Introduction by Christopher John Hogger

Michael’s first oral account to Effingham Local History Group (ELHG) of his life in Effingham was given in an interview recorded by Yvonne Shaw in The Sir Douglas Haig public house on 15 September 2010, and was transcribed approximately by Yvonne as Life in Railway Cottages, Effingham Junction; her transcript has recently been edited by Christopher John Hogger and Susan Morris to improve its accuracy. The interview was occasionally punctuated by questions posed by the late James Louie Nicholls, who was not an ELHG member but a regular patron of The Sir Douglas Haig.

In June 2011 Michael produced a DVD and sent this to ELHG a month later, in July. It contained a recording, made by Michael, which revised substantially what he had told in the first interview. This DVD, formally archived by ELHG under the reference ELHG/waller/disk/1, contains both video and audio components. The video shows a selection of his family photographs which he was displaying – one at a time, using a controller – on his television, while he was at the same time filming the television screen and reading from a script that he had written (thereby producing the audio component). In his reading he occasionally explains aspects of whichever image is displayed on the screen. In essence, the whole effect is that of a spoken commentary by Michael about his life in Effingham as well as about his family photographs as displayed on his TV.

Then in August 2011 Michael sent a second DVD, very similar to the first but with three minor corrections made to his spoken script. This DVD has been archived as ELHG/waller/disk/2 and a transcript for it has been generated by applying his three corrections to an earlier transcript made by Yvonne of the first DVD.

The transcript of the first interview and the transcript of the second DVD are presented in sequence in the article below. In the second of these, the images that Michael talks about are also shown.

In both transcripts Michael refers to the set of cottages in which he lived as, variously, “Railway Cottages” or “Station Cottages”. The latter is the correct name. Station Cottages, of which there were originally five, were situated just to the south of the railway line between Effingham Junction and Guildford; Nos 1 and 2 (he lived at No 2) stood alongside Effingham Common Road, on its western side, just south of the bridge over the railway line. By contrast, the twenty semi-detached properties formally named Railway Cottages stood rather further away to the north of the railway, along the western side of Old Lane.