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A MOVEMENT that started in mainland Europe, was piloted in 1992 by local historian Lesley Burton and the Gosport Society has mushroomed nationally and led ultimately to the launch in Winchester of a new organization, the Hampshire History Trust (HHT). Spearheaded by Nicky Gottlieb and Becky Brown, it started five years ago as the Winchester Heritage Open Day (actually growing to 10 days), which was so successful that it has now triggered a much more ambitious plan to create a county-wide, history-based organization. HODs originally began by offering free visits to places that people might not normally visit – such as museums and galleries – and others that are not normally open. The aim was to showcase and present new ideas to communities, so, anyone could be a ‘tourist for a day’. Since then, it has developed into much more, with guided walks and visits, talks, exhibitions, workshops, and children’s activities.
IN the last years of WWI so many officers had been killed or injured that the Army faced a crisis of command. And many of the dead were the products of public schools. More than 500 of the nearly 2,500 former pupils of Winchester College who served their country lost their lives (www.winchestercollegeatwar.com). The story nationwide is told in Public Schools in the Great War by Anthony Seldon and David Walsh, who challenge such productions as the 1960s Oh! What a Lovely War and the 1980s TV series Blackadder Goes Forth. In a bid to set historical scholarship against popular entertainment, they point to Journey’s End by R.C. Sherriff, a play based on personal experience on the front line. Whatever the reality, there was definitely a shortage of officers in the later years of the war, which required taking other ranks ‘from the trenches’.
NETFLIX’S star-studded film The Dig highlights the exciting discovery of a great Saxon treasure at Sutton Hoo in 1939. A few years earlier in 1932 Winchester had its own moment of excitement when excavation at Oliver s Battery unearthed one of Hampshire s finest Dark Age treasures, the Winchester hanging bowl. For many years it was held by the British Museum, but is now in the City Museum, Winchester. The full story of its discovery by a local archaeologist can be googled and read in a Hampshire Field Club journal, because virtually all its papers are now online. The bowl was found in the grave of a young man buried with a javelin and hunting sword and is decorated with red spirals and fittings in the form of aquatic birds. There are counterparts in seventh century Irish manuscripts. The archaeologist, W.J. Andrew, must have been delighted, but complained that the fabulous discovery has “almost completely obscured the original purpose of [the] tentative excavations”!