Jo Pugh

Education & Outreach, The National Archives

As news of the Luftwaffe attack spread, more and more people rushed to their keyboards. “Stomach churning”, “UH OH!”, “Eek! My home town”, “WE ARE UNDER ATTACK”, “WHA..WHAAT?!” Months ago they had woken up to find that Belgium had surrendered during the night. They watched the fall of France and the Battle of Britain with the daily threat of a German invasion. Now the Blitz is in progress. But the year isn’t 1940, it’s 2010. The bombs aren’t real. But they were once.

Since the beginning of 2010, The National Archives has been running an ambitious project using the social networking site Twitter, to ‘tweet’ the Second World War in near real time. Thousands of people have been following the progress of the conflict ‘live’ through the original papers of the War Cabinet, the heart of Britain’s war effort. They have been reading about military strategy alongside the latest celebrity goss and what their friends were up to last night.

The result has proved an immersive, engaging experience giving the archival documents an immediacy that would otherwise be hard to produce. Or, in the words of one follower: “If you aren’t fully caffeinated it can scare the hell out of you”. The full set of papers available online covers the period 1916-80 and all of them are freely available to download. We chose to focus on a year exactly 70 years before we were tweeting. Tweets appears online, if possible, to the minute that the event referred to in the original document occurred, with perhaps up to a dozen tweets a day. Each tweet links back to the original Cabinet paper so followers can see the primary source it is derived from (for free) if they choose - and many do.

One of the benefits of working online like this is that it’s easy to see straightaway what people make of your work. The project has generated great feedback from around the world, especially amongst education professionals (“uber cool educational use of Twitter”, “Wow! Great resource for History classrooms”). We are partnering with the education website TwHistory in America as they build digital tools to allow teachers to reuse these sorts of online reenactments more easily, as well as build their own.

The benefits for the Archives have been a new and extremely enthusiastic audience for our documents – in fact so enthusiastic that for 2011, we plan to help the War Cabinet’s followers research and write the tweets themselves which we will then publish.

People’s reactions have been extremely interesting. Some aspects of the war are extremely well known (Neville Chamberlain’s resignation, Dunkirk and so on) but others take people by surprise. For example, British support to Finland in its war against the Soviet Union. Followers have been able to see how close Britain came to being at war with Russia in 1940. Many followers were unaware of other facts such as British towns being bombed not just by the Luftwaffe but also the Regia Aeronautica, the Italian Airforce or that Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax repeatedly urged the Cabinet to consider peace negotiations during the Dunkirk evacuations.

Specific documents reveal more personal moments. Churchill’s irritation with the mountains of paperwork he was forced to read, which he calls “far too long” and full of "woolly phrases" and "officialese jargon". Or the Cabinet Secretary’s memorable description of French PM Paul Reynaud as looking “more like a marmot than any other man I have seen”. Neville Chamberlain’s Cabinet appear to find jokes about future Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir Stafford Cripps particularly amusing.

All this works to make primary sources less intimidating, in much the same way that the Royal Shakespeare Company attempted to demystify Shakespeare with its online production of Such Tweet Sorrow. For students, the format can also help to bring across issues of hindsight and an understanding of the sometimes limited information that the Cabinet had available to make decisions. Churchill and his colleagues often discuss outcomes which in the 21^st century we know will not happen (such as war with Japan in 1940) but which for them are real and pressing issues, vital for a full understanding of British actions.

Some schools have been reluctant to allow use of social networking websites by pupils or teachers in school time. They may believe that the genuine child protection issues outweigh what is often perceived lack of serious content on these networks. What the ukwarcabinet project has demonstrated is that a forum such as a Twitter can serve a serious educational purpose. In blocking access to such material schools may be doing their students a disservice and they risk leaving them ill prepared for the wired world that they will inevitably be encountering outside the classroom.

The project, with its new volunteers will be continuing into 2011 and 1941. Let us go forward together?

Links

ukwarcabinet

http://www.twitter.com/ukwarcabinet

Twhistory

http://twhistory.org/

The Cabinet Papers Online

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/cabinetpapers