Educational Trustees Meeting Nov 2017

organise members into the ACT in its formative years. How he fought to counter the exploitation of film production workers is indicative of the personal sacrifice many early ACT members made to improve working conditions in the industry before WW2. He was also a prominent figure in the propaganda war against European Fascism. He joined an ACT organised film unit to film during the Spanish civil war in 1936. From listening to this interview it is clear that Alan Lawson made a significant contribution to the British film and television industry, to the trade union movement and the goal of improving labour conditions in the industry. The Project has been very successful at going out and recording interviews with a wide range of the workforce. There are interviews with camera operators, film editors, hair and makeup artists, actors, projectionists, matte artists, writers, neg. cutters, electricians, dubbing mixers, costume designers - every craft is there. I t is a vast store of knowledge and experience. We continue to build the archive with new interviews. We’re currently filming an interview with Rebecca O’ Brien Producer at 16 Films. We’ve already recorded four hours of material with her – a fascinating woman, about her role as a producer and location manager and her work with Ken Loach. We continue to collaborate on behalf of BECTU with academics and fellow trade unionists. We’re working with a wide range of universities helping them with research - including The University of Sussex BBC Collective Histories Project. They have gained access to the collection of interviews with the BBC management over the last forty years. We provide them with interviews with the BBC workforce who made the programmes. We recently gave a speech at the Britain@ Work conference with a view to extending the involvement of trade unionists in the creation and recording of their workers’ own history. We want to encourage more trade unions to include a history dimension in their work and to organise their own oral history and archive building activities. We plan to give them every support. The History Project Volunteers The Project remains entirely voluntary with a small organising committee. We hold monthly meetings at BECTU Headquarters on the 2 nd Monday afternoon of the month. We have members from a wide range of ages, backgrounds and crafts who shoot and carry out the interview with our contributors. We do it because our industries are too important for the lives of hundreds of key contributors to go unrecorded. We now have an archive of 700 plus interviews which grows and grows. We have recently built our own website and have started the huge task of releasing the tapes from the archive and digitising, transcribing, cataloging and uploading the valuable interviews which have laid dormant for the last 30 years in the archive.