Our friend and colleague Helen Kendall (also known as Helen Clark during her working career), who has died aged 63 after suffering from motor neurone disease, was one of the pioneers of oral history in Scotland. She believed it was possible, by telling people’s stories, to change the world.
Helen was born in Lewisham, south London, to Sheila, a teacher, and Geoffrey Banfield, a manager with Esso Petroleum. She went to her local school and then studied education and history at Homerton College, Cambridge, where in 1973 she met her first husband, the molecular biologist John Clark.
Helen went to work as a volunteer at the National Museum of Scotland in 1977, then to Beamish Open Air museum in County Durham, where she developed her interest in recording oral history. She joined Edinburgh City museums in 1985, and remained there for the rest of her career.
She was passionate about enabling the voices of the dispossessed to be heard and led the development of the People’s Story museum in Edinburgh. Celebrating the lives, work and leisure of ordinary people is more commonplace today, but this was a radical new way of working for museums in the 1980s.
In 2006 Helen worked with the Living Memory Association to create Remember When (2003), a celebration of the histories of Edinburgh’s LGBT communities. More than 150 people, from 18 to 80 years old, shared their experiences to create an archive of oral history interviews, photographs and memorabilia. It is a lasting legacy of more than half a century of LGBT life in Edinburgh.
Helen was also passionate about women’s history. The book she co-authored with her friend and colleague Liz Carnegie, She Was Aye Workin’: Memories of Tenement Women in Edinburgh and Glasgow (2003), used oral histories to explore the lives of women facing poverty in the first half of the 20th century. It has sold around 23,000 copies worldwide.
Helen was diagnosed with MND in 2013. She faced the disease with courage and determination. She used her skills as a documenter of social history and of daily life to write a blog on living with MND.
With John she had two sons, Charlie and Laurie. After John’s death, in 2004, she met Jim Kendall and they married in 2011. The combination of their two families, her sons and his two daughters, brought her a great deal of happiness.
She is survived by Jim and her children.
