Project: On This Day

On This Day project update

Since last October, University of Birmingham History student, Gemma Daw, has been working with the Voices centre. Her placement has now sadly come to an end and we’re really grateful for all of Gemma’s hard work! Gemma has written an overview of the work that she has done:

As part of my history degree at the University of Birmingham, I have spent 120 hours this year completing a placement with the Voices of War and Peace WW1 Engagement Centre.

I was assigned my own project called On This Day. This mini project’s aim was to find and post an interesting article focussing on people or events which happened in Birmingham on the same day 100 years previously. For me this meant finding content for 1917. To find the interesting happenings in Birmingham during this year I used the British Newspaper Archive, which is a digitised online archive of the majority of newspapers in Britain, and includes papers dating as far back as the 1700s. I was able to search by date for keywords and phrases to find articles I found interesting, and transcribed them into a separate document ready to be uploaded to the website.

The content of the articles that I chose could range widely from new food control policies and new food imports, events for local children and wounded soldiers, strange crimes, men with missing memories and medal awards. This essentially can be summarised as anything I deemed vaguely weird and wonderful as well as notable every day occurrences within Birmingham which focused around the main themes of the Voices of War and Peace Centre. These core themes include: Faith, Childhood, Cities, Commemoration, Gender and the Home Front.

One of my favourite articles appeared in the papers on 11th August. The article described a man who appeared in Birmingham from Carlisle with seemingly no memory of who he was or where he was from. They sent him to the General Hospital in an attempt to cure his amnesia and issued public appeals. This led to his sister-in-law coming to Birmingham to find him, and upon her arrival his memory suddenly returned. This was definitely one of the strangest articles that I came across.

Another article I found interesting was from the 5th May. In the effort to try and discourage food waste during rationing, the article suggested parents stop giving their children lunches to take to school, on the premise that most children throw their sandwiches into the streets as opposed to eating them, and to simply give them breakfast. This article interested me as it showed the desperation in attempting to save food, as particularly during 1917 many of the articles I have come across revolved around food shortages. In today’s society it would be considered awful if in some way lunch was not given to children.

On 5th June the Birmingham Mail reported that the two recently appointed female police officers were to begin their patrols. I found this article very interesting as it not only demonstrated how women were increasingly utilised to undertake the roles of men during the time of conflict, but also because the article focussed on the type of uniform they would wear, and even included a picture.

Once I began finding a large amount of content, I was then trained to upload the articles to the website myself and later found how to use the accompanying images in the articles to go on the website posts too.