, @BLSoundHeritage and @soundarchive for all the latest news.

This week's selection comes from Cheryl Tipp, Curator of Wildlife & Environmental Sounds.

The Gondwana Rainforests of Australia are renowned for their lush landscapes and rich biodiversity. Stretching from Queensland to New South Wales, this collection of rainforests represents 180 million years of our planet’s natural history. It’s here that both ancient and more recently evolved species coexist, each having carved out their own special niche in this World Heritage Area.

Lamington National Park is just one of the Gondwana Rainforests. Running along the Lamington Plateau, an elevated range of valleys and uplands with volcanic origins, this natural wonder is known for its stunning waterfalls, prehistoric terrain and high proportion of rare species.

Dawn in Lamington National Park, Queensland (Photo credit: JohnGGM, CC BY-SA)

Lamington is not just a feast for the eyes however; its soundscape is just as lush as its landscape. In September 1986, wildlife sound recordist David Lumsdaine visited the park and recorded what many consider to be the sonic highlight of the day – the dawn chorus.

Lamington Plateau dawn atmosphere

Recorded in Queensland, Australia on 11 September 1986 by David Lumsdaine (BL ref 151390)

This 4 minute excerpt is a vibrant mix of songs and calls from a wide variety of early morning songsters. From the whip-crack song of Eastern Whipbirds and the yodelling of Pied Currawongs to the hurried rhythms of White-browed Scrubwrens, this recording is just bursting with life.

Follow @CherylTipp and @soundarchive for all the latest news.

It was when Glenda Jackson fixed me with her frankly intimidating glare and barked, ‘Is that enough for you?’ that I knew I was in way above my head. What on earth was I doing on London’s South Bank, not only with a national icon of stage and screen but with one of the pioneers of documentary photography, Grace Robertson? What on earth did I think I was doing? Luckily Grace (who sadly died on 11 January aged 90) came to my assistance, accustomed no doubt to dealing with tricky customers, and calmly said that yes she’d got the images she needed, thank you. Glenda was pacified.

Those times in 1993 took us around the country for the National Life Story Awards, part of the International Year of Older People, to meet and photograph ‘champions’. Jackson, Richard Branson and Lord Soper were amongst them, and it was a huge learning curve for a young and relatively inexperienced oral history curator. Grace, then aged 63, agreed to take part in the project to ‘celebrate the role of older women photographers’ and I got to know her gentle and unobtrusive technique (despite her considerable height: she was six feet two inches).

Lord Donald Soper being interviewed by his granddaughter as part of the 1993 National Life Story Awards. Image courtesy of Grace Robertson/British Library

Grace was fearless but great fun and with her husband, photographer Thurston Hopkins, was enormously generous to me when Val Williams and I were starting up our Oral History of British Photography (OHBP) project at the British Library in 1990. At exhibition openings she’d say to me: ‘Have you met XYZ [famous photographer]’, and then whisk me off to meet my heroes. She and Thurston played an important part in OHBP: both were interviewed themselves (see the BL Sounds website at Grace Robertson and Thurston Hopkins), and Grace trained up to become an interviewer herself, capturing recordings for the collection with Mark Gerson, Penelope Anne Tweedie, Humphrey Spender and Margaret Harker.

Born in 1930, the daughter of journalist Fyfe Robertson, Grace Robertson was one of the few women photographers to work for the magazine Picture Post, which did so much to promote documentary photography’s role in documenting ‘ordinary’ lives before, during and after the Second World War. Her father gave her a Leica camera in 1949 and Grace worked as a freelance photojournalist for Picture Post (initially under the pseudonym Dick Muir) from 1951 until it closed in 1957. She was often allocated commissions about women’s lives. Her 1955 images of childbirth were truly pioneering and she later remarked that ‘I felt I was an observer of society. I never thought about my presence in it. My driving force in photographing women was to find out what made them tick.’

From ‘Mothers’ Day Off’, Picture Post 1954. Image courtesy of Grace Robertson

Grace went on to work for other British and American publications including Life, retraining as a teacher in the mid-1960s, and only returning to photography in the 1980s. Latterly she lectured on women photographers and published an autobiographical monograph, entitled Grace Robertson – Photojournalist of the ‘50s. Shirley Read, another OHBP interviewer, remembers that Grace was also the Chair of ‘Signals, the Festival of Women Photographers’ in 1996, and ‘she could be formidable in that role’. In retirement she and Thurston moved to Seaford in Sussex where he died aged 101 in 2014.

Grace Robertson was interviewed by Alan Dein in 1993 for An Oral History of British Photography.

Blogpost by Dr Rob Perks, Lead Curator of Oral History @BL_OralHistory