Summary So Far
I was asked by Essex Uni to write a piece for the Imperial War Museum 'Mapping the Great War' Project. This is it. You are in there somewhere....even if it's only as an audience member at a film or talk
Essex Un for IWM
This project began in about 2005 as four friends deciding to identify the 102 men on the Harraton Memorial and then it grew – to include the Usworth Memorial (121 names) and the Washington Memorial (179 names). On our ‘journey’, which is ongoing, about 30 volunteers produced the research material for, and commissioned, 4 films – all available on youtube – Wad Thou Gan?, From Washington to Wipers and Warlencourt (the story of a bus trip of 45 to France and Belgium…we counted them out and we counted them in), Washington Men at the Somme, The Wear at War (film premieres for each of them in a variety of locations); we engaged with local schools for classwork, a visit to France and Flanders and assemblies (and one of those schools provided us with a young mastermind who created for us a phone app which has a lot of information about the men (and woman), around 50 short video clips telling some of their stories and an interactive map which allows people to do a four mile walk across Washington that connects all three memorials and takes people past around 30 (of 100) bronze resin poppies which mark houses and other buildings from which men left…but to which they didn’t return; there is a book published by Pen and Sword – Washington in the Great War; we commissioned Fool’s Gold to write 6 songs about Washington men and they performed these songs at 5 concerts in 2018, under the title ‘Now This Lousy War is Over,’ made a CD and then we put songs and photos of (many of) the men into an album (copies given to all local schools); we held a public Peace Party at Beamish Museum in the Summer of 2019 (it poured all day); we have created materials for, and mounted, exhibitions at Arts Centre Washington, Washington Library, Beamish Museum, Albert Tourist Information, Tanfield Railway, Tyne and Wear Archives, Durham County Hall, Durham Western Front annual Conferences; talks for local groups of all kinds – eg Friends of Sunderland Museum, local History Societies, Probus, local U3As, Mesothelioma, Church groups etc etc; we have donated over £3000 to local SSAFA from sales of albums, books, donations; we have organized well-attended (up to 70 people) talks by Peter Hart of IWM at local club and pubs; we have visited Washington graves/memorials in France, Belgium, UK, Berlin, Gallipoli, Northern Italy; we hung over 12,000 knitted poppies from Fatfield Bridge; we organized knitting in pub and knitting in public days; we hung labels on trees in local churchyards to commemorate death+100 years; we created a website with info about the men (and woman) with photos, recent events, poppy walk info, links to films; we had a dedicated bus stop; we organized local services for Armistice and Remembrance Sunday – in 2008 we had 6-10 people and The Last Post played on a cassette powered by a car battery – in 2018 there were around 400 attendees; we supplied the fruits of our research to families in Washington and across the world; we ran a Facebook Page and still post every week on both Facebook and Twitter; we helped the council with gardening and created a small memorial wild garden; we utilised TV, local radio and press slots; we made a podcast for the Western Front Association; we offered monthly research clinics for visitors to Beamish Museum (how do I find out about my grandad?); met and advised other local groups engaged in similar work; contributed to Heritage Open days; listed all our men (and woman) on Shrouds of the Somme; drank a lot of tea and coffee and ate a lot of cake.
We researched at the National Archives, Weardale Museum, DLI Museum, Durham County Record Office, Tyne and Wear Archives, Lambton Castle Archives, various other County Record Offices, through local newspapers and digital websites like Ancestry, Find My Past, The Long Long Trail - as well as using printed material.
We had support from Sunderland City Council, HLF grants (as well as smaller grants from James Knott Trust, the Coop, Washington Community Funds, Community Chest), Durham County Record Office, Beamish Museum, Wessington U3A, local relatives and those from further afield and local people generally.
For each of our 5 HLF-funded projects – ie four films, poppy walk phone app and Now This Lousy War Is Over - evaluations were written and sent off to Hallam Sheffield Uni and there were also evaluations for HLF.
In about 2003, over a bottle or two of wine – ‘Shall we see if we can find out who the guys on the war memorial were?’ The original Harraton Memorial stood on top of the Worm Hill (the Lambton Worm, ‘whisht lads, had yer gobs an’ aa’ll tell yers aa’ll an aaful story’) about 40 yards from our front window. It (the memorial) was moved, later, to a more central site because the Worm Hill was inaccessible to wheel chairs (and everybody else when it was muddy). We never imagined that….20 years later there’d be a book, 4 films, a website, a phone app and a group that is continuing its research and has also branched off in different directions.
The establishment of Wessington U3A enabled us to access HLF grants and gave us a pool of volunteers who were able to offer various skills – research, photography, IT expertise, creation of display materials, guiding round exhibitions, public speaking, bit of gardening, baking and so on. The willingness of local people (and later, as the project became more widely known, the Washington diaspora) to share their stories added to what we knew about the men and their families – the girl named Loos after the place where her father was killed, the grandfather who died without knowing his grandson, Bryan Ferry, the TA soldier who was the best shot in the 8th DLI in 1913…..
In terms of numbers: by the end of the Centenary period the attendance at Harraton Memorial was reaching the 400-500 mark; the attendance at Washington Village memorial has always been much higher and benefits from British Legion and Sunderland City Council involvement; the number of website visitors was generally over 300 per month, peaking in October 2017 with 798 visitors and in February 1918 with 3889 page visits; our four films have been watched by totals, so far of 5313, 2531, 1801 and 2569 (not to mention the viewers when the first two films were shown on Made in Tyne and Wear TV channel); we have spoken to thousands of people via email, Facebook and Twitter as well as at our regular exhibitions, lately at Beamish Open Air Museum, which attracts several hundred thousand visitors from all over the world (I’ve met the families of 2 VCs at Beamish – oh yeah, your grandad won the VC? – yep, here’s the photo of him with the King being presented with it, oh your grandad did win the VC); a couple of thousand leaflets for Wor Poppy Walk were picked up from local shops; hours spent visiting graveyards and walking the battlefields – a very lot; in writing end of grant reports for HLF we were asked to assess the volunteer hours the skill level involved eg professional, unskilled, semi-skilled and, on each occasion, we were amazed to calculate the tens of thousands of pounds (by HLF criteria) that the project had put into the local community; 100 poppies - visited by Tracy Spencer and, featured on Facebook, this caused an upsurge in book and album buying and thereby benefited SSAFA; 57 minutes and 23 seconds – the time taken by Glenn Thomas to run the Poppy Walk in November 2019 - as he’s the only one known to have done it, he holds the world record
One of the other rewarding aspects of this has been to see the personal development of the volunteers who joined because they could knit, or create display, or do research, or plough through newspapers, or fancied a trip to the battlefields – and then discovered they could develop those skills into engagement with the public as guides at exhibitions, or public speakers, or participants in video slots or artists or researchers (most recently into women’s suffrage and Rain’s Eye Plan of Sunderland 1797). Some also discovered they could enjoy talks at the Western Front Association or listening to WW1 podcasts or transcribing WW1 War Diaries.
We walked their streets, drank in their pubs and clubs, lived in their houses.
Peter Welsh, 4/2/21