Cumbria’s Museum of Military Life in Carlisle worked with schools either side of the Scottish-English border on projects inspired by Gallipoli. Read an evaluation report here.

Gallipoli Exhibition

As part of the centenary of the Gallipoli Campaign, the museum set up a temporary exhibition and asked four local young people – Sean Poole, Kirsten Blackwood, Caroline Angus and Tom Skelhorne – to research and produce this.  Three of them talk about the project here:

Their dedicated work involved exploring the Museum’s archives, working with historic items from the Museum collection, and learning how to put together this centenary exhibition. Throughout this process they developed their own skills – research, writing text, display techniques, working as a team and finding out how a Museum operates.

Caroline said “Working at the museum has been really great as it’s allowed me to get my first experience working with a museum’s collections and artefacts, which was really good fun.”

Tom believed that “School does teach us about certain aspects of history and WW1, but they only cover a tiny percentage of what happened. They don’t delve into the individual stories, the experiences. This has been an opportunity to further my knowledge and a sense of what I feel needs to be understood about the past.”

The exhibition explores the experiences of Border Regiment soldiers that went to Gallipoli through artefacts and images, as well as a broad overview of this this infamous campaign.

Gretna Primary School: The Great Rail Disaster

In another project, children in Gretna produced a drama presentation about the Quintinshill rail disaster, which took place near the school on 22nd May 1915.  Here is a video of the project.  Click here for the poem read by the children in the video.

International art project

As part of the International Çanakkale Children’s Biennial, the museum set up a holiday workshop making finger puppets.  Here are some of the results (photos: Cumbria’s Museum of Military Life).