National Life Stories
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| charitable trust and limited company | |
| Founded | 1987 |
| Founders | Paul Thompson, Asa Briggs |
| Headquarters | 96 Euston Road, NW1 2DB, London, England |
| Website | www |
National Life Stories is an independent charitable trust and limited company (registered as the ‘National Life Story Collection’) based within the British Library Oral History section, whose key focus and expertise is oral history fieldwork. Since 1987 National Life Stories (NLS) has initiated a series of innovative interviewing projects funded almost entirely from sponsorship, charitable and individual donations.
Each NLS project is archived at the British Library and comprises recorded in-depth interviews, plus content summaries and (if funds allow) transcripts to assist users. Alongside the British Library’s oral history collections, which stretch back to the beginning of the twentieth century, NLS recordings form a unique and invaluable record of people’s lives in Britain today.
The proposal for NLS was first developed by Paul Thompson (oral historian) and Asa Briggs in 1985-6. The project for a ‘National Life Story Collection’ had a number of distinct features; it was to be a ‘life story’ project intending to collect full autobiographical material including both written autobiographies as well as recorded ‘oral history’. And it was intended to 'record first-hand experiences of as wide a cross-section of present-day society as possible' combining recordings with both elites (who at that time had been largely neglected by British oral historians) and a cross-section of ordinary men and women.
During 1986 Thompson and Briggs recruited a distinguished body of trustees, including Baroness Ewart-Biggs, Penelope Lively, Austin Mitchell, Sir Russell Johnson MP, Robert Blake, Elizabeth Longford, Professor Peter Laslett, Professor John Saville and Jack Jones (trade unionist). Advisors included Melvyn Bragg. Other important early trustees included the property developer Jack Rose and the first Treasurer, Peter Hands. With Lord Briggs as Chairman and Paul Thompson as Director, an inaugural meeting of the National Life Story Collection (NLS) as a company was held on 11 November 1986, and registration as a charity was obtained in October 1987.
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