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 19th 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.
