Projects and Exhibitions
The Rifles and Spades Project
Leominster Museum Trust was delighted to announce in May 2014 that it had been awarded £ 8,900 from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) for an exciting project, ‘Rifles & Spades – Leominster in the Great War’.
Over the course of the year to May 2015, the project set out to explore in several different ways what the town was like in 1914, and how the effects of the First World War changed it forever.
Commenting on the award at the time, Deborah Jarman, Leominster Museum’s Voluntary Education and Outreach Officer, said: “We are thrilled to have received the support of the Heritage Lottery Fund for Leominster’s commemoration of the outbreak of the First World War. We want to encourage as many people as possible, young and old, to join in our voyage of discovery.”
The Rifles and Spades Project
The main elements of the project
- Three Open Days at the Museum between June and November 2014, which aimed to draw on Leominster families’ stories and memorabilia to complement the Museum’s existing First World War exhibits.
- Three free talks: one on the records to use to research family history associated with the Great War, and the other two by a noted local historian. She spoke first about the origins of ‘The Supreme Sacrifice’, the famous remembrance hymn written in Herefordshire, and secondly about the Arkwright family and the War.
- A major community commemoration event at Leominster Priory on 6th September 2014 entitled Children of the Stream and the Field.
- An exhibition entitled Our Story, which ran in Leominster Library during October and November 2014, and toured Leominster and a number of surrounding villages over the winter of 2014/2015. (The exhibition was revived in 2018, in Leominster and at Hereford Cathedral.) This made use of research in historic sources conducted by volunteers, which sought to uncover more about the impact of the war on the town and its people, together with some additional material brought in by the public at the Open Days.
- The creation of an education pack containing photographs of First World War items from the Museum’s collection, and copies of photographs taken by Thomas Henry Winterbourn, a Leominster photographer, in the Great War period. These are accompanied by activity sheets and a booklet of Teacher’s Notes.
- Concurrently, with separate funding, Leominster Museum republished, in facsimile, the 1919 commemorative booklet ‘Leominster and District in the Great War’ published originally by Leominster Printing Press.
