Since 1994, anybody who attends has been asked whether they would sit for an hour and say what it has been like. These are the transcripts. Nothing has been cut for content, and where somebody is critical of the Institute the criticism is printed at its full length and is not answered inside the account.
The oral history has been running since 1994. Anybody who has attended is asked, in the ordinary way, whether they would sit for an hour and say what it has been like; about a third agree, and the recordings are catalogued whatever they say.
Twenty-nine accounts are held. Nine are printed here. The selection was made by the archivist on the rule that the printed set must contain at least as many people who are critical of the Practice as people who are not, and it does.
Nothing has been cut for content. Where a passage has been cut it is marked, and the reason is always a name or a health detail belonging to somebody who did not consent to be in the recording.
The whole sound holding, its provenance, and the rule limiting how much of it may be one voice are described with the rest of what the houses print and record in what we print and record.
Three accounts of the reconciliation
Three people were asked, at three different times, what the reconciliation is for. Their accounts do not agree, and the disagreement is the reason they are catalogued as a set rather than separately.
The tapes are held at the houses named. The text below is the transcript, which is a document in its own right and was made by a person: where the transcriber could not hear a word, she wrote that she could not hear it, and where she disagreed with an earlier transcription she left both.
REC/1979/02
Remarks at the first reconciliation
Eleanor Vale · Then 44, and the person who had proposed the exercise.
17 February 1979 · North House receiving room · Cassette, house machine, one microphone on the table
Remarks from the close of the first reconciliation of the Common Record, kept because somebody had been asked to record the totals and left the machine running.
What plays here is a spoken reading of the transcript below, made for this edition by a reader who was not present. It is not the sound of the tape. The tape is held at the house named and is not published.
MP3, spoken reading of the transcript · 1 minute 50 seconds · Download the file
The cassette is held at North House and is not published. What plays above is a spoken reading of the transcript, made for this edition by a reader who was not present at the meeting; it carries the words and not the voice, the room, or the bell. The earlier part of the meeting was never recorded and the closing minute is too damaged to transcribe.
Transcript
I will say the same thing I said at the beginning, because several of you were in the kitchen.
This is not an exercise in agreement. If it were an exercise in agreement we could have done it by lunchtime and gone home pleased with ourselves. It is an exercise in making disagreement answerable, which is slower and much less enjoyable.
Two of the books in front of me do not agree about the same fortnight in November. I am not going to decide which of them is right, because I do not know, and neither does anybody in this room who is being honest about it. Both books stay. The difference is entered beside them, in words, with the date, and with the name of the person who noticed it.
You will find that unsatisfying. It is meant to be slightly unsatisfying. A record that resolves everything is a record that has been tidied by somebody with an opinion.
There is a further point and I would like it minuted. An absence in the book is not the end of a matter. A person can stop attending and the consequences of what they undertook can go on for years — the roof is still off, the fund is still short, the promise is still somebody's. We do not get to close the entry because the person has gone quiet.
So please do not confuse a responsibility with the thing you can currently point at. They are not the same size, and the second one is always the smaller.
A questioner, not identified[Inaudible; approximately eight seconds.]
No. I mean exactly what I said and not the more interesting thing you would prefer me to mean. Ask it again with fewer adjectives and I will answer it.
[A bell, single, at some distance.]
That is not the North bell. Leave it in the record.
[Chair. Paper. The machine is stopped.]
The intervals were measured from this file by a machine reading of the sound and are recorded as read; they are not the transcriber's. Lines with no words on the tape — the transcriber's bracketed marks, and passages spoken over — are given the silence between the lines on either side, and are marked as such rather than heard.
ORA/1996/01
Recorded account: G. Idris
Gwenllian Idris · Steward, later separated from the stewardship; she asked that the account be published unedited.
3 November 1996 · The speaker's kitchen, Bangor · Reel-to-reel, borrowed; a dog audible throughout
Passages from the same tape as the printed account, selected by the speaker, on the reconciliation and on the language the Institute uses about people it removes.
What plays here is a spoken reading of the transcript below, made for this edition by a reader who was not present. It is not the sound of the tape. The tape is held at the house named and is not published.
MP3, spoken reading of the transcript · 2 minutes 23 seconds · Download the file
The reel is held at River House and is not published. What plays above is a spoken reading of the transcript, made for this edition by a reader who was not present; it carries the passages the speaker selected for printing in 1997 and nothing else.
Transcript
You want me to say what the reconciliation is for. I will say what it does, which is a different question and the one worth asking.
It is very humane. Everyone is very humane. That is the part I would put a line under. I have watched this institution separate people while remaining perfectly polite throughout, and I want to be clear that the politeness is not decoration — it is the mechanism. Nobody has to say a hard sentence out loud, because the books say it for them.
Here is mine. In 1993 I found my name in a Thursday ledger, at a house I will not embarrass, for an evening I did not attend. I was two hundred miles away and I can prove where I was, and I have never claimed anything more mysterious than that somebody wrote the wrong name down. It happens. Clerks are tired.
What I objected to was what happened next. I asked for it to be struck out. They would not strike it out. They entered my objection beside the attendance, in the proper hand, with the date, and they were extremely kind about it, and both entries are still there.
So the book now says I was present and says that I say I was not. They call that keeping the record honest. I call it a way of never being wrong: if you write down both, you have not made a mistake, you have made a holding.
I am told the alternative is worse and I accept that the alternative is worse. That is not the same as this being right.
And no, before you ask, I am not suggesting anything peculiar happened. I am suggesting somebody had a list and copied it badly, and that an institution which will not correct a list has decided that its books matter more than the people in them.
Print all of that or none of it. I have no interest in being quoted warmly.
The intervals were measured from this file by a machine reading of the sound and are recorded as read; they are not the transcriber's.
ORA/1994/05
Recorded account: P. Amit
Peter Amit · Steward of Shore House; asked about the post and the ledgers.
11 October 1994 · Shore House receiving room · Cassette, house machine
An account of the practical running of a house between reconciliations, of which the passages printed here are a part. Chiefly about the post.
What plays here is a spoken reading of the transcript below, made for this edition by a reader who was not present. It is not the sound of the tape. The tape is held at the house named and is not published.
MP3, spoken reading of the transcript · 1 minute 57 seconds · Download the file
The cassette is held at Shore House and is not published. What plays above is a spoken reading of the transcript, made for this edition by a reader who was not present; it carries the printed passages and nothing further from the sitting.
Transcript
The reconciliation is a fortnight of arithmetic and I would not romanticise it. What I can tell you about is the post, because the post is where the arithmetic comes from and nobody writes about it.
We moved the office out of the old address in the spring of 1991. Everything was notified: the houses, the bank, the suppliers, the diocese, the two circles. And the correspondence kept arriving at the old address for four years. Some of it was addressed in hands I knew and some of it was not.
The redirection worked, mostly. What I would note is that a number of the redirected envelopes came back to us already opened, and slit cleanly, with file marks inside — a receipt stamp, a reference number in the margin, the sort of thing an office does when it has actioned something.
I raised it with the old office and they said it was ours. I raised it with ours and they said it was theirs. I have both replies and they are equally certain and equally polite. Ordinary mishandling would explain it; a shared reference series would explain it; somebody covering for a clerk would explain it. I have not established which.
What mattered at the time was that the work in the envelopes was real work with dates on it. A roof, a fund transfer, two requests from the circle at Antigonish. So we did it. It was the relevant fact in front of us, and I would do the same again.
I appreciate that is not a satisfying answer. Running a house is largely a matter of doing the work that has arrived and declining to build a theory around the envelope.
The intervals were measured from this file by a machine reading of the sound and are recorded as read; they are not the transcriber's.
The three tapes in this set are held at the houses named and are not published. Where a player is shown, what plays is a spoken reading of the transcript, made for this edition by a reader who was not present; nothing was cut or improved, and what the reading does not carry is stated on each item. Other transfers are held elsewhere in the archive and are shown with the items they belong to. The transcripts are complete for the passages named and are published with the agreement of the speakers or, where a speaker has died, of the stewardship.