Capturing Commemoration: Reflections on the First World War Centenary in Britain is a monograph co-authored by Professor Lucy Noakes (Rab Butler Chair and Professor of Modern History, PHAIS) with Emma Hanna, Laura Hughes, Catriona Pennell, Chris Kempshall and James Wallis.
The book approaches the centenary commemorations as a defining period of public engagement, focusing on the ways and spaces in which commemoration took place, its significance to national identity, and what it reveals about cooperation between the academy and the public.
It was published Open Access by Berghahn Books and can be downloaded and shared free of charge.
When did you begin work on it? Were you already planning it during the centenary?
The book grew out of two AHRC-funded projects that I was a part of. The first ‘Gateways to the First World War (2014-2019) was an ‘engagement centre’ established to help build links between academics and the wider public who were developing their own public history and heritage projects around the centenary. These included plays based on First World War scripts, museum displays, local history projects and films. The second ‘Reflections on the Centenary of the First World War’, which I led between 2017 and 2021 looked at the overall centenary in Britain, and considered what worked well, what worked better, and what we can learn from a project of this scale for the future. The first publication was a Report – Reflections on the Centenary of the First World War. This book is the second large scale publication to come out of the project.
How did you and your fellow co-authors come together?
We worked together on the AHRC Reflections on the Centenary project, and we had also all worked separately and sometimes collaboratively on the many public history projects that ran during the centenary.
What does your research reveal about general knowledge of the First World War and about the way in which the war is taught?
One of the key things that our research has revealed is the enduring power of the dominant memory of the war in Britain. The idea of ‘lions led by donkeys’ and of the war as a time of futile sacrifice, when lives were thrown away in the trenches of the Western Front is a powerful one. While the war is of course much more complex than this suggests, this kind of memory also has a purpose and a meaning to people, so shouldn’t simply be dismissed by historians.
One of the areas that people learnt about during the centenary was the role of troops from the imperial colonies, particularly India, the Caribbean and Africa, and the legacies of this for Britain today and for their descendants. While historians have taught these histories for some time, I think that the involvement of different communities in centenary projects means that this history is now much better understood.
Which event or activity do you think presented the most profound response to the centenary and which do you think made the greatest impact on the country at large?
It’s difficult to judge overall, but I’m going to say that ‘We’re Here Because We’re here’, led by the artist Jeremy Deller and with the support of the national theatres, was the most impactful, certainly emotionally. The event marked the centenary of the first day of the Battle of the Somme on 1 July 1916, which remains the day that the largest number of British troops were killed or injured, by making these troops reappear in everyday life. Groups of young men, trained to look as physically like men of 1916 as possible, appeared throughout the day in everyday settings – city centres, Ikea, beaches, railway stations – and when asked what they were doing, simply handed over a card with the name and date of birth and death of a soldier who died on that day. This had a huge impact on many people, who in turn recorded their responses on social media.
I remember marketing First World War studies in 2015 and being told by a bookseller that everyone had already had enough of the centenary and First World War books weren’t selling. How well do you think commemorative projects fared between the more dramatic centenaries of the war’s beginning and its end?
Many of us thought it would run out of steam but it didn’t! Many of the books and television programming were ‘front loaded’, coming out in 2014/15, but the public interest in the war didn’t seem to wane, and the National Lottery Heritage Fund continued to receive large numbers of applications for funding for projects right up until 2019. I think that the emphasis on local and shared histories was important here.
Overall, did the centenary project make any great changes to how we remember and view the war? And, looking far ahead, do you think it will shape events come 2039?
It definitely increased knowledge of the importance and roles of colonial troops and workers who had been pretty invisible before, and also of the role of women as vital war workers and members of the military for the first time in Britain. I hope that we learn from what went well (funding for diverse local projects and support for academic and local researchers to work together and learn from one another) and what could have gone better (ensuring digital resources weren’t lost) for the centenary of the Second World War in 1939.
Because your research acknowledges UKRI funding, the book fell within its policy requiring Open Access publication. Was OA publication ever a concern to you and how did you find the process?
It’s been a delight! The OA team at Essex have been great and have made things very easy.
How do you plan to take advantage of OA to share and publicise the book?
We have already done some work on social media about this and plan to continue to find ways to promote it among our networks.
Capturing Commemoration: Reflections on the First World War Centenary in Britain can be read and downloaded for free.
Want to know more about UKRI’s Open Access requirements? Start on the Library’s information pages.
