Museum Visit - Soldiers of Oxfordshire, August 2022


As I had a day when (unusually)  I wasn't pre-committed to something else, I popped up to the "Soldiers of Oxfordshire" museum, partly simply to see what they'd done in terms of museum design.

Overall, it had some nice ideas (I liked that the first exhibit is a reproduction of the legionary tombstone from the Roman fort at Alcester near Bicester, and thus of the first "Soldier of Oxfordshire" by a significant margin), but overall, it was very lightweight. Physically, it has only a couple of "big" exhibits (a 25 pdr and a section of a reconstructed Horsa glider) with a few weapons in cases (two Lee Enfields, a Bren and a Sten), along with personal ephemera. It doesn't even have a Vickers gun, which I thought was completely obligatory in any military museum.

It is definitely not a regimental museum, though the local regiments obviously do feature, but it is very interested in local connections - for example, Col Thorneloe is featured in the Afghan exhibit since he came from Kirtlington in Oxfordshire, even though he was commanding a battle group built around the Welsh Guards when he was killed in Afghanistan.

Apart from a wall display of medals, a short section of reconstructed trench and a reconstructed Anderson shelter, the museum is divided into eight "themes", each with essentially a single large four-sided case and some interpretation panels

- Winston Churchill and the Queen's Own Oxfordshire Hussars; This is about as "local" as one can get, given the museum is literally right next to Blenheim Palace, and focuses on a country yeomanry regiment 1900-1914, when Churchill was one of its squadron commanders. He actually seems to have been pretty diligent, and it's a side of him we rarely see. It also shows quite how much the officers of such a regiment form a closed group; literally every officer of one squadron is either a member of the Churchill family or closely associated with it.

- The Liberation of Bergen-Belsen by the Oxfordshire Yeomanry. Exactly what it says on the tin; it is notable that there is only a brief discussion of the camp before liberation, and very little at all about anything else the Yeomanry (an AT regiment at that time) do during the war; everything focuses on the month or two around the takeover of the camp.

- The Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light infantry in WW2. This essentially covers the three big combat operations of the various battalions of the Ox & Bucks - Rearguard at Dunkirk, airborne operations in NW Europe, and Italy. I'm actually surprised they don't make much more of Operation Bigot / Pegasus on D-day, which is barely mentioned in favour of Arnhem.

- Prisoners of War at home and abroad. This is nice to see, as it's not covered often. There is a definite local link (the battalion that acts as rearguard at Dunkirk is mostly captured, as are a lot of people at Arnhem) and it also covers the significant number of German and Italian POWs held in England and used as agricultural labour.

- 21st Century Soldier and modern conflict. This might as well just have been called "The war in Afghanistan", and does more or less what you'd expect from that.

- Oxfordshire airpower. This hits the "local" button, but it is very bitty, as there essentially aren't any operational airfields in Oxfordshire. The result is that you get stories of RFC training in WW1, a little on photo recon in WW2, the development of the ejector seat (as Martin-Baker are local), and USAF bases at Upper Heyford and the RAF transport hub at Brize Norton in the cold war.

- Secret Wars 1939-45. This is exclusively SOE and the French resistance, with a very heavy emphasis on female agents; it's not quite to the point where you'd assume all SOE personnel were female, but not far off. It's actually a perfectly decent exhibit, but the absence of any local connection does make me wonder if this was simply to cover the "women at war" niche for HLF funding

- Blood and War. This is theoretically about military medicine, but in practice it's just a grab-bag of items with no underlying structure - dysentery in the Boer war, penicillin in WW2, helicopter evacuation in Afghanistan - with again no local link, making me suspect it's another attempt to hit a HLF target, in this case STEM.

Overall, what you get isn't bad per se, but the problem is what you don't get - as you'll see from the above, there are very big gaps both chronologically and thematically.


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