Professor Paul Gough

Contested Objects: Material Memories of the Great War
Edited by Nicholas J. Saunders, Paul Cornish, ISBN: 978-0-415-45070-6 Published by Routledge, 3rd August 2009, Pages: 316

Contested Objects breaks new ground in the interdisciplinary study of material culture. Its focus is on the rich and varied legacy of objects from the First World War as the global conflict that defined the twentieth century. From the iconic German steel helmet to practice trenches on Salisbury Plain, and from the ‘Dazzle Ship’ phenomenon through medal-wearing, diary-writing, trophy collecting, the market in war souvenirs and the evocative reworking of European objects by African soldiers, this book presents a dazzling array of hitherto unseen worlds of the Great War.
The innovative and multidisciplinary approach adopted here follows the lead established by Nicholas J. Saunders’ Matters of Conflict (Routledge 2004), and extends its geographical coverage to embrace a truly international perspective. Australia, Africa, Italy, Germany, France, Belgium and Britain are all represented by a cross-disciplinary group of scholars working in archaeology, anthropology, cultural history, art history, museology, and cultural heritage. The result is a volume that resonates with richly documented and theoretically informed case studies that illustrate how the experiences of war can be embodied in and represented by an endless variety of artefacts, whose ‘social lives’ have endured for almost a century and that continue to shape our perceptions of an increasingly dangerous world.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1. ‘Just a boyish habit’ …? British and Commonwealth war trophies in the First World War, Paul Cornish (Imperial War Museum) 2. Shaping matter, meaning and mentalities: The German steel helmet from artefact to afterlife, Fabio Gygi (University College London) 3. The Great War ‘Trench Club’: Typology, use and cultural meaning, Daniel Phillips (University College London) 4. The Journey Back: On the nature of donations to the In Flanders Fields Museum, Dominiek Dendooven (In Flanders Fields Museum, Ypres, Belgium) Chapter 5. ‘Brothers in Arms’ – Masonic artefacts of the First World War and its aftermath, Mark Dennis (Library and Museum of Freemasonry, London) 6. Subversive material: African embodiments of modern war, Richard Waller (Bucknell University, USA) 7. Medals, memory and meaning: Symbolism and cultural significance of Great War medals, Matthew Richardson (Manx National Heritage) 8. Distinguishing the uniform: British military heraldry and group identity, Alan Jeffreys (Imperial War Museum) 9. The Consumer Sphinx: From French trench to Parisian market, Gulya Isyanova (University College London) 10. ‘The Returned Soldiers bug’: making the Shrine of Remembrance, Melbourne, Catherine Moriarty (University of Brighton) 11. Exploring a language of grief in First World War headstone inscriptions, Sonia Batten (University of Birmingham) 12. ‘P’raps I shall see you…’: Recognition of loved ones in non-fiction film of the First World War, Roger Smither (Imperial War Museum) 13. ‘A Few Broad Stripes’: Perception, Deception and the ‘Dazzle Ship’ Phenomenon of WWI. Jonathan Black (Kingston University) 14. Message and materiality in Mesopotamia, 1916-17: my grandfather’s diary, social commemoration and the experience of war, John Schofield (English Heritage) Chapter 15. Postcards from the past: War, landscape, and place in Argonne, France, Paola Filippucci (Cambridge University) 16. ‘Calculating the future’: panoramic sketching, reconnaissance drawing and the material trace of war. Paul Gough (University of the West of England) 17. Archaeology of the Great War: The Flemish experience, Marc Dewilde (Institute for Archaeological Heritage, Flanders, Belgium) and Nicholas J. Saunders (University College London) Chapter 18. ‘Slowly our ghosts drag home’: Human remains from the Heidenkopf, Serre, Somme, France, Martin Brown (MOD) 19. Great War Archaeology on the glaciers of the Alps, Marco Balbi (Societa Storica per La Guerra Bianca, Italy) 20. Training for trench warfare: The archaeological evidence from Salisbury Plain, Graham Brown and David Field (English Heritage)

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Planting peace: the Greater London Council and the community gardens of central London,
International Journal of Heritage Studies, January 2007, pp.20-40 Volume: 13 (1)
ISSN: 14703610 DOI 10.1080/13527250601010844

Paul Gough's investigations into the iconography and rhetoric of peace, peace-keeping and pacifism has been developed through fieldwork and site visits in Canada, Turkey, Singapore and northern Europe. Drawing on international parallels, this paper examines in detail two community gardens in central London, which owe their origins to radical agendas set within the political climate of the Cold War of the 1980s, and were intended as contributions to world peace, multi-lateral disarmament, and global accord. Twenty years after their creation, Gough explores their current condition and examines their value as sites of political value and heritage. The paper links with wider research being conducted into militarized landscapes, raising questions over the potency of the iconography of peace and its relationship to the visual rhetoric of war.

The research project was supported by an AHRC Grant, 2005, Places of Peace. A project website contains essays, typologies, and a gallery of images relating to peace gardens in north, central and south London, Bristol, and Greenham, near Newbury. The photographs offer the first appreciation of the peace gardens of central London. Initial findings were disseminated in the papers 'Garden of gratitude': the National Memorial Arboretum and strategic 'remembering' given as part of People and their Pasts. International Public History Conference, at Ruskin College, Oxford 16 - 17 September 2005; and 'Peace in Ruins - the value of mementoes, temporary shrines and floral tributes as markers of a public sphere' given at the conference: Public Sphere: Between Contestation and Reconciliation, held at the American University of Armenia, Yerevan, 25 - 27 October 2005.

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Stanley Spencer: Journey to Burghclere
Sansom and Company, 204 pages, ISBN: 1 904537 46 4

  

Other relevant details: As one of Britain's most eminent 20th century painters Stanley Spencer's work has often been overshadowed by his chaotic and colourful private life. This is the first book since Richard Carline's Stanley Spencer at War (1978) to focus entirely on the painter's service as an orderly, soldier, and patient in the First World War, and to critically evaluate his time in Bristol, the Balkans and Burghclere between 1915-1932. Drawing on Spencer's letters, illustrations and paintings, and interviews with relatives, curators and others who knew him, Gough examines Spencer's journey from cosseted family life, through the drudgery of a war hospital and the malarial battlefields of the Macedonian campaign, to the commission for the Sandham Memorial Chapel in Burghclere.

Through a close reading of contemporary texts and artwork, the book locates Spencer's work as a key component of the commemorative era after the Great War, situating Spencer's paintings of resurrection as a response to the complex bureaucracies of commemoration and a visual re-imagining of the exhumations and burials that were then taking place in battlefields across Europe. Spencer's work is examined in the context of other architects, sculptors and soldier-artists of the period, but is also positioned within the discourses of haunting and memory construction. A number of the themes in the book were aired through several conference papers: 'Resurrection: reviving the dead in the work of Stanley Spencer, Otto Dix and Jeff Wall' Spaces, Haunting, Discourse conference. Karlstad University, Sweden (15-18 June 2006); 'Heroic death: models and counter models', WAPACC conference, USA (28-30 October 2006).

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'Planting Peace: The Greater London Council and the Community Gardens of Central London'
International Journal of Heritage Studies Routledge
ISSN 1352-7258 Issue Volume 13, Number 1/January 2007 Pages 22-40

'Peace' has not lent itself easily to emblematic or mnemonic forms of representation. In Europe's furnished urban landscapes of the 19th century peace was often personified in female allegorical form. She can be seen in many of the sculpted memorials that commemorate distant battles fought on the edges of Empire. Invariably, however, the figure of 'Peace' had a more modest role in the allegory of commemoration than that of 'Victory' or 'Triumph'. As an ideal, peace and pacifism is more often regarded as a process, a long-term goal that cannot be captured in single static form. To this end, the promotion of peace has most often been realised through intervention, occupation, and fluid, temporal forms such as campaigns, marches, songs, dances and other extended programmes. Peace has also been promoted through slow, evolutionary forms such as designed landscapes, parks and gardens.

Drawing on international parallels, this paper examines in detail two community gardens in central London. Each owes its origins to radical local agendas set within the political climate of the Cold War of the 1980s, but both were born out of grand visions for world peace, multilateral disarmament, and global accord. Twenty years after their creation, the author explores their current condition and examines their value as sites of political value and heritage.

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