Northern Ireland War Memorial
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LearningTranscript
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00:28 Hi, so I'm Michael Burns, and I'm
00:30 research officer at the Northern Ireland War Memorial
00:32 Museum here on Talbot Street in Belfast.
00:36 I run the oral history project here,
00:37 so we seek to capture any and all wartime memories
00:40 in Northern Ireland, from Belfast Blitz, Derry, Fermanagh,
00:44 anywhere at all.
00:45 Memories of rationing, soldiers, the Belfast Blitz,
00:49 being evacuated, anything at all about the Second World War,
00:52 anything that you can remember.
00:53 We'd love for you to get in touch.
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01:10 So the oral history project has been running from about 2016,
01:14 and that was to mark the 75th anniversary of the Belfast
01:16 Blitz.
01:17 Following year, we did another project, US 75,
01:20 which marked the 75th anniversary of the US
01:22 entry into the war in 1941.
01:25 And from 2018 on, we've been running the War and Me,
01:27 oral history project, which seeks
01:29 to capture any and all wartime memories in Northern Ireland.
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01:47 I'm undertaking this project.
01:49 What has been your favorite element of it?
01:50 What have you enjoyed the most?
01:52 Honestly, it's probably getting to meet interesting people.
01:55 I've been all around the country interviewing people
01:57 that I never would have met in real life.
02:00 I've interviewed Bob Lingwood about two, three weeks
02:03 before his death.
02:04 He was 103, and he was a survivor of Dunkirk,
02:07 where he was wounded.
02:08 And he was awarded the military medal.
02:10 And he told me all about his wartime memories
02:13 and his escape from German imprisonment,
02:15 and all these interesting stories
02:17 that otherwise I would never have heard.
02:19 So that's the main thing, meeting interesting people
02:21 that I never would have met before.
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02:33 The oldest person I interviewed was Elizabeth Joan Urquhart.
02:36 So she was 105 when I interviewed her.
02:38 It was about a week before her 106th birthday.
02:40 And since then, she's turned 107 there in June.
02:44 And she had lots of memories.
02:46 She was a NAFI volunteer.
02:47 So she was all around Tunisia and Italy and the Netherlands,
02:51 running NAFI canteens for the army.
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03:12 What was the most interesting story you had heard
03:14 about the war times through the studies?
03:18 Probably one of the interesting or, I suppose,
03:20 surprising person we got in touch with
03:22 was Papa Jake Larson, who we got in touch with through TikTok.
03:26 Papa Jake was being interviewed by his granddaughter
03:29 about his memories.
03:30 And he mentioned that he'd been to Northern Ireland
03:32 during the Second World War.
03:33 He was one of the 300,000 people that were based here.
03:37 And from that, I interviewed him over Zoom and got to meet him.
03:40 And then, about a year later, he actually came to the museum
03:43 and visited.
03:44 So it was the first time in 80 years
03:46 that he'd been back in Northern Ireland.
03:47 And he was able to visit some sites
03:49 that he'd been to and meet all of us here at the museum.
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