Evening Telegraph (First Edition)
Dundee’s Great War Project coming to a close after five years
I T was i n 2011 t hat Dr Billy Kenefick and Dr Derek Pat r ick conceived the idea of the Great War Dundee Commemorative Project.
Formed as a partnership with a number of l ocal cultural, educational and commercial organisations, the project was established to commemorate the First World War and its impact on Dundee.
Now with the project coming to an end, the chairman of Great War Dundee, Dr Kenefick (pictured), has reflected on the project’s five-year journey.
Speaking about its creation, the retired senior lecturer at the university said: “It seemed to me that everybody was trying to find some way of commemorating the war as it was coming up to 2014.
“We looked, we talked to a few people across Scotland and realised we had enough within the city of Dundee to tell a story.
“In telling the story of the city, we’d be telling one element of that story for Scotland as a whole.”
With the assistance of Matthew Jarron, curator of the university’s museum collections and secretary of the Abertay Historical Society, the group directed their efforts towards raising funds to move the project forward.
After applying for Heritage Lottery Funding, they received £77,000 just in time for their official August 2014 launch.
Their commitment to creating a dialogue around the relationship between the First World War and the people of Dundee paid off.
The city became the centre national commemoration of the Battle of
Loos after its “hugely successful” 100th anniversary event, with the Scottish
Government injecting £20,000 of funding into the project.
Of all the fascinating stories Dr Kenefick has encountered during his tenure, one specific tale stands out for him.
“One of the highlights for me was when we opened the post office time capsule,” he said. “It featured a collection of letters, advertisements and posters. Despite being lost, we suddenly recovered it a couple of years before the anniversary of the war.
“We opened that in the presence of the lord provost, in the City Chambers.”
The memorial was created by post office workers in 1921 and was tracked down, nearly 100 years later, by 56-year-old amateur historian Janice Kennedy as she researched her family history.
“There was a
particularly poignant letter written by a woman called Annie Lamont,” Dr Kenefick said.
“She was talking about what she had been through, from a woman’s perspective, celebrating the fact women were getting the vote and how she was desperate to use that vote to get Winston Churchill out of power.”
Looking towards the future, Dr Kenefick is hopeful the project and the work that it does will still have a place, in some form.
He said: “We’d like to have one last meeting with the partnership group, saying a fond and official farewell to our project leader Fiona Sinclair.
“We’ve got enough money to keep the website going for a while.
“You could say this is the beginning of preparations for the next anniversary.
“I’ve been involved with this for a long time so I’ll be quite happy to step back and let someone else decide where it can go.”