Before the Tape Runs Out: The Devon Archivist Collecting the Stories Nobody Else Thinks to Ask For

Martin Chegwidden carries his recording equipment in a canvas bag that's been repaired so many times it's more patch than bag. Inside: a digital recorder, a decent microphone, a notebook, and a small tin of shortbread. "The shortbread matters," he says, with complete seriousness. "People talk better when there's something on the table."

Martin is 58, semi-retired from a career in local government, and he has spent the last twelve years driving the back roads of Devon and into Cornwall, sitting in front rooms and farm kitchens and sheltered housing lounges, recording the memories of people who are in their seventies, eighties, and occasionally their nineties. He has accumulated, at last count, over 400 hours of audio. He has also, depending on your view, either preserved something irreplaceable or documented the end of a world.

"Both, probably," he says, when I suggest as much. "But I try not to be morbid about it."

Why These Voices Matter

Oral history is not a new discipline. Folklorists and academics have been recording regional voices since the early twentieth century; the British Library's sound archive holds thousands of hours of dialect recordings and personal testimony from across the UK. But Martin's project — which he runs independently, with modest funding from a local heritage trust and a lot of his own time — has a different focus. He's not primarily interested in dialect as an academic specimen. He's interested in the texture of lived experience: what it felt like to grow up on a Devon farm in the 1950s, to work the night shifts at a Cornish tin mine in its last years, to raise children in a village that no longer exists in any recognisable form.

"The big historical record catches the events," he says. "The dates, the facts, who won, who lost. But it misses what it was actually like to be there. That's what I'm after."

He plays me a short clip — with the speaker's permission, clearly given — of a woman in her late eighties from a village near Crediton, describing the arrival of electricity to her family's farmhouse when she was a girl. The memory is vivid, particular, and funny: her mother's suspicion of the light switches, her father's insistence on keeping oil lamps as backup for years afterwards, the way the whole family gathered to watch the first bulb come on as though it were a theatrical event. The accent is thick Devon — the vowels long and warm, the rhythm unhurried.

"You won't hear that voice in twenty years," Martin says quietly. "Not like that. The accent is changing. The references are changing. That specific way of being in the world is going."

The Method Behind the Listening

Martin is careful to distinguish his work from journalism, from therapy, and from simple nostalgia-gathering. He follows established oral history protocols: informed consent, the right to withdraw, careful contextualisation of recordings. He's trained in the methodology — he took a course with the Oral History Society several years ago and has kept up with the field since.

But his manner in the room, he admits, owes as much to instinct as to training. He talks before he records. He asks about photographs on mantelpieces. He accepts the shortbread he brings as though he's surprised by the offer. He waits.

"People have been told their whole lives that their experiences aren't particularly interesting," he says. "That history is about kings and wars and famous people. So there's often a moment where they apologise — 'I don't know why you'd want to hear about this.' And you have to get past that before the real conversation starts."

Once it does, he says, it rarely stops. He's been in people's front rooms for five, six hours at a stretch. He's heard things that made him laugh until he had to pause the recording, and things that sat with him for weeks afterwards.

What's Actually Being Lost

The question of what constitutes loss is one Martin returns to often. He's not a sentimentalist — he doesn't think the past was better, or that change is inherently bad. But he does think that certain kinds of knowledge, once unrecorded, are simply gone.

He describes an interview with a retired hedger from mid-Devon — a man who'd spent forty years maintaining the county's characteristic banked hedgerows. The practical knowledge this man carried was extraordinary: which plants to lay when, how to read the land's drainage from the growth patterns of certain weeds, how to judge the age of a hedge from the species count in a thirty-metre stretch. Some of this is documented in agricultural manuals. Most of it isn't. It lived in his hands and his eyes and his accumulated experience.

"He had no children who'd gone into the land," Martin says. "No apprentices. When he goes, that specific knowledge goes with him. I've got about eight hours of him talking. It's not the same as having him there, but it's something."

The dialect question interests him too, though he's wary of being precious about it. "Language changes, it always has," he says. "I'm not trying to freeze anything. But there are words and phrases in these recordings that just don't exist in any dictionary — local terms for local things, expressions that never made it into print. If nobody records them, they vanish completely."

The Archive and Its Future

Martin is currently in conversation with the Devon Heritage Centre about a permanent home for his recordings. The logistics are complicated — copyright, access, digitisation standards — but he's optimistic. He's also, with some reluctance, started teaching a small group of volunteers to conduct interviews themselves.

"I can't do this alone forever," he says. "And there are more people who need to be recorded than I can get to."

He's not precious about the project bearing his name, or his particular stamp. What matters is that the voices get captured. That someone sits down with the shortbread and the recorder and asks the question that nobody else thought to ask.

"Every week I don't get to someone," he says, starting the car, "is a week closer to it being too late."

He says it matter-of-factly, without drama. Then he pulls out onto a Devon lane, and drives.