Expert’s Choice
Gillian Mawson, author of Britain’s Wartime Evacuees (Frontline, 2016)
I have a passion for oral history, having interviewed hundreds of evacuees who spent the war years in Britain plus those who lived under occupation. Included in this number are children and adults who came to England from the Channel Islands and Gibraltar in 1940. Indeed, about 17,000 Guernsey evacuees fled their homes just days before Germany occupied the Channel Islands. I have published four books on the British Home Front, organised commemorative events and contributed towards several documentaries.
One of my favourite websites is that of the Second World War Experience Centre ( warexperience.org). The centre, which is based in Otley, West Yorkshire, is a charity that collects and preserves the personal testimony of men, women and children who lived through the Second World War. The centre’s archive holds recorded interviews, letters, diaries, memoirs, photographs and other memorabilia of more than 10,000 wartime ‘lives’. These unique first-hand experiences serve to promote education, and inform present and future generations
The website gives an overview of the archive’s collections: the War at Sea; the War in the Air; the War on the Land; the Civilian’s War; and Clandestine Forces, which covers the secret intelligence work carried out by agencies such as the Special Operations Executive (SOE). Key aspects are highlighted with associated life stories giving first-hand accounts. The collection is now being digitised, and an online catalogue of the archive will be available soon. Back issues of the centre’s journal Everyone’s War can be purchased via the website, both in print and digitally, and some of its articles can be read for free online.