Eyam 1914-1918 - A Second Sacrifice

This project was enabled through Heritage Lottery funding. The result formed an exhibition sited at Eyam Museum, open to the public between May 2014 and February 2020. The content of the display focused on the stories of the forty-four local men who lost their lives in World War One. Despite an initial fear that the subject would be too narrow or only of interest to local people, these concerns would prove unfounded. Feedback from visitors showed our approach on locality to be a strength, because it showed how the conflict claimed lives from small communities like Eyam, where the total population of this small Derbyshire village was just one thousand people. We wanted to move away from the common narrative of World War One through numbers and statistics, by instead presenting an exhibition of a macroscopic story that told the stories of individual combatants and their families - bringing home the true cost of those who were involved. Visitors found the display enthralling and moving, often referencing their own family history in response to the poignant stories. The research, planning, building and staging the exhibition had an initial team of eight people. An appeal was made to Eyam and other local village residents requesting stories and items that could be put on display. Medals, cap and shoulder badges, photographs, newspaper cuttings, letters, postcards and other items were all loaned and donated to the museum. Whilst everyone in Eyam knows of its famous Plague story - with many current residents descendants of those villagers who sacrificed themselves in 1665 and 1666 - we found it rewarding to both collect and present these fascinating stories of soldiers and their families during the conflict as the village's 'Second Sacrifice'. The photograph shows the 1916 Eyam Parish Kalendar.