New Perspectives: Thiepval Memorial Museum, France

The Museum of Oxford Young Innovators are a multi-national and well-travelled group, so we will occasionally be posting about our visits to other museums we love both within and beyond the UK! Today’s post is by Hanna.

I was fortunate to be in France recently as part of a group of 25 PhD students from 11 countries who all study the First World War. We were brought to the Verdun and Somme areas for a week by l’Historial de la Grande Guerre, a FWW research centre in Péronne. A highlight of the week was attending the ceremony at the Thiepval Memorial for the 100 th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme. The Thiepval Memorial is the Memorial to the Missing of the Somme, and lists more than 72,000 names of British and South African soldiers who fought in this region and whose bodies were never found. It is a Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) monument, and is their largest monument in the world. The line between ‘memorial’ and ‘museum’ is a fascinatingly blurry one, and many war museums consider themselves to be memorials. Additionally, many

monumental memorials, including Thiepval, are accompanied by interpretive centres/museums so that visitors can fully grasp their significance. Thiepval's visitor centre underwent an enormous upgrade, with the addition of a museum wing, time to coincide with the 100th anniversary on July 1st. Here are some of my favourite features:


The centrepiece is a massive hall (with mirrors at the ends, creating false impressions of an infinitely extending space) with line drawings depicting the battle in a continuous narrative chronological sequence, in the tradition of the Bayeux tapestry or the lion hunt reliefs from the palace of Ashurbanipal in the British Museum. Rather than have traditional interpretive panels, accompanying the walls of drawings are primary source quotations from a refreshingly diverse array of perspectives; alternating nationalities and levels of seniority. The entire museum is also multilingual, with consistently two and sometimes up to four languages.

Running through the centre of the room are glassed-over floor cases interspersed with digital screens offering facts and figures about the battle. The layout of the space- particularly the location/height of interpretive text- is very accessible for wheelchair users and children. The use of embedded floor cases creates an almost archaeological effect, and is also a subtle yet effective reminder of the lethal danger that buried unexploded shells from the First World War are still posing to French farmers today.

I have a Masters degree in Museum Studies which involved spending a lot of time learning about different interpretive techniques and design elements, so I always love finding new ones that I haven’t seen before! One room of the museum was entirely dedicated to remembrance of individuals, with the walls covered in photos of soldiers who went missing on the Somme. On the floor are projected biographical details about specific soldiers, on a rotating basis. The information is projected in four languages, and visitors are given blank white pieces of board to hold up in front of them and 'intercept' the projection of the language they want to read. 

The Thiepval Visitor Centre welcomes 150,000 visitors in an ‘average’ year, and these First World War centenary years are producing public interest and visits well beyond average. The addition of the new museum will no doubt continue to keep Thiepval a relevant and meaningful place for visitors from the UK and beyond. 

Hanna

Spotlight: Real Tennis Balls

Some of the smaller and humbler objects in Explore Oxford, the Museum of Oxford’s current exhibition space in Oxford Town Hall, can easily be overlooked by the passer-by. However, we shouldn’t let their unassuming exterior blind us to the history which can be uncovered by digging a little deeper.

Let’s take our Real Tennis balls as an example. These balls were found on the roof of Wadham College and are about 400 years old. Unlike modern tennis balls, which have a hollow rubber core filled with pressurized air and covered in wool or nylon, these OAP balls have a centre of cork with fabric wrapped around them. Real Tennis balls are much less bouncy than normal tennis balls – though ours have probably lost their bounce altogether!

Real tennis is the game from which our modern day tennis is derived. Originally, players would throw a roughly-made ball against walls, floors, and roofs outside whilst wearing thick leather gloves to protect their hands. Eventually these gloves evolved into rudimentary rackets and the game moved inside. Played on an indoor court, Real Tennis incorporates sloping surfaces, galleries, and other unusual features of a room into the game.

In England, the sport used to be called Royal Tennis and was enjoyed by the aristocracy as well as ecclesiastical high-ups across Europe. Apparently a version of the game was played by the Greeks and Romans! Today there are few courts scattered across the globe, one of which can be found in Oxford’s Merton College and is still used by students today.

Wadham College, where our Real Tennis balls were found was founded in 1610. It is now one of the largest colleges in Oxford with about 425 undergraduates. We think our tennis balls are around 400 years old meaning they could date from the very first years of the college itself.

It’s wonderful to have such an ancient but homely reminder of the leisure hours of the millions of students who have passed through the city over the last thousand years. Next time you’re in Explore Oxford keep an eye out for these very special tennis balls!

Spotlight: Dances of Death

Explore Oxford has a couple of gruesome objects in its collection - such as a copy of Oliver Cromwell’s death mask. One other such object is the three panels showing part of the Dances of Death cycle. Originally these panels would have been part of a cycle of 40 images.

Our panels were rescued from 46, Broad Street, Oxford, the old home of the antiquarian William Fletcher (c.1738-1826) before its demolition in 1937. They depict Death dancing with a Canon, a Lawyer and a Physician and alongside the other panels would have decorated the walls of Alderman Fletcher’s property.

The Dances of Death - also known as the Danse Macabre - encompasses an artistic genre of late-medieval allegory on the universality of death. No matter your station in life the Dances of Death illustrated the equalising and inevitable power of death. This concept was expressed in poetry, music, and visual arts across western Europe in the Late Medieval Ages. Officially the Dances of Death are a representation of a dance between both living and dead figures, the living arranged in order of their rank – from the Pope and Emperors all the way down to the child and common Peddler. The Encyclopaedia Britannica suggests that this rather macabre artistic type gained popularity in the Middle Ages as a result of the Black Death followed by the Hundred Years’ War. 

Our panels date from slightly later; based on a 16^th century cycle they were created in the 18^th century. Did you know that our near neighbour the Ashmolean Museum are lucky enough to have another panel in this series? This image shows Death dancing with a pagan woman; a panel which would come relatively late in the cycle due to the low status of the living figure.

Do pop into Explore Oxford to give these pieces of history a gander!

To see a-forne the sodeyne

Violence Of cruel dethe

that ben so wyse and sage

Whiche sleeth allas

by stroke of pestilence

Bothe yonge and olde

of low and hie parage.

From John Lydgate’s The Dance of Death