Commemoration

From Bombay to the Western Front

Michael Noble

On Tuesday evening, I attended a commemorative event at the Imperial War Museum North. It had been organised to reflect on the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Neuve Chapelle, which was the first major offensive to involve the British Indian Army.

Among the speakers at the event was Dr Santanu Das, of the English department at Kings College London. Dr Das, who is an expert in the culture and literature of the First World War, made the argument that while the First World War is often defined as the ‘clash of empires’, it could equally be defined as a watershed event in the history of cultural encounters in Europe.

Dr Das has been leading an international and interdisciplinary team of researchers and a number of cultural institutions across Europe to illuminate and examine this question during the centennial years of the war’s commemoration.

In this film we see how Dr Das has partnered with Imperial War Museum, London, In Flanders Fields Museum, Ypres, and the Museum of European Culture, Berlin to scour their (and many other) vast archives for letters, photographs, literary texts, sketches, artefacts, newspapers, and audio recordings. We see how all these sources are being brought together to be examined side-by-side, in order to piece together a fuller picture of the experience of the Indian troops and labourers, and the Europeans who they came into contact with.

First World War Collaborative Projects

Michael Noble

The Centenary of the First World War provides an opportunity to build on the renewed popular interest in the war to collaborate and share expertise. Here are some of the initiatives that are offering such chances.

Lives of the First World War

lives-of-the-first-world-war-300x300The Lives programme is the Imperial War Museum’s effort to build a permanent digital memorial to the Lives of the First World War. The site offers people the opportunity to work with the IWM to piece together more than 8 million life stories, share them, and enable IWM to save them for future generations.

Each individual whose contribution to the First World War is recorded in official documents will have a personal Life Story page. Information about each person and their wartime experiences can be connected to Life Stories by members of the public who access the site.

Members can:

  • Link together evidence relating to the same person, using records from museums, libraries and archives across the world.
  • Add references to sources they have discovered elsewhere.
  • Upload digital images of their own precious family mementoes.
  • Include family stories and personal knowledge.
  • Group together individuals they are interested in by creating your own Community

As more and more people connect facts to Life Stories, the project can begin to piece together each individual’s life story.

Operation War Diaryoperation-war-diary

Operation War Diary is an effort to tag, classify and understand original documents from the First World War.

It brings together original First World War documents from The National Archives, the historical expertise of IWM and the power of the Zooniverse community.Working together, they and their volunteers will make previously inaccessible information available to academics, researchers and family historians worldwide, leaving a lasting legacy for the centenary of the First World War.

Data gathered through Operation War Diary will be used for three main purposes:

  • to enrich The National Archives’ catalogue descriptions for the unit war diaries,
  • to provide evidence about the experience of named individuals in IWM’s Lives of the First World War project
  • to present academics with large amounts of accurate data to help them gain a better understanding of how the war was fought

All of the data produced by Operation War Diary will eventually be available to everyone free of charge- a lasting legacy and a rich and valuable introduction to the world of the War Diaries.

UK Web Archive –First World War Special Collection

ukwa-logo-150The British Library archives the whole of the UK web domain under the terms of the Non-Print Legal Deposit Regulations 2013. This is done in an automated way, typically once a year.

In addition, their Special Collections are groups of websites, usually more than fifty and less than four hundred, brought together on a particular theme. These have been especially compiled by curators and other subject specialist to make useful and interesting Special Collections.

The First World War Centenary 2014-18 is a Special Collection that gathers suitable websites from the centenary period.

The Special Collection is open to sites that are issued from a .uk or other UK geographic top-level domain or where part of the publishing process takes place in the UK.

Sites concerning film and recorded sound where the audio-visual content predominates (but, for example, web pages containing video clips alongside text or images are within scope), private intranets and emails and personal data will not be included.

Site owners can nominate their site for inclusion here

 

Letter to an Unknown Solider

Michael Noble

Michael takes a look at a creative approach to remembrance…

This week I had the great pleasure to listen to a presentation given by Kate Pullinger of Bath Spa University. Kate, along with her colleague Neil Bartlett, spent much of this year working on the Letter to an Unknown Soldier project, which is a digital memorial scheme that invited people of 2014 to engage with someone from a century ago.

The statue at Paddington station
The statue at Paddington station

The project, which is supported by 1418 NOW, is based on Charles Jagger’s memorial statue, which is situated on platform 1 of Paddington Station and was unveiled by Viscount Churchill on Armistice Day 1922. The statue, which portrays the soldier in full battle gear, was designed to show him reading a letter from home. Pullinger and Bartlett’s idea was to invite people to imagine what they would write if they had sent that letter. What would they say?

They put out a call for people to send them their letters so that they could publish them on a dedicated website. The submission period was open from 28th June, the centenary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand to 4th August, a hundred years on from Prime Minister Asquith’s announcement that Britain had joined the war.

They received an astonishing response. Over 21,000 letters were submitted by people from all walks of life and from all over the world. Every single letter was read and published.

Although the project is a digital one, many people chose to write them by hand and post them in the traditional way, even if they had initially composed it on a computer. There is, Kate suggests, something in the act of putting pen to paper and physically posting it that makes people feel a closer connection to the recipient. Handwritten letters were scanned and are available to view online with every pen mark intact. A selection of the letters were later gathered for publication in a book that was released in November in time for Remembrance Sunday.

The soldier reading his letter
The soldier reading his letter

It’s a fascinating project that succeeds by prompting people to think about the effects and experience of war in a personal way. It can be difficult to know what to write to someone you have never met, and never will, and to do so across such a gap of time. As the thousands of writers can no doubt attest, it is worth the effort.

Football Remembers

Michael Noble

indexMichael looks at a new project that hopes to use football as a means of commemorating the first Christmas of the Great War…

It seems unlikely, given the state of no-man’s-land by December 1914, that anything like an organised football match took place during the Christmas truces. However, these spontaneous and cautious gestures did foster a handful of activities that may well have included a kick-about with a ball. It was then, as it is now, part of a universal language that demonstrates a similarity of outlook and reminds us that some things, class, fear, desire, football, remain the same no matter which direction your trench faces.

The existence of the Football Battalions, and the stories of professional players in the trenches offers a link to the past too. Young fans in 2014 can be encouraged to investigate the war by being reminded that, had they lived a century ago, the players they cheer on may well have ended up alongside them in uniform.

This is perhaps the thinking behind the Football Remembers project, run by  the British Council, FA, Football League and Premier League. Starting on the 6th December, Football Remembers will encourage avid young historians and the footballing community to take part in a mass-participation event.

The scheme invites people to play a game of football, take pictures and share them via twitter with the hashtag #FootballRemembers. Any match of any size can be uploaded, from school to Sunday league fixtures, five-a-side matches to kick-abouts in the back garden. Teams in the Premier League, the Championship and FA Cup Second Round will also pose for group photographs before matches and will display them alongside these submitted pictures, as well as on a dedicated website.

In addition, the Premier League will hold a special edition of its annual Christmas Truce international tournament in Ypres, which it has staged for U12 footballers every year since 2011.

Special educational resources are available here and here to help with the planning of matches and, most importantly, for learning about the events of Christmas 1914.

 

Soldiers of the 5th London Rifle Brigade with German Saxon regimental troops during the truce at Ploegsteer
Soldiers of the 5th London Rifle Brigade with German Saxon regimental troops during the truce at Ploegsteer

 

 

A Nottingham Library Remembers: Bromley House Library and The First World War 1914-1918

Michael Noble
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Jeff Buggs’s story of 9 Albert Avenue, Carlton

The Bromley House Library is holding a series of events to commemorate the war. Michael Noble takes a look at what’s on.

The Bromley House Library has served the people of Nottingham for almost two hundred years and is, at the start of the twenty-first century, one of the few remaining subscription libraries in the country. Its appeal lies partly in its collection of around 40,000 books and also in its pleasant atmosphere, described as ‘tranquil and unstuffy’ atmosphere. Founded in 1816, the library has been situated since 1822 in Bromley House, a Georgian townhouse that is now Grade II* listed. Access to the library is usually limited to paying subscribers but it is opening its doors this autumn and inviting the public to pay a visit to see a specially-commission exhibition of First World War artefacts and to hear a range of guest speakers.

The exhibition, which has been generously supported by the Lady Hind Trust, has been mounted as part of Nottingham’s Trent to Trenches programme. It consists of items that have been kindly loaned by the library’s members in an effort to tell the ‘stories’ behind their families’ experience of the Great War.This creates a natural focus on the war as it was experienced by Nottingham people. This personal element is made all the more poignant by the setting of cherished objects alongside beautiful photographic images of their owners, some of whom gave their lives in the conflict.  A modern interpretation of the war is provided by local artist Janet Wilmot, whose works have been displayed to accompany the historical material.

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BHL collections, images and one of the War Bond Posters
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Part of the installation by Janet Wilmot

The exhibition is displayed in the Bromley House Gallery and in the main reading rooms, and is open to the public every Wednesday from 10.30am – 4pm In addition, the library has a diverse programme of subjects and speakers for Saturday lectures (£5.00 pp) and Wednesday lunchtime talks. The talks on Wednesdays are free but tickets need to be reserved in advance.

 

 

 

For further information about the programme and reserving tickets please contact geraldine.gray@bromleyhouse.org, or phone 0115 9473134, visit www.bromleyhouse.org or just pop in!

 

 

The Dulmial Gun

Michael Noble
SONY DSC
The gun at Dulmial

 

A nineteenth century cannon sits at the entrance of a Pakistani village. Michael Noble takes a look at the story of the Dulmial Gun.

Dulmial is a village approximately a hundred miles south of Islamabad in Pakistan. A century ago, the area was part of British India, which meant that its inhabitants were drawn into the Great War on the side of the Allies. A settlement steeped in military history, Dulmial sent 460 of its men to fight in the British Army, the largest single participation of any village in Asia. Nine gave their lives. In recognition of this service and sacrifice, in 1925 the British government offered Dulmial an award of their choosing.

The man in charge of this choosing was Captain Ghulam Mohammad Malik, the highest ranking and most decorated soldier in the village. The Captain was a man of great experience, having commenced his military life in the Derajat Mountain Battery and participated in Lord Roberts’ march from Kabul to Kandahar in 1880. A career soldier, he eschewed the British offers of land, money and water facilities, choosing instead to have Dulmial’s contribution recognised with the presentation of a cannon.

Officers
Officers of Dulmial pose with the gun

The British agreed to this selection and provided Dulmial with a twelve pounder. Agreeing was the easy part. Getting the thing to Dulmial would be quite a different matter. The gun was to be collected from the First Punjab Regimental Centre in Jhelum, from where it could be carried by train to Chakwal. There, the gun was dismounted and loaded in a cart to be pulled by three pairs of oxen for the remaining 28 kilometres. The roads were semi-mountainous and passage was difficult. It would take the ox carts two weeks to cover the distances. From five kilometres out, at Choa Saiden Shah, the route became more difficult still and Dulmial had to despatch five additional pairs of oxen to relieve the initial six and complete the gun’s journey.

Safely in Dulmial, the gun was placed at the main entrance to the village and a photograph taken with the local commissioned officers. It remains there today, a reminder of the contribution that Dulmial made in the First World War.

Dulmial Plaque
The plaque attached to the base of the monument

Dulmial is now known within Pakistan as the ‘village with the gun’, but it is rather less well known in the UK. ‘This is because very little has been written or published about the the village in English’, says Dr Irfan Malik, a Nottingham man whose family originates in Dulmial. ‘I have visited Dulmial many times over the years’, he continues ‘and I have made it my aim to research the World War One history of the village as it played such an impressive part during the time’. It is Irfan’s intention to bring this hidden history to a wider audience and help to share the reasons of just what a nineteenth century Scottish cannon is doing in the mountains of Pakistan.