page_title: Enid Porter
section_title: Collection of folklore
hierarchical_section_title: Enid Porter / Career / Collection of folklore
caption_attribution_description: English: C18 Ely-made Nutcracker
context_page_description: Enid Mary Porter was a collector of folklore in Cambridgeshire and the longest serving curator of the Cambridge & County Folk Museum, now the Museum of Cambridge, working from 1947-1976. Her work was invaluable in recording the cultural and social practices of people in Cambridgeshire; she was innovative in the discipline of social history collection, employing working practices such as oral history, and engaging with people in areas that had previously been overlooked by folklorists. Her notebooks, now in possession of the Museum of Cambridge, hold a treasure-trove of information about Cambridgeshire customs, stories and songs.
context_section_description: The collection of the Museum of Cambridge grew vastly during Enid Porter’s curatorship; she accepted donations and regularly went to auctions to buy items for the museum. 
  The museum’s collection now comprises over 20,000 objects not including Porter’s personal notebooks. These notebooks contained copies of historical documents, newspaper articles and trade directories that she used to track movements of individuals, businesses and buildings. Porter’s notebooks are also home to accounts of numerous encounters with people she met during her professional life, detailing certain folk customs and superstitions and song lyrics. Some of her notes and transcriptions have been digitised by the Enid Porter Project run by the Museum of Cambridge and can be seen on the project website.
  Her collection of material in The Fens, the rural northern areas of Cambridgeshire, brought her into contact with W.H. Barrett with whom she published Tales from the Fens (1963), and More Tales from the Fens (1964).
  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 degree from the Open University in 1980. In 2015 a Cambridge blue plaque was installed at the Museum of Cambridge bearing her name.
caption: Wooden Nutcracker, handmade in Ely in the late 18th century. Purchased by Enid Porter at a sale by auction on 7 & 8 April 1964, Drill Hall, Ely.
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