Scottish Working People’s History Trust

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Welcome to the website of the Scottish Working People’s History Trust. Here you can learn more about the Trust, its activities and publications, and contact us for more information.


Ian MacDougall Memorial Lecture

The 2025 Ian MacDougall Memorial Lecture will be held 15th May 2025 at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh.

Dr Hugh Hagan, recently retired from National Records Scotland, will give a keynote talk entitled “Women’s Lives in the Shipbuilding Communities of the Clyde’s Lower Reaches: “It’s ma job tae work and it’s yours tae make it go roon”

This paper will explore the community of the shipbuilding towns of Port Glasgow and Greenock from the perspective of the lives of the female population. It will do this by relying heavily on oral testimony to shed light on the role of women as family managers – a multifaceted role that required them to be competent in a number of skills, but most of all in managing a family budget that was meagre and unpredictable from one week to the next. This paper will demonstrate how oral history can add to the body of knowledge by introducing a voice often neglected by the formal record.

The Scottish Oral History Group Free Event

The Scottish Oral History Group is hosting a presentation of short films and a roundup of oral history news at their AGM. The event will take place at the University of Edinburgh Project Room, 50 George Square, EH8 9LH.

The event will feature films from Aberdeen Museums and Galleries’ Voices from the Granite Industry. The films include worker’s memories of quarrying and working granite. There will also be insights into the granite used in the building of the Scottish Parliament.

There will also be a showing of Mar gum biodh an teine air do chraiceann (As if fire were on your skin), 2023. The film is based on recordings from the School of Scottish Studies Archive.

More information can be found on the Oral History Group’s website https://thesohg.org/news

Ian MacDougall Memorial Lecture

The 2024 Ian MacDougall Memorial Lecture will be held on Thursday 4th April 2024 at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh.

Caroline Milligan of the European Ethnological Research Centre at the University of Edinburgh will give a keynote talk on the bringing to publication of Ian MacDougall’s interviews with and research on Peeblesshire Textile Workers. The book will be available at the event.

Following Caroline’s talk, The Mills of Tweeddale Project will give a presentation on their current oral history recording and research project being run by Peebles Civic Society with the Innerleithen Community Trust and the Walkerburn Community Development Trust.

Thank you to the Franco-Scottish Society of Scotland

The Society has given us a grant sufficient to cover the editing of Ian’s interview transcripts for online publication. The grant will also provide for a copy to be lodged with La Maison des Johnnies in Roscoff, Britanny.

As the result of the interest created by the continued publicizing of Ian MacDougall’s research on French Onion Johnnies, we were delighted that publisher Birlinn Ltd. reprinted the book in June 2023, published this time as: ONION JOHNNIES Recollections of Seasonal French Onion Sellers in Scotland.