Remembrance Day…

On Tuesday 11th November we went to A Remembrance Day Special talk at the Westcott History Group.

The speaker was Andrew Tatham, who explained how a photograph of the officers of the 8th Royal Berkshire Regiment, taken on Salisbury Plain in July 1915, prompted a research project that focused on the First World War and those who fought in it.

He has a website called http://www.groupphoto.co.uk/ where he details what he has been doing and some of the information he has found out.

‘I have a group photograph of the officers of the 8th Royal Berkshire Regiment taken at their training camp on Salisbury Plain in July 1915. My aim when I started was to explore who those officers were - where they had come from, what happened to them, and what their families are doing now. So often wars are seen in isolation from the rest of history - well, I want to put the First World War in the context of the stories of these men and their families. One way that I have explored this is in the production of an Animated Film that shows all of their family trees growing over 136 years, mixed in with photos of their families and historical time markers, with contemporary music, and with the cycles of the moon and the seasons.

Andrew Tatham’

It was a very interesting and moving story that kept us entertained and made us think.