These two Memorial Death Plaques or ‘Death Coins’ from WW1 were given to the families of George Sloan Brown and Alexander Cumming for their sacrifices during the First World War.
It was in October 1916 that the British Government set up a committee for the idea of a commemorative plaque that could be given to the next of kin for those men and women whose deaths were caused by the First World War from 1914-1918. The first a family would know of the death of a family member was the arrival of a telegram from the War Office. This would then be followed by the First World War Death Plaque and any medals the serviceman would have earned serving his country.
Production of the plaques, which was supposed to be financed by German reparation money, began in 1919 with approximately 1,150,000 issued. They commemorated those who fell between 4th August, 1914 and 10th January, 1920 for home, Western Europe and the Dominions whilst the final date for the other theatres of war or those who died of attributable causes was April 30th 1920.
The next of kin of the 306 British and Commonwealth military personnel who were executed following a Court Martial did not receive a memorial plaque.
When HM Factory Gretna was built in WW1 they needed a place to house all of their workers, they came up with the idea to build two new townships near the Factory site. These two townships were Eastriggs and Gretna, many houses and hostels were built to house all of the workers during WW1 some of which you can see in the photo below of Dunedin Road in Eastriggs.
The photo below shows the temporary wooden huts which were eventually converted into proper houses using brick after the war built in Gretna along with some of the permanent hostel buildings which have now been converted into houses.
Below is a photo of the girls reading room which would be used some of the 12,000 female workers who worked at HM Factory Gretna during their spare time. The interior looks very nice but some reports we have of girls who worked at the Factory say that it was very cold inside during the winter as there was no heating.
This WW1 Trench Art from the Museums store shows what soldiers could create with used objects while they were stuck in the trenches.
The first item is an Ash Tray which has been made from the bottom of a shell. As you can see some of the pieces of the shell have been melted and folded outwards to fit cigarettes in them.
The next item is what we think is a lamp or heater. But could also possible be another ash tray looking at the design.
Trench art is any decorative item made by soldiers, prisoners of war or civilians where the manufacture was directly linked to armed conflict or its consequences. It offers an insight into not only their feelings and emotions about the war, but also their surroundings and the materials they had available to them.
Not limited to the World Wars, the history of Trench Art spans conflicts from the Napoleonic Wars to the present day. Although the practice flourished during World War One, the term ‘trench art’ is also used to describe souvenirs manufactured by service personnel during World War Two. Some items manufactured by soldiers, prisoners of war or civilians during earlier conflicts have been retrospectively described as trench art.
The Devils Porridge Museum Podcast has been created as part of an inter-generational oral history project. The project is now available for you to listen to online.
Through conversations and interviews, our volunteers and others from the local community will be sharing their personal stories and memories with The Devils Porridge Podcast Team.
In this weeks podcast we talked to David Dutton about Oswald Mosely and fascism in South West Scotland. David was meant to give a talk at the Museum about this subject but it was cancelled due to COVID-19 so we decided to get him on the podcast to tell his story instead!
At least in the early part of the decade Fascist ideas were not entirely beyond the political pale. Recent research suggests that the BUF made some progress in Scotland and that the south-west of the country was briefly a Fascist success story. Against this background this talk assesses the visits to Dumfries made by Sir Oswald Mosley and his Director of Propaganda, William Joyce, later notorious as Lord Haw-Haw.
If you would like to get involved in the project to share your own stories and memories or if you would like to find out more about joining our production team please contact: steven@devilsporridge.org.uk
Today’s website post is a little different as it does not relate to either World War One or World War Two but it is an item we have in the Museum store that we found interesting. The item in question is a Britain’s First Decimal Coins set which explains the changeover to decimal currency and what date it will be happening, it also includes five of the new coins which were being introduced.
The five coins which it includes are the Half penny, one pence, two pence, 5 pence and the ten pence. The day the United Kingdom changed to decimal currency was called Decimal Day and was on Monday 15th February 1971 and was nicknamed D-Day. These coins include designs which were made by Christopher Ironside who won the competition to have his designs on the new decimal coins.
Inside the booklet includes a list of information about how and when the new coins will be introduced into circulation and what the new system means with 100 pennies making up the new pound. Although the new coins were released from 1968 onwards the planning of the decimal coins started in 1961 when a special committee was set up by the Government to think about whether Britain should introduce a decimal currency. The committee decided in favour of decimalisation. So, on 1 March 1966 the Chancellor of the Exchequer, James Callaghan, announced that pounds, shilling and pence would be replaced by a decimal currency, with a hundred units in a pound.
This Nepalese Gurkha Kukri is being kept in the Museums store cupboard so we thought that we would do some research about it to find out what it really was and discover the history of it.
The Kukri is a type of machete originating from the Indian subcontinent, associated with the Nepali speaking Gurkhas of Nepal and India. The knife can be easily identified as it has a distinct recurve in the blade. It is used as both a tool and a weapon in the Indian Subcontinent. Traditionally, it was, and in many cases still is, the basic utility knife of the Gurkha. It is a characteristic of the Nepalese Army, the Royal Gurkha Rifles of the British Army, the Assam Rifles, the Kumaon Regiment, the Garhwal Rifles, the Gorkha Regiments of the Indian Army, and of all Gurkha regiments throughout the world, so much so that some English-speakers refer to the weapon as the “Gurkha blade” or the “Gurkha Knife”.
While the Kukri is most famed for its use in the Military it is most commonly used as a multipurpose tool for utility in fields and homes in Nepal. Its use has varied from building, clearing, chopping firewood, digging, slaughtering animals for food, cutting meat and vegetables, and opening cans. Its use as a general farm and household tool disproves the often stated “taboo” that the weapon cannot be sheathed “until it has drawn blood”.
The Kukri was first produced in 1810 and while we don’t know which time period the one we have is from they were used through multiple wars all the way up to the Falklands.
This First World War bayonet was recently brought into the Museum by one of our volunteers and is an American M1917 bayonet which was used in World War One, World War Two, Korean War and in the Vietnam War.
It was first used by American soldiers in WW1 on the Western Front. A sword bayonet design, the M1917 bayonet design was based on the British pattern 1913 bayonet. While designed specifically for the M1917 rifle, the bayonet was fitted for use on all the ‘trench’ shotguns at the time. The US continued to use the WW1-made M1917 bayonets during World War Two because of large stockpiles left over. The new trench guns being procured and issued were still designed to use the old M1917 bayonet.
The bayonet was then called upon again during the Korean war for issue due to the various trench guns still being in use. In 1966 procurement orders were let for brand new production M1917 bayonets. Stockpiles had finally run out, and new Winchester 1200 trench shotguns were being issued. These were issued in limited quantities during the Vietnam War. It was not until towards the end of the Vietnam War that new military shotguns were designed to use the newer knife bayonets.
M1917 bayonets were still used by the US Army as late as the early 2000’s for use with the M1200 shotgun.
The Steel-framed Voisin pusher biplane was in service with the French Army at the outbreak of war. A batch of the Voisin LA (Type 3) with 120hp Canton Unne (Salmson) engines was even waiting to be delivered to Russia. Escadrilles VB1, 2 and 3 with 18 Voisins formed the first French Groupe de Bombardment in November 1914 and carried out some very successful raids until September 1915 when day-bombing was stopped because of the superior German fighter aircraft, and Voisins changed to night-bombing. 37 Voisin LAs with 200hp Hispano-Suiza engines were obtained by the RNAS and used in the Aegean, Africa and Mesopotamia. British and French built Voisins were used on the Western front by Nos. 4, 5, 6, 7 and 16 Squadrons RFC and in Italy, this machine formed the operational establishment of five squadriglia.
Nieuport 10
The Nieuport 10 two-seater biplane was the earliest line of the famous French fighter aircraft which came to be used by France, Britain and Italy. It was operated by the RNAS in the Dardenelles where some of the Mk. 10s were converted to single seaters armed with a Lewis Gun. It was replaced by a larger and stronger Nieuport 12 which was used by Nos. 1, 4, 5, and 46 Squadrons RFC and by Nos. 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, and 10 Squadrons RNAS.
HMS Lion was a Battlecruiser built for the Royal Navy in 1910. She was the lead ship of her class, which was nicknamed the ‘Splendid Cats’. They were significant improvements over their predecessors of the indefatigable class in terms of speed, armament and armour. This was in response to the first battlecruisers, the Moltke class, which were very much larger and more powerful than the first British Battlecruisers, the Invincible class.
Lion served as the flagship of the Grand Fleet battlecruisers throughout World War One, except when she was being refitted or under repair. She sank the German light cruiser Cöln during the Battle of Heligoland bight and served as Vice-Admiral Beatty’s flagship at the battles of Dogger Bank and Jutland. She was so badly damaged at the first of these battles that she had to be towed back to port and was under repair for more than two months. During the battle of Jutland she suffered a serious propellant fire that could have destroyed the ship if it had not been for the bravery of Royal Marine Major Francis Harvey, the turret commander, who posthumously received the Victoria Cross for having ordered the magazine flooded. The fire destroyed one gun turret which had to be removed for rebuilding while she was under repair for several months. She spent the rest of the war on uneventful patrols in the North Sea, although she did provide distant cover during the Second Battle of Heligoland Bight in 1917. She was put into reserve in 1920 and sold for scrap in 1924 under the terms of the Washington Naval Treaty.
Some old postcards in the Museums store inspired us to research the Solway Viaduct in more detail. The bridge and its railway line used to connect England and Scotland, it was also used in WW1 to supply HM Factory Gretna and its former site is located about 6 miles from The Devils Porridge Museum.
The Solway Junction Railway was built by an independent railway company to shorten the route from ironstone mines in Cumberland to ironworks in Lanarkshire and Ayrshire. It opened in 1869, and it involved a viaduct 1 mile 8 chains (1.8 km) long crossing the Solway Firth, as well as approach lines connecting existing railways on both sides.
Reconstruction of the viaduct began in the summer of 1882: in the rebuilt viaduct, the three inner columns in each pier were still cast-iron, but the two outer ‘rakers’ were each a single wrought-iron tube filled with concrete and provided with timber ice fenders.
In 1914 an assessment of the maintenance needs of the viaduct was carried out. The long metal structure exposed to a marine atmosphere had deteriorated and £15,500 would need to be expended in maintenance work. The work was suspended on the outbreak of World War I, which saw increased use of the viaduct for iron-ore and pig-iron traffic from West Cumbria to Scotland. It was announced that stations south of the viaduct were to be closed from 1 February 1917 but this decision was promptly rescinded. The creation of a large munition works at Eastriggs, to the east of Annan, gave the line additional traffic; including (in May 1917) the Royal Train, carrying King George and Queen Mary on a four-day tour of that and other munitions factories.
Any future use of the viaduct was impossibly expensive, and after a period of dormancy, in 1933 arrangements were made to demolish it. Arnott, Young and Company purchased the bridge and dismantled it; much of the material found a second use, and some of the metal was used by the Japanese forces in the Sino-Japanese War. During the work three men lost their lives when attempting extraction of one of the piles; the men were inexperienced in boat work and their boat was caught in strong currents and capsized. The dismantling of the viaduct was completed by November 1935, but sections of the pier foundations remained in the bed of the estuary. The section of railway between the south end of the viaduct and Kirkbride Junction was dismantled as part of the process.
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The Devil's Porridge Museum is closed from 9th December 2024 for the festive season and will re-open on 6th January 2025. Please be aware any online shop orders made while The Devil's Porridge Museum is closed will not be posted until the museum re-opens in January. Thank you for your understanding and support! Dismiss
