Re-enacting the War

Last week, we were at the Long Meadows day centre with actor and writer Adam Nightingale. Adam performed a short piece about the experiences of a typical Tommy, exploring how the Trenches brought him into contact with people from all over the world; and we showed the group of elders some of the Museum's handling collection of objects related to WW1.

Adam's character was an ordinary working-class Nottingham bloke in the Trenches. His greatcoat was a bit tight around the middle because he'd been getting better food in the Army than he'd ever had in his life; and although he'd seen some terrible things, he kept his spirits up with a song and a drink. But on the Somme he was also coming into contact with types of people he'd never met before - not just the posh officers, but also soldiers from all over the Empire. He told us about the Indian soldiers, who were often ill-equipped with outdated rifles and no grtenades, but who made improvised grenades out of jam tins; and the men from the Caribbean he met on the front line; and the way that, in the heat of battle, many soldiers said that for a moment they felt they were all the same.

The performance got the audience joking along with Adam; but it also hinted at the fear and hardship behind our Tommy's cheery exterior. Many of the elders in the audience had lived through WW2, so they knew all about that - although WW2 was 20 years later, many of the feelings were similar. Access Artefacts' collection of objects brought 1914 to life for people - there is something about handling an object from the time that makes that time seem real.

Adam's next performances are:

• Mon 3rd November, 1.30pm, at Edwards Lane Community Centre, and 
• Tues 11th November, 1.30pm, at the Chase Centre in St Anns.

Songs of the First World War: sounds and silence?

Last week, we held a lovely special event at Crocus Cafe in Lenton: a sing-song of songs from the First World War. Outside the folk circuit, people rarely get together these days just to sing; and doing so felt like a 'way in' to the atmosphere of 1914-18, when this type of get-together was common. But what was really interesting was to see how enduring some of these songs from 100 years ago are. Even if people don't know all the words, they somehow know the tunes and vaguely what the songs are about. How does that happen?

singers at Crocus Cafe

Take a song like Hanging On The Old Barbed Wire. There are any number of versions of it. I sing one passed down from my granddad, who fought in WW1; Chumbawamba's version is slightly different, and the ones I've heard other singers do are different again. That's the beauty of this kind of song – you can make it personal. Was it the quartermaster, the major or the sergeant who was to be found drinking all the company's rum? - well, that depended on who was the biggest, greediest drunkard in your company. When a song is made to be customised, like this, it's not surprising it gets remembered and handed down: there is something about the adaptability, and the personalness of the satire, that makes us feel we're hearing something real.

But what about songs like Pack Up Your Troubles or It's A Long Way to Tipperary: songs that didn't spring from the soldiers themselves, but were written by professional songwriters, and which superficially look quite anodyne and manufactured? How and why do we all know those,100 years on? Well, many of us learnt at least some of them in primary school; and I think primary teachers right through to the 1980s, when they decided to teach us those songs, were influenced by the hugely popular 1969 film Oh! What A Lovely War, adapted from  a groundbreaking 1963 play by theatre director Joan Littlewood. Both the film and the play used these old songs to great effect, just at the point (50 years after the War) that they were starting to fade from living memory.  Along with the poems of soldier-poets like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, it shaped a generation's view of the War.  That's part of how the songs have stayed in the public consciousness.

But why are they so effective  and memorable? It's the powerful effect of bringing the past into the present. Songs about old wars resonate across history because the passage of time transforms them. The bland cheeriness of Pack Up Your Troubles might have been mildly ironic to a soldier at the time; but looking at it with what we now know about WW1, it gains a layer of depth that it never had in 1915. And Keep The Home Fires Burning,with its apparently outmoded message of “Don't question the War!” is nevertheless poignant and touching today, because although we no longer love the idea of “keeping a stiff upper lip”, we know that women are still, today, bravely waving their husbands and sons off to wars “although your heart is breaking”. Cerys Matthews' version (which she did as a nod to the Welshness of the songwriter, Ivor Novello), still carries all the tear-jerking power it had in 1915, albeit for slightly different reasons. These songs gain a lot from the knowing, sideways glance born of 100 years of retrospect.

looking at the touring exhibition at Crocus

But our 11-11-11 project was about non-British views of WW1. And the interesting thing about our folk night is that once we'd sung Eric Bogle's brilliant 1970s commentaries And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda and The Green Fields of France, there wasn't much from outside Britain that we all knew. The best-known Irish songs of the period are about the Rising, not the War – although a song like The Foggy Dew does reference the War in lines like “T'was better to die 'neath an Irish sky/than in Suvla or Sud El Bar”. Still, the song was written after the fact, in about 1920 - it seems that what the Irish soldiers were singing in the Trenches was the same as what the Tommies were singing. And as for the Indian, Caribbean, South African, Australian, Canadian etc soldiers: again, it seems it was mostly the same. If there were Hindi songs about the War, or calypsos, we haven’t found them.

Music and songs are a repository of history; and especially, of the attitudes that don't get into the official history books, and the lived experience of those who were there. But even so, there are still certain perspectives that don't even seem to have got into the songs. As far as we have been able to tell, the British Empire's soldiers were pretty much all singing the same songs. So if any of them had a different perspective on the War, due to being Jamaican or Trinidadian or Indian or Irish, that didn't get sung about. Is there a hidden history of songs that reflect this difference of perspective, that we have yet to uncover?. Or was it a deliberate thing, aiming to unite all those disparate identities under the banner of the British Empire?

Poetry and WW1

The first of our creative sessions around 11-11-11 happened last week at New Art Exchange, when we led a workshop bringing together collage and cut-up poetry.

We took this idea from some of the things that went on in the art world around the time of WW1. Because of the carnage people were seeing, and the sense (even amongst those left at home) that the world had tuned upside down, the old styles of art couldn’t any longer reflect how people felt. Movements like surrealism, expressionism, and Dada responded to this widespread sense that the world had changed beyond recognition, and that everything that used to make sense, no longer did.

 So in our workshop, we used collage - an idea that came from the Surrealists, who liked to cut out and juxtapose unexpected images from many sources, to produce a dream-like effect; and the cut-up poem, an idea created by poet Tristan Tzara, leading light of the anti-establishment Dada movement, just after WW1. At a Dadaist rally, Tzara made poems by picking words at random out of a hat; and he often used word-collages comprising text from newspapers, leaflets, and other random sources. The idea is that, hiding within any text you like (whether it’s a leaflet from the bus company or a letter from the DSS) there lies a poem, just as a statue is hidden within a block of marble. All you have to do to reveal the poem is to chop away at the text and rearrange things. Each person will do this differently, and will come up with a different poem - as Tzara said, “your poem will resemble you.”

We made cut-ups with old children's books, newspapers, novels, and actual poems written during WW1, and got some vivid pieces that gave us a feel for how some European writers responded to the traumas of WW1. But the workshop also made us think about what other responses writers made to the War, in countries outside Britain. Many of us learnt a lot in school about the British "war poets" - but what else was there? Read the next blog post to find out.

Eleven Eleven Eleven touring exhibition

 

After alot of very hard work from our Volunteers the touring exhibition for our Eleven, Eleven, Eleven project is complete. This exhibition explores some of the themes we uncovered in conversations with different community groups about the 1914-18 period in their own countries. The exhibition looks at the use of propoganda, opposition to the First World War, women's roles, revolution and how the world changes afterwards.

 

We will be showing the exhibition in a number of locations around Nottingham over the next couple of months starting with

 

Central Library, Angel Row, August 9th from 10.00 till 4.00

and

New Art Exchange, August 12th from 1.00 till 4.00

 

 

 

 

Bringing propaganda posters alive

So the Eleven-Eleven-Eleven project is going great, and the opening of our exhibition (26th July at Nottingham Castle) is in sight! The Exhibition Design team has created a really cool design for the touring display that will be visiting community venues around the city from August onwards; and the Events and Marketing team are pulling together a great set of events. Meanwhile we (the Film and Audio team) have been making the films that we've been planning and developing for so long!

Here we are in rehearsal, getting ready to film some recreations of WW1 propaganda posters. (Check out that genuine 1917 Enfield rifle!)


Propaganda was a fairly new thing during WW1, and some commentators in the 1920s and 1930s felt that Britain and America's enthusiastic embracing of it was actually the thing that made all the difference and won the war. Germany in 1914-18 was quite reluctant to use too much propaganda, seeing it all as a bit vulgar... (that all changed during WW2!)





WW1 posters tell us a bit more about the society that created them than perhaps the makers intended. As well as the overt "Join the Army" messages, there are all sorts of other messages about the roles of women and men, the idea of nationhood, and the question of what is worth fighting for.







When filming, we found that the trick was to keep our scripts short and to the point, and to try to unpick the image and get at the central message at the heart of each poster - "what's it really saying?". It's almost enough simply to present that, without irony - a modern audience can instantly see how much times have changed since 1914. But it's interesting that some of the emotions that these posters play on - guilt, patriotism, fear of not being "man enough" - are exactly the things that modern-day advertising and propaganda draw on as well. There's nothing new under the sun!

War of all Nations

On theTrip we learnt alot about different countries roles and experiences during the First World War. One of the group wrote this poem in response...

 

 

War of all nations

 

Lost,

Physically & mentally,

Unaccompanied and,

Seconds away from death,

 

Imagine!

 

Over 90 thousand soldiers,

Trapped by;

Mines,

Barbed wires and

Dying fields.

 

Bending, running, shooting

Through the tunnel zone,

Flinching, freezing, ducking

Through no mans land.

 

Left,

 

  Dirty haired, dirty scalps

Filthy bearded sobbing men

Groaning for morphine

To relief their pain,

 

Of constant choking fumes,

Infectious wounds, turning graves,

And vomiting tears burning their faces.

 

Some cocaine will keep them alive

In their mind for a while,

To reduce distraction

Of their very limited communication

Between their parents and siblings

 

Nurses decorated

Dangly jaws, whilst their

Skeleton teeth rotted away.

 

Waking up next to death,

Became so cheap

Waiting, waiting, waiting

For the next explosion.

 

Gunshots as greetings,

Pretty much like

A fake friend,

‘How would you like your eggs in the morning?’

With a stab in the back.

 

Inhaling the stench of dead animals,

YES

They too suffered

From all the chemical fumes, LEFT

Dead rabbits, rats, mice, cows, chickens and horses.

 

The ground even cried blood,

Booby traps, shells, tripwires and grenades,

Cutting the battlefields like razors. 

 

 

Chaos took over peaceful innocence

To God’s home

Of a perfect exquisite

Creation!

To result in,

Medals from bravery,

Killing and looking respectable,

For their country,

Resting their cold blood amongst their fellow soldiers.

Families and friends left sadden

By their losses

With very little money to express

Words on their tombstone,

You wouldn’t believe

The grief for just one word.

 

Sitira Williams

Trip to France- WW1 Battlefields

Many of us from all over the world went on an epic trip to France and Belgium to visit World War One (WW1) battlefields and memorials to learn more about what happened on the Western Front during 1914-1918. In our group there were people from Britain, Kenya, Gambia, Somalia, Zimbabwe, Jamaica, Hungary, Pakistan, Vietnam and China, everyone was from each end of the age spectrum and some from the middle too! This interesting mix of cultures and ages meant that we came together to share our own cultural heritage and learn more about how so many countries contributed to the Great War.

Our amazing tour guide was called Bruce Cherry (a very amazing name indeed!) - his immense insight into this subject blew us all away. What was particularly special about the trip was that Bruce tailored the tour to fit with our new community project called ‘Eleven Eleven Eleven’ - he focused on the international contribution on the Western Front which kept us all very engaged and inspired us to take lots of photos and even write some poetry! The main aim of the project is to collect non-British WW1 stories from Nottingham’s diverse local communities for a major exhibition that is launching at Nottingham Castle on the 25 July 2014.

During the trip we wanted the blog to capture our experience through film, photography, poetry and writing. We hope that reading our blog will inspire others to learn more about the Great War or take similar journeys to the peaceful lands where thousands of soldiers from all over the world now rest in peace.

Over the next couple of weeks we will be posting our thoughts, poetry and photography from the trip.

If you would like to be a volunteer on the project or if you have a story to tell, please contact Melissa Lewis on 0115 8762738 / Melissa.lewis@yahoo.co.uk or Rosny Hayward on 0115 8762248 Rosny.hayward@nottinghamcity.gov.uk