First World War: Centenary

Baroness Andrews Excerpts

Monday 4th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Andrews]

My Lords, I am very pleased to take part in the debate this evening. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Clark, on securing this opportunity, and on his speech which captured the totality and scale of the war without passing over the fact that what we remember—the extraordinary, haunting images which we hold of this war—are individuals, usually men, on the battlefield.

I declare an interest as chair of English Heritage. We will be commemorating the war in many different ways. We are going to focus on the sites and memorials associated with the First World War, and the often untold and unrecognised heritage. Many of the great buildings which we hold in trust—the castles and great houses—were, for example, turned into hospitals and training camps. We will be conserving the story of Cannock Chase, for example, which is the largest of the training camps. In Richmond Castle, there is graffiti left behind by conscientious objectors, which is now in a state of decay. This is an extremely important and honourable part of the memory which we must honour as well.

Obviously, we also want to generate new knowledge. We are seeking to fund a pilot national archaeology project to research and record traces of World War 1—another programme for the noble Viscount, Lord Colville, I hope. It will also enable us to think again about the significance of these sites, about how we designate them in the future and how we conserve them. The noble Lord, Lord Cope, spoke about the work that we are doing on war memorials, and we are very proud to be in partnership with the War Memorials Trust and with other partners up and down the country.

We will also generate new research. We have historians who will be working on aspects of the home front and on the shipwrecks, for example. Above all—and I hope that this will please the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes—we will be working very closely with schools to help young people to understand the impact of the war on their own families, communities and histories. Through the Heritage Schools Make History project, we will invite schools to make a national archive of local World War 1 stories, presented as short films and made publicly accessible. There have been wonderful ideas across the Chamber this evening already as to how we can make these live again and connect communities.

Picking up something that the noble Viscount, Lord Colville, said, I also hope that it will be a time to think about other aspects of how we construct our history and our memory. A great book written about 20 years ago by Paul Fussell entitled The Great War and Modern Memory demonstrated just how powerful the images, language, experiences and literature of the First World War are, and the impact that the war has had on our own history, lives and memories, and on how we think about our relationships. It is an extraordinary book about an extraordinary time and war. I hope that we will be able to listen again to those voices of the war, in literature and music; to think about how science and technology aided conflict, and about the abuse of science; about the many things which were done for the first time; about what we mean by patriotism; and about what Wilfred Owen meant when he talked about the pity of war.