Ceredigion archivist Helen Palmer presents Penparcau from the past

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Transcript

00:00 was really to encourage the rebuilding of Pen Parkie. We're coming up to this post-war

00:18 period now where they want to clear the slums - I use the word divisively, it's not my word

00:25 - and so they were making bits of Pen Parkie look as bad as they possibly could. I'm sorry,

00:32 it's just how it was. So this is back street Pen Parkie. I don't think these English language

00:39 labels were necessarily there before the photographer came along, I don't know. This house features

00:48 again, just a second. This is the same house, and you may or may not know this image, it's

00:54 a bit of propaganda. This sign, let me use the pointy thing, there we are. The house

01:02 where the baby died and the rats were after its corpse. Now, do you think that could have

01:10 some kind of political overtones? Would it be that somebody thought that it was time

01:15 to build some social housing? It's a bit hysterical, isn't it? But there we are, that's what it

01:22 said. We talked about the toll house right at the beginning and how it lost its significance

01:29 really just at the time that the first big audit survey map was produced. So by the time

01:37 that this picture was taken, troops marching through Pen Parkie - not the spending of course

01:42 - I am assuming, and this may be utterly wrong because I am not a historian, I'm an archivist,

01:48 that they are part of the First World War. They don't have to be because of course there

01:53 was an awful lot of training done in the Aberystwyth area of the territorials in the years before

02:01 the war, but I think those are probably something to do with the First World War. Man up a ladder

02:06 there, doing some painting. Can you see him? Little sign there saying Aberaeron. It's quite

02:17 a poignant picture I think actually and again it's telling us a bit about exactly what the

02:23 toll house looked like. Of course as you all know the toll house is now happily living

02:27 down in St Fagans, which is really nice isn't it because how many buildings have we lost

02:35 that didn't go to St Fagans? It's really really nice when one makes it down there and gets

02:42 treasured and valued. Because a building is a big thing to look after isn't it?

02:48 Is St Fagans a site or what? I've never heard of it.

02:51 I'm very sorry, St Fagans is a museum. It's a museum of the open air and it's down just

02:58 by Cardiff. And it's wonderful. I say it's wonderful, I haven't been for years, but it's

03:03 a museum of old buildings brought from all over Wales and put there for people to go

03:10 around and enjoy. I like archives because they tell us about the past in our area, in

03:16 our county and they're not history books, it's the raw material and there's something

03:25 very wonderful about that. It's not mediated by anybody else. What you're getting is from

03:31 all sorts of different perspectives, versions of the past and in giving a lecture this evening

03:38 what I hope to do is to show how we can bring different sorts of documents, different sorts

03:43 of archives together for local government, personal collections, photographs, maps, all

03:48 these things, newspapers, can be news, we can bring it all together and we can make

03:54 something much greater than the past. Why do I like that? Well why wouldn't anybody like

04:00 that frankly? We can go from what we remember, so our own pasts, and then go back and back

04:09 to things that our parents or grandparents might remember and then back to that side

04:13 that nobody remembers now, but we can still see people in their everyday lives, living

04:20 those lives, getting born, married, dying. And there is a kind of magic, there's a magic

04:28 in archives that it shows us how people were very like we are in some ways and yet living

04:36 in very different circumstances but in the same place that we know and love.

04:41 [silence]