As one gets older, sobering thoughts seem to strike one with ever-increasing frequency. Not long ago, when considering the possible implications for the WFA of the approaching centenary commemorations of the First World War, I realised, with something of a jolt, that I had already begun my long career at the Imperial War Museum when the fiftieth anniversary of that conflict occurred.
Looking back, the IWM's efforts to commemorate that fiftieth anniversary were perhaps surprisingly low-key. It should be emphasised that the IWM provided a great deal of material help and advice to the BBC - not least in terms of archive film footage - during the production of the landmark Great War television series. My own minor role in that process was to act as a kind of historical ‘watchdog' for the Museum to ensure that its material was responsibly used.
It was in this capacity that I first met John Terraine and Correlli Barnett - two of the most distinguished contributors to the series - and little I knew at the time that, one day, I would have the honour of succeeding both of them as President of the WFA.
The IWM also presented, in 1964 and 1965, two relatively small ‘Then and Now' photographic exhibitions covering the battlefields and events of 1914 and 1915 respectively, but in 1966 they were all busy working on a major new extension to the Museum and the fiftieth anniversary of the Somme offensive passed by largely unacknowledged.
Things were certainly different then, in so many ways. For all the valiant attempts of a few historians, such as John Terraine, to swim against the prevailing tide, most people's perceptions of the Great War, including my own, were still coloured by the gospel according to Basil Liddell Hart, by the views expressed in Alan Clark's The Donkeys and by the recently-staged production of Oh, What a Lovely War!
As Professor Brian Bond pointed out in The First World War and British Military History (1991) the mores of that decade, the 1960s, ‘might be characterised as anti-imperialist, anti-heroic, hostile towards traditional authority and profoundly sceptical of the efficacy of force in general and war in particular to solve political problems'.
Scholars had not yet explored the official records of the Great War held in public archives; the superb collections of personal diaries, letters and unpublished memoirs now held by the IWM and the Liddle Collection at Leeds did not yet exist or were in their infancy; and oral history, subsequently spurred on by the development of the portable cassette tape recorder, had similarly not reached its full potential.
Comparatively few of us on the IWM staff, with the notable exception of the legendary Rose Coombs, had even visited the Western Front before the late 1960s, and anyone who had predicted that, in future, we would do so with the aid of Sat-Nav, the ‘Linesman' technology or trench maps on DVD-Rom, would probably have been dismissed as a wild fantasist!
It was indeed my colleague Rose Coombs who introduced me to the Western Front when, in 1967, she organised a one-day trip to the Ypres Salient for IWM staff and their families.
This involved meeting at the IWM at some ungodly hour to catch a coach to (I think) Southend, where we boarded a Blackburn Beverley transport aircraft for a mercifully short flight to Ostend. To have described the passenger facilities on the aircraft as basic would have been to over-praise them and, when one of the flight attendants distributed printed instructions to us before take-off, an IWM colleague enquired: "What are these - bloody prayer sheets?"
Having, against all the odds, landed safely in Belgium, we embarked on a whistle-stop tour which took in Sanctuary Wood, Tyne Cot, Hell Fire Corner, the Cloth Hall, the Menin Gate and Toc H in Poperinghe before we braced ourselves for the return flight to Blighty.
When I reflect upon that trip now, I keep thinking about the curious fact that we were all dressed for the office or for a Sunday morning church service rather than for a tour of a notoriously muddy battlefield. Suits, ties and belted raincoats predominated among the men, while the ladies in the party were clearly wearing their best frock or coat, or even a hat. In this respect, the contrast between my first trip to the Salient and the typical battlefield visit of today could not be more marked.
However, thanks to the inspirational Rose, that all-too-brief visit on a cloudy day in the late 1960s made me truly aware, for the first time, of the magnetic qualities of the Western Front and of the critical importance of remembering, recording, researching and disseminating the real experience of those who served, fought and died there between 1914 and 1918.
With much greater resources now at our disposal -and thanks not only to the sterling efforts of the WFA and to new generations of scholars emerging from British, Commonwealth, American and European universities - we should all be much better-equipped to fulfil these important tasks in the years from 2014 to 2018.
Peter Simkins
This article is the featured article from Bulletin No 91, the WFA's in-house magazine for members.
