Paul Thompson

Professor Paul Thompson is a social historian and sociologist, internationally recognised as a pioneer of the use of oral history and life story interviews in social research.

Paul is Research professor in Sociology at the University of Essex, and author of over twenty books including The Voice of the Past. He is Founder of the National Life Story Collection at the British Library, Founder Editor of the journal Oral History (from 1970) and of the Oral History Society. Subsequently he became Founder of the National Life Story Collection at the British Library National Sound Archive (1987), now the world’s leading oral history archive. In 1994 he established Qualidata, the ESRC’s action unit for archiving qualitative research fieldwork. His book The Voice of the Past (1978; revised editions 1988 and 2000) is the classic text on the oral history method (over 40,000 copies in ten languages).

Currently, his principal research interest is complex families. He is joint author (with three therapists) of Growing Up in Stepfamilies (1997), and has recently published along with Elaine Bauer, their joint book Jamaican Hands Across the Atlantic (2006). Paul is also currently active in a number of community oral history projects in London and elsewhere.

After reading Modern History at Oxford and writing his doctorate on the rise of the Labour Movement in London, Paul became one of the initial members of the Department of Sociology at the newly-founded University of Essex. He was encouraged to experiment with interviewing older people by the department’s first professor, Peter Townsend, who had recently published his Family Life of Old People (1957), based on his research at the Institute of Community Studies. It was also through Peter that at the Institute he first met Michael Young (whom he later recorded in a life story interview of 1990, now in the National Sound Archive, as part of his ongoing series of interviews with Pioneers of Social Research).

There have been three strands in Paul’s research and writing. Earlier he was strongly involved in architectural history and also conservation work through the Victorian Society. He wrote a biography of the controversial Victorian architect William Buttterfield (1971) and a biographical study The Work of William Morris (1967; revised editions 1977 and 1991), and co-authored a popular History of English Architecture (1965; revised edition 1979; 35,000). Most recently he is co-editor with Stephen Hussey of The Roots of Environmental Consciousness (2000). Secondly, since the late 1960s he has used retrospective oral history interviews for social history. This led first to The Edwardians (1975; revised editions 1977 and 1992; 20,000) and then to The Voice of the Past. He has also edited oral history collections on The Myths We Live By (with Raphael Samuel, 1990) and on Narrative and Genre (with Mary Chamberlain, 1998). The third strand of his writing has been concerned with contemporary social change. His book Listening for a Change (with Hugo Slim, 1993) has been widely used by development workers in the South/Third World. With his study of Scottish fishing communities, Living the Fishing (1983), he explored the links between family and community culture and economic adaptability, using a combination of archival research, oral history and anthropological fieldwork. Subsequently he has pursued similar issues in life story interview studies of car factory workers and of City of London financiers, and in his joint works with Daniel Bertaux Between Generations (1993) and Pathways to Social Class (1997).