Collection of oral history memories from Ely area by Lorna Delanoy

Women’s Work is Never Done

Collection of Oral History memories of friends in the Ely area

Women’s Work is Never Done

Never done by Lorna Delanoy MBE

This compilation of women’s work has several sources: interviews from the Seventies and Eighties for the Farmland Museum Sound Archives (visitors told such wonderful stories that it seemed a good idea to record them “on tape” so that other people could listen to them). Family anecdotes told round the fire when I was a child (no TV or computers in the War years) and the realisation that the role of women has changed so much since my grandmothers’ were married in the early years of the 20th Century. Students from Homerton College Department of History related oral history to exhibits in the museum, completing a set of four teaching files: in 1977 the museum was awarded a grant to buy and install ‘listening posts’ so that more use could be made of the tapes and they have also been used in such BBC Radio programmes as “The Archive Hour”. By producing this book it will ensure that memories of “How we used to live” will reach a wider audience and that children of the 21st Century will have some idea of the hard times in which their ancestors lived in the area around Ely in the Cambridgeshire Fens.