Voices From 1918

Photo:  Olive and Florence Harcourt at Beaucroft Red Cross Hospital, Colehill.  Olive Harcourt’s diary will be used in the Voices From 1918 project. The project is being produced by delivery partner organisation ScreenPLAY who will work with the Dorset History Centre, Priests House Museum and others to create a view of 1918 from a Dorset perspective Voices from 1918 will present the voices of men and women as they experience events in the final year of the war. It will be presented on a daily basis as a series of news, Twitter feeds and apps enabling people to receive stories of each day in 1918 direct to their phones, tablets and computers. Young people with a learning disability will spend a second day at Dorset History Centre with artists Sharon Hayden and Alastair Nisbet looking at how Voices from 1918 brings together stories from the archives and modern technology for a new audience. May Update from Alastair Nisbet:

We’ve spent some time searching the British Library catalogue for Marie Stopes material and will be going up to London for at least a couple of days getting them out - they include her diaries and a series of photographs by George Bernard Shaw which sound interesting.

We were in Bristol for a day with Joan Cocozza who has given us more material about Olive Harcourt.

Joan’s mother was Olive’s housekeeper and Olive because her guardian during the blitz when there was a real danger that her parents might be killed in the bombing.

She then spent half her time with her family and half living at Olive’s house in Clifton where Olive taught her music and the piano.

Our Portland quarryman James Sansom who has been a stretcher bearer with 230 Field Ambulance in Palestine for two and a half years, is finally on his way back to Europe - on a troop transport which has just left Alexandria, bound for Marseilles.

For two weeks his unit were resting near the Suez Canal, swimming in the canal every day. When they arrive in Marseilles on May 7th they will be cheered through the streets by thousands.

Mary Collier’s son Lord Robert Monkswell [home injured] has received a letter from his former driver, also injured but resting back from the front. The boys had a rough time "in the Cambrai lot” he tells his Lordship they were all “in the pink’ at the news that their CO Major Woodward had been awarded the DSO.

Our Voices blog will be up and running soon and will form an accumulating archive of the project.