How to Speak Essex: 20th Century Voices from the Essex Sound and Video Archive

Martin Astell, our Sound and Video Archivist, blogs for us about one of the things Essex is most famous for – its accent…

Are you looking for a Christmas gift with a difference? Our CD called How to Speak Essex: 20th Century Voices from the Essex Sound and Video Archive may be just the thing for that awkward relative or friend who seemingly has everything.

How to Speak Essex

The CD includes examples of Essex accents and dialect recorded in the twentieth century. The earliest example dates from 1906, while the majority are recordings of people born between 1900 and 1940. The CD includes both speech and song, with examples from across the county.

I wanted to produce the CD both as a way of promoting the Essex Sound and Video Archive – not everybody is aware that the Essex Record Office collects and preserves sound recordings and videos – and in order to present genuine examples of the way ordinary people in Essex spoke in the twentieth century.

The decline of the Essex dialect and accent, and the seemingly unstoppable spread of theLondonaccent, has been discussed and mourned a great deal in recent times. When people think of the language of Essex they are most likely these days to think of ‘Estuary English’ rather than a soft and lyrical rural accent akin to that heard still in other parts of East Anglia. On the other hand, someEssexresidents can, perhaps, have a nostalgic or exaggerated view of the accents used by former generations. Our CD should provide enough genuine examples to enable a realistic understanding of the language of Essex people born prior to the Second World War.

The recordings should also demonstrate the diversity of accents in Essex. I have split the county into ten geographical areas so that the listener can compare, for instance, the accents of villages in the north of the county borderingSuffolkwith areas of historic Essex now deemed to be part of Greater London. However, even within these relatively small areas a good deal of variety can be heard.

The extracts cover a range of topics and will hopefully provide some insight into life inEssexduring the twentieth century. I have tried to group them in ways which provide a degree of narrative, thus helping to make the CD enjoyable as well as instructive. However, the main effect should be to bring alive the speakers and their use of language.

The CD is available direct from the Essex Record Office priced at £10.20, including postage and packing. You can order your copy by telephoning 01245 244644, or writing to: Essex Record Office, Wharf Road, Chelmsford, CM2 6YT, enclosing a cheque made payable to Essex County Council.

Essex on film

Readers, today’s blog post contains Good News.

Those of you who came to our Discovery Day recently might have seen the films that we were showing in our lecture theatre.

If you had feared that you would never be able to see them again, we are pleased to announce that you can now relive the joy through the magic of YouTube.

First up, a selection of extracts from videos held in the Essex Sound and Video Archive, including morris dancing, the opening of Bradwell power station, a 1950s police video insulting Colchester’s pedestrians, the opening of Lakeside shopping centre, wartime landgirls, people on their holidays at the Essex seaside, and lots more.

You can also visit our YouTube channel to see some of the other videos which were playing on the Discovery Day, including the now famous ‘document production’ video. (It’s better than it sounds, honestly.) Enjoy!

Belt up!

Martin Astell blogs for us about one of the weird and wonderful things he is called upon to do as the Sound and Video Archivist at the Essex Record Office…

Because the Essex Sound and Video Archive preserves a range of sound recordings on all sorts of obsolete media, to some extent we have to be a kind of working museum of old audio equipment.

This is a Fostex R8 – an 8-track open reel tape recorder built in Japan in the late 1980s for the high-end home recording market. Our machine was refusing to play tapes, so I decided to investigate.

I could see that the capstan (i.e. the bit that drives the tape through the machine) was not turning so I guessed that there may have been a problem with the drive belt. I took the front panel off to see if I could identify the problem.

This is the daunting sight that greets you when you remove the front panel. The cotton swab you can see stuck into the machine is showing the capstan drive wheel. I could see at this stage that the belt was slipping off the drive wheel as it turned.

The rubber drive belts unfortunately stretch over time, eventually reaching a point where they no longer grip the wheel sufficiently. The remedy is to replace the belt.

 

Here is a close-up of the capstan drive wheel. Note that there is quite a small ‘window’ through which the belt and drive wheel can be seen. So how do you change the belt? This is when I discovered (thanks to the wonders of the internet and the willingness of analogue recording enthusiasts to help one another) that I should have taken off the back panel of the machine.

 

Here are the scary circuit boards which present themselves when you remove the rear panel and the daunting tangle of wires, motors and electrical doo-hickeys behind them.

Through the judicious use of a screwdriver and some tweezers (which reminded me at times of playing the children’s game ‘Operation’) I was able to remove the drive motor, take off the old belt and replace it with a new one. Having put it all back together (with no bits left over), I am mightily relieved when I turn the machine on and see the capstan spinning as intended.

All very rewarding, but it does make me think, “The other archivists don’t have to go through all this bother to access their records. They just have to open a volume and start reading!”

But, I hear you ask, where do you get a new drive belt for an old, obscure and obsolete Japanese tape recorder? Well, that would be telling…