Radical histories, emotional legacies, and everywhere in between? Exploring everyday responses to the traumas of war in Blood Swept Lands & Seas of Red. (2014)

ABSTRACT

War commemoration in the UK has become spectacular, performative, and mediatised, manifesting new scales of visual power. This article assesses this ‘visual turn’ via an analysis of Blood Swept Lands & Seas of Red (BSL&SR) – an installation of 888,246 ceramic poppies, each representing a British and Colonial service fatality of the First World War, ‘planted’ in the Tower of London’s moat to mark the First World War Centenary (FWWC). Celebrated as a major success by FWWC officials, and attracting extraordinary public acclaim, academic analyses found that BSL&SR encouraged ‘unthinking’ re-circulation of ‘tropes’ about the war, which inhibited pluralism and critical consideration of the UK’s history of armed intervention. This article traces and explores the range, diversity, and nuances of ‘everyday’ public responses to the installation, drawing on a wealth of new information accessed through embedded research within Historic Royal Palaces (HRP). In doing so, it prompts reflection and debate about future state-supported cultural programmes and the role of heritage therein.

KEYWORDS:

• Heritage
• First World War Centenary
• mourning
• commemorative atmospheres
• national identity

Acknowledgments

The work of HRP Transcription Volunteers, a network created under LWF in 2019, was fundamental to the research upon which this article was based. The author thanks Michaela Goldberg, Linda Parker, Susan Cullen, Wendy Bedborough, Mairi Allen and Henrietta Grant for contributing to this project and for their support during lockdown. The author also thanks Dr Megan Gooch, the Principal Investigator of Lest We Forget, for her mentorship, generosity and encouragement, as well as her valuable feedback on early drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This article does not negate the role of the ceramic artist (Paul Cummins) and designer (Tom Piper) whose expertise and inspiration made BSL&SR. The Artist is widely seen as the central force in memorial making and both Cummins and Piper’s perspectives have been covered extensively in their own publication (2018) and media coverage. The organisational vantage point is also crucial, however, as HRP contractually and practically retained control over the interpretative environment (e.g. decisions what the installation meant through design choices or via communications, such as interpretation boards, advertising, emails, press releases), both onsite and online.

2. A sample of these (418) were accessioned into HRP’s Collection. HRP. LWF 38. Poppies Ephemera.

3. The Tower is associated with imprisonment and state-sanctioned murder, and its core myths involve stories of innocence and youth. Most famously, the ‘Princes in the Tower’, two young heirs to the throne, mysteriously disappeared whilst kept in the Tower under the ‘care’ of their uncle Richard III in the 15^th century. Two wives of King Henry VIII, the Queens Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, who were beheaded in the 16th century on charges of treason, are also considered by many to be innocent of the charges against them, either by dint of youth or lack of evidence.

4. BSL&SR represented part of a longer-term expansion of ideas of authenticity in HRP’s heritage work: a move from a site specific ‘history where it happened’ narrative approach to a diffused notion of authenticity based on thematic or period relevance.

5. As well as housing the Royal Armouries and Fusiliers Museum, the Tower is also a locus for recruitment and daily operations, in the deployment of Ceremonial Guards. Its institutional staff have military backgrounds, as do some Security personel.

6. Thanks to Dr Megan Gooch for sharing findings from her research of the Memorial Mosaic.

7. The inbox for the [email protected] account was downloaded onto a spreadsheet, anonymised, and coded for participation and keywords via a distance reading.

8. This included the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, and cabinet ministers (Defence Secretary), as well visits of the Vice-President of the USA, Prime Minister of Singapore, members of the High Commission of Canada and Australia. The Queen’s visit in October 2014 attracted considerable attention, although this was part of an already scheduled visit.

9. Tower Hill study data recorded 133 people out of 171 surveyed specifying that they were coming to see the poppies. The study acknowledged that language barriers might have affected this result.

10. At the end of the installation, there was considerable public pressure to keep BSL&SR (a temporary installation) at the Tower. Instead, two of its sculptures (the Wave and Weeping Window) were bought by the Backstage Trust and Clore Duffield Foundation and given to 14–18 NOW – the arts consortium that oversaw the main FWWC arts productions. The ‘Poppies Tour’ visited 19 heritage locations across the UK and were visited by an estimated 4.6 million people. The sculptures were passed to the Imperial War Museum. https://www.wherearethepoppiesnow.org.uk/poppy-tour/.

11. HRP’s volunteering programme experienced a significant boost after BSL&SR.

12. I did not seek confirmation of whether Blair had volunteered. HRP staff had no record of the former Prime Minister in the moat, but also confirmed that many MPs and celebrities took part incognito. The volunteer was certain it was Blair. Her evidence here testifies to the Tower’s sensed geopolitics in 2014.

13. The 2003 invasion of Iraq was predicated on intelligence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. These claims were investigated in the Chilcott Inquiry, 2009–2011, and testimony indicated that the evidence was highly exaggerated. e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/may/12/iraq-dossier-case-for-war.

14. Twitter data #TowerPoppies (95,183 tweets), LWF 52. Our analysis shows c.78% were retweets.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [AH/R006652/1].

Notes on contributors

Eleanor O’Keeffe

Eleanor O’Keeffe’s academic research has focused on the intersections between war, culture, and society. Her PhD examined rituals of remembrance in British localities after 1918, exploring the intimate relationship between remembering and (re)mobilisation through its focus on military communities. Between 2018 and 2020, she worked as an embedded researcher at Historic Royal Palaces, unravelling heritage making and memorialisation in the 2014 installation Blood Swept Lands & Seas of Red. Since 2020, Eleanor’s work has expanded to encompass culture’s role in managing societal experiences of shock change, including the COVID-19 pandemic and digital innovation.