Royal Greenwich Heritage Trust has been awarded funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund for a World War One Project that explores the role of women in Greenwich during the Great War.
Here Come the Girls, will take three portable exhibitions – a factory, an auxiliary hospital and a wartime home – facilitated by Factory Workers and Nurses on a tour across the borough sharing the stories of women at work during the First World War. Each portable museum, with unfolding tops and drawers, will open to reveal objects, documents, activities and stories that help visitors learn about the lives of women. Manned by costumed interpreters, staff and volunteers, each will offer visitors a range of multi-sensory experiences whether do and make, hear and touch, smell or taste. Each portable museum will end its tour with a celebratory Family Day seeing Greenwich Heritage Centre transformed into a munitions factory, Charlton House a hospital ward and Progress Housing Estate a 1916 home. Audiences will learn to assemble a cartridge shell, learn basic first aid and help knit socks for soldiers.
Keen to learn as much as we can about the role of women and the impact of the war on the Royal Borough, we are keen to hear your stories. Do you have any local stories, letters, photographs or artefacts from the First World War? We are collecting stories about women during the First World War 1915-1918. In particular we are interested in hearing stories about women Munitions Workers at the Royal Arsenal and King's Norton, Nurses, British Red Cross and Voluntary Aid Detachments and women & families who lived in the hostels and on the Progress Estate, Eltham.
If you have any stories, photographs, memorabilia and letters you would like to share with us, please get in touch:
Carolyn Ayers, Greenwich Heritage Centre, Artillery Square, Royal Arsenal, Woolwich, London , SE18 4DX. Tel: 020 8854 2452
