We were looking for a soldier because he was lost in the battle
of the Somme. We found him on 2A in the East Yorkshire Regiment as a Second
Lieutenant.
Because he was a local person from our area, it made us feel kind of proud,
in a way, because this is a big monument and the fact
that his name was put on that,
it made us feel kind of proud.
One of the greatest challenges is that at so many of the sites you visit, you're
dealing with a huge huge scale. You're going to cemeteries where there
are nearly 12,000 graves or you visit a memorial with 73 thousand names on.
Very quickly, it could just become a numbers visit.
Everywhere you go it's about numbers. So, one of the things we try to do is adopt
a process essentially of micro history. We take it down to an individual story.
So, in a cemetery we would start with just one grave.
We would show how that grave, in itself, can start to tell a story - that it has a
broader history.
We're trying to learn about each individual soldier because when we
look at the figures of World War I, it's kind of hard to think about how
they actually lived.
So, if you look at a certain individual, then you can think about how they lived.
Instead of just being almost a number, which I think is an adult I'm quite ignorant
to, to say that almost 60,000 soldiers were injured on the first day of the
Somme, how to visualize that is quite hard. So, to a pupil. it's even more
difficult.
To find someone significant to you and going to find their grave, all of a
sudden, it's not just a number. It's that person, that's their story and actually
it was a real person that lived and died.
My grandfather has been doing our family tree and he found someone who
name is going to be on the wall.
So, we stopped there this morning and I found it and I put a little cross down
with his name on and his reg. number.
It was quite nice just to find someone from my family who'd fought in the war.
You hear about all these stories and stuff but then when it's just your
family, it's more
personal and emotional.
We're focusing on Robert and George Henry Smith who died in nineteen sixteen.
They had one
surviving brother, Wilfred, who the Queen Mary sent home because the mother
was grieving and that was the last remaining son out of the six.
I think it's useful to go there because you can't really imagine what they saw
while they were fighting. Then it was a battlefield where people died.
You can feel it more in your heart than just looking at a picture of it on the
whiteboard.
Each day we structure the tour around a key inquiry question. Each of the sites
we then visit, each of the sites we then choose for that tour, then links closely
with that question. That encourages us to look at things such as the concept of a world
war and how the whole world was involved.
It also encourages to look at the impact that war has had on people both the
time and also in developing shaping communities today. We also look at themes
such as remembrance, encouraging students to reflect on what that actually means
both to them and in the societies and communities and they've come from. So,
they're very much considering is remembrance still important?
Why is it important? Some of those deeper questions that are beyond just the
simple historical questions of what happened, why did it happen.
Down in the trenches,
it felt as though you were actually a soldier and you definitely got a feel
and an experience of what it was like. Definitely felt a lot more real.
The number of experts and guides and things that we have available really
does help. Helps me as a teacher and I definitely know it helps the students as well.
We're not just bringing young people out here to see the sights.
What we also look to do is develop the teachers through our professional
development programs, through the work we do with them before the tour,
when they arrive on tour and during the tour, but very much working with those
students, considering how best that they will learn in a different environment
and therefore deepen their understanding and encourage them to think.
It's been quite overwhelming. I feel like I've learnt so much that's really going
to help in the classroom.
The fact that we've actually been able to go to cemeteries, museums and stand
on actual battle fields has brought the whole project to life for us. It's made me
reflect massively on on the whole situation of World War I.
If you're doing it in the classroom you only see the pictures, you don't actually feel it and see what it's
actually like. You hear other people . people talk about it, not just your own perspective
on it is, as well.