Home Front Project

 In our archives, we are fortunate to have around twenty short films about Croydon. These have been offered to us over many years and one particular film, Croydon in 1943 is always enjoyed by our visitors when we show it at events or talks. We had worked with Digital Drama, on a previous project, 100 Banners and in 2019 we were pleased to be asked to partner on a project to record the memories of our residents who had grown up during WW2 and to create a soundtrack for our silent film. Merton Local Studies and Archives were also part of the project and funding was awarded by the National Heritage Lottery Fund

We hosted the first project meeting at the Museum of Croydon in March 2019 when we did some reminiscence training with Malcolm Jones from Age Exchange. This involved both staff and volunteers from Croydon and Merton and we used the film footage to devise questions to capture wartime memories. In April 2019, we invited local residents who had lived through this period to join us and shared some of our handling objects such as a nightdress made out of parachute silk and an ARP whistle. Our guests shared some of their memories and we then invited them back to individual sessions with Kate and Alison from Digital Drama who created a recording studio in the Museum activities room.

In the next few months, the films were restored, edited and a new soundtrack was created linking images from the films with memories from the recordings. We then started planning an event for 4th September, the 80th anniversary of Evacuation from Croydon. We shared items from our handling collection, bomb maps and details of evacuation from our local school log books. We finished with a tea party and showed our Home Front Croydon film with some special guests, those who had shared their memories with us during the project.

The second phase of the project followed a similar pattern with additional partners from Camden, Kingston and Gunnersbury Museum (covering the boroughs of Hounslow and Ealing). The film focus for this phase was London locations and four films have been made covering the themes of Evacuation, Digging for Victory, Bombing and the Blitz as well as one focusing on VE day which launched on Friday 8th May as part of our online VE day celebration

For this second phase we recorded 12 new interviews with Croydon residents and are looking forward to being able to invite them into the Museum when we are able to re-open again. Their full interviews will be accessioned into the Museum of Croydon Oral History Collection.

We have thoroughly enjoyed working again with Digital Drama, our volunteers and our amazing residents to record their memories and share them with a wider audience and these films give us a great way to do this. We thank the National Heritage Lottery Fund for the opportunity to capture these recordings of such an important period in Croydon’s History.