THM Oral Histories Lead, Evelyn Somerville interviews Howard Davies. Image credit: Mike Smith

The Hockey Museum was one of the first groups in the UK to receive a Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) Sharing Heritage grant for an exciting project to collect Oral Histories from past players, umpires, officials and administrators.

Sharing Heritage was a new funding programme introduced last year to help people across the UK explore, conserve and share all aspects of the history and character of their local area. The Hockey Museum in Woking - led entirely by volunteers who have had a past relationship with the game of Hockey - was given £7,100 to set up and start running this programme.

Volunteers have interviewed 25 people who have had an involvement in the game of hockey at all levels and are today making those oral histories available on their website here. From today you will be able to access and listen to the whole interviews or search for keywords and jump to the corresponding segments within each interview if you have an interest in a particular topic area such as the Olympics or the administration of the game of hockey. To achieve this, The Hockey Museum has utilised an innovative, new software called OHMS, created by the Louie B Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky. In doing so, The Hockey Museum has become the first cultural institution in the UK to make use of OHMS and it has resulted in a clean and intuitive user experience that greatly enhances the accessibility of its oral history collection to the wider public.

The Hockey Museum exists to collect and preserve as much as possible of the origins and development of the game of hockey in the UK - both written and oral material and a wide range of artefacts. Over the years, much material of great historical interest has been lost or destroyed, because of the absence of a suitable repository for it. The Museum already has a large collection of heritage and history material but, until now, very little by way of personal recollections. This project set out to start collecting as much of this material as possible, as quickly as possible because in the four years of the Museum's existence, a number of long-standing hockey lovers, whose recollections would have been of great value, have already died.

This initial oral history project has focused on 25 former players and/or officials who have been long-time participants in the game, at all levels within the sport. The objective of these conversations was to record their recollections and preserve them for the education of current and future generations of participants and potential participants, to encourage greater awareness of, and participation in, the sport. The conversations focussed on the way the sport has changed over the years, both in the way it was played and also the way it was organised and administered. The intention is that these very personal recollections will help to bring to life the written records of the development of the sport, and thereby be of greater interest and stimulation to listeners.

Chair of THM Trustees, Katie Dodd, said:

"I am delighted that The Hockey Museum is able to report the successful completion of this Heritage Lottery funded project. This is just the start of our work to bring many more of hockey’s fascinating stories to a wider audience so we hope that people will find the current interviews published both interesting and informative."

Our sincere thanks go to the Heritage Lottery Fund whose grant made this possible and to all those who have generously given their time to be interviewed for sharing their personal memories with us and the wider public through this medium.

Download the full Press Release by clicking the PDF icon to the right and for more information contact THM Oral Histories Lead, Evelyn Somerville, through our contact form.