Where are the interviews? They Shall Not Grow Old

[MrJazzy]

So I don't really know where to ask this, or if anybody who reads this has any answer but here's my situation and question.

I've watched the recent documentary They Shall Not Grow Old, and I thought it was an amazing watch. The remastering and reconstruction of the old black and white footage is amazingly done and the soundtrack is so aswell. It does make me curious though, sometimes I hear a line from a soldier and I'd like to know the context of the question he answered. Are these interviews public domain, if so where are they? They're incredibly interesting accounts of a forgotten time that I'd love to learn more about.

[IlluminatiRex]

They were done by the BBC for their documentary series The Great War in the 1960s.

The oral histories are currently in the archives of the Imperial War Museum. The great thing about the IWM is that they have a huge amount of stuff digitized. If you go to https://www.iwm.org.uk/ and click the "search" button on the top you can type in the name of whoever you're interested in seeing if their oral history is online. After typing in your search, you are going to want to hit the button that says "more objects" and then narrow down the selection by choosing "sound" for the audio category and "First World War" for related period.

For example, I pulled up the Oral History from Guardsman Horace Calvert: Calvert, Horace (Oral history) | Imperial War Museums

Now, I've been able to find 4/5 I've searched for (the exception being Charles Carrington). I might be getting lucky in that the BBC and IWM did their own oral histories, and I think that's the case because the dates I'm seeing for production on the oral histories I've found are the 1980s-90s so I'm fairly certain they are not the same oral histories that Jackson used. However, they would likely be fairly similar to the ones he used if they are not the same. But he also might have used these ones so I'm not entirely sure on that count.

While I felt TSNGO was a good film, extremely well edited - it's not a strong documentary since there's not a lot of context to stuff. Such as no names being attached to voices. And they used a lot of oral histories. And if you look at the one I linked there are a total of 19 thirty minute reels of recordings. The description does state what is stated on each reel, but again without know exactly who you're looking for, and exactly what they were discussing, it may be hard to find any sort of match. So you may have your work cut out for you.