Harry Patch, the “last fighting Tommy”, was 19 years old when he fought at Passchendaele. His remarkable story is told in Cornwall’s Regimental Museum in Bodmin, which is fundraising to upgrade its first world war displays to mark the centenary of the end of the conflict.
This year, numerous other museums and heritage organisations across the UK will be putting on exhibitions and activities related to the anniversary. The emphasis for many, as it has been since 2014, is to find new ways to connect today’s generations with the experiences of the men and women who lived through the conflict.
The image of the guns on the western front finally falling silent on the 11th hour of the 11th month in 1918 remains powerful. But after four years of commemorating the major battles – such as the Somme, Gallipoli and Passchendaele – the emphasis in Britain will shift.
“For us, work really started with the cessation of hostilities,” says Victoria Wallace, the director of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC). It was established in 1917 and began developing a network of cemeteries around the world the following year. While the vast military cemeteries in France and Belgium dominate the imagination, there are in fact more individual sites in the UK.
“You are never more than three miles from a war grave,” Wallace points out, as so many churchyards and municipal cemeteries contain often-overlooked graves of soldiers who died of their wounds back in Britain. She has recently visited Arnos Vale, a Victorian-era cemetery in south Bristol, which is tended by volunteers and includes many graves of men who died in Bristol’s military hospitals. More than 600 British and Allied soldiers, sailors and airmen from both world wars and older conflicts are remembered at Arnos Vale, which, as well as being a functioning cemetery, aims to engage visitors with issues related to life and death.
The CWGC has launched an internship project, which involves young volunteer interpreters at war graves in France and Belgium. Wallace says they can convey the history of sites differently from older guides, particularly to younger visitors. They also convey a certain poignancy by being the same age as many of the young men who died fighting. The internship programme is funded via a scheme introduced by the government in 2012 to use the proceeds from Libor fines imposed on banks to support charities related to the armed forces and emergency services, and other good causes. The money is also helping to fund a visitor centre at the CWGC’s main depot in Beaurains, near Arras in France, which Wallace hopes will be open by 2019.
Artistic expression
This year also includes events related to the 100th anniversary of some women winning the right to vote and become members of parliament. A £5m fund to support the centenary was unveiled by chancellor Philip Hammond in last year’s budget. The 1918 Representation of the People Act only gave some women the vote for the first time but paved the way for the introduction of universal suffrage 10 years later, when women won equal voting rights to men.
The artist Gillian Wearing’s statue of the suffragist Millicent Fawcett will be unveiled outside parliament in London in late spring and will be the first of a woman in Parliament Square. An exuberant statue of Manchester’s firebrand suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, by the artist Helen Reeves, is to be revealed in the city’s St Peter’s Square at the end of this year. The campaigner will be seen standing on a chair, as if giving a speech in the street. And in Plymouth, there is a campaign to erect a statue to the first female MP to take up a seat in parliament, the American-born Nancy Astor. As the MP for the constituency of Plymouth Sutton for three decades, Astor made her mark straightaway, facing down more than 500, mostly hostile, male MPs to make her maiden speech in 1920.
Jenny Waldman is the director of 14-18 Now, which was set up to commission a programme of arts experiences to connect people with the first world war. The organisation, which commissioned Wearing’s statue of Fawcett, recently unveiled an ambitious programme of UK-wide events.
One of the major activities will be Processions, where women and girls will be invited to take part in a mass participation artwork on 10 June on the streets of Belfast, Cardiff, Edinburgh and London. The event, which will mark the anniversary of the 1918 Representation of the People Act, is being organised by Artichoke, which works with artists to create public art in cities, the countryside and on coastlines around the UK.
The 14-18 Now programme has already included lots of public art projects, most notably Jeremy Deller’s We’re Here Because We’re Here project. As part of the event on 1 July 2017, thousands of “ghost soldiers” appeared on the streets and at railway stations across the UK to mark the centenary of the first day the British infantry went “over the top” (left the safety of their trenches to attack the enemy) in the Battle of the Somme. The performance piece was a collaboration with Rufus Norris, the director of the National Theatre (NT) in London and produced by Birmingham Repertory Theatre and the NT, in conjunction with 26 organisations. This year the aim is the same: to help people reflect on the legacy of historic events.
“Artists are reinventing the war memorial as living art that captures our imagination and rests in our memories,” says Waldman. “The 2018 season is an ambitious and interactive programme, which we hope will reach new audiences in fresh ways with events across the UK, online, broadcast and around the world.”
Bringing back memories
The 14-18 Now programme also commemorates aspects of the first world war that have been overlooked. At Tate Modern, there will be a large-scale performance created by South African artist William Kentridge, telling the story of the millions of African porters and carriers who served British, French and German forces during the war.
Raqs Media Collective, an organisation based in Delhi, India, will show a new commission at Firstsite, an arts venue in Colchester, Essex; the Scottish artist Christine Borland will present a work at Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum; and the US artist Suzanne Lacy will work with residents and communities from both sides of the Irish border on a piece for the Belfast International Arts Festival. The programme also includes a multi-screen installation by the British artist John Akomfrah that remembers the African men and women who participated in the first world war. This will go on show at the Imperial War Museum (IWM) London then the New Art Exchange, Nottingham.
Waldman says the Spanish flu is another important topic, referring to the 1918 influenza pandemic that killed millions, more people than the conflict itself. It was called Spanish flu because it was first widely reported in Spanish newspapers when it had been hushed up by wartime censors elsewhere in Europe, says Danielle Olsen, a curator and producer who is working with the Wellcome Trust on Contagious Cities, an exploration of how cities and diseases have shaped each other, designed to coincide with the centenary of the pandemic.
Olsen says usually the youngest and oldest in society are the most vulnerable to flu, but in 1918 it was young adults in their 20s that were worst affected. “We are only just starting to understand why,” she says. “Spanish flu is a reminder of the importance of epidemic preparedness.”
Global moves
While most of the 1918 commemorations have a local or national focus, the Wellcome Trust is working with partners in Geneva, New York and Hong Kong on the Contagious Cities project. As with 14-18 Now, contemporary artists are playing a key role. From January, the performance and interactive art group Blast Theory has set up home at the World Health Organisation in Geneva. The group is located in the Shock Room, which constantly monitors possible outbreaks around the world. The New York-based, Afghan-born artist, writer and filmmaker Mariam Ghani is doing research at the New York Public Library and other institutions ahead of an exhibition titled Germ City at the Museum of the City of New York in September. The Tenement Museum in New York’s Lower East Side is another partner, along with the New York Academy of Science. The exhibition will go beyond the epidemic of 1918-19 to include other mass killers including polio, Aids/HIV and Ebola. Proposed exhibits will range from an iron lung to an Ebola suit. Historic walks by commissioned writers, a mini-series in partnership with BBC Radio 3 and digital programmes will form part of the events.
Olsen says some people believe that one day the 1918-19 flu pandemic will be regarded as a bigger event than the first world war. Laura Spinney, the author of Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World, argues that the flu outbreak was as significant, if not more, as both world wars in shaping the modern world and in disrupting global politics, race relations, family structures and thinking across medicine, religion and the arts.
But for the time being, the word remembrance refers only to what many hoped would be the war to end all wars. Gill Webber, the executive director, content and programmes, at Imperial War Museums (IWM), says that an important strand of its commemorations will be how, 100 years ago, people strove to make a new world after such unprecedented bloodshed.
A photography exhibition at the IWM in London opening in September has the working title Renewal. It will focus on the revival of hope and the human spirit in the aftermath of the war. The years after the conflict and before the great depression of 1929 were a time of creativity, new opportunities and the jazz age, as well as of mourning the dead. And in the 1920s, people did not know that there would be another war within 20 years.
Another exhibition at IWM London opening in September is called Generation Hope: Life after the First World War. An immersive installation with the working title of Moments of Silence will aim to help visitors reflect on the rituals of silence and remembrance. Thanks to the growth of IWM’s sound archive over the past four decades, the museum can draw on thousands of hours of testimony from veterans.
Meanwhile, at IWM North in Manchester in July, Lest We Forget will explore how symbols of remembrance have been created, sparked controversy and continue to evolve. Highlights will be paintings commissioned by artists including John Singer Sargent, William Orpen and Stanley Spencer for the never-built Hall of Remembrance, which would have stood on Richmond Hill in south-west London.
Tate Britain will be doing its bit with Aftermath: Art in the Wake of World War One, which will open in July. It will include British, French and German artists’ work, showing responses to the physical and psychological scars left on Europe, as well as visions of the future at the time, as people rebuilt their lives and cities “fit for heroes”.
With such a wide range of commemorative events, the public will get the chance to hear lots of stories about people, such as Harry Patch, who lost their lives fighting in the conflict, and the significance of the events of 100 years ago today.
“This year marks the culmination of the first world war centenary as we come together to commemorate the conclusion of that monumental conflict,” says Diane Lees, the director-general of IWM. “The war claimed the lives of more than one million British and Commonwealth military personnel and involved the mobilisation of whole populations across the world. 14-18 Now’s artistic programme will captivate and engage people in every community across the country, encouraging us to consider the centenary and how we perceive the first world war 100 years on.”
Javier Pes is the UK editor of Artnet News and the former editor of Museum Practice magazine
This year, numerous other museums and heritage organisations across the UK will be putting on exhibitions and activities related to the anniversary. The emphasis for many, as it has been since 2014, is to find new ways to connect today’s generations with the experiences of the men and women who lived through the conflict.
The image of the guns on the western front finally falling silent on the 11th hour of the 11th month in 1918 remains powerful. But after four years of commemorating the major battles – such as the Somme, Gallipoli and Passchendaele – the emphasis in Britain will shift.
“For us, work really started with the cessation of hostilities,” says Victoria Wallace, the director of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC). It was established in 1917 and began developing a network of cemeteries around the world the following year. While the vast military cemeteries in France and Belgium dominate the imagination, there are in fact more individual sites in the UK.
“You are never more than three miles from a war grave,” Wallace points out, as so many churchyards and municipal cemeteries contain often-overlooked graves of soldiers who died of their wounds back in Britain. She has recently visited Arnos Vale, a Victorian-era cemetery in south Bristol, which is tended by volunteers and includes many graves of men who died in Bristol’s military hospitals. More than 600 British and Allied soldiers, sailors and airmen from both world wars and older conflicts are remembered at Arnos Vale, which, as well as being a functioning cemetery, aims to engage visitors with issues related to life and death.
The CWGC has launched an internship project, which involves young volunteer interpreters at war graves in France and Belgium. Wallace says they can convey the history of sites differently from older guides, particularly to younger visitors. They also convey a certain poignancy by being the same age as many of the young men who died fighting. The internship programme is funded via a scheme introduced by the government in 2012 to use the proceeds from Libor fines imposed on banks to support charities related to the armed forces and emergency services, and other good causes. The money is also helping to fund a visitor centre at the CWGC’s main depot in Beaurains, near Arras in France, which Wallace hopes will be open by 2019.
Artistic expression
This year also includes events related to the 100th anniversary of some women winning the right to vote and become members of parliament. A £5m fund to support the centenary was unveiled by chancellor Philip Hammond in last year’s budget. The 1918 Representation of the People Act only gave some women the vote for the first time but paved the way for the introduction of universal suffrage 10 years later, when women won equal voting rights to men.
The artist Gillian Wearing’s statue of the suffragist Millicent Fawcett will be unveiled outside parliament in London in late spring and will be the first of a woman in Parliament Square. An exuberant statue of Manchester’s firebrand suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, by the artist Helen Reeves, is to be revealed in the city’s St Peter’s Square at the end of this year. The campaigner will be seen standing on a chair, as if giving a speech in the street. And in Plymouth, there is a campaign to erect a statue to the first female MP to take up a seat in parliament, the American-born Nancy Astor. As the MP for the constituency of Plymouth Sutton for three decades, Astor made her mark straightaway, facing down more than 500, mostly hostile, male MPs to make her maiden speech in 1920.
Jenny Waldman is the director of 14-18 Now, which was set up to commission a programme of arts experiences to connect people with the first world war. The organisation, which commissioned Wearing’s statue of Fawcett, recently unveiled an ambitious programme of UK-wide events.
One of the major activities will be Processions, where women and girls will be invited to take part in a mass participation artwork on 10 June on the streets of Belfast, Cardiff, Edinburgh and London. The event, which will mark the anniversary of the 1918 Representation of the People Act, is being organised by Artichoke, which works with artists to create public art in cities, the countryside and on coastlines around the UK.
The 14-18 Now programme has already included lots of public art projects, most notably Jeremy Deller’s We’re Here Because We’re Here project. As part of the event on 1 July 2017, thousands of “ghost soldiers” appeared on the streets and at railway stations across the UK to mark the centenary of the first day the British infantry went “over the top” (left the safety of their trenches to attack the enemy) in the Battle of the Somme. The performance piece was a collaboration with Rufus Norris, the director of the National Theatre (NT) in London and produced by Birmingham Repertory Theatre and the NT, in conjunction with 26 organisations. This year the aim is the same: to help people reflect on the legacy of historic events.
“Artists are reinventing the war memorial as living art that captures our imagination and rests in our memories,” says Waldman. “The 2018 season is an ambitious and interactive programme, which we hope will reach new audiences in fresh ways with events across the UK, online, broadcast and around the world.”
Bringing back memories
The 14-18 Now programme also commemorates aspects of the first world war that have been overlooked. At Tate Modern, there will be a large-scale performance created by South African artist William Kentridge, telling the story of the millions of African porters and carriers who served British, French and German forces during the war.
Raqs Media Collective, an organisation based in Delhi, India, will show a new commission at Firstsite, an arts venue in Colchester, Essex; the Scottish artist Christine Borland will present a work at Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum; and the US artist Suzanne Lacy will work with residents and communities from both sides of the Irish border on a piece for the Belfast International Arts Festival. The programme also includes a multi-screen installation by the British artist John Akomfrah that remembers the African men and women who participated in the first world war. This will go on show at the Imperial War Museum (IWM) London then the New Art Exchange, Nottingham.
Waldman says the Spanish flu is another important topic, referring to the 1918 influenza pandemic that killed millions, more people than the conflict itself. It was called Spanish flu because it was first widely reported in Spanish newspapers when it had been hushed up by wartime censors elsewhere in Europe, says Danielle Olsen, a curator and producer who is working with the Wellcome Trust on Contagious Cities, an exploration of how cities and diseases have shaped each other, designed to coincide with the centenary of the pandemic.
Olsen says usually the youngest and oldest in society are the most vulnerable to flu, but in 1918 it was young adults in their 20s that were worst affected. “We are only just starting to understand why,” she says. “Spanish flu is a reminder of the importance of epidemic preparedness.”
Global moves
While most of the 1918 commemorations have a local or national focus, the Wellcome Trust is working with partners in Geneva, New York and Hong Kong on the Contagious Cities project. As with 14-18 Now, contemporary artists are playing a key role. From January, the performance and interactive art group Blast Theory has set up home at the World Health Organisation in Geneva. The group is located in the Shock Room, which constantly monitors possible outbreaks around the world. The New York-based, Afghan-born artist, writer and filmmaker Mariam Ghani is doing research at the New York Public Library and other institutions ahead of an exhibition titled Germ City at the Museum of the City of New York in September. The Tenement Museum in New York’s Lower East Side is another partner, along with the New York Academy of Science. The exhibition will go beyond the epidemic of 1918-19 to include other mass killers including polio, Aids/HIV and Ebola. Proposed exhibits will range from an iron lung to an Ebola suit. Historic walks by commissioned writers, a mini-series in partnership with BBC Radio 3 and digital programmes will form part of the events.
Olsen says some people believe that one day the 1918-19 flu pandemic will be regarded as a bigger event than the first world war. Laura Spinney, the author of Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World, argues that the flu outbreak was as significant, if not more, as both world wars in shaping the modern world and in disrupting global politics, race relations, family structures and thinking across medicine, religion and the arts.
But for the time being, the word remembrance refers only to what many hoped would be the war to end all wars. Gill Webber, the executive director, content and programmes, at Imperial War Museums (IWM), says that an important strand of its commemorations will be how, 100 years ago, people strove to make a new world after such unprecedented bloodshed.
A photography exhibition at the IWM in London opening in September has the working title Renewal. It will focus on the revival of hope and the human spirit in the aftermath of the war. The years after the conflict and before the great depression of 1929 were a time of creativity, new opportunities and the jazz age, as well as of mourning the dead. And in the 1920s, people did not know that there would be another war within 20 years.
Another exhibition at IWM London opening in September is called Generation Hope: Life after the First World War. An immersive installation with the working title of Moments of Silence will aim to help visitors reflect on the rituals of silence and remembrance. Thanks to the growth of IWM’s sound archive over the past four decades, the museum can draw on thousands of hours of testimony from veterans.
Meanwhile, at IWM North in Manchester in July, Lest We Forget will explore how symbols of remembrance have been created, sparked controversy and continue to evolve. Highlights will be paintings commissioned by artists including John Singer Sargent, William Orpen and Stanley Spencer for the never-built Hall of Remembrance, which would have stood on Richmond Hill in south-west London.
Tate Britain will be doing its bit with Aftermath: Art in the Wake of World War One, which will open in July. It will include British, French and German artists’ work, showing responses to the physical and psychological scars left on Europe, as well as visions of the future at the time, as people rebuilt their lives and cities “fit for heroes”.
With such a wide range of commemorative events, the public will get the chance to hear lots of stories about people, such as Harry Patch, who lost their lives fighting in the conflict, and the significance of the events of 100 years ago today.
“This year marks the culmination of the first world war centenary as we come together to commemorate the conclusion of that monumental conflict,” says Diane Lees, the director-general of IWM. “The war claimed the lives of more than one million British and Commonwealth military personnel and involved the mobilisation of whole populations across the world. 14-18 Now’s artistic programme will captivate and engage people in every community across the country, encouraging us to consider the centenary and how we perceive the first world war 100 years on.”
Javier Pes is the UK editor of Artnet News and the former editor of Museum Practice magazine