We can go one better than the traditional ‘ten Lords’ and offer you ‘one royal’…

We’re not going to lie to you, this one is a bit tenuous. But we couldn’t resist the opportunity to share one of our most successful outreach projects to date.

Thousands of children have been involved in an immersive First World War education programme that UCL Special Collections have played a key role in delivering. This was part of the Shrouds of the Somme project, one of the major centrepieces of Armistice commemorations that took place at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park from Thursday 8 to Sunday 18th November this year.

The Shrouds of Somme project is the brainchild of Artist Rob Heard, who has spent the past five years making more than 72,000 small shrouded figures, each one representing one of the men killed and never recovered from the battled field at the Battle of the Somme. On Thursday 8 November, each of the shrouds were laid out as a graphic reminder of the scale of sacrifice they made in the Great War. The installation welcomed just under 3000 school pupils as well as around 85,000 members of the public.

UCL Special Collections teamed up with the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and UCL Institute of Education’s First World War Centenary Battlefields Tour Programme to create free online teacher resources, worksheets for visiting schools and a programme of workshops for schools in the neighbouring Olympic Park boroughs (Tower Hamlets, Hackney, Waltham Forest and Newham). Special Collection’s Education Coordinator, Vicky Price, delivered 33 workshops, visiting 12 schools and reaching almost 1000 pupils.

The workshops combined historical enquiry with creative writing and used primary resources from UCL‘s College archive. Through exploring archival items like Rosenberg’s student record and a publication of perhaps his most famous poem, Break of Day in the Trenches (in Poetry: a magazine of verse. Vol. IX (3), December 1916 [reprint edition, 1966], STORE Little Magazines), pupils learnt of the poet Isaac Rosenberg, who had been a student at the Slade School of Fine Art. He grew up in a Jewish working class family in Mile End and went to art school to become a painter. When war broke out, he volunteered to fight, sending poetry back to the UK from the trenches. He was killed in France in 1918.

But where does the royalty come in? (I hear you say). Well, we were honoured to be invited to attend a visit by The Princess Royal at the installation site. Vicky Price (UCL Special Collections Education Coordinator) shook the Princess’ hand and explained the work we had done alongside pupils and the Head Teacher from the Bobby Moore Academy.

Women are by no means absent from UCL Special Collections’ archives, records, manuscripts and rare books, but it is not unfair or exaggerated to say that overall our collections are heavily dominated by men – by and large they were first collected by men, containing works created by men, that were quite often produced for men, too.

For International Women’s Day this year, we’ve been tweeting about some of the women featured in our collections. A complete guide to all the women who sit on our shelves is a pipe dream for the moment, but we can at least celebrate some of the women whose lives and works have captured our attention!

Today’s highlights were:

• Grace Aguilar, novelist, poet, and writer on Jewish history and religion.
• Spare Rib, the Women’s Lib magazine we hold in our Little Magazines collection. The British Library has digitised their archives of Spare Rib.
• Biochemist Professor Patricia Clarke, who had a particular interest in ensuring more women became scientists, and had the same career prospects as men in the sciences.
• Harriet Martineau‘s reflections on female writers in the early 19th Century.

• Crystallographer Kathleen Lonsdale, the first woman tenured professor at UCL.
• The behind the scenes influence women have had on our collections, such as Helga Sharpe Hacker, whose donations to UCL included an important Byron manuscript.
• The National Union of Women Teacher’s (NUWT) archive, a rich source of information on equality in teaching and a host of political campaigns in the first half of the 20th Century.
• Virginia Woolf, who with other women of the Bloomsbury group, makes a few brief but valuable appearances among our collections.

• Agnes Kate Foxwell, a UCL graduate whose book Munition Lasses describes some of the dangerous but vital factory work undertaken by women during the First World War.

Our work promoting the women on our shelves, and celebrating women’s suffrage, doesn’t stop at a few social media posts. Next term, we’re excited to be welcoming a visit from the Girls’ Network, and hope to be once again working with Newham Libraries to create a touring exhibition for the centenary of the Representation of the People Act. There’s our own ongoing exhibition, Dangers and Delusions, just one of the many Vote 100 events happening around UCL. We’re also more than a little curious to explore the many exhibitions and activities created and hosted by our colleagues at other organisations – like the National Trust’s Suffragette City, which just opened today.