Tag Archives: Learning

Remote volunteering – working with Keele University placement students

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Over the past year we’ve had the pleasure of working with staff at Keele University to provide placements for students from their School of Humanities.

The opportunity came about after working with Dominic Janes, Professor of Modern History at Keele, on the Laughter in the Long Twentieth Century exhibition in 2025, who put us in touch with his colleagues in the placement team. Our offer was advertised to students, along with many others, in the Winter term of 2025, with placements beginning in January 2026. We had applications from two students, Saleem and James, who would be working with us remotely during the entirety of their placement.

Whilst setting up and running remote volunteering can be challenging, we had had some experience over the last few years of working with students in this way, so felt that we would be in a good place to widen this offer out to students outside of Kent. As their placements required them to complete 70 and 100 hours of effort respectively, we decided we would split the role into three seperate tasks, to not only widen the students experience of the sorts of collections you might work with in an archive setting, but also to give them some task variation over their time with us.

Playbill, David Drummond Pantomime Collection [DDP/PB/BIRK/ARG/002]

I initially met with the students for a short interview in December, where we discussed their interest in the project and what they might bring to it. Then, after both agreeing to move forward with the placement, we met again in January to kick off the placement and to go through training and expectations. Regular catch ups where then scheduled throught the placement for us to all check in. The work was organised using Google Drive and Teams. The activities they worked on were:

The placements ran up unitl the end of May 2026. We are so grateful to both Saleem and James for the time and effort they have spent with us over the last few months. Here are some reflections from them…

From James:

Over the last five months, we have been cataloguing artefacts from three collections to make them available online via the university’s online catalogues. This will benefit the academic community, particularly those with an interest in local and theatrical history and politics, as well as the local community.

The Martin Rowson Collection documents over three decades of political and social activity across the United Kingdom. We listed almost 200 cartoons in this collection, which will be added to the British Cartoon Archive, one of the largest cartoon collections in the UK. The cartoons that we have been creating metadata for will be among the most significant nationally, since they are the work of Martin Rowson, cartoonist for The Guardian. His art style makes the caricatures appear amusing and satirical to the reader, whilst also educating them about the event from that day.

The David Drummond Collection is an extensive collection documenting the history of pantomime over 200 years through playbills and other materials. Through the work we have carried out, users will be able to search by pantomime title, location of each performance, as well as by actor/actress if they are looking for something specific.

The Winstanley Collection is an oral history collection consisting of a series of interviews conducted by Michael Winstanley with Kent residents in the 1970s, discussing life in Kent at the turn of the 20th century. In these recordings, they discuss their lives and how the local community has shaped them and others. This work involved editing transcripts and creating content summaries, which will make the collection more accessible and discoverable to users. This will be impactful to the local community, as some members may well be descended from the people interviewed. Therefore, this will allow them not only to learn about them but also to listen to them in their own words.

From Saleem:

How did I start?
Through a placement module at my university, I got the opportunity to apply to work with The University of Kent’s special collections and archives (UKSCA) on three of their collections. The collections included the Martin Rowson Guardian cartoons, David Drummond playbills and Michael Winstanley oral history collection. After reading the description of the tasks I had to complete I decided it would be an amazing fit for myself and after applying and interviewing, I got the job. I had 5 months to complete 75 hours’ worth of work online starting from January which was great news.

Martin Rowson Cartoons Collections
This collection was my favorite one to work on. The collection comprises many cartoons that Martin Rowson has drawn to be published in the Guardian newspaper in recent years. How politicians and scenarios are drawn out was something I found very funny. It made it an extremely enjoyable experience cataloguing them. It was also great as I could catch up on what was happening across those years, how people perceived these scenarios and how important they were.  All this combined made this collection one of my favorite ones to complete due to how fun the material I was working on was and the manner of the work I had to complete.

David Drummond Playbill Collection
This collection comprised of numerous playbills collected overtime by David Drummond from pantomimes. The playbills were from the 19th century to the 20th century from across the UK. I found this collection to be a very good insight into what the entertainment industry used to be like. The way they advertised and sold tickets to shows has completely changed and how they did it was very simple. It was also incredible to see what pantomimes are still going on to this day. Many of the shows have now been adapted over time but seeing how they originated was fascinating. It opened my eyes to what theatre used to be like and understanding that this used to be people’s primary form of entertainment made this collection feel more important to me since this was probably so important to everyone who went to these pantomimes.

Michael Winstanley Oral History Collection
This collection was very fascinating to me. It comprises of transcriptions of different interviews Michael Winstanley carried out with people who lived in Kent during the turn of the 20th century. He asked these people about different aspects of their lives, even the menial parts such as what they primarily used to eat and drink, school life and much more. It opened my eyes to what people had to experience and to know that it came from a person who grew up living this way and knew nothing else except for that helped me understand how far humanity has come in less than a century. The lack of options they had would only cover 10% of the options we have available to use now. It is also fascinating as we could be the ones being interviewed for someone in the future to look at and think about how people could live like this.

To Conclude
This opportunity has been amazing. With so much history to look back on and realizing what each collection represents, it makes me wonder what else there is about the past that we could catalogue so that we can better understand the people who came before us. With how much knowledge and enrichment I have gained from working on these collections, I hope to gain more from finding different aspects of people’s lives from the past to catalogue.

 

Beyond the trenches

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On 11 November 2014, Armistice Day, Special Collections & Archives was involved in an outreach event which explored the themes of the First World War through the theatre of the time, going beyond the trenches to discover how theatre can tell us more about the past. Starting off with the sources (as we always do), we then had a great opportunity to explore the theory and get to see some World War One plays of various kinds. This event was a new and exciting opportunity for us to talk to researchers, from school age to retirees, interested in all kinds of disciplines.

The event’s leader, Dr. Helen Brooks, tells us more:

“It is easy to get bogged down (excuse the pun) in the Battles of Trench Warfare, but now I see that plays of the time are an insight into the culture of the time, which to me is equally as important in understanding the reasoning behind the Great War. This new insight has opened up a whole new perspective”.

Lindsay Kennett, who wrote these words in an email to me last week, was just one of the 30 plus participants who took part in our public study day on First World War theatre, on Tuesday, 11 November at the Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury. The aim of the day was to raise public awareness about how looking at theatre can shed new light on ideas about, and responses to the war: for Lindsay and the many other participants who echoed her sentiments in their feedback, it was clearly a great success.

SONY DSC Over the course of the day we got stuck into a diverse range of activities, all of which were facilitated ably by a team of fantastic student, and ex-student helpers from the Drama Department in the School of Arts – Rebecca O’Brien, Rebecca Sharp, Kinga Krol, and Charlotte Merrikin. Beginning with a brilliant workshop run by Jane Gallagher, from Special Collections at the Templeman, participants had a chance to get ‘hands on’ with sources from Special Collection’s archives (including newspaper clippings, scripts, programs and playbills) and to interrogate them in order to answer questions such as ‘how did the theatre “do its bit” for the war effort?’, SONY DSC‘what impact did the war have on the theatre industry?’, ‘in what different ways was the theme of war treated in performance?’, and ‘how did audiences change during the war?’. This last question then led us into Professor Viv Gardner’s (University of Manchester) stimulating talk about audiences during the war. Reminding us that audiences were made up of diverse groups and that their responses changed depending on the context of the performance, Viv also drew on some moving stories about individual spectators which brought to life the experience of theatre-going during the war.

After a delicious lunch, courtesy of the Marlowe, and an opportunity to chat to each other about our diverse interests and backgrounds (participants included students from the Langtons schools, members of the Western Front Association, and local historians, to name but a few) the afternoon began with rehearsed readings of three First World War one-act plays: The Devil’s Business by J. Fenner Brockway (1914); God’s Outcasts by J. Hartley Manners (1919); andSONY DSC A Well Remembered Voice by J.M. Barrie (1918). It was quite something to see these plays brought to life, the first two quite probably for the first time ever. The actors, including three current Drama students, Zach Wilson (PhD) , Alexander Sullivan, and Louise Hoare, all did an excellent job, especially as the plays were quite distinct in tone and style, and as the actors had only had two and a half days rehearsal in total. After a stimulating discussion about the plays, with some excellent insights from audience members, the day was then rounded off nicely with a thoughtful talk by Dr Andrew Maunder (Reader at University of Hertfordshire) about his own experience of staging ‘lost’ WW1 plays, and in particular A Well Remembered Voice.

This wasn’t the end though! After just a few hours break – during which it was exciting to see our pop-up exhibition on WW1 theatre in the Foyer attracting a lot of attention from audiences waiting to see the RSC – many of us were back at the Marlowe for the evening rehearsed readings. It was great to see an almost entirely SONY DSCnew audience for this. As well as a number of Kent students people came from as far as Dover to join us for this exciting performance. Three of the one-act plays we shared were the same as in the afternoon (although the performances were quite different in energy, something the actors reflected on in the questions afterwards) and we also added an unpublished short play about the Belgian experience during the war entitled There was a King in Flanders (1915) by John G. Brandon. With these four pieces we therefore covered not only the chronological breadth of the war but also a number of different responses to this world event. From The Devil’s Business (1914), a biting satire on the arms trade and its place in fuelling conflict, which was banned in London during the war; to There was a King in Flanders (1915) with its focus on a dying Belgian soldier; and finally to God’s Outcasts (1919) and A Well Remembered Voice (1918) both of which offer sharply different responses towards grief, the plays as a whole offered new insights into the diverse ways in which theatre treated the war between 1914 and 1918. And with insightful comments and an enthusiastic response from the audience, it seems there’s certainly potential to hold similar events in the future.

SONY DSC If you’d like to find out more about Theatre of the First World War, contact Dr Helen Brooks at h.e.m.brooks@kent.ac.uk. Our pop-up exhibition on Theatre of the First World War is available for free loan to theatres, schools and other public institutions. If you would like to host this exhibition simply get in touch with gateways@kent.ac.uk. There is no charge for hosting or delivery.

This study day was one of a series of events being run by Gateways to the First World War, an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded centre for public engagement with the First World War. To find out more about Gateways and how we can help you with activities, advice and expertise, visit www.gatewaysfww.org.uk.

With thanks to Leila Sangtabi for provision of photographs.