Lived: Minehead, Dunster
Recording made: 2002
Length of recording: 4 hrs 46 mins
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HILDA PARHAM
Born:
Minehead,
Somerset, 1914
Lived:
Minehead, Dunster
Recording made: 2002
Length of recording:
4 hrs 46 mins
To read a summary of the contents of the oral history recordings click CD1, CD2, CD3 or CD4. To read quotations from the recordings made as part of the Artlife 'Perspectives' project in 2003 click CD1.
Listen to an audio clip by clicking wma or mp3. (Click here for information about downloading audio clips)
Hilda Parham was brought up in Minehead and Alcombe. Her father was a carpenter, staircases his speciality. She trained as a teacher and taught at Wellington, before marrying and moving to Dunster to help run the family stores. It was a time when people scrubbed their doorsteps weekly, made their own scouring powder and eggs were wrapped in newspaper. They patted two hundredweight of butter at a time and kept doe figs on the counter to tempt the customers.
She knits and crochets and is a member of the Women's Institute. She has been to their AGM in London several times and once met the Queen Mother, a fellow member. Interested in local history she belongs to the Dunster Village Society. But things have changed. It isn't her village any more, she says.
She has listened to the Archers since its inception, exchanges her books every fortnight at the travelling library, and cancels her newspaper when there's an election.
Hilda Parham was also recorded for the Artlife 'Perspectives' project, part of the Moor to Shore Festival 2003. A copy of that recording is held by the Somerset Record Office.
postscript - Hilda Parham died in May 2007