The SWWHPP is a three year, national initiative led by IWM supporting partners in the cultural heritage and academic sectors to engage with new audiences as they reflect on these significant histories and explore their lasting impacts on our lives, in digital form and public events. The SWWHPP is generously supported by the National Lottery Heritage

This month marks the 105th anniversary of the tragic and untimely death of Nurse Caroline Maud Edwards during the First World War. Caroline was born in Llanharry in 1887 to a family with strong connections to Newport and the County of Monmouth. In fact, by 1901 she was living with her parents and siblings in Rockfield and attended Haberdashers Monmouth School for Girls. She went to Bedford College, London and became a nurse in The London Hospital in Whitechapel by 1911.

Born in Hull in 1903, Amy was a pioneering pilot who set many long distance flight records in the 1930s. During the Second World War she joined the newly formed Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA), which transported Royal Air Force aircraft around the country.

Our fifth Case Study within this round of projects is ‘Battlebags and Blimps’, a community engagement project delivered by a range of partner organisations including Carrickfergus Museum and Mid & East Antrim Borough Council in Northern Ireland.

During the Second World War, the German Propagandakompanie (Propaganda Troops) was a branch of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS. Its function was to produce and disseminate propaganda material, both for the fighting troops and the civilian population. These companies were the only news-reporting units in areas of military operation, as civilian news correspondents were not permitted to enter combat zones. They functioned both as soldiers and as reporters, writing from the front for the radio and newspapers. In the Luftwaffe, the PK reporters often flew together with the crew on missions and air raids.

In the bowels of the Imperial War Museum, or to be specific in a climate-controlled warehouse in Cambridgeshire, one can find a wealth of private papers. Among these are a few dozen typescript pages of storytelling, narrating thirteen months of conflict in colonial Kenya. Sources considering late-colonial wars still overwhelmingly originate from white administrators, but as this article will show, there are items in IWM’s collections that allow for intertwining narratives and a more perceptive understanding of such insurgencies.

We hear from the Creative Director of ‘Celf ar y Blaen/Head4Arts’ for our next project, an organisation that led on various projects in the South East Wales Valleys region, including ‘Who Do I Think I Was?’

There is no better place in which the word ‘legacy’ can take a stronger meaning than in the planting of forests. In the depths of Yorkshire’s Dalby Forest lies Forestry Commission’s and Rachel Whiteread’s sculpture, Nissen Hut, which was presented in 2018 as part of the 14-18 NOW programme. Nissen Hut connects forests with the legacy of the First World War.

As a second year Collaborative Doctoral Partnership (CDP) PhD student at Imperial War Museums and the University of Bristol, I now have extensive experience using the museum’s Research Room and accessing its expansive archive. I am fortunate that my supervisor Sarah Paterson works in the Library, and the staff there are both knowledgeable about the archive’s content and very helpful.

In 2020, IWM initiated Digital Futures, a five year project to digitise 1.8 million films, photographs and sound recordings and improve the storage and slow down the degradation of 6.8 million items by freezing, isolating or refrigerating them. This mass preservation project is digitising some of our most vulnerable media from the Cold War era.

War memorials can be researched from various angles: military, social, and family history, and also as artistic objects. The memorials can take the form of the traditional cross in the churchyard or town square, a commemorative plaque or window, or a more practical memorial, and Andover has examples of all of these.

One hundred years ago, in November 1920, thousands of women wrote letters to the government asking to be part of the ceremony at Westminster Abbey on 11 November. They were convinced that the Unknown Warrior being buried there that day was their son. This was just one of the stories our young team unearthed in our quest to find out how the Great War affected women’s mental health. We wanted to find out what has changed for women in the past 100 years and which challenges women still face today.