Over 120,000 people have seen The Way We Worked at Poole Museum!

This is the exhibition digital:works helped make as part of the Our Working Lives project. For two years we worked with a community group in Poole collecting oral histories around people’s early working lives from 1945 to 1959. We were interested in collecting people’s stores of leaving school and finding the first jobs.

–        Did they get careers advice?

–        How did they find their first jobs?

–        Looking back was the job suitable to them?

–        And, how long did they stay in this job?

This proved to be a fascinating time in British history and helped form a lot of the contemporary world we know today, but at the same time it was a completely different time. As we expected people had no trouble finding work and could freely leave an employer on Friday and get a new job on Monday. Still it could be a risky occupation in the days before H&S legislation, with a few reports of serious accidents in the workplace.

The exhibition digital:works helped make went up at Poole Museum in April 2011 and proved to be one of the most popular exhibitions they had put on. It was due to come down in September 2011, but the museum decided to keep it up for an extra six months. It is due to be replaced next week.

For more information on Our Working Lives;

• www.digital-works.co.uk/owl.html
• www.ourworkinglives.org – where you can hear the oral histories and see other background research collected during this project.