This is a provisonal title for the Bodleian’s centenary exhibition in 2014 which will be centred on the lives of eight (possibly more) Oxford alumni, using their letters and diaries to find new perspectives on the Great War. Edmund Blunden, alumnus of Queen’s College, has inspired the exhibtion title. ‘Daring the huge dark’ is from his poem Flanders Now. I think it conveys something of the foreboding with which individuals, and the nation, entered unfathomed depths, and yet ‘daring’ reminds us of the courage needed by ordinary men and women to endure.

I recently made a brief visit to the Somme, and took this photograph looking over to Thiepval Wood and the Memorial from a point near the village of Mesnil, close to the entrance to ‘Jacob’s Ladder‘. This was a communication trench  that led down to the British line at Hamel in the Ancre valley. Blunden describes it (and this whole section of the front) in Undertones of War, and it is mentioned in his poem, Trench Nomenclature. The tranquillity of the present scene is in marked contrast to the description of the area in his poem Thiepval Wood, which begins with the lines:

The tired air groans as the heavies swing over, the river-hollows boom;
The shell-fountains leap from the swamps, and with wildfire and fume
The shoulder of the chalkdown convulses.
Then the jabbering echoes stampede in the slatting wood

Thiepval Monument from the Mesnil-Hamel road

The image below is a detail from a trench map in the Bodleian Library drawn up just before the Somme offensive began, and shows the proximity of the British (blue) and the German (red) lines around Thiepval. The above photograph was taken from the fork in the road just north east of Mesnil, looking across to Thiepval village, with Thiepval Wood in the middle distance. Thiepval Memorial stands about 200 metres south-east of the chateau marked ‘CH’ on the trench map on the western edge of the village. ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ can be seen running between Mesnil and Hamel.

The trenches between Hamel and Thiepval, June 1916

Postcard to Gilbert Murray from Capt. Godfrey Elton, 4th Hampshire Regt., Baluchistan, July 1915, MS. Gilbert Murray 28, fol. 7

Thanks to Katie Longo for an excellent talk about the Gilbert Murray papers and the Great War on Friday 18 May. It was good to see the room packed with academics, students and library staff. It was particularly pleasing to have Gilbert Murray’s grandson in attendance as he was able to add some fascinating insights.

Guest Post by Teresa Franco (Sommerville College and Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages).

Can we conceive anything more distant in its intents from war than academic life? As Vera Brittain magnificently wrote in her unforgettable recollection of the wartime, Testament of Youth, Oxford symbolises all that is quintessentially against war: knowledge, study, serenity of mind, devotion. Nonetheless, as Brittain’s experience shows, college life and intellectual withdrawal were not to be spared.

Flyer for exhibition

Made possible by the kind permission of Somerville College and the Taylorian Library, the exhibition, The War at Oxford, displayed war’s disruptive impact on academia, but also the efforts towards reconstruction and the preservation of humanistic values. Originally conceived to serve as an additional insight to a conference on the Great War in Italy (The Great War in Italy. Representation and Interpretation), it offered the opportunity of enlarging the critical framework, linking the two allied nations’ war experience together, and comparing some outputs of the most representative pro-war Italian cultural movement – the Futurism avant-garde – with the Oxford own response to war, and some significant testimonies.

Famous as Vera Brittain’s college and directly affected by war, the Somerville archive provided most of the materials, making it possible to trace back the exceptional story of its conversion into a military hospital from 1915 to the end of the war. Over all, more than 70 items were displayed, accounting for three main sections. The first one included pictures of the college occupied by the convalescing soldiers, original documents about its handover to the war office as well as other private records, donated to the college long afterwards; the second section was devoted entirely to Vera Brittain’s life, starting from her courageous decision to become a nurse, through to her pacifist commitment as a writer. Some of her major works on war were, consequently, put on show; including some originals of her famous Letters to the Peace-Lovers and her war poems as they first appeared on the current war and post-war issues of the university Oxford Poetry magazine, together with those of other famous contributors (e. g. Robert Graves, Winifred Holtby). Finally, the last section, with its rare and precious books on Futurism owned by the Taylorian library, moved as far as to Italy, allowing the visitor not only to get a sense of the strength of Italian propaganda for interventionism – and the direct influence literature was able to shed on the life of thousands of soldiers – but also to appreciate the novelty and the artistic conception laying behind the realization of each of them.

On Friday 18 May Katie Longo (Balliol College, Oxford) will give a talk, Towards the Great War Centenary: selections for an exhibition (1:00 pm, Seminar Room, Pitt Rivers Museum – see the CSB Calendar). This is also an opportunity to hear about plans for the Bodleian’s 2014 exhibition.

Katie was appointed to this year’s Balliol-Bodley Scholarship, which affords Balliol postgraduates the opportunity to work with Western MSS. in the Bodleian Library in support of cataloguing or curatorial research. With the 2014 exhibition in mind, Katie has been exploring the papers of Gilbert Murray (1866-1957), Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford. Murray is a good starting point for asking certain questions about contemporary perceptions of the Great War. He is well known for his association with conscientious objectors and with the foundation of the League of Nations; and yet in 1914 he wrote a pamphlet justifying the British war position. Katie has been surveying the Murray papers, concentrating on the early part of the war, with several questions in mind. What is his general attitude to the war? Does he have a realistic understanding (in terms of the scale, duration, likely losses, strategy etc.)?  What is the source of his information (official sources, friends, newspapers, propaganda, soldiers at the front etc.)? What is his attitude to Germany and the Germans?

Over the course of the next few months I will be surveying some of the major archives of Oxford alumni, politicians, academics, writers, soldiers and others held in the Bodleian and elsewhere in the University, to ask such questions, and to find out what impact the war had on these individuals and their circles. Do their views change as the war develops, especially after the Somme in 1916, Passchendaele in 1917, and the German breakthrough in the Spring of 1918?  How do they react to the armistice in November 1918 – is there a sense of victory, a feeling that the war was worthwhile, or that it was futile? I hope to gain a sense of what the war meant to them as it happened, when none of them had the benefit of hindsight or any foreknowledge of how the post-war world would unfold.

Back in 1996, OUCS, in collaboration with the English Faculty produced the Wilfred Owen Archive. The archive held digitised copies of all OWen’s manuscripts and a selection of letters alongside contextual items from the Imperial War Museum. With these primary sources the archive also created a set of online tutorials, making it one of the first eleraning resources in rge subject area.

In 2008 the Department received a grant from JISC to develop the Owen archive further and digitise manuscripts from other major British War poets. The First World War Poetry Digital Archive (http://www.oucs.oxa.c.uk/ww1lit) contains over 7000 items from Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Graves, Vera Brittain, Seigfried Sassoon, Edward Thomas and more. Additional multimedia artefacts from the Imperial War Museum were added to meet the requirements of new directions of teaching. A new set of specially developed educational resources were added including an  exhibition in the three-dimensional virtual world Second Life and interactive timelines. The archive is freely available to the public as well as the educational community.

Also in 2008 OUCS started its Great War Collections initiative. The Great War Archive (http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/gwa) contains over 6,500 items contributed by the general public between March and June 2008. Every item originates from, or relates to, someone’s experience of the First World War, either abroad or at home. Contributions were received via a special website and also through a series of open days at libraries and museums throughout the country.

The original Great War Archive initiative accepted contributions until June 2008. After that, people have been invited to share images that they have by posting them to The Great War Archive Flickr Group. To post to the group you will need to set up a free Flickr account.

Since 2010 the Great War Archive has also been working with Europeana to extend this initiative. The Europeana 1914-1918 (http://europeana1914-1918.eu/en) project has been receiving contributions in Germany since 2011, and in 2012 from Luxembourg, Ireland, UK, Slovenia, Denmark, and Belgium. this pan-Europeana project has so far collected over 30,000 items that otherwise may have been lost forever.

Most recently the Department received a grant to develop a World War 1 Open Educational Resource (OER). World War One: Continuations and Beginnings (http://ww1centenary.oucs.ox.ac.uk/) surfaces the highest quality OER on this historic event through a cross-disciplinary set of thematic collections that reappaise the War in its social, historical and cultural context. Each theme also includes a series of expert commentaries created by some of the most notable academics in the field of World War One studies and related disciplines. Alongside these thematic directory areas, the Resource Library contains dynamic feeds of relevant resources from the wider OER community. A series of revisualised OER will showcase the full potential of using open material to seed academic debate.

OUCS is now considered to be experts in the field of the creation of digital resources for a variety of First World War disciplines. The leaders of these projects sit on a number of national strategic committees that are planning the UKs response to the Centenary of the War.