One of our recent acquisitions is Villa Patricia, which was donated by a local couple in Woodstock. The doll’s house was commissioned by Dr Richard Blaiklock who served with the Hampshire Regiment as Regimental Medical Officer. He was sent overseas to Southern Italy in 1944 to assist local hospitals, and from there was sent into several prisoner of war camps to assess the prisoner’s medical needs. One of the camps…
Visiting the E H Shepard Archives In September our Collections Manager Peggy visited the University of Surrey archives to see their E H Shepard archives, with a view to a potential exhibition at SOFO in 2023. The initial research follows the story of Shepard during his service with the Royal Artillery in the Great War, and explores the stories of other creatives who served in the Army. Peggy said of…
Cavalry training manuals to go on display at SOFOFour cavalry training manuals from the collection at Blenheim Palace are due to go on display at the Soldiers of Oxfordshire Museum, Woodstock in November 2021 including a copy of Field Service Regulations (1905) signed by Charles Spencer-Churchill, 9th Duke of Marlborough. These manuals offer an insight into the manoeuvres and training of cavalry regiments including the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars (QOOH),…
Star Objects – Waterloo OBLI:5356 – unattributed print of an Officer of the 52nd Foot c.1815 To get us prepared for our upcoming Waterloo lecture with historian Gareth Glover, we will be looking at a few of the Waterloo-era objects from our archive. In this post we will look at the uniform of an Officer of the 52nd. OBLI:5803 – 52nd Officer’s shako c.1815 This shako was…
Try to guess what the theme is for December’s OOTM… of course it’s Christmas!In previous OOTMs I have tried to stick with a theme for each month, which has proved fairly difficult for some months. Luckily, we have many Christmas cards sent from and to Oxfordshire soldiers in our archive, so I was rather spoiled for choice.I also featured a Princess Mary tin, with 1914, 1918 and 2018 Christmas cards,…
November’s Object of the Month (OOTM) was chosen by another of our work experience students; Adam. He chose further items from the Private Alfred Franklin collection – many of these objects were also displayed in our Oxfordshire Remembers Part II exhibition, which has now finished.Adam chose a letter detailing Franklin’s struggle with Spanish Flu, with two photographs and his forage cap displayed alongside. I think that whilst displaying one object…
October’s Object of the Month (OOTM) started well, as I forgot to photograph it. The images attached to this blog post are from the object itself, and I printed them out alongside for the display.The object was a notebook of recipes from Gunner L H Webster, who was born in Oxford and attended the Army School of Cookery in Weymouth in the August of 1915. I liked this notebook for…
September’s Object of the Month (OOTM) was a recent acquisition to the museum, and one of my personal favourites! They are wooden models of buildings in the Oxfordshire town of Deddington, used by the local Air Raid Precautions to plan their operations during the Second World War.This object was great fun to display as I had free reign to arrange it as I wished! No wonder the previous owner’s children…
