Remembering the past

My name is Jonathan McDaid and I teach History at Dyke House Sports and Technology College in Hartlepool.

At the moment, I am working in collaboration with BBC Outreach & Corporate Responsibility and writer Kate Fox on a unique project. The project is focused on the Bombardment of Hartlepool, an event that brought the damage and destruction of the First World War to the streets of Hartlepool. The Bombardment of Hartlepool came unexpectedly on the morning of 16 December 1914 and led to over 100 civilian casualties as the town was shelled for around three quarters of an hour.

2014 marks the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War that will be commemorated in many ways through the media and across Britain. However, the Bombardment of Hartlepool is of great historical significance and deserves to be commemorated in its own right. This was an event that affected ordinary people at home and not the soldiers who had gone off to fight. Ordinary men, women and children all fell victim to the German attack as they went about their everyday lives.

History can be defined as a story and that story is usually told by historians (and indeed History teachers) who generally have not had the first-hand experience nor lived through the events of which they teach. This is certainly the case with the Bombardment of Hartlepool. With the passage of time, survivors of the Bombardment have aged and died, meaning that their experiences went with them. For me, this is why I got involved with the BBC Outreach & Corporate Responsibility project. It’s an intriguing one - because we were able to acquire oral history interviews that had previously been unheard. This is what gives the project authenticity - in that we were able to hear the story told by those who lived through it. It is their story, in their own words.

Hearing the interviews for the first time was a privilege and one I am glad to have shared with my students. Many of these students knew of the Bombardment from what they had learned at home or at school but had not reflected on it at a deeper level. The voices and the stories told by the interviewees brought History alive to the students. These were not people who were mere names or statistics to be learned, but rather individuals whose experiences the students could connect with. One particular story about the death of a 14 year old boy resonated with the students as they could put themselves in his shoes.

The potential of the project is great and the opportunity for students to take what they have learned and share it with a wider audience is an excellent way to commemorate the Bombardment.

*BBC Outreach & Corporate Responsibility links the BBC with its audiences on face to face projects that fulfil our six Public Purposes. This project places the BBC at the very heart of a community as it reflects on am important event in its history. On 16th December, BBC Tees will broadcast a minute by minute description of the attack, as live, on the 100th anniversary. In advance of the broadcast, this project will create a piece of poetry, which will be performed at the unveiling of as a new WW1 memorial. For inspiration, the 15 young people listened to recently discovered audio recordings of survivors sharing their memories.