Selecting Stories

When thinking about ‘Why Stay Silent ?’ we decided we wanted to feature 25 different people’s stories from relatives who remember people, to those people that have been remembered. To find the 25 chosen stories, we wrote a project brief to decide on our target audience, key messages and the themes we wanted to include. 

We wanted to make sure we had a mixture of stories from different time periods, starting from the 19^th Century (before the First World War) and going up to the present day.  We knew, for example, that we wanted to feature repatriations of Marines today and Wootton Bassett, as well as the new Royal Marines Memorial Wall at the Commando Training Centre, Lympstone. We also knew we wanted to include as many physical objects from the Museum collections as possible.

Once we had a rough list of topics and themes, we compiled a list from the Museum’s collections team’s own knowledge of the collections, our collections management software and by going through photographs boxed in categories including ‘memorial’.  

It meant that we made links across the collections. For example Lt Alec Talbot Turner, one of the featured people, was posthumously awarded an Albert Medal for jumping overboard to save Sgt Young in 1939. Both Sgt Young and Lt Turner were never seen again. In the museum collection we have photographs of the memorial service, tenor drums dedicated in his name, a memorial plaque which used to hang in St Andrews Church, Eastney and his medal group. This perfectly illustrated the different ways that he was remembered by his Royal Marine colleagues. 

Once we had identified the chosen stories, we than had to do as much research as possible about them. This included contacting people that knew them, reading books on the subject and accounts from the time, and in some cases contacting outside institutions such as documentary makers and other archives/museums.

Advertising Why Stay Silent?

Before we started designing how the exhibition would look, we got design agency Starfish to come up a poster and leaflet campaign. Staying with the personal story theme, we took photos of a serving Royal Marine and one of the relatives Ruth who is the niece of one of featured stories Leslie Cannons, who died when HMS Barham sank in 1941.

On the day of the photo shoot, I headed over to Starfish, where they had created an intimate photography studio. The photo shoots needed to capture the emotion of the stories and the subject, so whilst the photographer was shooting he got Ruth to tell her memories her uncle Leslie and how his death had affected his family.

On the way back to the Museum, I stopped off with Ruth to find her uncle Leslie’s name on the Portsmouth Naval Memorial.

We were really pleased when the designs came back and we now have a great leaflet and poster to advertise the exhibition. Let us know what you think of the poster! 

The run up to 6 week countdown

Why Stay Silent? Is all about personal stories about acts of remembrance, which meant my starting point for the exhibition was finding those stories. I started by brainstorming with my colleagues in the curatorial department to identify around 30 people who had stories covering all different aspects of remembrance and memorials.

With the people identified, I then had to research the topic, which meant contacting either the featured people or their relatives, going through our archival material and watching documentaries where our featured people had been interviewed.  This gave me a pretty good idea of how the exhibition content would work together.

When we create temporary exhibitions, one of the curatorial staff members project manages it, but they are a team effort. It requires all the curatorial staff to look through their areas of the collections; photographs, paintings, archives and artefacts. We meet with the marketing department to discuss how and where the exhibition will be marketed. We also meet with the estates department to discuss the removal of the old exhibition and installation of the new one. We let them know then too if we have any special requirements for the new exhibition, like sets built or new painting jobs.

Welcome to our new behind the scenes blog!

For the next six weeks, the assistant curator Anna Lebbell will be blogging about how we put together temporary exhibitions in the lead up to the opening of our newest exhibition, Why Stay Silent?

The exhibition is about how and why people are remembered; it uses 20 Royal Marines stories to explore the topic. The stories range from a Royal Marine Artillery Gunner who died and was buried on an Arctic exploration in 1876 to the parents of Royal Marines talking about the loss of their son in Afghanistan.