Saturday, 4 October 2025

A visit to the Imperial War Museum

PXL_20251002_134312823My chosen picture is by an Ethiopean artist, and shows the Eyties (on the right) invading in the 20s. You could almost, from this, think it was balanced; but of course it wasn't; and I have cropped out the aeroplanes, whose wheels you can just see at the top. It makes me think of The Deep, a little; you can try to work out why if you like. Other pix here. Web: IWM site; Wiki tells me Founded as the Imperial War Museum in 1917, it was intended to record the civil and military war effort and sacrifice of the United Kingdom and its Empire during the First World War. The museum's remit has since expanded to include all conflicts in which British or Commonwealth forces have been involved since 1914.

II have almost no memories of the IWM, though my father took us there as children, though I could not say how often. I do remember the 15" guns at the entrance; though I had not previously noticed that they aren't quite aligned.

Since it starts at WWI, it is naturally divided into the big blocks of WWI, WWII, and other bits. It felt quite small to me; though actually the bits out of the main hall where you wander around WWI or II is probably larger than I thought. And there's a big Holocaust block. Which has a touching display of letters, but also many photos of Jews who were killed; from my perspective the obvious thing about 95% of the pix is not that they are Jewish, because they don't look like that, it's just that they all look like 1930's type people that I couldn't really tell apart from the ethnically-Kraut, if that means anything.

WWI has the obvious horrors of seas of mud and alien-like gas masks. But some other stuff I was less aware of; here is a display of German posters exhorting people to gather nuts and women's hair, and pointing out that approx 500k civilians died of malnutrition; what the UN nowadays would call genocide I suppose.

Trivia: train to KC; Thameslink to Blackfriars, which is in the middle of the river; walk from there; and walked all the way back.

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