Talking Meggies - Tell Us Your Stories

Our first event of 2018, entitled “Building Bricks of Cleethorpes: The People and Places of Alexandra Road and Seaview Street”, which is scheduled to take place in March (date to be confirmed), will include the launch of our year-long “Talking Meggies” project, which will record stories about Cleethorpes and its people and present them in a variety of formats, whether that be as audio or video recordings or as written material and displays.Up until last year, we put a great deal of work into staging events for a few hours on a single day and then all the information was filed away and if you weren’t there, you didn’t get to see it. But last September, we made our first inroads into giving our research greater longevity when we premiered our two new films, “Death Takes a Holiday: When Cholera Came to Cleethorpes” and “Talking Meggies: A Conversation with Sir George Moody” as part of our Heritage Open Day event. We were delighted that the films were well-received and we want to embrace modern technology and do more in the future, which is where our “Talking Meggies” project comes in.

Both of our films are now available to view on YouTube (we’ve just uploaded our conversation with Sir George), so they have a life far beyond that day in September when people came and sat in our “cinema” at Cleethorpes Town Hall and watched them. As our plans for a permanent base didn’t work out, we see this as the way forward for Friends of Cleethorpes Heritage, so that the fruits of our labours can be seen (and hopefully enjoyed) all day, every day of the year.

But we need your help. Firstly, we need stories, but it’s not just about people like Sir George, who was such a massive influence on the Cleethorpes we know today, and about whom there was a lot of information to discover and work with, both online and in the local archives. We also want to hear stories about so-called “ordinary” people, who may not have contributed much to the column inches in the newspapers, but in their own way led extraordinary lives, or have a remarkable or possibly sensational story attached to them. It is these stories, in particular, that may only be known by family members or friends, that we want to record and share before they are lost. Everyone has a story to tell, so please, tell us yours.

Secondly, we need people who can help with research, assist at events or have the time and skills to help us with film production. When the scripts for our first films were being written last year, they were originally envisaged as video rather than audio recordings, but lack of knowledge of film production as well as lack of money and time meant they ended up more like the radio version of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads, rather than the TV series. Now, there’s nothing wrong with radio and it gets the imagination going far more effectively than TV, where you don’t need to paint yourself pictures of the characters and the surroundings and situations in which they find themselves. But we’d like to do a bit of both, so if you have the skills and are willing to work for tea, cake and kudos only, we’d love to hear from you.

We’d like to have a few stories ready for when we launch the project in March, so if you have tales to tell about the people and places of Cleethorpes, please let us know and we can use them to hopefully inspire others to share theirs.

You can contact us either by emailing friendsofcleethorpesheritage@gmail.com or via our Facebook page @CleethorpesHeritage.