The Windrose Archive
The Trilith-Windrose archive is an important community-based film and audio archive of Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire which has been assembled through 35 years of improvisation, voluntary effort and small scale spasmodic funding.
It is a considerable resource for communities, especially in rural areas but cannot be made properly accessible and put to real use unless a new phase of development is funded and its long- term preservation assured.
This is being tackled through a partnership between Windrose and Dorset History Centre (DHC) in liaison with Wiltshire & Swindon History Centre and Somerset Heritage Centre. Funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund and other sources has been gained and work has been carried out to digitise the archive in order to open up public access and to allow its use for the benefit of, for example, people with Alzheimer’s or hearing loss.
Research opportunities have been made available for both university students and volunteers. There is also considerable volunteer involvement in outreach work which takes material from the archive into rural communities.
The archive is exceptional because it is concerned centrally with rural life and because it has been created by long years of highly active community work.
Very large numbers of people from village and small town communities have been involved in its creation and have taken part in its activities.
The archive exists only because of them. It is a genuine community archive.
Working in partnership with Windrose, they have discovered and helped to save old films of local life and have participated in many oral history, creative and other related media projects, as detailed below.
They have been deeply involved in organising a large number of outreach events, including over 250 archive shows.
The archive has two broad elements:
THE FILM ARCHIVE
We have an ongoing mission, through work in the community, to find, save and make publicly accessible as much old cine film of local life in Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire as possible.
Financially the film archive has had a hand to mouth existence but has nevertheless achieved much.
Some 2,321 reels of film, dating from 1903 onwards, have been saved and nearly all copied onto a more modern (but, in many cases, pre-digital) medium.
Much of the most worthwhile film in the collection records everyday work and life but key films also include, for example: the only known animation by Heath Robinson; a 1918 film made at the behest of James Ismay (brother of Bruce Ismay of Titanic fame) to show how a Dorset village community survived the impact of the First World War; a 1917 film of an artisan pottery in Verwood; rare colour films of farming, livestock markets and life in Purbeck and Wimborne during the Second World War.
Windrose works with the three county record offices (now History/Heritage Centres).
With the agreement of the film donors, it deposits original films in those well-equipped archives for preservation.
It holds master copies itself, on tape or hard disc, from which, given funding, viewing copies and edited sequences can be made for public access and project purposes.
The cost of copying films, which has to be done commercially, has been one of the most difficult issues.
In addition, as films have been copied over a 35 year period, most copies are on pre-digital tape formats and require obsolete machines to play them.
A great deal of money has been spent over many years on telecine work to produce copies.
This will be wasted if the tape copies cannot be preserved and the material they contain made accessible.
The only recourse otherwise would be to recopy the original films; a massive organisational task and very costly indeed.
Hence the current programme of work to digitise many of these copies and to prepare the material they contain for public access.
There are 774 broadcast standard video tapes (on 6 formats), plus many hundreds of audio recordings on various formats (both tape and disc). there are also some 500 camera tapes from which productions have been edited.
THE PROJECT ARCHIVE
Over the 33 year period, a large number of media-based projects have been devised and carried out.
Some have used archive films; some have trained volunteers to make oral history recordings; others have produced original creative and documentary material about rural life.
All have involved local communities closely and have produced their own archive of video or audio material.
Examples are:
A series of television/video productions made in partnership with a wide range of community organisations and local authorities about community initiatives and many other socially relevant subjects in rural areas.
A Youth Radio Project enabling young people to make their own radio programmes for broadcast on local BBC stations.
Farm Radio, an internet radio station for family farms and people in related occupations, including Future Farming Voices (for young people growing up on farms) and links with community broadcasters in Ireland, Australia and Malawi. Programmes were made over a four and a half year period by young people and women volunteers from farming families working alongside professionals.
A project in which young people from today’s farming families recorded oral history interviews with people who were growing up on farms during the Second World War.
Video productions to assist people with mental health problems living in rural areas.
A radio drama project, enabling local people to write, perform and record their own original radio plays, usually on local themes, with BBC broadcast outcomes.
A similar project to enable local people to make their own radio documentaries.
Training and support for community groups undertaking oral history recordings and community videos in their own villages.
A series of radio ballads combining specially commissioned music and poetry with recordings of local people talking about their working lives.
Projects to give established and new artists the opportunity to create new music and poetry to accompany archive films and radio documentary material on local subjects.
A series of archive film-based productions contextualising old films with local people’s memories and knowledge.
Audio trails portraying journeys through local landscape and its history, including all kinds of encounters and discoveries.
Education packs based on archive films and oral history recordings.
Song and Film, a series of shows staged in theatres in Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire which combined archive films, traditional music from the area, performed live, and narration.
Salisbury Cine Club, the revival of films made by one of the area’s most enterprising cine clubs of 1960s through the production of a DVD also incorporating the memories of surviving film makers.
A therapeutic project taking archive films to the elderly and alzheimer’s sufferers.
A project to create an archive for a theatre, including training theatre staff and performers to film oral history memories of the theatre, involving young people in the creation of songs about the theatre and culminating in a performance including archive film, new oral history video, live music and narration.
The aim, therefore, is both to conserve all this material and make much more of it available to the public for a wide range of learning and other purposes.
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS
Close Encounters is a source for a selection of material from the archive.
The aim of the site is to make it possible to go directly to film, video and audio material from our archive relevant to specific towns and villages.
You click on your chosen location on a map and immediately discover old film, oral history, creative and context recordings concerned with that place. In other words, it creates a geographical archive.
The aim is to develop Close Encounters substantially by building into it a good deal of material from the archive and expanding it to cover many locations in the three counties. It will thus become one of the archive’s main public access provisions and will feature material from all aspects of the archive.
SUPPORT OUR WORK
Please click on the link to find out more information on how you can support Windrose.