My time with PHC

Since September, I’ve been working with People’s Heritage Co-op for my placement on the Professional Skills module on my history course at the University of Birmingham. Now that my placement is over, it has made me reflect on everything I have done over the past seven months, and the progress that I’ve made in that time. When I chose this placement, I did so as it seemed like an opportunity to do something unlike any previous work experience I had taken, but I did not realise just how varied my work would be or how rewarding I would find it.

Desert Island Archive

Exploring Archives of photos
from 2011 at Paganel School

Imagine you were to leave three items for future generations to use to study our society, what items would you choose? Or if you could only take three personal items with you onto a desert island, what would they be? These questions can be useful in establishing what is important to you as an individual. What items hold sentimental value? Or perhaps represent a particularly happy memory or an object from a loved one passed on to you. Archives are not only official records held in libraries or museums, archives can be a family photo album or a piece of jewelry from your great grandmother. We can create our own individual archives as representations of our lives and what we consider to be important to us and items which embody personal or family identity.

These were some of the questions we asked the children in Year 5 at Paganel Archive After-school Club, and their responses were surprising. 

In Soldiers Footsteps: Commemorating WW1 and the Somme

Often individual stories, especially in regards to the First World War, are lost when commemorating a big and significant part of history. The workshop I created for the Year 5 children at Paganel school was aimed at highlighting the individuals involved worldwide in the war and extracting their individual stories, not only of their experiences of war but their families, who were left behind.

Working hard 100 years on

Graduates leaving the ceremony

Last week I was invited by Baron Bilimoria of Chelsea, in full ceremonial dress as chancellor of the University of Birmingham to sit back in the Great Hall of the University of Birmingham and appreciate the history of just that one room - the events and celebrations that have happened there.

Favourite thing in archive? An archivist

The young archivist team at Paganel Archives

We've been asked to blog about our favourite things in Archives for explore your archive week.  Archives are great, but my favourite thing in Paganel Archives are the young archivists. They're (literally) what makes the Archives!

Wide Eyed with Archives

Every time I wander through an archive store I get the same thrill from what is around me - a doorway into every imaginable subject, from its early beginnings to the present. Thursday was my last day working for Birmingham Archives & Heritage service. I’ve had an amazing 11 years working as a creative learning officer, an outreach and education worker, an engagement co-ordinator, a collections curator. The names have changed a bit but the core of the work, opening up Birmingham’s archive collections to people was constant throughout and with it the privilege of unfettered access to thousands of documents that tell the history of the City and it’s people.

A week before I left, I accompanied Paganel School on their year 6 trip to London to visit The National Archives, a repeat visit from last year for a school that has it’s own archive and a weekly archive after school club. Those kids know about archives first hand, they have catalogued collections, repackaged photographs and have captured their peers’ experiences of SATs and residentials for the next generation. They have helped preserve, build and capture the life of their school and know their story exists within it.

At the The National Archives we had a rare behind the scenes tour showing us just one of their 5 storage areas housing millions of documents. Our amazing guide wowed the children with tales of Jack the Ripper papers, and Elizabeth I’s signature, but it was the thought that they were also all already in there, listed on the census, (even though they’d need to wait another 90 years to see them) that really excited them. We only had time to look at one original document, a Victorian Child Prisoner’s record, detained for 15 days at age 11 for running away from school. The Paganel children were suitably shocked, not only at the sentence for a child the same age as they are, but at the diet which didn’t include any fruit or vegetables.

They interrogated the photos like old hands, inferring meaning from what they spotted and constructing stories as to how people had come to be in that situation. They used their own experiences from looking at archives and their own experiences as children to imagine the past and draw parallels with now. I noticed those same observation skills later when we walked through London back to Euston and they commented on the busyness of the Capital, the many homeless people we saw, the different coloured buses, landmarks that they’d only seen on the tv before.

Archives open eyes, to what was and has been, to what hasn’t been saved and needs to be and to what’s going on around us and how we fit into it. An endless source of stories and potential to open up the past and to inspire us for the future, outreach officer or school child.

Uncovering Birmingham WW1 history with Paganel School

Looking at World War 1 Memorials at Lodge Hill Cemetery

Dr Nicola Gauld writes:

Paganel Primary School is unique in that it has its own archive and its Year 6 pupils are well versed in research, collecting evidence and making connections between events in history. The warfare project which took place in June made great use of these skills. The school is situated close to Lodge Hill Cemetery which has its own First World War memorial where victims of the war who died at the Southern Cross Hospital (located at the University of Birmingham’s campus at Edgbaston) are buried.

This formed the focus of this week-long project. The week began with pupils looking at archive material to establish what the pupils already knew about the First World War (quite a lot), what they knew about Birmingham’s experience during the war (a bit less) and what they would like to find out by the end of the week (what the experience of children was like, what food and clothing was like at the time, what weapons were used).

The following day the class worked in two groups, both visited Lodge Hill with question sheets relating to the men and women buried there while the second group carried out research using the Commonwealth War Graves Commission site. While some of the dead had been Birmingham residents before they joined the war or had joined the Royal Warwickshire regiment, we discovered that many had come from much further afield, from Australia and Canada for example, but also that there was a Maori soldier buried there. This helped the pupils appreciate the war in its global context, as well as the different regiments and the different jobs that could be done as part of the war effort.

Creating a storyline from photos

On the final day we used the archive material and research we had gathered to create stories, thinking about what life was like back then for the soldiers stuck in the trenches, children living in Birmingham, nurses and women munitions workers. It was clear that the children had absorbed and taken on the stories that they had learned about earlier in the week and were able to deal with the subject in a sensitive and mature manner. The stories each group devised were then presented to the rest of the class, teachers and head teacher. Overall, it was a really positive project, dealing with difficult and challenging subject matter, and the response of each pupil was impressive. Lots of questions were raised and there is certainly the potential to extend this into a larger scale project which could make a valuable contribution to the commemoration of the war’s centenary.

Using a green screen to project children into archive photographs