We at Twechar Community Action gratefully acknowledge the Heritage Lottery Funding that made the ‘Twechar: An Oral History of a Pit Village’ possible. This funding and the widespread support and volunteering contributions made by the wonderful people of Twechar have resulted in a hugely popular project, many creative outputs, and a fantastic oral history archive that will preserve the village’s proud heritage and ensure that it is passed down through the coming generations.

In addition, we would like to express our sincere gratitude to the following:

Dr Sue Morrison, Oral History Research & Training Consultancy, who provided invaluable project management mentoring and consultancy, oral history training and support, and spent lots of time working with volunteers, respondents, local youth groups and schools to produce the project outputs, including website content, filmed interviews, the wonderful project book and additional artwork and learning materials. She was also on hand to support the project at its various reminiscence and other events in the community.

Our fantastic project co-ordinators, Isobel Hartley and Rachel Kelly, who assisted Sue with all of the above and worked with enthusiasm and dedication, for which we are greatly appreciative. In addition, Isobel organised the oral history interviews, whilst Rachel did much of the research required for the project outputs. Their enthusiasm was infectious!

Thanks also to:

Tim Mitchell of Rubikon Pictures, and the very talented Skip Hopkins, author, for writing and working with local children and volunteers to make the Coachie Bear films; Tim also worked with Sue to create one of the school films; Rainy Days Images completed additional film making and designed many of the graphics used in this book and on the website; Annette Allison for her work with volunteer creative writers and performance artists; Donald John MacLean for his brilliant photography work; Catherine Smillie for helping us to catalogue project photographs; the fabulous Janice Miller and Peter McCormack at EDLC for helping us to locate relevant archival materials; and to all the staff at the Centre, especially the fantastic Sandra Sutton, Meg Ralston, Jean Blair, Shirley Hopkins, Andy Jordan, Robert Hopkins, Ross McClement and Samina Saine. The wonderful original art illustrations in this book and on the project website are the creations of Susan Arbuckle, S. Bluck, Chelsea Hinds and Robert Louth. Some of their work will be hung in the Twechar Healthy Living & Enterprise Centre as part of a permanent exhibition. And special thanks to Mark W. Downie, who designed and created this fantastic project website.

Most of all, we are eternally grateful to all those lovely Twecharites who shared their memories, stories, experiences, photographs, poems and writings, thereby helping us to create a unique oral history archive of this former pit village.

                                                                                                                                                  Thank you, All!