In July 2009 Test cricket came to Wales for the first time, when Cardiff played host to the first Ashes Test between England and Australia. It was a significant moment in the history of the longest standing team sport in Wales and in preparation the cricket ground at Sophia Gardens underwent
a £9.6m redevelopment programme to turn it into the new 16,000 seater SWALEC stadium. Part of that redevelopment was a new Museum of Welsh Cricket which will house a mixture of objects, interactive displays and digital artefacts.
Glamorgan Cricket is unique in that it has responsibility for both the professional and social aspects of the game and has 264 clubs from across Wales affiliated to it. It was a desire to engage these clubs in the creation of the museum and its collections that has led to a partnership between Glamorgan Cricket and academics from The George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling at the University of Glamorgan.
TaleEnders™ is a project, funded by the AHRC’s Knowledge Catalyst Scheme, that seeks to gather the oral narrative heritage of Welsh cricket and to explore the use of digital technology as a way of turning those narratives into artefacts and making them available to the broader community.
Over a period of nine months Sophie Leslie, under the academic supervision of Professor Mike Wilson, has worked with six diverse clubs across Wales to collect the stories and memories of players, spectators, umpires, scorers, tea ladies and groundstaff. These stories have taken the form of video interviews, audio interviews, written accounts and digital stories and along the way the team have collected almost a thousand photographs documenting cricket in Wales from late nineteenth century onwards. These images are now held on a flickr website as a resource bank for anyone wishing to participate in the project.
The project is driven by two basic principles: everyone has a story to tell and one story invariably leads to another. Stories will be on display in the Museum via monitors, as well as on the TaleEnders™ website. Most importantly, though, there will be the opportunity for visitors to respond to the stories with stories of their own so that the archive becomes a constantly growing and living thing. It is also hoped to broadcast some of the stories over the big in-ground screen during a season’s matches and the project will have a major presence as part of the Ashes Exhibition.
A further six clubs are already lined up to work on a second phase of the project and the team are already developing a linked KTP project, a training programme and on-line toolkits for community use in order to support self-archiving, co-curating and a sustainable future for TaleEnders™.