Memories of War: New Narratives and Untold Stories
MEMORIES OF WAR: NEW NARRATIVES AND UNTOLD STORIES
CONFERENCE ON SATURDAY 9TH OCTOBER 2010
Queen Anne Building
Old Royal Naval College
Park Row
London
SE10 9LS
9.30 amRegistration and coffee in Queen Anne 075
9.45 amWelcome addressin Queen Anne 080
10.00 am
11.15 am Coffee in Queen Anne 063
11.45 am
1.00 pmLunch in Queen Anne 063 and visit the exhibition
2.00 pm Queen Anne 080
3.15 pmTea in Queen Anne 063
3.45 pmQueen Anne 080
5.00 pmDrinks reception in Queen Anne 063 followed by dinner in Greenwich
CONFERENCE ABSTRACTS
The role of design and archives in the remembrance and commemoration of WWI and WWII commonwealth war dead.
Daniel Alexander: University of Portsmouth
Andrew Haslam: University of Brighton
In 1918 Sir Fredric Kenyon wrote ‘War Graves, how the cemeteries abroad will be designed’. This report established the design principals for the British and Commonwealth battlefield cemeteries and memorials of the First and Second World Wars. It identifies all the elements of the design brief, which the three leading architects, Sir Edwin Lutyens, Reginald Bloomfield, and Herbert Baker were commissioned to envision. In 2010 a newly built CWWG cemetery was opened in Fromelles where two hundred and fifty newly discovered bodies from WWI were buried. DNA testing helped identify ninety-six of these bodies.
This paper takes the Commonwealth War Graves and Memorials as an example through which to explore issues surrounding the remembrance of war dead. By presenting new photographic images of key archive documents: letters, drawings, photographs, alongside new imagery of the cemeteries and memorials photographed in France and Belgium, we have created a visual narrative that investigates the design processes behind a commemorative project of this size. We have also used this material to explore how social attitudes at different points in time manifest themselves in cemeteries and memorials. Key examples of this in relation to the CWWG’s are the importance of the individual being recognised through the equal burial of all men regardless of rank, the ban on re-internment, and the shift in tone of the dedications on the headstones from WWI to WWII.
The new cemetery in Fromelles is an example of a contemporary implementation of Kenyon’s 1918 report and allows us to investigate the integration of modern day resources such as DNA testing and advanced building techniques in the creation of a cemetery that fulfils the ethos andshares a visual identity with the other CWWG sites. This has been done in part by creating a timelapse film ( spanning the cemetery’s ten month build offering a unique document of the complex layers of construction that took place to create this site of remembrance.
Police Women and Two World Wars
Helen Barnard: University of Greenwich
Seventy years ago Britain was facing the battle of a lifetime. Below the skies the civil population - the Home Front - faced an uncertain and dangerous future.
This paper illustrates the development of one particular group of women, involved in policing, whose genesis had been during the First World War and whose significance is largely unknown by the general public. It argues that the personal and working lives of these women can be used to reinforce a message that they played an important role in social progress.
Initially it looks at the women who became involved during World War One introducing two volunteer groups. It highlights briefly the creation of the Defence Regulations, as a contextual framework for policing in both wars. It then offers an insight into the female pioneers in the Metropolitan Police particularly during the interwar years introducing Superintendent Sofia Stanley and Women Patrol Rose Tooke. Drawing on a range of sources it explores ‘memory’ of life under war conditions from 1939. It looks at recruitment to the regular women’s police department and the interaction with the Women Auxiliary Police Corps (W.A.P.C) It investigates the world of woman constable Frances Hancox on the Isle of Man, understanding the issue of internment of enemy aliens and exploring her personal memories and the discovery of a strange meeting with a ‘girlfriend’ of Hitler. It recognises the need to reduce the women’s training on recruitment and a relationship with W.A.A.F absentees through the lens of Thora Thomas’ memory.
On the question of ‘Remembrance’ it acknowledges the death of an officer, Bertha Gleghorn linking it to questions of comradeship and of leadership displayed by Superintendent Dorothy Peto. It acknowledges that not everything was perfect, by conceding that two of the women were convicted and imprisoned for theft. The paper concludes that there are compelling reasons for continued research.
Peg’s War: a story told through letters.
Charmian Cannon: London Metropolitan University
A question constantly debated is ‘How did the Great War change women’s lives?’ This is the story of my grandmother’s experience of the Great War years as recorded by herself. I shall focus on the last two years 1916 -18. My main source is monthly letters written as her contribution to a round robin circulated between her and her brothers and sisters. I will discuss the implications of using letters as a source particularly these letters, which were passed to my mother and then to me. But my main aim is to reconstruct the war time lives of Peg and her family of three daughters and two sons as seen from her perspective. Peg was part of a Unitarian middle class family; the daughters and sons were brought up in the Edwardian period with traditional gender boundaries between her and her husband, and her sons and daughters. What made it unusual was that her husband had moved out in 1913 while continuing to support and keep contact. She was therefore the matriarch who determined family culture. In the last two years of the war both her sons and her son-in-law were killed. In the same period three grand children, the babies of two of her daughters were born. She gave them much support. The letters tell the story of this recurring experience of death and mourning and new life and hope. Interspersed is her account of the battle to cope with the challenges and anxieties of life on the home front, including one excursion into combat territory in France to visit her son in hospital.
I will conclude by considering briefly the post-war consequences of the war for Peg and her daughters and the significance of the letters in transmitting family culture and continuity between generations.
Academic women refugees
Dr Susan Cohen: University of Southampton
This paper looks at the story and experiences of academic women refugees who came to Britain from a variety of Eastern European countries prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, under the auspices of the Emergency Refugee Committee set up by the British Federation of University Women. Some 200 women were fortunate enough to be helped by the organisation between 1933 and 1945, receiving a broad range of practical, educational, vocational, financial and moral support from the committee members, all of whom volunteered to assist their fellow academics. The paper looks at one or two individual cases and relates how the lives of the women were transformed by the assistance they received.
Because the archive material for the Federation is currentlyclosed to researchers
(another paper in itself!), this is a largely untold narrative, and it has only been possible to put together this picture of their work by a set of lucky coincidences, and the co-operation of Nancy Edwards, the late archivist for the BFUW.
‘With her apron tied around his waist’
Being a man in wartime Britain, 1939 – 1945
Dr David Clampin:Liverpool John Moores University
Whilst there have been many efforts to tell the stories of women’s lives in Britain during the Second World War, notably in the work of Penny Summerfield and Sonya Rose, to date very little has been presented that explores the male experience or that uncovers masculinity on the home front. This paper is designed to fill that gap by exploring a variety of ways in which male roles were reflected and projected.
Based on a survey on every advertisement featuring men that appeared in Picture Post between 1939 and 1945, certain recurring themes and perspectives are identified which suggest a variety of ideals around the male character. With reference to the brief surveys produced elsewhere, this research goes someway to reinforce portrayals of men as ‘temperate heroes’ (Rose 2003). However, in other respects a divergent picture is offered which does not readily fit with the archetypal image of the warrior as set out by Dawson (1994).
What is presented is a new narrative on the man at war that suggests that the ultimate expression of masculinity was not necessarily concomitant with the wearing of a uniform and which shied away from the violence and machismo that might be associated with war. Instead, it is suggested, the ideal British male in wartime was a more sensitive and caring character who adhered to pre-war practices and standards of behaviour. Far from being subsumed by the exigencies of war, these men sought to actively differentiate themselves amid the mass of uniformed others, stand out from the crowd in an effort to attract or retain a partner, and stayed firmly wedded to home and family. This paper uncovers a new perspective on the British male during the Second World War that is, so far, absent from other histories.
Women teachers and the Second World War
Dr Peter Cunningham: Homerton College, Cambridge
Primary school teaching, already a predominantly female profession by 1939, was further feminised on the outbreak of the Second World War. Although teaching was a ‘reserved occupation’ where conscription was concerned, large numbers of male teachers tended to opt for military service and the consequent shortage was made up by retired teachers returning to the classroom and younger married women whose teaching careers had been terminated by the marriage bar. Their role was a crucial one in sustaining young children’s education through the many disruptions to everyday life on the home front.
The conditions of ‘total war’ extended and inflected the traditional role of the teacher in a variety of ways. Physical dangers from aerial bombardment, and even the threat of invasion, lent urgency to the teachers’ role in ‘protecting children’. Conscription and evacuation gave new meanings to the concept of ‘loco parentis’. Ideology and propaganda generated a new cultural environment for citizenship education.
This paper seeks to explore the meanings of this situation for teachers, through their own memories. It draws on testimony gathered in the course of an oral history research project that focused on the war as a turning point in teachers’ professional identity and practice. Prevailing discourses to be found in official statements and professional literature highlight patriotism and self-sacrifice embodied in teacher’s contribution to the war effort. The teachers’ own voices offer a far more nuanced recollection of personal experiences, of changing relationships with their children and of approaches to the task of teaching. In evacuation teachers often discovered a lot more about their pupils and developed greater sympathy for the difficulties they faced. In the air-raid shelter, fears for themselves and for their families were shared with their pupils, drawing teachers and children closer together. Immediate and longer term consequences will be considered.
Panel: Rhetoric and Practice in Institutions: experiences on the periphery
This panel will explore the experiences of individuals in war in relation to government discourse. By examining women’s employment on “men’s” postal work (Dr Helen Glew), the realities of women’s weapons training (Dr Corinna Peniston-Bird) and queerness in relation to the official rhetoric of the “People’s War” (Dr Emma Vickers), this panel aims to highlight the differences between official policy or rhetoric and realities of individual, lived experience. In drawing on oral testimony, the panel will discuss how individuals depart from or frame their experiences in relation to official and public discourse.
“You’re the very lady I want”: policy and practice surrounding women’s war work in the General Post Office, 1914-1919
Dr Helen Glew: University of Westminster
On the outbreak of the First World War, the General Post Office encountered a number of new operational challenges. The Postmaster General actively encouraged his male staff to join the armed forces and sought to fill the staffing gaps with temporary male staff and current staff ineligible for military service. Though women had formed a considerable part of GPO staff since the 1870s, there were initially grave - but often contradictory - concerns about employing women on work hitherto done only by men. Drawing on oral testimony from the Imperial War Museum, this paper will explore some of the practical realities of women doing men’s jobs in the Post Office. In particular, it will explore their individual experiences and self-perceptions, in contrast to official rhetoric and fears, and will evaluate the significance of such war work in the context of their lives as a whole.
For Men Only?: Women's Weapons Training in the Second World War
Dr Corinna Peniston-Bird: Lancaster University
In December 1941 the National Service Act made British women liable for compulsory military service for the first time. It included the provision that no woman called up for service would be required to use any lethal weapon, unless she had signified in writing her willingness to do so. The implication that she therefore might handle weapons is misleading: the combat taboo remained largely intact, although certain roles, such as those of the Ack Ack girls, rendered this taboo ambiguous, and some women, specifically those in Women's Home Defence, challenged it. In oral testimonies, however, it is clear that some auxiliaries did receive weapons training, while others sought informal and often very secretive introductions to arms. This paper draws upon testimonies held in the Imperial War Museum and on the BBC People's War Website to examine female firearms training and what significance was accorded to British women wielding weapons, both by themselves and in the external gaze.
Queerness and the “People’s War”
Dr Emma Vickers: University of Reading
The perennial fascination of scholars and the general public alike with the Second World War has provoked a significant outpouring of academic study on the place and memory of the conflict. However there has yet to be an examination of the intersection between a conflict that is commonly referred to as 'the People's War' and the queer minority who formed part of the wartime populace. Conceived by the Ministry of Information during the Second World War, the People's War was a carefully-crafted piece of morale-boosting propaganda that espoused the virtues of tolerance, stoicism and equal sacrifice. Following the end of the war, both the People's War and the myth of British civilian morale were, as Ian McLaine highlights, 'continually nourished by the tendency of politicians and others to call for a revival of the "Dunkirk spirit" whenever Britain faced a threat to her well being'.[1] As scholars such as Sonya Rose have suggested, the British people rallied to the cause of the war but it was a conflict that could not entirely eliminate difference, not least within the arenas of class and morality. This paper will interrogate the concept of the People's War in relation to queerness, thereby exploring the place of the sexual 'other' both in discourses of wartime social inclusion and post-war memories of the conflict.
Seeking the shadow of a dream grown vain: love and loss in the First World War
Sarah Haybittle: University of Brighton
This paper will discuss how narratives of love and loss in the First World War are expressed through artworks developed as part of my practice-based research, investigating narrative, memory, and the telling of stories. Artistic practice and critical theory are used to explore the creative potential of making the invisible, visual: addressing the ways in which the parallel perspectives of biography, creativity and social history – a synthesis of art and society – can be developed and maximised for their potential to engage and communicate.
Recent work explores the impact the First World War had on the women left behind. History documents facts and figures, a representation in the public realm. Soldier’s lives, rightly, are well documented through books, museums, films, photographs etc. Women’s experiences of war work – nursing, driving, office work etc – are also recorded, alongside the broader impacts this work had in changing women’s role within society, but the undocumented lives of millions of women, who experienced deprivation, fear and loss during the war, remain quiet, more private histories.
For every man that died, there was usually a broken-hearted woman, devastated by bereavement – casualties, whose suffering and loss is excluded from history books. Narratives of the intangible. Love and loss are explored specifically through the shadow of love: the bright hope of sweethearts, blossoming romance, quiet loves unrealized, and repressed feelings – relationships disrupted by the turmoil of sudden departure to war, absence, fear and often, by life changing loss. Borrowed memories and gathered biographies recounting such ephemeral tales and fragments are captured in composition as visual narratives, and articulated through the symbolic
and evocative. Stories, with embedded trace, absence, and condensations, act as physical expressions of social history, embodying and evoking qualities of time, space, sensuality, romanticism, and meaning, and are used as a means of documenting, and giving voice to, silent histories – a mediation between audience and understanding.