Enid Porter

Enid Mary Porter was born on 8 October 1908 in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, to father Hugh Porter and mother Ethel Mary Porter. Her father Hugh, originally from Bedford, completed his teacher training at a higher-grade school in Cambridge before becoming a secondary master at Southend High School. Her mother, Ethel Mary (née Scott), was from a family which could trace its roots in Cambridge as far back as the seventeenth century. As a result, Enid regularly visited relatives in the city of Cambridge and knew the area well. In her later career she would record local lore gleaned from her Cambridgeshire family. The Porter family was of the professional middle class and employed a servant until the First World War. After obtaining a degree in modern languages at University College London (which at this time housed the Folklore Society library, deposited in 1911), Enid followed her father and trained as a teacher at the Catholic Training College, London before working in schools for some years until after the Second World War. Her true interests however, lay outside teaching, and seeing a staff vacancy advertised at the Cambridge and County Folk Museum in 1947, she applied and was appointed Assistant Curator in September of that year. ==Career==

Curatorship at the Museum of Cambridge The museum grew out of the 1934 ‘Festival of Olden Times’ hosted by the Cambridge Guildhall and organised by Catherine Parsons, the then chair of the Cambridgeshire Women's Institute. The Museum was formed in 1936 by members of the local Rotary Club and University of Cambridge, in the site of the abandoned White Horse Inn; the museum occupies the same site today. The original aim of the museum was ‘to collect and preserve for the benefit of the general public and for the purposes of education, objects of local interest and common use’. During the official opening of the museum, Sir Cyril Fox proclaimed ‘I am inclined to think that in the University of Cambridge there is more exact knowledge of the social anthropology of, let us say, Papua than of Pampisford’; Porter was awarded The Coote Lake Medal by the Folklore Society in 1968. Years before a methodology was standardised for oral history collection, Porter engaged with people from all over the region, collecting stories, anecdotes and valuable personal feelings and impressions of interviewees. Porter preferred to use her notebooks as she felt that contemporary recording equipment affected the interviewees negatively and spoilt the material. Although some of these methods would have been considered unempirical by academic historians, they were recognised when the University of Cambridge awarded her an honorary MA in 1972, followed by the same award from the Open University in 1980. In 2015 a Cambridge blue plaque bearing her name was installed at the Museum of Cambridge. ==Personal philosophy==

Enid Porter was influential within the museums movement of the 1960s which aimed to widen museum attendance and to discourage elitist tendencies in the sector. She gave talks about local history to all sorts of groups and published articles in Cambridgeshire, Huntingdon & Peterborough Life magazine. Porter never missed an opportunity, and even took note of conversations she held when she was in hospital for her own health, sharing stories and anecdotes with other patients nearby. These methods of collection are a consequence of the key philosophy that she thanks her predecessor Thomas Bagshawe for; the importance of going out to collect information rather than sitting and waiting for it to be brought to the museum or the curator. Enid Porter worked using a multi-disciplinary method in her collection of folklore, social history and community life. She wrote that ‘Just as no man is an island unto himself, no academic discipline should, or can, remain in isolation’. ==Works==

• Tales from the Fens (London: Routledge, & Kegan Paul, 1963) - W.H. Barrett, edited by Enid Porter • More Tales from the Fens (London: Routledge, & Kegan Paul, 1964) - W.H. Barrett, edited by Enid Porter • ''A Fenman's Story'' (London: Routledge, & Kegan Paul, 1965) - W.H. Barrett, edited by Enid Porter • Sixty Years a Fenman (London Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966) - Arthur Randell, edited by Enid Porter • Fenland Railwayman (London Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968) - Arthur Randell, edited by Enid Porter • Fenland Memories (London Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969) - Arthur Randell, edited by Enid Porter • Victorian Cambridge (Dobson, 1969) • Cambridgeshire Customs & Folklore (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969) • Fenland Molecatcher (London Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970) - Arthur Randell, edited by Enid Porter • The Hearth and the Kitchen (Cambridge & County Folk Museum, 1971) • The Folklore of East Anglia (London: B.T. Batesford, 1974) • ''Victorian Cambridge: Josiah Chater's Diaries, 1844-83'' (Phillimore & Co., 1975) == References ==