Accessibility statement

CECS Student brings 1940s archive interviews to life in film project

Posted on 15 September 2021

The interviews uncover everything from contemporary working lives to romantic relationships.

A digital exhibition, showcasing a film project led by CECS PhD student Rachel Feldberg as part of a Humanities Research Centre Jane Moody Scholarship Project (2021) in
collaboration with The Rowntree Society and the Borthwick Institute for Archives, has just opened on the Borthwick Institute website.

Bringing the Rowntree Leisure Time Interviews to Life - Borthwick Institute for Archives, University of York Working with professional actors, CECS MA graduate Hazel Lawrence as production manager.and a film crew from the Department of Theatre, Film, Television and Interactive Media, Rachel created a series of nine innovative, digital performances inspired by real-life interviews with ordinary people in post-war Britain.

The interviews, held in the Borthwick archive, formed the raw material for Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree’s study of English Life and Leisure (1951), and document interviewees’ working lives, religious and political beliefs, leisure activities, sexual practices, romantic relationships, and hopes and worries for the future in the late 1940s.