Michael May Diaries
Caroline Skelton talks about her dad's diaries. Michael May was a farmer in the Goole area. He started writing a diary aged 18 and made an entry every day for 62 years until he died in 2021. She now has all the diaries, and is hoping to donate them to a museum or archive.
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00:00 I'm Caroline Skelton and I've got some of my dad's diaries which he kept from 1958 to
00:09 2020, so 62 years.
00:13 Well my dad was a farmer originally and he kept diaries so that he could record how many
00:22 eggs his chickens were producing and then he also would write about how the crops were
00:28 doing but then he also wrote about his family, his mum and dad, his sister, his twin brother
00:36 and then he would write when he got married he wrote about that and my mum and myself
00:44 and my three sisters.
00:46 We used to know about the diaries, he always used to keep them up of his bed and he used
00:50 to write in them every day and if he missed a day he would write in the morning the next
00:56 day but we weren't allowed to read them so my dad's no longer here because he died in
01:03 2021.
01:04 I've got all these diaries, myself and my three sisters and it's a case, well we can
01:10 look in the diaries and find anything, any information from the last 60 years we can
01:17 find it and it's very interesting.
01:20 So he wrote about things like the moon landings, he wrote about the royal family, he wrote
01:26 about things to do with all sorts of political events, although he wasn't political, but
01:37 it's interesting just to read about when, for example, when I was born I can read that
01:42 and when my sisters were born and when my children were born, it's all in the diaries.
01:49 And also I've got my nieces and they message me and ask me to send them a picture of the
01:56 day they were born.
01:58 I have learnt, not specifically from the diaries because I did know, he wrote quite generally
02:05 about things, but he wrote about his time at boarding school and he wrote a piece that
02:13 fell out of one of his diaries which was all about being at boarding school, what it was
02:18 like, how he played sports, some of the antics that they got up to at boarding school, him
02:25 and his brother and, this is his twin brother, and just what school, what that was like which
02:33 I didn't know before, so that's been quite interesting.
02:38 All of us want to keep them, there's four of us and we all want them because it's like
02:44 having part of my dad and it is historically, there is a lot of facts in these diaries which
02:50 are very interesting, so it's what we do now, I'm not sure whether we could hold them somewhere,
02:56 they might be of interest to somebody else, or whether we get them copied somehow, that
03:03 would be quite helpful, if we could get them copied and then we could all have copies of
03:09 them, but there are 62 so I'm not quite sure how we do that.
03:13 Keeping a diary, it's not something that's easy because sometimes you're tired aren't
03:20 you at night and you don't want to write, but he did it every single day religiously
03:25 and to think that he did all that and then, you know, what can we do with them?
03:31 It's amazing really.