What is it like to run a poetry workshop in a Colombian prison? Or stage Hamlet in a historic church building in Yemen? How do you react when war breaks out in the foreign country you’ve come to think of as home? And how do you look back on these experiences ten, twenty, thirty, forty years later?
You can find out through a new oral history collection created for our 90th-anniversary celebrations this year. Oral histories: the British Council in Action features 26 interviews with people from the UK and around the world who have ‘been there and done that’ when it comes to our work in arts, education and English over the past decades.
The interviews are an authentic, unscripted and personal testimony of our work in a changing and unpredictable world. Interviewees include the poet and broadcaster Lemn Sissay - whose first trip abroad as a young artist came through a British Council initiative - and the British politician Neil Kinnock, who was Chair of the British Council from 2004 to 2009. International figures interviewed for the project include the Indonesian architect and politician Ridan Kamil and the Yemeni theatre and film director Amr Gamal (director of the Hamlet production mentioned above). We also hear the remarkable story of Ruben Otero. A survivor of the sinking of the cruiser ARA General Belgrano during the South Atlantic conflict between the United Kingdom and Argentina in 1982, Ruben later participated in a British Council theatre project bringing together Argentine and British veterans, before writing his own play about his life. His interview explores how theatre and music have allowed him to process and express his traumatic experiences. Current and former British Council colleagues – some of whom recall British Council careers stretching back over forty years – also form part of the collection.
Our interviewees shine a light on what we do, how we do it and what difference it makes. But this is no vanity project. The collection is being archived at the British Library as part of the UK National Sound Collection. It will be an openly accessible online resource for scholarship and research – a contribution to the ‘living archive’ of the past that oral history aims to preserve and a useful asset for the study of international cultural relations.
No, we don’t empty the bins!
Public confusion about the nature of our work is a theme many British Council colleagues, past and present, recognise. Former colleague Roy Cross recalls being on a training course in Bracknell, UK, early in his career and having to go out and ask members of the public what they knew about the British Council. As he recalls, the ‘overwhelming response’ was the assumption that we were ‘the guys in charge of all the [local] councils and all the rubbish bins in Britain’. Of course, this is not correct!
And yet our interviews show that cultural relations initiatives are widely valued – and sometimes in unexpected quarters. Roy Cross relates a chance encounter with an ‘inebriated gentleman’ in a pub whilst taking a break from his duties at the Edinburgh Book Fair. Responding to the gentleman’s demands to know what he did for a living, Roy rather sheepishly explained that he worked for the British Council, perhaps anticipating a tirade about the bins not being collected on time. Instead, his response was greeted with a ringing endorsement of our Schools Partnerships programme – through which the gentleman’s son was connected to a school in Kenya and clearly enjoying the experience enormously. Roy was ‘absolutely gobsmacked’ but clearly proud that, at least in one Scottish family, the British Council’s work was well received.
And we don’t shove Britain down people’s throats
Alongside positive reactions, our interviewees report having to overcome scepticism about the purpose of the British Council. Fiona Bartels-Ellis our former Global Head of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, addressed this point directly in her interview. She recalls differing responses to her joining the organisation in the year 2000:
"The initial reaction of my friends was very negative. They said, “How can you, a conscious black woman, work for that racist organisation?” And I said, “Why do you say it's a racist organisation?” “Well, it’s British colonialism, isn't it?” And I said, “No, where'd you get that from?” “Well, there’s all this British, British, British stuff.
"People, even in the British Council, never mind outside, spoke about the British Council trying to promote British culture. But that isn't what the British Council has ever tried to do, to promote, I don't think. I think it's 'share' British culture, British way of life, the language, all of that and 'learn and engage'. In my whole time at the British Council, which was 23 years, I never experienced the British Council trying to shove Britain and British culture down anybody's throat."
The sharing of UK culture that Fiona alludes to can include cultural products and performance that explicitly critique aspects of British history and identity. Neil Kinnock points to the example of Black Watch, the 2006 British Council commissioned production at the National Theatre of Scotland, which subsequently toured internationally. Neil recalls the difficulty some audiences had in understanding the rationale for the British Council to support the production, given it attacked aspects of British imperial and military identity. He cites the play as an example of how the British Council works to increase understanding of the United Kingdom in the world – rather than simply portraying an idealised image of the country:
"I saw it three times ... it was absolutely brilliant … it said so much about the UK, positively and devastatingly scathingly. And anybody who watched it and thought about it could get, in an hour or two hours, insights into the UK, ancient and modern … It was a play about the nature and condition of the United Kingdom and a great means of communication about our country."
Judging from our interviews with figures from outside the UK, engagement with the British Council certainly can achieve the kind of enhanced understanding that Neil refers to. Irish policy analyst and climate campaigner Andrew Ramsay notes how his experiences as a participant in our Active Citizens programme have made him more sensitive to the nuances of the complex relationship between Ireland and the UK. As Andrew comments: "It's easy for us people to hate the UK. That's the easiest thing in the world and it's our favourite pastime." The value of international cultural relations, Andrew argues, is its potential to make people "look beyond those really superficial perceptions".
It's the relationships that matter
One of the collecting the oral histories is to explore aspects of change and continuity in the approach and impact of the British Council over time. Several interviewees describe an evolution away from ‘top-down’ processes and towards working more in partnership with organisations and experts based in the countries where the British Council operates. As South African education consultant and trainer Deborah Avery explains:
"It came as a bit of a surprise to me to realise how very communal the whole process was, how people actually worked together rather than just coming in and giving things from a distance … I do think that there must have been a time when it was a fairly patriarchal way of looking at things, a charitable organisation, giving money to people in countries that have less resources … it's become much more of a cooperative relationship."
This embrace of the ‘local’ finds particular expression in the sphere of English language teaching. The assumption that native speakers of English make the best English language teachers guided the policies of the British Council and others within the English Language teaching sector for decades. It is now firmly rejected.
Indeed, current colleague Pilar Aramayo cites her opposition to our erstwhile ‘native speakerism’ as a factor in her initial lack of interest in working for the British Council. Pilar moved from her home in Mexico to become British Council Country Director in the Philippines in 2018. Her interview offers a particularly moving account of personal and professional development and the delights – and challenges – of living and working outside your homeland.
‘Growing out into the world’
Virtually all our interviewees reflect on the power of international connections. For example, Lemn Sissay stresses the importance of international perspectives for his development as an artist. He describes connecting with other people as also being an internal experience – one of ‘growing out into the world’, as he puts it, through listening to other people’s stories and learning about their cultures. He refers to his tours with the British Council in South Africa as a case in point:
"The first thing I was told by South African artists and creatives when I went there with the British Council was “Don’t tell us about racism!”.. .and I was, like, “Oh, God! That’s half my set!” … That was a really interesting learning curve … it just gave me a perspective of other people in other places in the world. We’re just a series of small islands here and the British Council has allowed me to meet other perspectives."
What’s true for British people travelling overseas is equally true for those travelling in the other direction. Indonesian architect Ridwan Kamil won the British Council Young Creative Entrepreneur Award in the design sector in 2006 and visited London, Bristol and Glasgow. He recalls how the trip inspired in him a vision for the future of the creative economy in his home country:
"It changed my view about the business, the industry. It changed my view about the UK movement towards the creative economy. When I returned, many inspirations coming from this programme [were] implemented when I was a city mayor."
Sometimes visits to the UK could serve more immediate and practical ends. Nepalese teacher and academic Jai Raj Awasthi confesses that when he came to London for a British Council study visit early in his career, he used money provided for accommodation costs to purchase books on English language teaching – it must have been a good investment as he says he still has them today!
Looking ahead
Pointing to trends and developments shaping the world today, chief amongst them the rapid advance of artificial intelligence, our interviewees urge us to find ways to remain relevant in a changing world. There is optimism about our future – albeit countered by a notable mood of pessimism and frustration with the fragmented and fragile state of the international relations context in which we operate.
Education consultant Janet Ilieva reflects that the language of geopolitics today has uncomfortable echoes of the ‘us’ and ‘them’ Cold War world in which she grew up in communist Bulgaria. In this context, she states her belief in the importance of building trust for the international cooperation required to secure a more sustainable future.
A word cloud of keywords from the interview transcripts would feature the word ‘trust’. Stephen Kinnock, a Government Minister in the UK who worked for the British Council earlier in his career, describes the building of trust as the ‘number one role of the British Council’. He adds: "We could change the way that the world works if we could make the world a little bit more like the British Council".
Next steps
Our analysis of this collection – and a sister collection that was compiled as part of our 75th anniversary, which is already archived at the British Library – is ongoing. We’ll be mining the two collections for further insights into our 90-year backstory and the wider history of international cultural relations, with a report planned for publication in 2025.
In the meantime, we invite you to explore the collection. We guarantee you will discover something you never knew about the British Council. You may also come to question some of what you thought you knew about the British Council. Especially if, like the good citizens of Bracknell, you thought we were responsible for emptying the council bins!
