interviewee	date(s) of interview(s)	comment
Angela Church	22nd March 2003	Angela moved to Fordham as a girl in the 1940's and was very much involved with village life. 1 hour.
Margaret Playle (DECEASED)	21st April 2003	Girly has lived in Fordham for all but two years of her life and still (she was 100 in May 2008) lives in the house where she was born. She become our most celebrated villager since she had become a centenarian. Girlie died in 2009. 1 hour.
Dorothy Kettle (DECEASED)	29th November 2003 and 22nd October 2005	Dorothy was born in Fordham (she is now in her 90's) and still lives in Fordham. She was in service in London as a girl and has been very much involved with village life. 2 hours.
Arthur Edward Harman (DECEASED)	27th March 2004	Arthur grew up in Wormingford, an unhappy childhood living with an aunt and uncle. Served as an engineer in WW2. His poetry is marvellous and his interview a delight. 1 hour.
Marlene Boyle	10th April 2004	Marlene moved to Fordham as a girl and has been very much a part of Fordham life ever since. 1 hour.
Pat Lewis	1st August 2004	Pat has ancestral ties with Fordham, having grown up in London and retiring with her husband Clayton to Frinton. She is president of Fordham Local History Society. 1 hour.
Arthur (Jeph) Jephcott (DECEASED)	2004 to 2005	Jeph was born in 1915 in Birmingham and lived in Dovercourt until his death in July 2007. He fought in Burma during WW2 and worked at Woods of Colchester until his retirement. Almost 8 hours recorded.
Richard Gregory	Dec 2005 and Jan 2006	Richard was born in London in 1923, was apprenticed with Smiths Industries, working in Cheltenham during WW2, joining the RAF in 1946, ground crew, becoming a pilot flying Spitfire, Harvard, Vampire, Hunter, etc. aircraft. Later became an instructor. Now living in Woodbridge. Almost 4 hours recorded.
Frank and Pam Horspool	10th March 2007	Their son Roger arranged for this interview at Frank and Pam's home in Barn Hall, Colchester. Both Frank and Pam grew up in Colchester and have spent most of their lives there. 1 hour.
Geoffery Thorpe	20th January 2008	Veronica Doughty, a Fordham resident, arranged this interview with her uncle. Geoffery grew up in Priory Street, Colchester and worked all his working life at the Colchester Lathe Company, a highly successful engineering company that closed its doors in the 1990's. 1 hour.
David Cannon	26th January 2008 20th May 2008	David came to Fordham in the 1950's and lived with his wife Nancy at Watercress Hall, Fossetts Lane. With tales of his origins in Hertfordshire, being descended from a line of blacksmiths and well diggers, together with David's stories of his time as a borough councillor and one time Mayor of Colchester, this interview is very varied and interesting. David is another of Fordham's celebrities. 2 hours.
Reg Jones	3rd May 2008	...and talking of celebrities, we have another in Reg. He and wife Barbara came to live in Fordham when they retired from the pub trade and Reg is famous for the lecture circuit that developed as a result of the occasional talks that he used to give on the subject of his life in the Royal Horse Guards cavalry. 1 hour.
Pip Pennefather	July 2008	Pip is a Wormingford girl who now lives in Fordham. She has had a very interesting career and her story, as far as she is able to tell us (due to the limitations of the Official Secrets Act) is quite different to most. She holds an MBE. 1 hour
Harry Parratt	2nd August 2008	A highly entertaining chat with a man who was born in Stanway and worked at Markham's pawnbrokers and then the Co-op, went to the Bluecoat School, was a quartermaster during the war working at a prisoner of war camp in Wales. 1 hour
Grahame Page	18th October 2008	Grahame is the son of one of the founders of the well know motor car dealership in Colchester, Page and Scott. He was born in Colchester in 1925 and spent some time in the Home Guard during the war. This interview complements another recording done by Bernard Polley concerning the Page and Scott business for which Grahame is very knowledgeable. 1 hour.
Doris Beard	November 2009	Doris was born in Fordham and has spent all of her life in and around the village. During the course of the interview, we discovered Doris' large collection of old, Fordham related, photographs. 1 hour.
Alan Farrant (DECEASED)	December 2009	Alan was born in Walthamstow and came to Fordham in 1968. He served with the RAF during the war, a WOP AG (aircraft gunner) mainly connected with Warwick aircraft on search and rescuse duties. After the war he became an accountant. 1 hour. Alan died in June 2012.
Derek Clampin	November 2011	Derek was born in Ford Street, Fordham and still lives in Ford Street. Fordham. He followed in his grandfather's and father's business as a builder and developed a life-long interest in motorcycles, especially trials. Derek brought along some old photographs and talked about these during his interview. 1 hour

We are all mortal but this project brings a kind of immortality to a few of us. The record that is left behind will be enjoyed by family and by history researchers alike.

To volunteer to be interviewed, please contact us here, or by writing to

Jess Jephcott

Ditchling, Quilters Green, Fordham, Essex CO6 3LZ

or by telephone on 01206 242228 or 240788 or 07714 250949

There is absolutely no charge for this. We do it for the enjoyment of hearing an old'un talk about the past and for opportunity to make a record of a fragment of our country's history. A copy of your interview will be put onto a video cassette for you to keep. Further copies can be made but we would like you to provide the tapes for this purpose.

 

PRESERVATION

With ever changing technology, we need to make sure that the data is stored for posterity in such a way that it can be used by future generations. Our current procedure is as follows:

1. Make a Mini Digital Video Cassette (60 minute duration) of the interview. The file is in a .avi form and the size of a one hour recording is around 13GB.

2. Make a backup copy of the file using a 250GB capacity remote hard drive and remove this to a separate location. This enables approximately 20 hours of recorded interviews to be stored on one remotely located drive, at a remote place from the original disc. Hence, this gives added security against fire or flood. The added advantage of this is that the remote hard drive is easily carried and has a USB2.0 connection so individual interviews can be easily copied to other storage locations, or used for demonstrations and lectures at the click of a mouse.

3. It is usual for each interviewee to be given a VHS cassette recording of their interview for their own personal use. With changing technology, this storage medium is becoming less and less popular, in favour of DVD form. This will be reviewed from time to time.

4. From the 13GB .avi data we can produce a DVD with a size of 3.9GB. The quality of the DVD recording is not as good as the original, but this is an easy to use, and share, medium.

 

FORDHAM PHOTOGRAPHS

We started a new project in 2011 to make copies of people's Fordham related family and local sights photographs. The method that we have adopted is to scan each photograph to a high quality and then to insert them into a Microsoft Powerpoint presentation file that can easily be annotated with identification details and other information. So, ifyou have any Fordham rleated photographs and would be willing to let us scan them and have you identify the people and places, please let us know. We hope to build a Fordham picture file for posterity.

OUR AIM