Pack Up Your Troubles

We don't normally do a great deal for Heritage Open Day at Swanvale Halt: the church is mid-Victorian and not exactly of startling architectural quality, so it's never seemed that we will get hordes of visitors come to marvel at the ingenuity of our 19th-century forebears. This year, however, to tie in with the World War One centenary, we decided to do something a little different and have a display of relevant memorabilia. A local antiques dealer lent us a cabinet to put things in and I knew I at least had the bronze memorial plaque, issued to the next-of-kin of casualties, which my grandparents dug up from their garden forty years ago, even though I had no idea what else might come in.

In the end the range of stuff we were loaned, from congregation members and general local residents alike, was really rather interesting. It wasn't all directly Swanvale Halt-related, but I decided that didn't matter. As well as the expected range of medals and embroidered postcards, there was:

- a photograph of a local man who enlisted as a Royal Engineer and was then shifted to the Royal Flying Corps, receiving a Military Medal. I've never seen a photo of a medal-awarding ceremony like this: he and three other chaps are lined up in front of the whole squadron arranged around them, with the planes behind;
- a photograph of a group of chaps in their barrack room, presumably having just scrubbed and cleaned it spotless, with a decorative stack of buckets and brushes in the centre;
- a pair of cavalryman's boots bought in a local charity shop;
- an entrenching tool found in a garden shed when the current owner moved into the house, presumably brought back illicitly from the War and then used in the garden for fifty years;
- records of three West Yorkshire brothers, one of whom joined the Royal Army Medical Corps, and the other two of whom were wounded and passed through his ambulance post at different times. One survived and the other died.

Having been a museum curator - and even more, having worked for the Royal Engineers in their museum - this was a bit of a step back into the past for me. It was fun to do, and people enjoyed lending things and telling me about them, and seeing what was on display, even if we still didn't get hordes of visitors from outside the church community.

We had an envelope with Open Day publicity including nice bright pink bunting bearing the logo which I strung along the church fence. On Sunday morning it had disappeared. I wonder what anyone found to do with it.