Activities for the 100th celebration?

[rickpreston@nasuwt.net]

I have been asked to attend a meeting in the local town re what sort of actities should take place to celebrate the centenery of the Great War in 2014 and beyond.

I would be interested to know what activities other towns are planning to hold, any help or ideas would be most welcome.

regards to all

Richard Preston

[kenf48]

I think the preferred usage is 'commemoration', ten million dead and the bloodshed and problems for the modern world that followed are hardly cause for 'celebration'.

Most of the discussion is in the thread 'Worrying development' http://1914-1918.invisionzone.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=188139&hl=

Ken

[Moonraker]

Point well made, Ken. I wonder how many references to "celebrations" we'll see over the next few years. Even

November 11, 2018 will not be a day for celebration.

Moonraker

[rickpreston@nasuwt.net]

You are quite right the use of the word celebration is incorect and Commemeration is far better. I thank you for correcting my terminology.

I would still like to have ideas off members of the forum as to what kind of commerations they think we should have. I want to do justice to the men who fought and were killed in the Great War.

Any thoughts and ideas welcome.

Rick

[RobL]

Point well made, Ken. I wonder how many references to "celebrations" we'll see over the next few years. Even

November 11, 2018 will not be a day for celebration.

Moonraker

Why isn't 11th November suitable for celebration whereas the anniversary of VE and VJ days have been in the past?

[Moonraker]

I prefer to use the word "celebration" for the actual days in 1945 and "commemoration" or "marking" for the anniversaries, though I concede that Googling the respective terms only partly supports my view.

Moonraker

[rickpreston@nasuwt.net]

I think the introduction of ww2 is irrelevent. Perhaps rememberance would also apply, although there is an important educational motive too. The town I think want to take up Prime Ministers theme of rememberence though I feel it is important not to fall in with the clasical ideas which developed from the 1930's onwards.

I believe is is important to develop the idea of the learning curve, the victory of the last 100 days etc.

How to put these ideas over is the poinant question

Any Ideas

Rick

[bruce]

I have been invited to just the same sort of meeting, so am equally interested in what others are doing.

My first thought was wreaths. Since I know where all the men on my local war memorial lived before the Great War, I had the thought of getting the Town Mayor to seek agreement from the current property owners to lay a wreath at their home on the centenary of their death. This would involve 40 wreaths.

Then I started to think a bit more about it. The Mayor would have nothing to do in 2014 and only two to lay in all of 2015. However, on July 1st 2016 the mayor would be busy, visiting eight homes.

As a result, I am still pondering what the town might do to mark the centenary.

The names on the memorial plaque don't need and further enhancement, or re-engraving, so I am still looking for ideas.

Bruce

[spof]

Bruce

What about something to highlight those who came home or served at home in the military or on war service? I'm not sure what you'd do to spread it out over 4 years but a Roll of Service for November 2018 would be a useful permanent addition to the Local Archives.

Glen

[bruce]

Nice idea!

I'll have a think about that.

Bruce

[Kath]

This made me think, why not a poppy on every house which sent a member of the forces!

Hundreds-what an impact, but impractible.

Would a map of the town with each house or street marked be effective?

Kath.

[SteveMarsdin]

If your town or village is twinned with another in France or Germany, as many are, you could combine it with their roll of honour.

if you have a local newspaper who has archive copies from the war years, you could exhibit each day's news in the town-hall (or on their website), perhaps with background information

[T8HANTS]

I am also being drafted onto a committee, and I think I want to emphasise the whole community involvment for the Isle of Wight.

From Lord Jellicoe to the 'umblest snotty nosed I.W. Rifleman, from the ladies who threw open their homes for hospitals and nusing homes to the the elderly farrier whom operated the forge alongside my old home who made thousands of horse shoes to be sent to France.

From a local paper from Oct 1914

Mentioned in Sir John French's despatches

Capt Viscount Gort M.V.O.

Capt A.L. Moulton-Barrett.

Lieut Prince Maurice of Battenburg.

Lieut B.B. von B im Thurm (R.E.) and German Baron

Cpl J. Peach of Union Street.

I bet he never thought he would be in the same newspaper column with such worthies.

My thoughts are commemorate the fallen where they lie, in your local area commemorate what the community at the time achieved or suffered.

At the start of the war the editor of our local paper said he wanted people to write about their families servicemen so later generations would know what they did to serve the country. I have blessed his foresight ever since, because without him and his pages most of the Islands daily particpation would have been lost.

Gareth

[Alan Tucker]

Don't forget the Warwicks reserve battalions at Albany Barracks, Parkhurst. The following might be of interest....

Captain Robert Hamilton 1/Warwicks

Six days later he saw an ear specialist and on January 27 1915 was examined by two doctor Colonels at the War Office. On February 2^nd he reported to the Warwicks training base at Albany Barracks, near Newport on the Isle of Wight. On the following day he learnt that he was to take over 300 men who were to form the next draft. In his diary he recorded “There are 1700 recruits here and not a bad lot at all. 2200 recruits and 57 officers have already gone from here”. On February 4 “Montgomery rolled up for lunch and seemed fairly fit. He has got a Brigade Major job in the North of England somewhere”. Hamilton never returned to the front, presumably for medical reasons. He stayed on the Isle of Wight until April 16 when he left for a post as Commandant of the Military Detention Barracks at Hereford, where he arrived on September 26 after an induction period at Wakefield Detention Barracks. The training regime during his time on the island included….

Route marching

Musketry

Bayonet fighting

Constructing Defence of the Island trenches

Saluting parades

Company drill

Tactical exercises

General

It has already been noted that the Royal Warwickshire Regiment had a base or depot on the Isle of Wight where regulars were posted after returning home with injuries and recovering sufficiently to await posting back to the front. Captain Hamilton’s diaries provided some evidence of this process. New drafts for the regular battalions were also based on the island.

The Parkhurst Military Cemetery attached to the Albany Barracks contains 21 graves of Warwicks’. Nine died before the end of July 1915. Six were from the 3^rd Reserve Battalion and three from the 4^th Extra Reserve Battalion. Privates Willie Robertson and Frederick Taplin both died of pneumonia. Robertson, aged 27, died on September 5 1914 and left a wife, Leah, at Ladywood in Birmingham. Taplin, aged 23, came from Leamington and died on February 22 1915. His father was a coachman and his mother a nurse. Conditions of tented life were obviously not always conducive to health. In the House of Commons on November 23 1914 Mr Rupert Gwynne, MP for Eastbourne, asked the Under-Secretary for War whether he was aware that the camp of the 3^rd Royal Warwickshire Regiment, at Parkhurst, Isle of Wight, is 18 inches deep in mud; how long it is intended to keep this battalion under canvas in a quagmire; and why the construction of huts for the winter accommodation of troops in the Isle of Wight was not commenced before October? The minister replied that men of the battalion were now all in billets or in huts.

Second Lieutenant Roger Drysdale was a 4^th Battalion officer stationed at the Golden Hill fort on the western end of the island. In April 1915 he was sent on a training course at Portsmouth and on April 19 was returning on a train between Brockenhurst and Lymington when a shot was heard. He was found dead with a bullet through his temple and his service revolver on the floor. He was a 27 year market gardener from Childswickham, near Evesham. At the outbreak of war he had joined the 8^th Worcestershire Regiment but was then gazetted into the Royal Warwicks. He had had a severe attack of flu and had faced depression previously. It was a ‘tragic death’.

As discussed earlier 2^nd Lieutenant Bruce Bairnsfather was invalided back to the U.K. with shell shock from the 2^nd Battle of Ypres. In mid-1915 a medical board passed him fit for light duties which meant a posting to the Warwicks’ depot at Albany Barracks for two months. He gives insights into life there in his second memoir, ‘From Mud to Mufti’. The island was like an ‘armed camp’ – ‘one congealed mass of khaki’. The men were now in the ‘redbrick grandeur’ of the old barracks or in a ‘myriad of supplementary huts’ instead of the ‘old, haphazard, primitive tents in a sodden field’ on his earlier encounter’. He found a plain barrack room for himself looking out on the six acres of gravel which formed the parade ground after an initial hut spell when a captain was posted to France.

“You mustn’t look for domestic pleasures in an army. You are one of a vast horde of trained gladiators. The proper use for a soldier is putting him on to shooting, clubbing or sticking someone else who happens to get in the way of his country’s welfare”.

Bairnsfather was posted to command and train a company, also on light duties, of 200 men who had already seen active service, some with him in the 1^st Battalion. After a while he was posted to a more demanding recruit company. He looked forward to weekends and a chance to visit Cowes, Ryde or Ventnor. One day Bairnsfather was called to the orderley room where there was a telegram announcing a posting to a New Army division on Salisbury Plain as a machine-gun instructor.

A.A Milne.11^th Bn

The battalion received a new officer from home at some time in late July 1916. This was Second Lieutenant Alan Alexander Milne better known later by his initials, A.A Milne, and as the author of ‘Winnie the Pooh’ and other works. He travelled to France from the Isle of Wight with a ‘quiet boy’ also destined for the 11^th Battalion. Milne described how his parents had bought for him….

“an under-garment of chain mail, such as had been worn in the Middle Ages to guard against unfriendly daggers, and was now sold to over-loving mothers as likely to turn a bayonet-thrust or keep off a stray fragment of shell..He was much embarrassed by this parting gift(but) was taking it to France with him. He did not know whether he ought to wear it. I suppose that, being fresh from school, he felt it to be ‘unsporting’ ;something not quite done; perhaps even a little cowardly”

He fell ill on the Somme on November 7 1916…

Milne was in hospital for several weeks but was well enough on December 1 to attend a Punch dinner. After Christmas he rejoined the Warwicks on the Isle of Wight and rented a cottage at Sandown. Whilst there he wrote his first play – ‘The Two Wishes’. He then moved to Fort Southwick to be in charge of a signalling company at the signalling school for the Portsmouth garrison. He wrote a reflective war poem – see Appendix 83. He had still not recovered from his illness so went to the military hospital at Corsham and then to a convalescent hospital at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight for three weeks. Robert Graves was also there. A medical board in mid-1917 recommended that he was only fit for sedentary work. He returned briefly to Fort Southwick but by November 1917 was working on propaganda as an Intelligence Officer at the War Office.

2^nd Lt Charles Lander, 10^th Bn

Second Lieutenant Charles Lander had been wounded in the Battle of the Ancre in November 1916 and ,back in England, left hospital on December 2. After six weeks leave he reported to the 3^rd Reserve Battalion of the Warwicks at Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight on January 9 1917. He was only there for ten days but was not impressed….

“At this time of the year and at this period of the war, reserve battalions were not very cheery places…There was a pig of an adjutant (Captain Archdeacon) nicknamed by the ranks ‘arch-dunghole’. He was a singer by profession and had never been out and never did go out. The place seemed full of dugouts Majors, the type who went sick when there was anything doing; and drank and played bridge all day. The younger members of the mess were therefore in the way and soon got drafted out again”

Lander was soon sent to the Command Depot at Ballyvonear, county Cork in Irelland

Bruce Bairnsfather

Arrived at 1st Bn around Plug Street on 29 November 1914 from the Isle of Wight.

[kenf48]

Times today has an article on the Household Division 2014 Memorial Garden

for further info on the Garden if you're not a subscriber http://www.memorial2014.com

and full brochure http://www.memorial2014.com/images/Brochure-Memorial-Garden.pdf

Seems a garden is a popular choice

Ken

[Bernard_Lewis]

On a personal level I've been commissioned to write 'Swansea in the Great War' and I hope to cover the home front in some detail.

As well as the obligatory coverage of those who served on land, sea or in the air I have also identified material (that I have not yet looked at) on a well known Swansea businessman who served in a Friends Ambulance Unit, extensive stuff on the local Red Cross unit's actions and the activities of the local Jewish community.

So I hope to shine a light on some of the lesser known stuff as well as the combatant's, battles etc.

As a side issue I have also received what I think might be the first of several invites to give a talk on the Swansea Battalion.

I also plan to shortly give the Swansea politicians a nudge in the ribs, especially as the Swansea Battalion was essentially raised by the Mayor of the time.

Bernard

[Tonym]

Activities for the 100th celebration?

I think that the correct term is "COMEMORATION"

[rickpreston@nasuwt.net]

Thank you for your ideas.

There is certainly food for thought in many of your entries.

Rick

[dannyhill86]

I am co-ordinating a project in my local area running from 2014 with a museum exhibition in 'real-time' where members of the public can come in and 'build' the exhibition through research and have real interaction with the personnel who served. We will be reproducing the local newspaper in full 100 years to the day that it was released and at least once (probably the first time) circulating it in with the modern newspaper to all households. Also we will have a WW1 day on 5th August 2014 where we will re-create the journeys that local soldiers made on that exact day (according to service records), of leaving their homes, walking the same streets to 'sign up' and going through the medical etc. Local cinema will show comptemporary newsreels, street vednor's in period clothing selling 'war is declared' newspapers, and a whole series of smaller events to bring the town to life as it was 100 years before.

Although who knows what will have changed by the time we actually get there!

Any thoughts or suggestions appreciated!