CITIZEN HISTORIAN IN THE MAKING
UKPHA team member Harbakhsh Grewal had the pleasure of attending a very special WWI Centenary reception in the garden of No.10
Staff and friends at the British Library provided a fascinating introduction to their archives for our Citizen Historian pathfinder team.
We sent a crack team of Citizen Historians down to the National Archives in Kew, West London, to learn the what, where, when and how of delving into these key archives.
This event has become an annual fixture in London's calendar and attracts up to 30,000 people each year, so we couldn't miss the chance to be there and spread the word.
Our friend Bill Basra of Warwickshire country Council has been helping us get the word out about our project. Here he is with a couple of well 'ard looking squaddies, promoting us at Coventry Vaisakhi mela.
The EFW outreach team had great fun at Lampton Mela last weekend, recruiting volunteers for the project and promoting our forthcoming exhibition.
The Centenary commemorations have been preceded by much publicity and rethinking of that momentous and terrible event in modern world history. Much discussion has already begun to take place about the global nature and impact of the war, and of the variety of voices, interpretations and ways of looking at the conflict and its consequences that can or should be considered this time as opposed to at previous commemorations.
The second of our 4 archive access workshops took place at the National Army Museum in Chelsea, London.
A reading and translation from a letter sent by a wife in Punjab to her husband who has gone to fight in WW1.
Our superstar volunteer Amrit Lohia single-handedly organised and gave a presentation at Southgate gurudwara in North London.
Several of our volunteers trawled through an illustrated weekly magazine called 'The Great War', which chronicled in great detail major developments during the war.
We held the second of our Project History Baseline Workshops at Hounslow Gurudwara on 1st March.
Members of the Youth Panel for the Empire, Faith & War project came together in Hounslow gurudwara's classroom annexe on 1st March for a series of workshops, including an Exhibition Interpretation session.
We sent two of our volunteers, Rachel and Simran, on a special mission to visit the Royal Collection, held at Windsor Castle, to see what they could dig up from the vaults.
We sneaked in another History Baseline Workshop, this time for a small team of volunteers that couldn't make any of the other sessions.
On the 23rd Jan we kicked off the first of our archive access workshop sessions. This was a chance for our crack band of citizen historians to learn more about how to research the Sikh involvement in the war.