Swanage, Wimborne, Blandford, Wareham: all the little Dorset museums are closed by the pandemic at the moment, and a couple are caught in the middle of refurbishment projects. So my museum-visiting was confined to the Tank Museum at Bovington, another place I hadn’t seen in maybe forty years. Reports from my sister and family encouraged me to return to a collection which wouldn’t normally have tempted me much, but of course times have moved on since the 1970s and the Tank Museum is now imaginatively displayed and has a pleasant cafĂ© on a mezzanine above the great hangar (with the tanks) which used to be all you got.
Walking down the incline after my lunch into that dramatic space, I was hit by the aroma of metal, oil, and canvas, which took me back to my years working for the Royal Engineers Museum in the mid-1990s. There’s much too much to take in over the course of a mere ninety minutes or so (several of which were spent waiting to take that photograph of the film reflected on a female tank factory worker’s denims), and I felt the most intense section of the displays was the first, exploring early tank development in World War One. Those first machines look so weird, so alien, that they have a hideous power even surpassing the sleeker and more familiar violence of their modern counterparts. You can easily imagine the impact that they would have had crawling across the trenches towards the German lines, even before they managed to fire a shot: an emissary from somewhere hellish, within that general hell.
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