Oral history project: what we've learned after 400 interviews
15 June 2026
We recorded our first interview in a kitchen on Henrietta Street in the spring of 2008 — a retired coble fisherman who talked for two hours and apologised, at the end, for "going on". Four hundred and eleven interviews later, that apology is the thing we hear most often. People in this town genuinely believe their lives are ordinary.
They are not. Between them, our interviewees have described hauling nets by paraffin lamp off Sandsend, packing herring on the Fish Quay as a fourteen-year-old, carving jet in a Church Street workshop that is now a fudge shop, and watching the lifeboat go out into weather that kept everyone else off the pier.
What the archive actually holds
The numbers, for those who like them: 411 recorded interviews, roughly 730 hours of audio, 214 of them fully transcribed by volunteers. The oldest interviewee was born in 1912; she remembered the harbour so full of drifters during the herring season that, in her words, "you could walk from one side to the other and never get your feet wet."
Three things we've learned
Memory is communal. The same stories surface in interview after interview — the 1936 storm, the wartime evacuations, the last big herring years — but each teller holds a different corner of them. No single interview is the truth. Forty of them, together, get close.
Work is the spine of memory. Ask someone about their childhood and you get generalities. Ask them what their father did between four in the morning and breakfast and the detail pours out — gear, weather, wages, the names of boats gone sixty years.
Loss sharpens rather than fades. Our most vivid recordings are of things that no longer exist: the jet workshops, the drifter fleet, the shipyard. People keep what the town has lost.
What happens next
Every recording is archived in duplicate, catalogued, and — where the interviewee agreed — made available to listen to at the museum on Church Street. If your family has Whitby stories, we would like to record them. It costs you an afternoon and a pot of tea. It gives the town its memory back.