A students room in Keble College, Oxford. The student is one of 18 at present in residence and has received his discharge from the Army (owing to health), after a period of fighting in Egypt and France – his discharge is to be seen hanging over the mantle-shelf where he is standing. Image available under the IWM Non Commercial Licence, © IWM (Q 30292).
A short podcast from the BBC Oxford World War One at Home Series: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01s4zr3.
With a view to encouraging and informing reflection, the McDonald Centre in association with Christ Church Cathedral will stage the following series of public lectures during Hilary Term.
21 January
Jeremy Paxman, Great Britain’s Great War
28 January
Margaret MacMillan, Accident or Choice? The Outbreak of the First World War
4 February
Gary Sheffield, Victorious Donkeys? British Generals and Generalship of the First World War Reconsidered
11 February
Nigel Biggar, 1914–1918: Was Britain Right to Fight?
18 February
Matthew Grimley, The War and English Religion
25 February
Holger Afflerbach, “If you do not want to see God’s hand in everything, even in the most unbearable, you are lost.” Experiencing the First World War Alongside Kaiser Wilhelm II
The programme for The British World War One Poetry Spring School has now been announced.
This is the second spring school run by Oxford University’s English Faculty. The School is open to (and aimed at) members of the public, and particularly at those who have read some WW1 poetry but are now seeking a deeper critical appreciation. It will bring together world-leading experts in the topic, each invited to give an introductory lecture guiding the attendees to further avenues of study. Speakers will be encouraged to put together reading lists and follow-up exercises for students to do after each lecture on their own.
Speakers include Adrian Barlow, Margi Blunden, Meg Crane, Guy Cuthbertson, Gerald Dawe, Simon Featherstone, Philip Lancaster, Stuart Lee, Jean Liddiard, Alisa Miller, Charles Mundye, Jane Potter, Mark Rawlinson, Jon Stallworthy.
Further details are available at: http://www.english.ox.ac.uk/news-events/upcoming-events/201404/british-world-war-one-poetry-spring-school
This is an update on earlier posts about the First World War exhibition at the Bodleian Library. The final title has been agreed. It will run from 12 June until 2 November 2014.
Parliamentary Recruiting Committee Poster no. 80, from the John Johnson collection.
Using letters and diaries of politicians, soldiers and civilians, all in some way connected with Oxford University, the exhibition will relate contemporary experiences of the Great War. It concentrates on the years 1914 to 1916, from the outbreak of war to the end of the battle of the Somme and the fall of Asquith. One of the themes of the exhibition is the challenge of leadership during wartime, and it will feature a variety of manuscript and print materials revealing different experiences and perspectives. It includes letters of three Oxford-educated Prime Ministers: H.H. Asquith was brought down by the war, and Harold Macmillan’s experiences in the trenches were the foundation of his political career. Clement Attlee fought at Gallipoli. Private papers of politicians relate stories from the Cabinet where aims and strategy were debated, detailing arguments and personality clashes not noted in the official record. Letters of Oxford alumni who served as junior officers in the trenches on the western front and in far flung parts of the empire convey not only their experiences but also their ideas and beliefs about the war. In Oxford academics engaged in fierce public debate about the war, while in one Essex village, the local rector compiled a diary to record the impact of war on his community, forming a chronicle which he passed on to the Bodleian Library at the end of each year. The rich print resources of the Library, including trench maps, posters, pamphlets and books, many acquired during the war, provide a backdrop to the personal stories.
The exhibition is part of a series of three different but connected exhibitions in three countries looking at ‘War in the Archives’. The Bodleian exhibition is the second of the three, between August 1914 Literatur und Krieg at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach, which opened last week, and 1914, La Mort des Poètes at the Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire de Strasbourg, which will open in the Autumn of 2014. At the core of the partnership is the German expressionist poet Ernst Stadler, born in 1883 in Alsace, then part of Germany, educated at Strasbourg and Oxford where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He was killed by a British shell at Zandvoorde in October 1914 in an action noted in the diary of brigadier Ernest Makins now among the Bodleian’s collections. In the Bodleian’s own archive there is an entry in the register for Ernst Stadler of Magdalen College, admitted to the Library to study English literature in November 1906.
This spring Oxford’s English Faculty will be hosting a British Poetry of World War One Spring School.
The School is open to (and aimed at) members of the public, and particularly at those who have read some WW1 poetry but are now seeking a deeper critical appreciation. It will bring together world-leading experts in the topic, each invited to give an introductory lecture guiding the attendees to further avenues of study. Speakers will be encouraged to put together reading lists and follow-up exercises for students to do after each lecture on their own.
Speakers confirmed so far include: Adrian Barlow, Meg Crane, Guy Cuthbertson, Gerald Dawe, Simon Featherstone, Philip Lancaster, Stuart Lee, Jean Liddiard, Alisa Miller, Charles Mundye, Jane Potter, Mark Rawlinson, Jon Stallworthy.
For the latest news on the conference see the updated Great War and Global History conference poster. Changes to the programme have been added to the last post.
On the 5th-7th September 2014, Wadham College will be hosting an international conference to celebrate the British Poetry of the First World War.
Run by The English Association, the conference is designed to appeal to all who have an interest in the poetry of the Great War, a distinctive feature will be that all the various societies, fellowships and associations devoted to individual poets of the First World War will be invited to participate by contributing lectures, panel discussions and recitals as well as exhibiting items from their archives and displaying their publications.
The conference patron is Professor Jon Stallworthy and plenary speakers will include Professor Edna Longley, of Queen’s University, Belfast and Professor Jay Winter of Yale University.
Oxford senior members Dr Stuart Lee and Kate Lindsay are on the conference steering committee representing Oxford’s First World War Poetry Digital Archive and The English Faculty.
Booking is now available on the conference website.
Great War and Global History conference poster
‘The Great War and Global History’ conference
9-10 January 2014
Maison Française, Oxford
A two-day conference hosted by the Oxford Centre for Global History, Changing Character of War programme and Maison Française d’Oxford. Convenors: Hew Strachan, James Belich, John Darwin
PLENARY SPEAKERS:
FINANCE
Patrick O’Brien (LSE)
‘Warfare with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France and the Consolidation of British Industrial Supremacy’
Georges-Henri Soutou (Paris)
‘They Marched Singing into Bankruptcy: Finance in the First World War’
*************
REVOLUTION
Dominic Lieven (Cambridge)
‘Imperialism, War and Revolution: a Russian Angle’
Hans van de Ven (Cambridge)
Title TBC
*************
IDENTITIES
Hervé Drévillon (Paris)
‘Identities and Otherness as Agents of Globalization in Early Modern Wars‘
Tamara Scheer ((Ludwig Boltzmann-Institute for Social Science History, Vienna)
‘Habsburg Empire’s National Identities during World War One’
*************
MANPOWER
Jos Gommans (Leiden)
‘Fair Play in Early Modern Warfare’
Douglas Porch (California)
‘From Carnot to Reynaud: The Ascent and Disintegration of the French Nation in Arms, 1793-1940’
*************
MYTHS
Margaret MacMillan (Oxford)
Title TBC
Stig Förster (Bern)
‘The Myth of the Short-War-Illusion in 1914. A Long-Term Perspective’
*************
GEOPOLITICS
Tonio Andrade (Atlanta)
‘The Global Military Balance: A Long View, 900-1918’
Naoko Shimazu (Birkbeck)
Title TBC
*************
RESISTANCE
Martin Ceadel (Oxford)
Title TBC
Karen Hagemann (UNC)
‘Women, War and the Nation: Gendering the History of the Wars Against Napoleon’
George Butterworth’s letters addressed to his father at NER offices must have landed here in his father’s in-tray.
Entrance to the former North Eastern Railway head office at York
Recently it was announced that the AHRC would be funding a PhD studentship, Britain’s Railways in the Great War, 1914-1918, to begin in September 2013. The project is to be managed by the Science Museum Group, and will address ‘six core inter-connected themes – political, administrative, economic, technical, cultural and social … to explore the basic questions of how, and how well, the railways coped’ (see the project outline).
Once Butterworth had reached France in August 1915 with the Durham Light Infantry things did not improve. His battalion marched in the middle of the night to a railway where the men sat down and waited for a train to take them to the front: ‘the transport arrangements at this point were defective, as we had to wait about two hours by the side of the line, during which time some fifty trains must have passed us, mostly empty and returning to the base.’ Eventually their train turned up, comprising ‘three first class compartments for the officers and cattle trucks for the men, 40 in each.’ Rumours spread that they were heading straight to the front, ‘but after a few hours journey the train pulled up at a small wayside station’ and they were marched ‘five very hot and dusty miles’ to their billets in a village.
On 28 November 1915 Butterworth wrote to his father about his turn in the trenches. At the end of the letter he mentions the pioneer battalion raised by the North Eastern Railway Company (the 17th Northumberland Fusiliers): ‘I hope the N.E.R. Battalion will have luck—it is rather thankless work out here, and our Pioneer Battalion has certainly had more than its share of artillery and machine gun fire.’
Memorial in York to the 2236 men of the NER who died in the Great War
Showing as part of the CCW War in Film Series
Monday, 2nd Week, 29 April 2013, 8.00pm
Pichette Auditorium, Pembroke College
A small group of French officers struggle to escape their fates as German prisoners during World War I. Filmed in 1937 as Europe fell under the shadow of fascism, Jean Renoir’s masterpiece portrays the transcendence of human relationships against the futility of war.
The War in Film Series is intended for undergraduate and graduate students, as well as faculty and movie fans among the wider Oxford University community. Screened in the new Pichette Auditorium at Pembroke College and hosted by the Oxford Changing Character of War Programme, the Series presents outstanding war films that emphasize the human dimension of war: the challenges of leadership, dilemmas of morality and ethics, war and literature, the tragedy of war, and its dark comedy.