Creative historical practice: an eighty-year family journey

Kate Wilcox, Library Services Manager at the IHR, recently completed the IHR’s MA in History, Place and Community, embracing the opportunities offered by the programme to engage in creative approaches. Her final project was awarded the 2025 Phil Batman Family History Prize, from the Centre for Regional and Local History, University of Leicester. Here, she shares her experiences of developing a critical-creative research project.

The IHR’s MA in History, Place and Community gave students the opportunity to produce coursework in a variety of forms: interpretation panels, funding applications, posters and annotated maps, alongside traditional academic essays. I enjoyed producing history in creative ways and for different audiences, and for my final project took the Applied Research Project route, where creative outputs could be combined with a reflective essay.

I explored a family story where new information had recently come to light. My great-aunt May was tragically killed aged 23 on 4 October 1945, when the plane she was travelling on was lost over the Mediterranean. We had documents and photo albums, but May’s mother and brother hadn’t spoken much about her, and they’d both died before my own mother had the chance to ask questions. Silences in one generation had created gaps in knowledge and the wish to know more in the next. In 2022 my mother was put in contact with the family of May’s fiancé, Basil Henderson. We had not previously even known that she was engaged. Basil had later married Eileen Whymark, who had lost her husband in the same accident.

May in ATS uniform, with inscription to her brother Bill.

Basil’s family generously shared photos and documents which gave vivid impressions of May’s life and character, and the later experiences of grief. These included:

• a letter from May to Basil describing a period of leave spent in Rome with her brother, my grandfather, in October 1944
• extracts from Basil’s diary while May’s plane was missing and in the immediate aftermath, 3 October – 4 November 1945
• a letter from May’s mother to Mrs Whymark after the accident, November 1945

Penultimate page of May’s letter to Basil reflecting her playful personality. I used the spiral motif in the research diary and video, and as a metaphor for thinking about the non-linear format of the project and experiences of grief and memory.

There has been recent work on the critical study of family collecting and memory, historians’ engagement with their own family history, and the subjectivity and emotional experiences of doing historical research. Building on this historiography, and producing varied outputs, I was able to critically analyse family emotions, while at the same time feeling my own affective response. I used creative methods to research and recount May’s life, intertwined with the story of 80 subsequent years of family grieving, remembering and rediscovery. The accompanying essay considered the themes of how families grieve and remember, and emotional response to historical sources within and beyond private family collections.

Creative methodology

Research rarely happens in a linear way. It felt instinctively right to capture this multi-generational search for information over a long period of time by combining writing, recordings, diagrams, maps, imagery and found objects. I made a research diary in a digital scrapbook format. I assembled fragments from public and family collections and used experiential site visits and maps to explore the places where May had lived and where she is commemorated, reflecting on the process and emotions of doing the research. The episodic format allowed me to play with time, capturing different voices and perspectives, some of which survive only indirectly, for example in my grandfather’s photo albums and an In Memoriam notice from a newspaper. I included my mother’s story of a visit to Rome in 1967, and the realisation that her dad had been there with his sister, of growing up with an ‘auntie-shaped hole’ in her life, and of hearing May’s voice through a letter so many years later.

From the albums, I pieced together aspects of May’s childhood in Bermondsey, and her clerical job. Staff at Southwark archives helped me to link a photo in our family album to staff magazine accounts of a dance and a sports day that she attended. I visited Dunblane Hydropathic Hotel where she had trained in January 1944 before being posted to Italy. I explored Second World War Rome through guidebooks and maps produced for soldiers based there, like my grandfather. My family travelled to the Brookwood Memorial and the International Bomber Command Centre in Lincoln, where she is commemorated.

Staff at Southwark Archives used the date of this photograph in my grandfather’s photo album to identify a booking for the Alaska Sports Club dance on that day. They pointed me towards the staff magazine for the Alaska Factory on Grange Road, Bermondsey (C.W. Martin & Sons Ltd) in their collections.

The three documents shared by Basil’s family together tell a powerful story. I arranged for family members to record them: my sister Sarah, her daughter Emily, and Emily’s partner Luke, chosen because their relationship to one another was the same as the original writers: mother, daughter and fiancé. It was important to me to reverse the chronology, beginning with loss and bereavement in 1945, and ending more positively with the liveliness of May’s long letter from the previous year. I added imagery to the recordings, using historical maps to tell stories of places and journeys spatially, with images of the people involved or representing the period and places.

I brought family members together to commemorate May, choosing to remember the 80th anniversary of her letter to Basil. Again, it felt important to foreground May’s life, as family memory had previously focused on her tragic death.

Outcomes

I have told May’s story through her family’s experience of loss and our more recent journey of discovery. The multi-media, non-linear format enabled me to capture my research and reflections in engaging ways that could be shared with and include the voices of family members. In the accompanying essay I explored where and how objects and memories have been preserved and have evolved in meaning. I was both historian and family member, emotionally involved but also critiquing that involvement.

Recording the sources opened up another type of emotional response. The family members who voiced the letters and diary felt themselves closer to the ‘historical experience’, and viewers of the video felt that it made the events more ‘tangible’ and gave them more insights. My project has rebuilt lost memories. It explored the way families collect while itself creating a family archive. It analysed the ways that families remember while also in itself being an act of remembrance. Despite the silences following her death, or perhaps because of them, May continues to be present in my family’s memory.

I am grateful to Bob Whymark and Mike Henderson for generously sharing documents and other information, to my mum, Irene Wilcox, for inspiring the project and to Sarah, Emily, and Luke for their recordings. Thanks to many staff at archives, libraries, museums, and commemoration sites, particularly the International Bomber Command Centre and Chris Scales at Southwark Archives. Thanks to Catherine Clarke and other staff at the IHR, and to the Phil Batman Family History Prize.

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