Sarah-Joy Maddeaux, Project Officer for You Are Hear, writes for us about one unexpected aspect of her recent work…

An unanticipated result of the development work for our Heritage Lottery Funded project, You Are Hear: sound and a sense of place, has been the number of new accessions it has prompted to flow into the repository of the Essex Sound and Video Archive.

I have spent most of the last four months investigating the copyright status of our collections, to establish which we will be able to use for our project. As I sort through the paperwork and get in touch with depositors of five, ten, or twenty years ago, this has served as a reminder of our existence. We have received recordings from people who have been busy creating new material since their last deposits, for example additional videos about Ongar from David Welford (Accession Number SA715 to add to five earlier deposits) and a new batch of oral history interviews from the Ongar Millennium History Society (Accession Numbers SA712 and SA713). Artists have given us final versions of earlier recordings, for example a fully printed and slightly amended CD from the Arts Action East and Arts in Essex African Lullaby Project, created by Julia Usher and Anna Mudeka to capture and create lullabies used by mothers in Essex from a range of cultural backgrounds (original Accession Number SA592).

Having recently visited the tea rooms and museum at Wilkin and Sons jam factory in Tiptree, I was particularly interested in an interview with John S Wilkin, then Director of the company and grandson of the founder, recorded in 1986, shortly after the company’s centenary. We had received a copy of a similar interview in 1993, but unfortunately it was of such poor quality that it was not worth keeping. Thanks to Mr Wilkin’s widow, we now have a replacement. In an interview for Radio Colchester, Mr Wilkin explains the story behind the foundation of the company, its gradual growth, and the different stages of production. Although at the time of the interview they were in the height of strawberry season, they had abandoned the strawberries in order to complete an ‘urgent’ order of peach jam for Germany. Let nothing stand between a man and his condiment of choice.

What piece of Essex heritage will come through our doors next?

(Please note that these new recordings cannot be accessed by researchers until access copies have been created. To express an interest in hearing these recordings, please contact us on ero.enquiry@essex.gov.uk)