IWM Blog

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.

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.