How You Can Help Build a Second World War Air-Raid Shelter At SOFO we tell stories of everyone affected by war in the county of Oxfordshire; from the soldier on the front line to ordinary families on the home front. Our small but dedicated team of staff and volunteers work hard to tell these stories of conflict and county in many different ways, including museum displays and learning sessions. Our latest…
Refugee Week 14-20 June 2021 ‘Gunner Gerin: Refugee and Liberator’ How did a Jewish Polish refugee come to be one of the liberators of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945? A brief mention in a soldier’s war-time diary led Harry Staff, a volunteer researcher with the Soldiers of Oxfordshire Museum, to track down a remarkable story. Gunner Henry Gerin was formerly Henryk Bochynski. Born 1905 in Poland he arrived in…
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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…
Operation Dynamo – 80 years ago in May Shortly after the first Blitzkreig strike on 10 May 1940, the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was in disorganised withdrawal before the tide of German Panzers, and Operation Dynamo jolted into action. A 60 mile escape corridor was organised to buy time for the BEF to evacuate from Dunkirk. The 1st Buckinghamshire Battalion and the 4th Battalion, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, the…
OBLI:5356 – unattributed print of an Officer of the 52nd Foot c.1815
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…
