Ordinary person historical memroirs

[RedRedWhiney]

Can anyone recommend any memoirs? Not famous people, I love reading about 'ordinary' experiences.
Loved Road to Nab End and Call the Midwife.
Angela's Ashes until I found out it was mainly made up....
Any recommendations like that please :)

Helen Forrester?

She seems to be a novelist? I love historical fiction but looking for real stories:)

Helen Forresters books are based on her childhood, definitely non-fuction!

I'd also recommend Nella Lasts diaries from the WW1 mass observation project.

'A Home Front Diary 1914-1918' by Lillie Scales

Nella Last 'Housewife, 49.'

Kathleen Dayus memoirs of growing up poor in the West Mids.

Road to Nab End is one of the best biographies I have ever read.

You are both right - some are autobiographical but she does also write novels

Below Stairs by Margaret Powell. She was a domestic servant in Hove and London in the 20s and 30s.

Helen Forrester's memoirs are very good- think the first one is Twopence to Cross the Mersey.
Monica Dickens One Pair of Hands is good too.

I've also really enjoyed Kenneth Lane's Diary of a Medical nobody, about his time working as a rural GP. Lovely read

The House by the Dvina - Eugenie Fraser

Shoes were for Sunday - Molly Weir

The Choice - Edith Eger

Educated - Tara Westover

Manchester, Fourteen Miles by Margaret Penn is just lovely.

In 1936 anthropologist Tom Harrison, poet and journalist Charles Madge, and documentary filmmaker Humphrey Jennings set up the Mass Observation Project. The idea was simple: ordinary people would record, in diary form, the events of their everyday lives. An estimated one million pages eventually found their way to the archive - and it soon became clear this was more than anyone could digest. Today, the diaries are stored at the University of Sussex, where remarkably most remain unread. In Our Hidden Lives, Simon Garfield has skilfully woven a tapestry of diary entries in the rarely discussed but pivotal period of 1945 to 1948. The result is a moving, intriguing, funny, at times heartbreaking book - unashamedly populist in the spirit of Forgotten Voices or indeed Margaret Forster's Diary of an Ordinary Woman.

Lark Rise to Candleford by Flora Thompson is autobiographical about a working woman at the turn of the 20th Century.

When a crocodile eats the sun

Betty MacDonald wrote brilliant (and very funny) autobiographies. My favourites are The Plague and I and Onions in the Stew.

If you like medical stuff then I’d also recommend Echo Heron’s books about critical care nursing but obvs that’s a bit niche!

Molly or MV Hughes - A London Child of the 1870s, A London Girl of the 1880s, A London Home in the 1890s and A London Family Between the Wars.
Flora Thompson - Lark Rise to Candleford.
Winifred Foley - A Child in the Forest.
Laurie Lee - Cider with Rosie.

Slightly Foxed specialises in reprints of memoirs. I think you’d find their website well worth a look.

Blitz Spirit
by Becky Brown

History offers us a bird’s-eye view of events, presenting change and conflict as though they were a coherent story. But for people living through such events, nothing about them is coherent: life unfolds apparently at random.

In 1937, the Mass Observation project asked ordinary people to keep diaries of their everyday experiences, recording the raw material of history.

Blitz Spirit is a fascinating selection from the anonymous diaries kept during the war years by people struggling with rationing, the dread of bombing and invasion.

Alongside grumbles about politicians and fantasies of post-war life are beady observations of the unpatriotic behaviour of neighbours, including a snobbish couple who refused to plant potatoes on their grass tennis court ‘as it would look so bad from the windows’.

www.waterstones.com/book/blitz-spirit/becky-brown/9781529347081

Came to say this! I’m half way through and really enjoying it.

I also really enjoyed all 3 of Nella Last’s books.

Also All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot (he was a vet, is that ordinary or extraordinary?)

Yes to Betty McDonald! I love her writing. I love Anybody Can Do Anything when she has all these random jobs in 1930s Seattle. It had me rolling with laughter

Second Margaret Powell mentioned upthread. Her books are supposed to have inspired Upstairs Downstairs and so Downton Abbey

Angela's Ashes is made up?!😯

Home by Julie Myerson is good. It's the history of all the people who previously lived in her house.

Can any Mother Help me? by Jenna Bailey about mothers during the war and later.

It's semi-autobiographical

The Light in the Window - June Goulding. It's nurse/midwife working in a home for unmarried mothers.

The View from the Corner Shop - Kathleen Hey. Part of the wartime mass observation project.