The Centenary of the End of the Great War in Cheltenham

Project Group: Rebecca Humphrey, Rhian James, Lily Lord, Bertie Lyman

Our group is looking at the centenary of the end of World War One and the effect on the local area in Cheltenham. After visiting the archives as a source of preliminary research we decided to divide the project into three separate areas.

After setting up a simple timeline outlining the events of the Great War, we are going to provide a case-study of a specific area in Cheltenham, allowing us to research the impact on a direct local area. As we already know, Cheltenham racecourse was converted into a military hospital, so we think that this might be an interesting area to study due to the massive change in purpose. However, we are also interested in studying the St Paul’s area, as this housed two schools as well as having a large residential population. The impact of the war on both of these separate areas would have been considerable and so we hope this will form an interesting section of our project.

We would like to look at the impact of the war on specific people. We have already completed research on the soldiers who fought in the war from both St Paul’s college and other schools, working with the university archives to aid our research. From this point, we have decided to choose 3 specific case-studies to research for our final piece, including not only a soldier from the school here, but perhaps someone who was not killed in battle as well. Mary Young was the only woman to be commemorated in the university memorial boards.

Finally, we have been researching memorials in Cheltenham. In addition to this, we have a specific interest in how exactly the end of the war was celebrated in the town. We are planning to combine both aspects of this commemoration of the end of the war to provide an overview of the legacy and impact of the war, both immediately and throughout time.

Through the research and presentation of each of these areas, we are hoping to provide a comprehensive and interesting overview of the impact of the Great War in Cheltenham. We are hoping that through studying specific areas, people and dates we can provide a good insight into the time whilst humanising the event and provoking emotion in anyone who reads our project findings.