Oral History Project

Over the past few years, we have been collecting the memories of some of our older local residents (most born in the 1920/30/40s) in the form of audio recordings; they talk about growing up in the village, about their school days, about Milborne Port during the Second World War and about what life was like for families working in the gloving industry.

Their voices have been recorded for posterity and a running order of each recording produced so that anyone researching particular elements of history can quickly find what they are looking or listening for in the recordings.

We hope that these recordings will be an invaluable source of information in the future for those carrying out family or social research.

If you would like to take part in this ongoing project, please contact Lesley Wray  lesmik71@gmail.com  or Nathalie Hetherington via mphhgroup@gmail.com , and we will be only too happy to give you details of how we intend to gather the information.

To see the running orders of the recordings that we have already made, please select the PDFs below. To listen to the recordings, please select the audio files.

In addition to these interviews, we have a fascinating recording of Pat and Mary Taylor talking about their experiences during World War Two. Mary was the youngest daughter of the Southcombe family who had a glove making business in Milborne Port and lived at Windy Ridge (now Kingsbury House); it was discovered well after the end of the war that Mary had served at Bletchley Park. Click here to listen.