The W.R. Mitchell Archive
Preserving the voices of the Yorkshire Dales
In early 2012, we established the W.R. Mitchell Archive to save and preserve the vivid oral histories of the Yorkshire Dales. Created as a digital library of recorded voices, the archive ensures that the memories, dialects and lived experiences of local people are not lost, but remain available for current and future generations to listen to, learn from and cherish.
Through the archive, you can discover stories that span social class and circumstance — from between maids and farm workers to landed gentry — all told in the authentic voices of those who lived them. Together, they form a rich and deeply human portrait of life in the Dales.
W.R. Mitchell: a life devoted to listening
The archive is named in honour of W. R. Mitchell (1928–2015), a journalist whose working life was devoted to capturing the stories of Yorkshire. Known affectionately as Bill, he was editor of The Dalesman magazine for over forty years and the author of more than 200 books on local history and Dales life.
His writing explored places, people and industries that shaped the region, from the Settle–Carlisle Railway to biographies of well-known Dales figures including James Herriot, Alfred Wainwright, Hannah Hauxwell and Kit Calvert. Alongside his published work, Bill undertook something even more extraordinary: over the course of four decades, he recorded more than 600 interviews with people from Yorkshire, Cumbria and Lancashire.
These tapes, often recorded in kitchens, farmhouses and village homes, capture local dialects, memories and ways of life that have all but disappeared. Without Bill Mitchell’s curiosity, patience and respect for ordinary lives, many of these stories would have been lost forever.
From cassette to digital archive
In January 2012, Settle Stories received a £50,000 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund to deliver the W.R. Mitchell Archive Pilot Project. This funding enabled us to begin digitising a selection of Bill Mitchell’s original cassette tapes, allowing a new generation not just to read history, but to listen to it.
As part of the pilot, we digitised, catalogued and archived a sample of 16 recordings. This marked the first step in a much larger ambition: to bring together the full breadth of the W.R. Mitchell recordings into one accessible digital collection.
Today, the wider archive is held across several institutions. A significant number of tapes are housed in the North West Sound Archive, with others held in Special Collections at the University of Bradford and the University of Leeds. Only a small proportion of the recordings have been digitised so far, but our long-term aim is to digitise them all, reuniting these voices in a single, living archive.
Voices from the Dales
The range and depth of the collection is extraordinary. It includes stories from local gentry such as Philip Dawson of The Folly in Settle and the Yorkes of Halton Place, alongside voices of ordinary people scraping a living in some of the most remote and challenging landscapes in the Dales.
Listeners can hear Jim Smith, a hill farmer near Ingleborough, and Sam Dyson, farming on the Haworth Moors, speaking honestly about life and labour in a harsh climate. Kit Calvert and Norman Swindlehurst recall everyday life in small Dales communities such as Hawes and Keasden, while Thomas Dugdale shares memories of early cinema in Settle.
Other recordings capture the texture of working life: John Geldard describes the ancient craft of dry stone walling; Henry Cox recalls years spent in the cotton mills; and Bill Alderson recounts the life of Susan Peacock, landlady of the Tan Hill Inn in the early twentieth century.
Music, leisure and domestic life are also woven through the archive. Lawrence Rukin speaks about singing with the Keld Singers, John Keavey remembers early recreational cycling in the Dales, and Alice Maunders records her experiences as an ‘inbetween maid’ in a large household. Ann Margaret Mason describes life as a farmer’s wife, from baking and laundry to the relentless rhythm of domestic work, while Marie Hartley and Joan Ingilby reflect on their own efforts to record and document Dales life from the 1920s onwards.
A living legacy
Together, these recordings form an invaluable archive of Yorkshire dialect, memory and lived experience. They remind us that history is not only found in books and landmarks, but in the spoken words of people describing their own lives.
Where is the archive now?
The W.R. Mitchell Archive is held by Settle Stories but is currently not available for public access. The digital files are securely stored and offline following the end of project funding.
Access to the archive can be arranged for a small fee. If you would like to enquire, please contact Jess at jess@settlestories.org.uk to discuss availability and access.
