Join us for our Armed Forces Day celebration on 1st July 2023! Serving Armed Forces, Veterans and Cadets can visit FREE One week on from National Armed Forces Day, we’re inviting members of the Armed Forces community to come and enjoy the museum, a range of events, and our Women and War exhibition, FREE! Alongside our permanent exhibitions, covering the history of the county regiments and many other aspects of…
Their Finest Hour Second World War Digital Collections Day at Soldiers of Oxfordshire Museum Join us at SOFO Museum to share your Second World War stories, photos and items on the 1st April 2023 – we’ll record your stories and photograph your objects to add to the Their Finest Hour online archive. The museum will open to visitors free of charge throughout the day and will be hosting a range of…
New Volunteer Opportunities at SOFO Do you enjoy telling the stories about the museum’s collection? Are you someone who enjoys being hands-on and getting stuck into events? The museum is on the lookout for Engagement Volunteers to support the museum to engage visitors from all ages. Become an Engagement Volunteer! About the Role We are looking for Engagement Volunteers to support the museum in engaging visitors of all ages. For…
The Man Behind the Medals In this blog series, SOFO Museum’s Research volunteers look at the stories behind some of the medal sets in the museum’s collection, from those that can be seen on a visit in our dedicated Medals display to some of those that are still tucked away in the archive. As this week’s blog fell on the anniversary of the action that saw Alfred Wilcox awarded the Victoria Cross…
SOFO Summer Shelter Competition! To celebrate our recently opened Anderson Shelter display (built with the support of our wonderful Crowdfunder backers!) we’re running a special competition this Summer – show us your own home-made air-raid shelters and we’ll award prizes to the best! Plus, we’ll feature submissions in an online gallery – so they’ll all be museum pieces! Here are a couple of examples of shelters crafted by the museum team’s…
Winston Churchill, Blenheim Palace, and the Oxfordshire Yeomanry Connection Guest blog by Douglas S. Russell, author of Winston S. Churchill: Soldier, The Military Life of a Gentleman at War (2005) From the time of the first Duke of Marlborough (1650–1722) each succeeding generation of Spencers, Churchills, and Marlboroughs was active in the military service of Great Britain, and Blenheim Palace has been a part of that tradition. Each duke from the first in…
THE QUEEN’S OWN OXFORDSHIRE HUSSARS’ AND PRIVATE MOTOR CARS 1914-1915 The following excerpts, researched and compiled by Harry Staff, were all taken from The Oxfordshire Hussars in the Great War by Adrian Keith-Falconer (KF), and touch on the way private motorcars were brought over to France and used by officers for much of the war. KF was an officer who served with the Queens Own Oxfordshire Hussars/Oxfordshire Yeomanry during the…
Children and Military Lives – Stories of Adventure, Family and Exile Exhibition – 2 June to 24 November 2022 The new exhibition will tell the stories of today’s service children (children of serving British Armed Forces personnel) and their experiences of living life in the military community, as well as stories of children who become victims of war, experiencing the effects of military conflict – from Second World War evacuees…
Featured: The Great War POW Album and Pilot’s Log Book of Lt. Frederick Matthews Recently donated to the museum was an incredible collection of items relating to Frederick Matthews, often referred to as ‘Eric’, who served with the Queens Own Oxfordshire Hussars and later the Royal Flying Corps. Eric’s story is already featured in our Airpower display in the museum’s permanent exhibition space, alongside copies of images now part of…
An incredible story from the SOFO Museum Archives, Captain J Shaw’s account of how he became a Great War POW and his involvement in a number of escape attempts was originally published in three instalments in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry’s Regimental Journal from September 1931 to January 1932. A few years later, in March 1939, the Journal would also publish a number of Shaw’s sketches of the tunnel which he…
