‘Great care has been taken with the settings and constructing relevant backgrounds. For example, there is one full-page picture of a rifle leaning against a door, the door and the building are of the correct period and the weapon has its webbing sling and cloth mud cover over the breech. The soldier on leave has gone inside and left some of the memory of the trenches on the doorstep’
Review, Stand To!, June 2014
This review, by Bob Wyatt of the Western Front Association, taps directly into the ethos of Remembering Tommy, a book that sets out to present, through the collaboration of artist and writer, a means of understanding the life of the Great War soldier through original artefacts and historic settings.
Avoiding ‘noise’ from twenty-first century Britain, we selected a street seemingly stuck in a time-warp for our recruitment poster (modern shoppers stopping in amazement).
We gained permission and assistance from the National Trust to use ‘Mr Straw’s House’ in Worksop as the location of a middle class officer’s family home, and tip-toed about, carefully mingling wartime relics with those already present.
The Royal Armouries at Fort Nelson gave us a superb opportunity to reconstruct a soldier’s kit inspection in their superb barrack block.
Beamish Living History Museum in County Durham, set in 1913 and so rich in appropriate settings gave us unparalleled access behind the scenes and in public areas; our time there, as at all sites, was exhausting, but rewarding.
Peter Doyle is a military historian and geologist, specialising in military terrain. He is a familiar face as television expert on documentaries, including WW1 Tunnels of Death: The Big Dig, Battlefield Detectives and The Great Escape: Revealed on Channel 5. He is Visiting Professor at University College London and is co-secretary of the All Party Parliamentary War Heritage Group, which is actively supporting the British government’s commemorations for the centenary of the First World War.
He has co-written Beneath Flanders Fields: The Underground War 1914-18 and Grasping Gallipoli , as well as Battle Story: Gallipoli 1915 , Battle Story: Loos 1915, Trench Talk: Words of the First World War and Remembering Tommy: The British Soldier in the First World War.