News

The Soldiers of Oxfordshire Museum Trust has received a huge boost with the news that it has won a £50,000 Heritage Lottery Fund award for a project called “Children and War”.

The money will enable the Trust to stage a first class exhibition at the Oxfordshire Museum in Woodstock and run a participation programme with the County Museum’s education service to include schools, families, young people, local residents and community groups as well as military historians, children of current servicemen and women and veterans.

The project is designed to be a thought-provoking and engaging programme with a core exhibition, an expanded online gallery and a broad learning and outreach programme. The exhibition will explore aspects of war and children’s contact with it, from boy soldiers and propaganda through evacuees and refugees to reconciliation and remembrance. 

It will ask challenging questions using the Museum’s archive material and collections, as well as loans from our partners, including the Imperial War Museum, and from private individuals. The Trust is extremely pleased to have the expert support of Oxford author and historian Julie Summers as exhibition curator.

Ian Inshaw, the Trust’s Chairman, said "We are delighted to have secured this grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund which will enable us to demonstrate another facet of conflict and how it affects all involved.  Children are the future of any generation. The effect of the trauma of war on children is a poignant reminder to those who see war as a solution to conflict in its various forms.   I look forward to this exhibition with eager anticipation." 

Stuart McLeod, Head of Heritage Lottery Fund South East England,  commented, “This project will reach a wider audience across all age groups with a particular emphasis on young people connecting them with their local military heritage and giving them new skills in artefact research, conservation and interpretation of museum objects.”

Myfanwy Lloyd, the Trust’s programme manager, sees it also as a way of increasing the membership of the Trust’s Volunteer Club: “There are so many jobs that will need doing in connection with the exhibition and we will be using the programme to help volunteers find worthwhile ways to use and improve their skills.”