“We Decided the Museum Would Be the Best Place for Them”: Veterans, Families and Mementos of the First World War

Abstract

Abstract:Although it is generally considered that there was relatively little interest in the First World War throughout the 1970s and 1980s in Britain, these decades constitute a key moment in time when the embodied memories of the war transitioned into the cultural memory we are familiar with today. This article examines the transmission of memories of the First World War from veterans and their families to museums. It uses the Durham Light Infantry Museum, a small regimental museum in the northeast of England, as a case study to examine who donated war-related objects and their reasons for doing so.