I went back to the IWM after some years away, and found myself rather
disappointed by the way it's now set up.
The IWM has a splendid collection of war-related artefacts. And
what I go to a museum for is to see those artefacts in person. Here
is an actual tiny boat that was part of the Dunkirk evacuation. Here
is an actual T-34, an actual V-2 rocket.
But it seems to me that the density of those things is now much
lower than it was. Here are gas masks and radios from the Blitz, but
next to that is not more stuff but photographs and stories from Dave
who got bombed out. Here are photographs and one-paragraph bios of
people who were involved in the Battle of Britain, but no maps.
Now there's definitely a case for this. While most of us (apart from
old impotent men who don't have to get involved in the wars they
start) can agree that war is a whole lot of No Fun, the ways in which
it affects individuals are varied and worth knowing about. But that is
a thing which can be done in varied ways: I tend to favour books,
explanatory videos also work, and these can be conveyed by other means than
trudging around a gallery looking at text and screens.
What nothing but the museum can do is show me the things, in three
dimensions, behind glass fair enough, but one still gets a sense of
the size and physicality of the rifle, the boat, the knife, the model
planes someone made while waiting to be scrambled.
The temporary exhibition on the fights for independence in (modern)
Malaya, Cyprus and Kenya took the same approach, but to my mind worked
rather better, because the explicit point of that exhibition was to
tell the human story. (I felt it drifted a little too easily into the
popular conception of colonisers as villains; which yes, many of them
were, but not in their own minds. They were people who'd been told
"come to the colonies for a healthy land-owning life", and you had to
treat the natives roughly, it's the only thing they understand, and
yes, some of them liked that part of the life, but most of them just
didn't ever think about it; and now they were being told by the other
side "you have no right to be here". Of course they reacted violently.
Both sides' leaders wanted them to, to increase the commitment (and
cost) of British forces and the intensity of conflict; and nobody was
interested in a negotiated peace when they all thought they could win
the war.) But in any case, fair enough for a specific subject
exhibition, particularly one that's now fairly obscure; not, to my
mind, so great as the approach to the main exhibition and the whole
thing the museum is about.
Probably I'm in a minority here. There are lots of buttons for the
kiddies to press and run on to the next thing, and maybe some of the
ideas will rub off on them. There are lots of screens and
loudspeakers. (Though the piece on the Home Guard could really have
benefited from Noel Coward's "Could You Please Oblige Us With a Bren
Gun", here on YouTube.)
I would rather look at books and videos and web sites first to do the
learning, then come here to see the things.